Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said the United States is ready to fight a conventional ground war on the Korean peninsula if needed, despite draining conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has wisely long kept itself ready for a sudden conflict with North Korea, where loss of life would likely be massive. One of the best studies I have seen on how a new Korean war would go appeared in the Atlantic in 2005. The only good thing that could come of such a conflict would be the end of the North Korean regime, which now probably can no longer count on China to save it from destruction if war erupts.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
How Close is War with North Korea?
Few realize how close the United States came to war with North Korea in 1994, when Pyongyang’s nuclear program was first discovered by U.S. spy satellites. The Clinton White House was unwilling to allow plutonium reprocessing underway at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor and came up with a plan to bomb it. They figured they could destroy the facility and entomb radioactive material in one stroke with precision airstrikes. The catch: North Korea would likely retaliate with a massive artillery and missile barrage on Seoul and elsewhere in South Korea, sparking all-out war on the peninsula. Pentagon officials calculated that the ensuing battles would likely leave between 300,000 and 500,000 American and South Korean soldiers dead along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Such a war was only days away from unfolding in 1994. For the best account of the saga, see Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book the Two Koreas, which goes a long way towards explaining why North Korea remains such a dangerous and difficult issue for the current White House.
In the 1994 crisis, the bombing of the Yongbyon reactor loomed as the trigger for what would surely be the bloodiest fighting seen in Asia since Vietnam. An eleventh-hour political bargain between Washington and Pyongyang diffused the situation. But North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a new trigger for such a war today. U.S. Naval intercepts of North Korean vessels thought to be carrying nuclear materials could occur in the seeable future as Washington grows increasingly worried and watchful of what comes and goes off the North Korean coast. North Korea has already said it would consider such intercepts an act of war and warned South Korea not to cooperate with U.S. Naval efforts.
It’s hard to know, honestly, how strongly North Korea would react if the United States or South Korea captured one of its ships carrying nuclear weapons or materials. Would North Korea’s leadership beat their chests or bomb Seoul? Pyongyang regularly airs venomous war rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, much of which can be dismissed as the wackiness of a hermetic Stalinist regime. But I suspect that North Korea would be willing to fight for real over the one national treasure the desperately impoverished country holds, nukes. Which means a war like one the United States and North Korea were both ready to fight in 1994 may be nearer than we realize.
Such a war was only days away from unfolding in 1994. For the best account of the saga, see Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book the Two Koreas, which goes a long way towards explaining why North Korea remains such a dangerous and difficult issue for the current White House.
In the 1994 crisis, the bombing of the Yongbyon reactor loomed as the trigger for what would surely be the bloodiest fighting seen in Asia since Vietnam. An eleventh-hour political bargain between Washington and Pyongyang diffused the situation. But North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a new trigger for such a war today. U.S. Naval intercepts of North Korean vessels thought to be carrying nuclear materials could occur in the seeable future as Washington grows increasingly worried and watchful of what comes and goes off the North Korean coast. North Korea has already said it would consider such intercepts an act of war and warned South Korea not to cooperate with U.S. Naval efforts.
It’s hard to know, honestly, how strongly North Korea would react if the United States or South Korea captured one of its ships carrying nuclear weapons or materials. Would North Korea’s leadership beat their chests or bomb Seoul? Pyongyang regularly airs venomous war rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, much of which can be dismissed as the wackiness of a hermetic Stalinist regime. But I suspect that North Korea would be willing to fight for real over the one national treasure the desperately impoverished country holds, nukes. Which means a war like one the United States and North Korea were both ready to fight in 1994 may be nearer than we realize.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Why Federal Courts Can Handle Gitmo Cases
The advocacy group Human Rights First in May of 2008 issued a detailed report showing that federal courts have a long, successful track record of handling terrorism prosecution, despite arguments otherwise chiefly by Bush administration officials out to defend torture, black sites and Guantanamo Bay. The report examined more than 120 international terrorism cases prosecuted in the judicial system over 15 years. The cases ranged from the famed 1993 World Trade Center bombing to obscure pre-emptive prosecutions of plots uncovered and thwarted.
