WAR 05/18/2013 to 05/24/2013____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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John Kerry in the Middle East: Eclipse of a Superpower?

By James Kitfield
Updated: May 23, 2013 | 9:54 a.m.
May 23, 2013 | 9:40 a.m.
Comments 5

Doha, Qatar – Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in the Middle East today with two of the most vexing problems in international affairs at the top of his agenda: a downward spiraling Syrian civil war that continues to draw neighbors into to its bloody vortex and destabilize the entire region; and the slow-rolling death of the two-state solution to an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that remains an open wound in Western-Arab relations.

The very fact that Kerry has spent so much energy early in his tenure on those thankless and intractable crises indicates that he understands the stakes involved. Whether out of indifference or impotence, Washington's inability to manage, let alone resolve those twin crises is seen as conclusive proof that U.S. power and influence are rapidly waning in a region where it was dominant for decades.

Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate how widely the narrative of declining United States leadership and relevance has taken hold here in the Middle East. Partly that is the inevitable result of the U.S. pulling troops out of a still unstable Iraq, publicly announcing a strategic "pivot" to Asia, and looking inward to "nation building at home" after two wars and a Great Recession. U.S. inability to mount a Marshall Plan to help post-Arab Spring countries make the difficult transition to democracy advanced the narrative of a former superpower in decline.

And yet it was the Obama administration's apparent abandonment of a Middle East peace process that has been in paralysis for years, followed by its ineffectual response to a Syrian civil war that has claimed the lives of over 80,000 people, that truly cemented the impression. In a conference of regional leaders and senior officials this week at the Doha Forum in Qatar, for instance, even close allies described a United States in eclipse.

"We're now seeing the beginning of the end of America as the great, regulating power in the Middle East," said Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-2010), speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar this week. After two unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, the United States has lost the will to act even when it knows what must be done. "We all know what needs to be done to reach an equitable peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and to help the wretched people of Syria, but I question whether the will to do it exists, particularly in Washington, D.C.," he said. "Unless the White House decides to take more assertive action, I fear you people in the Middle East are in for a long, dark winter with many dangers ahead."

Kerry's visit will begin in Amman, Jordan, where he will meet with international partners and try to rally support for a U.S.-Russian peace initiative. Middle Eastern and Western officials at the Doha Forum were nearly unanimous in their support for the initiative calling for talks between Syrian rebels and the regime of Bashar al-Ashad next month in Geneva, just as they were united in low expectations of a diplomatic breakthrough.

"We all hope the proposed U.S.-Russian conference on Syria will actually be convened and lead us forward, but given the huge obstacles it's difficult to have much hope in it," said Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States and chairman of the Munich Security Conference, speaking in Doha. Simply repeating the slogan 'Assad Must Go' is not a substitute for action, he noted, and absent further action Syria is likely to end in the worst of all outcomes: hundreds of thousands killed and wounded, a failed state that radiates regional instability, and loose weapons of mass destruction.

"I was the chief German negotiator during the 1990s when we confronted a very similar tragedy in Bosnia, and as a consequence of our hand-wringing and inaction the conflict only got worse," said Ischinger, recalling a crisis that was resolved only when the United States decided to lead collective action by the NATO alliance. "This time Syria is falling apart in front of our eyes, ripped open by hatred and violence of the most appalling type. And once again we're learning that doing nothing does not absolve any of us from responsibility. Doing nothing carries its own responsibility and guilt."

After Jordan, Kerry will travel to Israel and the West Bank as part of an ongoing U.S. effort to restart peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians that have been stalled for years. Once again expectations of a major diplomatic breakthrough are low, but Kerry is widely credited in the region for understanding that the situation is urgent. Continued Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, coupled with Palestinian disunity and growing despair that a two-decade old "peace process" has yielded only process and very little lasting peace – all are conspiring to close the window on the two-state solution.

In a recent public letter signed by the "Eminent Persons Group," a score of former heads of state and top European officials, raised the alarm on the urgency of Kerry's mission to restart meaningful talks. "We are writing to express our concern about the dying chances of a settlement based on two sovereign states of Israel and Palestine," the group wrote, warning that Western policy inaction was actually entrenching Israel's occupation of the West Bank. President Obama made a similar point in his March 2013 visit to the region, the group noted, "but he gave no indication of action to break the deep stagnation."

