Threat to UK's AAA rating; Petraeus and the real Afghan scandal; Transition in China

1 Threat to UK’s AAA rating (Larry Elliott in The Guardian) Geroge Osborne was warned by one of the world's three biggest rating agencies that the UK will lose its prized AAA credit status if the UK sinks into a triple-dip recession this winter. In its annual health check on Britain, Moody's served notice to the chancellor that it would be carefully monitoring how he managed the difficult balancing act between growth and deficit reduction over the coming months.

The ratings firm said it had not yet decided whether to cut Britain's credit rating but said it could act in the new year either if growth prospects worsened or if Osborne failed to stick to a demanding timetable for reducing national debt.

The move came on the day that the Bank of England said the boost that accompanied the Olympics in the summer would be a one-off and halved its growth forecast for 2013 to 1%.

Moody's said: "The UK government's most significant policy challenge is balancing the need for fiscal consolidation against the need for economic stimulus."

The rating agency added that it would consider whether the UK should lose its AAA status in the new year once it had assessed how Osborne coped with its growth-deficit reduction dilemma in the Autumn Statement. It said the coalition's attempts to reduce Britain's record peacetime budget deficit were being hampered by "weaker economic prospects as well as by the risks posed by the ongoing euro area sovereign debt crisis." Moody's put the UK on negative watch – the threat of a downgrade in February this year.

2 Petraeus and the real Afghan scandal (Maureen Dowd in The New York Times) David Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama. Accustomed to being a demigod, expert at polishing his own celebrity and swaying public opinion, Petraeus did not accept the new president’s desire to head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The general began lobbying for a surge in private sessions with reporters and undercutting the president, who was trying to make a searingly hard call.

Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the CIA had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to experience.

Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they were “given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.”

So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal.

3 Transition in China (Khaleej Times) As the People’s Congress leads a leadership overhaul, there are several issues waiting to be tackled. China today is not the same as it was under Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping that talked about cultural realities and the syndrome of growth and adaptability. Chinese today are concerned more for their sense of inertia and initiative with which they could recast their political future. The trend of globalisation and the country’s rapid growth phenomenon has put the sarcasms of communism and socialism on the backburner. Neo-capitalism and authoritarianism is the way of life in what was once Mao’s Red China. The ruling Politburo can’t be insensitive to growing inequalities in the population and will have to ensure that the transition paves way for a broader egalitarian dispensation.

China’s once-in-a-decade overhaul of its top leadership has gained special significance this time around owing to the episode of Bo Xilai, who was thrown out of the party for his alleged quest for openness. In the wake of that fiasco, the little-known Xi Jinping, who is likely to succeed Hu Jintao in March next year, will have to determine boundaries of internal dissent in the CCP.

China’s one-party system has failed to cater to the needs and aspiration of the people. The party ought to soon deliberate about this vexing problem, if it hasn’t done so already during the session of the Congress. The least that this politburo should do is to change the decorum of decision-making and elevate itself from the status of rubber-stamp. China as the growth engine of world is in need of an articulate political leadership.