Existing law and the adaptability of courts allowed successful prosecutions in the vast majority of cases, the study found. The report’s authors concluded that there is no need to create special tribunals or unusual legal measures such as prolonged detention in order to deal with terrorism cases. They are right, and the Obama administration is wrong to be considering both those practices in trying to figure out what to do about the cases in Guantanamo and future ones like them certain to come.
The U.S. court system as it exists today stands as one of the most successful enterprises of the American political experiment. Over the course of U.S. history the court system has faired better, arguably, than the economy, the electoral system and the institutions of the free press on the whole in terms of its effectiveness and durability. It does not need to be reinvented or augmented with special tribunals or measures allowing prolonged detention, which would inevitably invite the kind of Constitutional challenges that have plagued the organizers of the Guantanamo Bay trials. The federal courts already have the flexibility to address even the enormous complexities imposed by terrorism prosecutions that sometimes involve classified evidence and other obstacles.
To be sure, the courts are not perfect. And they certainly do not represent the only way the U.S. needs to confront the likely unending threat of terrorist violence. Military action, diplomacy, development and aid in the regions of the world where terrorism thrives of course must continue. But abandoning or sidelining the legal system should not be part of that approach.
Look, I’m not a lawyer. But through my travels as a journalist I have had the chance to observe up close some of the world’s good and bad governments and legal systems. In my experience, creating special tribunals and locking people away for long periods without trial is the stuff of weak and fearful states in troubled corners of the world. It’s un-American, in other words. Moreover, that approach is not toughness in the face of terrorism. It’s another form of the scared cringe the Bush administration wore in the aftermath of 9/11, a reflection of the mentality that led the U.S. government in those years to jail people illegally and then begin systematic torture of many of them.
Obama took the White House in large measure because the American public had come to reject the political mindset that put the country’s leadership down the path of the “Dark Side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney famously put it. Obama has an obligation to resist the pressure he is facing now from Cheney and others to take backward steps on the path he charted to move the country past what so many agree today is shameful history.
Existing law and the adaptability of courts allowed successful prosecutions in the vast majority of cases, the study found. The report’s authors concluded that there is no need to create special tribunals or unusual legal measures such as prolonged detention in order to deal with terrorism cases. They are right, and the Obama administration is wrong to be considering both those practices in trying to figure out what to do about the cases in Guantanamo and future ones like them certain to come.
The U.S. court system as it exists today stands as one of the most successful enterprises of the American political experiment. Over the course of U.S. history the court system has faired better, arguably, than the economy, the electoral system and the institutions of the free press on the whole in terms of its effectiveness and durability. It does not need to be reinvented or augmented with special tribunals or measures allowing prolonged detention, which would inevitably invite the kind of Constitutional challenges that have plagued the organizers of the Guantanamo Bay trials. The federal courts already have the flexibility to address even the enormous complexities imposed by terrorism prosecutions that sometimes involve classified evidence and other obstacles.
To be sure, the courts are not perfect. And they certainly do not represent the only way the U.S. needs to confront the likely unending threat of terrorist violence. Military action, diplomacy, development and aid in the regions of the world where terrorism thrives of course must continue. But abandoning or sidelining the legal system should not be part of that approach.
Look, I’m not a lawyer. But through my travels as a journalist I have had the chance to observe up close some of the world’s good and bad governments and legal systems. In my experience, creating special tribunals and locking people away for long periods without trial is the stuff of weak and fearful states in troubled corners of the world. It’s un-American, in other words. Moreover, that approach is not toughness in the face of terrorism. It’s another form of the scared cringe the Bush administration wore in the aftermath of 9/11, a reflection of the mentality that led the U.S. government in those years to jail people illegally and then begin systematic torture of many of them.