Ironically, one of the signatories to the letter calling for more decisive U.S. and European leadership on the Israel-Palestinian peace process was former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine. In the late 1990s Vedrine coined the term "hyperpower" to describe dominant U.S. power that the French felt was too often unchecked and wielded unilaterally. At the Doha conference, Vedrine joined a chorus of former officials and leaders warning that the decline of U.S. influence and power in the Middle East could become provocative.

"I did use to talk about American hyper-power, but these are different times and U.S. power and influence are clearly in relative decline," said Vedrine. Largely as a result, he said, Europeans are feeling abandoned by the U.S. "pivot" to Asia: Tokyo is wondering whether the U.S. security umbrella still protects Japan from China: and in the Middle East allies are alarmed that the vacuum created by declining U.S. power is being filled by chaos and disorder. "Whether your viewpoint is European, Asian or Middle Eastern, we all recognize the need for continued U.S. engagement and involvement in the international arena," said Vedrine. "While the international system goes through this period of transition and upheaval, we need a United States that continues to try and solve common problems in partnership with other countries. There is no other superpower able to play that role."

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Central Asia Politics Security Afghanistan
Tehran’s Designs on Afghanistan
May 23, 2013
By Sanjay Kumar
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Comments 3
Evidence from Herat and elsewhere suggests a growing – and at times deadly – Iranian influence over its eastern neighbor.

The bullet mark on the left side of Ali Asghar Yaghobi’s chest is still very fresh, the wound not yet fully healed. The doctors at the local medical center in Herat have removed the bandages, but shrapnel remains etched in his neck. It was only luck that saved Yaghobi; the Herat Hospital is the largest medical center in the city but is not equipped to perform complicated surgery. Fortunately, the bullet just missed vital organs and Yaghobi survived the attack, which apparently involved a gun with a suppressor.

The attack occurred in the afternoon of February 22, when the 30-year-old journalist was on his way to Mojhda radio station in Herat, where he has presented a daily evening show for the last four years. Yaghobi used the program, called “Tazyana” (meaning “a whip to arouse the conscience of the people”), to question certain conservative Shia practices and the rising influence of Iran in Herat society. He was also associated with a foreign crew documenting the cultural and political influence of Iran in Afghanistan.

Afghan Journalist Centre writes that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. However, Yaghobi has told The Diplomat that the “modus operandi used by the attackers is not employed by the Taliban, but is the handiwork of Iranian intelligence active in Herat through fundamentalist Shia groups.” His claim was supported by local intelligence officials, who demanded anonymity. Yaghobi says that past attacks on creative people and journalists have been carried out by these local groups.

Because of its geographical proximity and religious bonding, Shia Iran’s influence is visible throughout western Afghanistan. The overarching presence of the large neighbor is evident not only in the goods on sale in Herat, Farah and other provinces, but also in the religious and cultural spheres.

“It’s very suffocating the way Iran controls your life in Herat,” says Yaghobi. “For the outside world it's the Taliban that is disrupting Afghanistan, but the fact of the matter is that Iran is also playing a very negative role in destabilizing Afghanistan, in radicalizing Shia society and using that to serve its narrow political interests.”

Prominent Afghan writer Taqi Bakhtiari, a Shia himself, agrees. He blames Tehran for injecting fundamentalism into Shia society in Afghanistan. Bakhtiari has been forced to live in hiding since publication of his novel Gomnami (Anonymity), which tells of a young Afghan boy who goes to Iran to learn Islamic teaching but is sexually assaulted in the seminary. The incident abruptly neuters the young boy’s religious zeal and he returns to his homeland, where he starts reading secular texts and loses faith in established religion. For this work, which Bakhtiari claims is based on real story, he has been declared persona non grata in Afghanistan. Facing a serious threat to his life, Bakhtiari has gone underground with his family. When The Diplomat met him, he was living with eight members of his family in a cramped one bedroom accommodation. He has approached the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees seeking asylum in the West.

The novelist remains very bitter about Iran and blames “Afghans acting at the behest of Tehran” behind the threats to his life. He says that the “Iranian regime is trying to expand its theocratic dominion and for the last three decades Iran has been using Shiites against Sunni and thousands of Hazaras who are mostly Shias have lost their lives in this game.”