Obama took the White House in large measure because the American public had come to reject the political mindset that put the country’s leadership down the path of the “Dark Side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney famously put it. Obama has an obligation to resist the pressure he is facing now from Cheney and others to take backward steps on the path he charted to move the country past what so many agree today is shameful history.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Closing Gitmo
The Obama administration has clearly made little progress towards its goal of closing the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s easy to see why. Closing Gitmo poses an extraordinarily complex legal dilemma. At bottom, there are no good options. Anything short of proper criminal trials for Gitmo prisoners treads on the spirit if not the letter of U.S. law. Allowing trials risks seeing known terrorists go free on legal technicalities sure to arise in courtrooms because of the Bush administration’s unthinking approach to detaining suspected terrorists.
I tend to think the best (or least bad) option is to put the roughly 30 hard-core Gitmo inmates on trial in federal courts and either release the rest or hand them over to their home countries. This is not a popular idea I gather by the recent congressional vote on the issue. But it’s the only option I can see that would empty Camp X-Ray while trying for some sense of justice for 9/11 and other acts of terrorism at the same time.
I tend to think the best (or least bad) option is to put the roughly 30 hard-core Gitmo inmates on trial in federal courts and either release the rest or hand them over to their home countries. This is not a popular idea I gather by the recent congressional vote on the issue. But it’s the only option I can see that would empty Camp X-Ray while trying for some sense of justice for 9/11 and other acts of terrorism at the same time.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Staggering Sums
According to recent U.N. figures the ongoing strife in Pakistan has now displaced more than a million people. In Sri Lanka, months of fighting have left an estimated 265,000 people displaced. And in recent days the United Nations upped its estimate for the number of displaced in central and east Africa to 11 million throughout 16 countries.
Meanwhile, a new U.N. report shows that urban areas around the world are groaning under the weight of poor migrants. Roughly a billion people now live in slums or shanty towns across the globe. That's almost a sixth of humanity living in places like Kibera, the sprawling slum at the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. The U.N. report stresses that urban crowding raises the risk of human catastrophe in increasingly frequent natural disasters related to climate change.
If those statistics aren’t dizzying enough, click here for a real-time world clock with streaming data on everything from traffic accidents to replanted forestland.
Meanwhile, a new U.N. report shows that urban areas around the world are groaning under the weight of poor migrants. Roughly a billion people now live in slums or shanty towns across the globe. That's almost a sixth of humanity living in places like Kibera, the sprawling slum at the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. The U.N. report stresses that urban crowding raises the risk of human catastrophe in increasingly frequent natural disasters related to climate change.
If those statistics aren’t dizzying enough, click here for a real-time world clock with streaming data on everything from traffic accidents to replanted forestland.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Beyond the Valley in Pakistan
The Pakistani military appears poised to deliver a blow to Taliban fighters holed up in Swat Valley, which has seen a massive refugee exodus. The picture of how the battle is unfolding day to day is murky at best. There are few, if any, journalists in the area, and neither the Pakistani army nor the Taliban can be expected to provide honest accounts.
The eventual outcome is already clear nonetheless. In the days ahead, Pakistani troops will overrun the Taliban positions in Mingora, the valley’s main town. Taliban survivors of the assault will scatter and begin to regroup for a counterpunch. Pakistan now has an insurgency on its hands, and so it will go like this for as long as one side or the other is willing to keep up the fight.
But the battles in the counter-insurgency campaign Pakistan is now undertaking distract from the real mission the government must launch, i.e. bringing the tribal territories where the Taliban were born under government control. The military will have a role in that to be sure, but the real work to be done is in development of this desperately poor region.
For decades the central government of Pakistan has allowed tribal rule of its territories bordering Afghanistan. Islamabad has granted the tribal territories government support such as roads and basic services but without demanding that the societies who benefit from this state support adhere to systematic rule of law like the rest of the country. That’s why you see the occasional news of a public stoning in the tribal territories, where the central government usually leaves law and order to tribesman rather than police and courts. Nuclear Pakistan allows, even encourages, a huge swath of the country’s population to languish in underdevelopment and backwardness. This must end if Pakistan is to escape the fate of failed states.