Listen to the Friday sermon at the Shia center in Heart, and Bakhitari’s claim seems credible. The mosque located in the center’s basement was packed on April 19, when The Diplomat visited. More than five thousand people had gathered to listen to Sayed Baqer Hasaniyan, chief imam of the biggest Shia mosque in the province. In an address lasting more than an hour, the imam blamed the West “for keeping Islamic countries backward and destroying their culture.” He called upon all Islamic people “to unite and fight together against the Western world for interfering and intruding into Islamic countries.” He also exhorted people “to shun music and ask women to behave according to the Islamic law and culture.”

Right next to the Islamic center is an old mosque, currently being renovated with the help of Iran. Once completed, it will have capacity for more than 8000 people.

Not far from the Shia center is Taqi-e-Abul Fazl library, one of the biggest in Herat. The majority of the books on display have come from Iran and narrate Iranian folk tales and stories about the Islamic movement. Very little literature about Afghanistan’s history and way of life is available. Some bookshelves display jihadi materials and have books on holy war.

The influence of Iran is also visible in the marketplace, where the majority of goods are Iranian-made. Some of the shopkeepers seem less than happy with the growing tentacles of their western neighbor.

“Iran is destroying our culture and imposing its narrow interpretation of Islam on us. We are Afghans and want to preserve our way of life,” says one shopkeeper in Khurasan market. This anger is shared by many on the streets of Herat.

“Besides Pakistan, Iran is the most disruptive element in Afghanistan. It wants to control us, which is not good, and the problem is that the Afghan government cannot act against its neighbor,” says a vegetable seller.

Recently, there have been several reports about Afghani concern over Iranian influence, with some experts expressing grave concern about Iran’s increasing penetration of Afghan society, and its use of Afghanistan as a way to strike at Western interests.

Omar Sharifi, director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies in Kabul, disagrees, arguing that “Iranian influence remains strong among more religiously conservative Shiite groups at best, with nominal to very little influence over other groups. Iran can be a destabilizing element at the local level in the Afghan conflict, but its ability to create a major crisis for Afghan government is shrinking due to Tehran’s isolation at the world level.”

At a conference attended by The Diplomat, Herat Governor Dr. Daud Shah Saba said that, “Iranian influence is because of geography, but yes Afghan forces have captured an arms consignment at the Iranian border and they have also recovered Iranian-made weapons from the hands of the Taliban.”

Iran thus remains an enigma for Afghanistan. But some reports suggest that Tehran is trying to fill the void that will be created by the U.S. withdrawal at the end of 2014, and is cultivating closer relations with the Taliban, funding politicians and media outlets.

Meanwhile, Yaghobi has fled Herat, fearing for his life. He hopes to start anew in another country, somewhere he and his family might feel safe from fundamentalist groups.

Related Features

Averting a Civil War in Afghanistan
Echoes of Cairo In Tehran
Afghanistan’s Forgotten Province
What Next in Afghanistan?
It Just Got Worse in Afghanistan

China Has Begun Limited Fielding of New Antiship Ballistic Missile
Started by MC2006‎, 05-07-2013 01:47 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ed-Fielding-of-New-Antiship-Ballistic-Missile

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Airsea Battle With Chinese Characteristics
By James R. Holmes
May 23, 2013

So the U.S. Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff penned a good piece over at Foreign Policy last week, explaining the sister services’ AirSea Battle doctrine. Have a look.

Something struck me while reading it, namely that China is pursuing its own AirSea strategy under the guise of “counter-intervention” operations or, in Western parlance, anti-access and area denial. You might even call it AirSeaLand, since part of Chinese sea power resides in the Second Artillery Corps, the army’s missile force. But joint sea power is nothing new. History abounds with examples when coastal states alloyed land, sea, and eventually air into an implement of sea combat.

Nor do we have to look to exotic climes for examples. Here’s one from U.S. history that sounds strikingly modern. I’ve been reviewing my Spanish-American War history while piecing together some remarks for a Memorial Day speech next week in Newport. Hat tip to my colleague Professor George Baer, whose masterwork One Hundred Years of Sea Power (1994) reveals how eminent fin de siecle Americans thought about maritime defense and offense. Popular opinion deformed the U.S. war effort to a certain extent, in large measure because ordinary Americans entertained outsized fears of the Spanish fleet’s prowess. Citizens of seaports like Newport and New York clamored for protection from naval bombardment. Their pleas siphoned assets away from the main fights in the Caribbean Sea and Philippine Islands.