There are many voices in Pakistan and even the West who may balk at the idea of judging an entire society’s way of life as “backwards” and consider it an imperial insult. To that I would say: Bullshit. There are societal norms we can all agree are good. Things like low infant mortality, literacy and longevity. These development indicators all point in the wrong direction in tribal societies and have throughout time. There is an enormous body of scholarship documenting this truth. Read Nonzero by Robert Wright and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a start if you need convincing that romantic notions of tribalism serve only to perpetuate human suffering.
The reasons why Pakistan has preserved its tribalism are part cultural, part economic and part strategic. Regardless, the result of brooking tribalism for decades amounts to a social and political disaster for all involved. The people in the tribal territories of Pakistan live in some of the deepest poverty found in Asia or the Islamic world. And the militancy bred there now threatens to undo much of the rest of the country’s progress, hence the fleeing of more than a million Pakistanis from Swat, a formerly bucolic tourist destination.
The Pakistani military can and must defeat Taliban forces on various battlefields in the months and years ahead. But no number of military victories can solve the root problem. To civilize the tribal territories will require a massive act of well-intentioned statecraft along with a completely altered political view from Pakistan’s leadership on what the country will be in a future time, when perhaps the residents of Swat have returned home.
The eventual outcome is already clear nonetheless. In the days ahead, Pakistani troops will overrun the Taliban positions in Mingora, the valley’s main town. Taliban survivors of the assault will scatter and begin to regroup for a counterpunch. Pakistan now has an insurgency on its hands, and so it will go like this for as long as one side or the other is willing to keep up the fight.
But the battles in the counter-insurgency campaign Pakistan is now undertaking distract from the real mission the government must launch, i.e. bringing the tribal territories where the Taliban were born under government control. The military will have a role in that to be sure, but the real work to be done is in development of this desperately poor region.
For decades the central government of Pakistan has allowed tribal rule of its territories bordering Afghanistan. Islamabad has granted the tribal territories government support such as roads and basic services but without demanding that the societies who benefit from this state support adhere to systematic rule of law like the rest of the country. That’s why you see the occasional news of a public stoning in the tribal territories, where the central government usually leaves law and order to tribesman rather than police and courts. Nuclear Pakistan allows, even encourages, a huge swath of the country’s population to languish in underdevelopment and backwardness. This must end if Pakistan is to escape the fate of failed states.
There are many voices in Pakistan and even the West who may balk at the idea of judging an entire society’s way of life as “backwards” and consider it an imperial insult. To that I would say: Bullshit. There are societal norms we can all agree are good. Things like low infant mortality, literacy and longevity. These development indicators all point in the wrong direction in tribal societies and have throughout time. There is an enormous body of scholarship documenting this truth. Read Nonzero by Robert Wright and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a start if you need convincing that romantic notions of tribalism serve only to perpetuate human suffering.
The reasons why Pakistan has preserved its tribalism are part cultural, part economic and part strategic. Regardless, the result of brooking tribalism for decades amounts to a social and political disaster for all involved. The people in the tribal territories of Pakistan live in some of the deepest poverty found in Asia or the Islamic world. And the militancy bred there now threatens to undo much of the rest of the country’s progress, hence the fleeing of more than a million Pakistanis from Swat, a formerly bucolic tourist destination.
The Pakistani military can and must defeat Taliban forces on various battlefields in the months and years ahead. But no number of military victories can solve the root problem. To civilize the tribal territories will require a massive act of well-intentioned statecraft along with a completely altered political view from Pakistan’s leadership on what the country will be in a future time, when perhaps the residents of Swat have returned home.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Damage Done
The American Civil Liberties Union is quite right to cry foul at President Obama’s refusal to release more than 2,000 photos documenting detainee mistreatment at U.S. military prison facilities in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”
The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.
True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.
What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.
For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.
In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.
"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”
The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.
True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.
What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.
For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.
In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.
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