To appease public sentiment, the U.S. Navy formed a flying squadron for Atlantic waters. It also stationed long-in-the-tooth monitors — think of USS Monitor dueling CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in the 1860s — in East Coast seaports. Alfred Thayer Mahan reports that the monitors boasted little military potential, but they did create a placebo effect. They were tokens of Washington’s commitment to the national defense, and they looked forbidding. How ships look determines their political impact on various audiences — especially when no gunfire is exchanged that could debunk the comforting image they project. The monitors were there. No Spanish fleet appeared off American shores to test their mettle. So these engines of war did their job despite their decrepitude.

That insight furnished Mahan with the opening discussion for his book Lessons of the War with Spain. We often berate Mahan for indifference to what transpires on land, and there’s some justice to such charges. In this case, however, he proposed harnessing land power for nautical purposes. Emplacing long-range coastal artillery at select ports would provide real defensive power. After all, a ship’s a fool to fight a fort. Army gunners would spare the navy from supplying warships — in effect mobile guard towers — for harbor defense.

Thus liberated from coastal defense, the fleet could roam the seven seas, executing such offensive functions as national leaders deemed fit. Call it LandSea Battle. The U.S. Army hoisted a protective aegis over Atlantic seaports while the fleet acted as the long arm of U.S. foreign policy. Or, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it, land power rendered the navy “footloose.” (Cue crappy old Kenny Loggins tune.)

That sounds remarkably like Beijing’s approach to sea power, but with a twist. Land-based PLA weaponry and short-range naval platforms hold off adversaries while the main PLA Navy fleet, like the U.S. Navy in the age of Mahan and Roosevelt, is footloose and fancy free. Here’s the twist, though: the reach of land-based sea power is now so great that the PLA Navy surface fleet can shelter within striking range of Fortress China while still remaining largely footloose. That reduces the urgency of China’s naval buildup, allows leisure time for fleet experimentation, and opens up manifold deterrent and coercive options for Beijing.

It’s rather as though Mahan’s coastal artillery boasted an effective firing range measured in hundreds of miles, as opposed to the few miles of offshore waterspace big guns actually could sweep. Such alt-history armaments would’ve granted commanders singular freedom to act beyond American waters. Or, Washington could have elected to remain on the strategic defensive, maintaining a small navy for constabulary duty and quelling local challengers. It appears you can accomplish a lot at sea with forces based ashore — and open up new strategic vistas for your navy in the process.

Maritime history: it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/16/breaking_the_kill_chain_air_sea_battle


Foreign Policy
National Security

Breaking the Kill Chain
How to keep America in the game when our enemies are trying to shut us out.
BY ADM. JONATHAN GREENERT, GEN. MARK WELSH | MAY 16, 2013
Comments 50

Our military services and national security leaders are consumed right now with reductions to defense budgets. Whether from years of continuing resolutions, sequestration, or just less funding in general, our military will have to adjust to getting fewer dollars to protect our nation's security interests. At the same time, the world continues to present challenges to U.S. interests, including instability in North Africa and the Middle East, regular provocations from Iran and North Korea, and territorial disputes between China and its neighbors. Our military will need an affordable and effective approach to counter coercion and assure access to places where conflict is most likely and consequential.

The caps established in 2011 by the Budget Control Act place defense spending at the same level as the early 2000s. This level of funding was sufficient to organize, train, and equip a force able to defeat Saddam Hussein's military, deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. But our fiscal situation is different today. Personnel and infrastructure maintenance costs have risen by double-digit percentages since 2003 as our services took on new missions, such as defending allies from ballistic missiles and countering piracy and illicit trafficking. Meanwhile, our competitors are more capable than a decade ago thanks to proliferation of weapons and other military technology. Less funding will compel us to reprioritize our efforts and make some hard choices with respect to the size and shape of our forces. This does not mean we will be unable to address our nation's security needs, but we will need to focus our investments and operations on our most important interests.

The Defense Strategic Guidance issued in January 2012 assessed our security environment and fiscal circumstances following the first set of BCA-imposed budget reductions. Although we are reevaluating that strategy in light of potential additional cuts imposed by sequestration, one of the most significant challenges the strategy identified remains a concern: the dedicated effort by some nations and groups to prevent access to parts of the "global commons" -- those areas of the air, sea, cyberspace, and space that no one "owns," but upon which we all depend. These "anti-access" strategies employ military capabilities, geography, diplomatic pressure, and international law to impede the free use of ungoverned spaces. The Air-Sea Battle concept -- which disrupts the so-called "kill chains" of our potential adversaries -- is our services' approach to negate these efforts.

A new form of coercion

Nations seeking to intimidate their neighbors are turning to anti-access strategies because they are cost-effective. Merely threatening to close key maritime crossroads such as the Strait of Hormuz or demonstrating the ability to cut off a country from cyberspace or international airspace can be an effective tool for regional and international coercion. Similarly, these capabilities can be applied to prevent or slow U.S. or allied assistance from arriving in time to stop or repel an attack -- providing an aggressor much greater leverage over neighbors who depend on allies for security.

Three well-known developments made this shift in our competitors' strategy possible. One, the world economy has become more interconnected, so impediments at air or maritime chokepoints have a much faster global impact. Two, technological advances in sensing and precision have spurred the development of more lethal air defenses and anti-ship cruise missiles; cheaper, more integrated surveillance systems; and new weapons, such as anti-ship ballistic missiles. Improvements in automation have made these systems easier to use while proliferation has put them in the hands of a range of potential new adversaries. And three, the American way of projecting force changed from placing bases and garrisons close to potential battlefields to a more expeditionary strategy whereby a smaller overseas presence is supported by forces that can surge into the area from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

In history there are numerous examples of anti-access capabilities and strategies. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," used aircraft, gun emplacements, and mines during World War II to disrupt access to France during the D-Day landings at Normandy. Mines were used in the Arabian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq "tanker war" of the 1980s to hinder the passage of both countries' oil. Serbian forces and Saddam Hussein each employed Cold War-era air defenses in an attempt to deter intervention by NATO and a U.S.-led coalition respectively. Anti-access strategies have always been employed to increase the cost of intervention beyond an acceptable level and show potential victims of aggression that help is not likely to come. Today, however, anti-access capabilities have much greater range and lethality. And they are typically employed as part of an overall strategy in peacetime alongside legal, diplomatic, and geographic means to deny access even before a conflict occurs.

Anti-access strategies also undermine our ability to stabilize crises. Suppose an aggressor threatens to attack a country within range of its anti-access military capabilities. If we cannot reliably defeat the aggressor's array of cruise and ballistic missiles, submarines, aircraft, etc. and project power, U.S. forces will be less able to move into the area to interdict attacks, reassure our allies, and defuse potential hostilities.

The Air-Sea Battle concept

The Air-Sea Battle concept, approved by the secretary of defense in 2011, is designed to assure access, defeat anti-access capabilities, and provide more options to national leaders and military commanders. Air-Sea Battle is one of the operational concepts nested within the overarching Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) -- the Joint Force's approach to defeating threats to access. Air-Sea Battle is not focused on one specific adversary, since the anti-access capabilities it is intended to defeat are proliferating and, with automation, becoming easier to use. U.S. forces need a credible means to assure access when needed to help deter aggression by a range of potential adversaries, to assure allies, and to provide escalation control and crisis stability.

Some examples of where Air-Sea Battle may apply include the Arabian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, where a favorable location provides Iran the ability to threaten the production and passage of almost 20 percent of the world's oil. If Iran can demonstrate or credibly assert that it can prevent or slow a U.S. response to its aggression, it is more able to coerce its neighbors or the international community. In the eastern Mediterranean, the government of Syria has deployed an array of modern anti-air missile systems to raise the costs of outside intervention in its ongoing civil war. And in the Pacific, North Korea has already demonstrated its willingness to employ anti-access capabilities with the sinking in 2010 of the South Korean ship, Cheonan.

Air-Sea Battle is not a military strategy; it isn't about countering an invasion; it isn't a plan for U.S. forces to conduct an assault. Air-Sea Battle is a concept for defeating threats to access and enabling follow-on operations, which could include military activities as well as humanitarian assistance and disaster response. For example, in the last several years, improved integration between naval and air forces helped us respond to floods in Pakistan and to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Normally, operational concepts are developed by commanders to carry out a specific set of actions in their area of responsibility. In contrast, the military services are using JOAC and Air-Sea Battle to guide their efforts to organize, train, and equip forces provided to operational commanders. Further, we are integrating these concepts into the tactics and procedures we develop to operate with our allies. This is similar to the effort in the 1980s to implement the "Air-Land" Battle concept and associated NATO concepts to defeat Soviet aggression in Central Europe. That effort resulted in programs such as the JSTARS radar aircraft that we still use to track targets on land. And while Air-Land Battle was focused on a singular threat and region, the idea of using a specific operational concept to guide investment is the same approach we are taking with Air-Sea Battle.

Breaking the "kill chain"

Air-Sea Battle defeats threats to access by, first, disrupting an adversary's command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems; second, destroying adversary weapons launchers (including aircraft, ships, and missile sites); and finally, defeating the weapons an adversary launches.

This approach exploits the fact that, to attack our forces, an adversary must complete a sequence of actions, commonly referred to as a "kill chain." For example, surveillance systems locate U.S. forces, communications networks relay targeting information to weapons launchers, weapons are launched, and then they must hone in on U.S. forces. Each of these steps is vulnerable to interdiction or disruption, and because each step must work, our forces can focus on the weakest links in the chain, not each and every one. For example, strikes against installations deep inland are not necessarily required in Air-Sea Battle because adversary C4ISR may be vulnerable to disruption, weapons can be deceived or interdicted, and adversary ships and aircraft can be destroyed.

U.S. forces need not employ "symmetrical" approaches to counter each threat -- shooting missiles down with missiles, sinking submarines with other submarines, etc. Instead, as described in the JOAC and Air-Sea Battle, we will operate across domains. For example, we will defeat missiles with electronic warfare, disrupt surveillance systems with electromagnetic or cyberattacks, and defeat air threats with submarines. This is "networked, integrated attack" and it will require a force that is designed for -- and that regularly practices -- these kinds of operations.

Building a truly "joint" force

Conducting operations across domains requires rapid and tight coordination between air, ground, and naval forces -- a level of integration well beyond today's efforts to merely pre-plan and deconflict actions between services. This integration can't be achieved effectively and efficiently on an ad hoc basis. Forces must be "pre-integrated" -- before the fight begins. This compels us to work more closely as we develop and prepare our forces.

Today, for example, instructors from the Navy's "Top Gun" school routinely train with their counterparts at the Air Force Weapons School. As part of Air-Sea Battle we are pursuing this type of inter-service cooperation between all the services, as well as within each branch of each service. Just as in tactical aviation, we are expanding our doctrine integration to include additional areas of collaboration -- such as Army air-defense forces and Marine reconnaissance units. With the doctrine, procedures, investment, and training included in Air-Sea Battle's initiatives, we are moving from cooperation toward integration across domains. To foster integration we are directing an intensified approach to building common procedures, complementary budgets, combined exercises, and joint war games.

An essential prerequisite for cross-domain operations is communication and data links that connect sensors, decision-makers, and shooters armed with kinetic, electromagnetic, and cyber weapons. Our investments, guided by the Air-Sea Battle concept, are building increasingly robust networks able to communicate between each service's platforms, even in a contested electromagnetic environment. Part of this effort is focused on the systems and procedures for Joint Tactical Networking to connect today's aircraft and ships with new 5th generation aircraft, such as the F-35 and F-22.

Two recent tests advanced our efforts to promote Joint Tactical Networking. In the first, an Air Force F-22 provided updated targeting information to a Navy submarine-launched Tomahawk missile. Similarly, in September 2012 an Army Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) ashore successfully guided a U.S. Navy SM-6 surface-to-air missile to intercept an incoming cruise missile, demonstrating the ability to extend the range of an Aegis-equipped ship to well beyond the horizon and over land. These examples show how integrating capabilities from multiple services and domains combine to provide greater range and more options for commanders.

We cannot forget, however, that the enemy gets a vote. Electromagnetic jammers and decoys are becoming less expensive and easier to obtain, and they can emit more complex signals. Our communication networks will need to be resilient and redundant. We are investing together in new waveforms that are resistant to jamming while also building systems that can back up traditional satellite communications. Through the FY 2013 Air-Sea Battle Implementation Master Plan, our services will continue to pursue communication network improvements through technology development, war games, and the operational alignment of our Air and Maritime Operations Centers around the world.

By improving our integration, we improve our combined capability to assure access without expensive new investments. A more efficient and effective force will provide a starting point for evaluating how and where we should address potential reductions in future defense budgets.

Keeping up the momentum

We continue to implement the Air-Sea Battle concept in three main ways: compelling institutional change, fostering conceptual alignment, and promoting programmatic collaboration.

Compelling institutional change. The Air-Sea Battle concept establishes a "new normal" for integration between services so they are able to conduct successful cross-domain operations. This approach will require breaking down traditional service and community paradigms. Each of our services and each of the communities (e.g., fighters, bombers, submarines, surface ships, satellites, cyber operators, patrol aircraft, etc.) within our services have decades of established tactics, procedures, and traditions that may not align with each other. We will have to eliminate some of these differences to become a more integrated force able to operate across domains. For example, fighter aircraft may be used as surveillance platforms to support submarines attacking air defenses, or submarines may operate remotely-piloted aircraft to support Marine special forces attacking a radar.

This change will take sustained effort. We established a joint Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO) with representatives from each service to lead day-to-day implementation of the concept. The ASBO sponsors war games and simulations, assists with service-level doctrinal changes, and advises on budget decisions. Most recently, in December, the ASBO hosted 150 personnel from all four services for the 2012 Air-Sea Battle Implementation Working Group. Representatives from U.S. Central and Pacific Commands, as well as their supporting components, played prominent roles during the discussions. The working group made significant progress in solidifying the habitual relationships Air-Sea Battle will require between the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.

Fostering conceptual alignment. The ASBO promotes incorporation of Air-Sea Battle concept elements in service concepts and assures the Air-Sea Battle effort stays consistent with and supports the overarching Joint Operational Access Concept. For example, Air-Sea Battle was incorporated into each of the services' war games during 2012. The Marine Corps' Expeditionary Warrior (March), Army's Unified Quest (June), Navy's Global (August), and Air Force's Unified Engagement (December) included objectives that explored Air-Sea Battle as a way to meet anti-access challenges. The Air-Sea Battle focus increased with each successive game, culminating with Unified Engagement 12, a "table-top" wargame including about 300 participants from a dozen nations. This was the first Air-Sea Battle war game to include participation by our treaty allies. Allied participation will remain a priority going forward, with the intent of influencing multinational military concepts, tactics, and doctrine.

Promoting programmatic collaboration. The ASBO assesses service programs and budgets and recommends specific solutions to address Joint Force shortfalls against anti-access challenges. To most efficiently deliver solutions, the ASBO's specific programmatic recommendations are coordinated between the services. Starting with the FY 2010 budget, application of the Air-Sea Battle concept has resulted in tangible investments to deliver the integrated, cross-domain capabilities required to defeat modern threats to access. Over the past two years these investments included the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile; Navy electronic warfare systems, such as Ship Signals Exploitation Equipment; and new data links for our fighters.

As part of its assessments, the ASBO is identifying redundancies across the services that can be eliminated. These efforts will be important as our resources become more constrained. For example, in the FY 2013 budget our services proposed reductions in Global Hawk unmanned vehicles, Air Force strike fighters, and Navy surface combatants. We will use the Air-Sea Battle concept to help integrate our force further and maintain our capability in the face of smaller budgets.

A challenge we can't ignore

Some will argue the United States can afford to retrench and "reset" following more than a decade of war, with decreasing resources and without an existential threat such as the Soviet Union. We don't have that luxury. Anti-access threats erode confidence in the freedom of the global commons that underpins our global economy. Nations are fielding and directly threatening their neighbors with anti-access systems. And potential aggressors are using these capabilities to assert that they can slow or prevent a U.S. response in order to undermine confidence in U.S. security guarantees.

The United States must sustain its capability to assure access when needed to counter these trends. Our services will continue to increase the integration of our training and improve our coordination in developing doctrine, operating concepts, new capabilities, and investment plans. We will need, however, the support of our partners in Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to ensure this integration is implemented in our budgets and strategies. Through our combined efforts, Air-Sea Battle will assure continued U.S. freedom of action and with it our ability to deter aggression, maintain regional stability, dampen crisis, and assure our allies and partners.
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MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty Images


Admiral Jonathan Greenert is the chief of naval operations, and General Mark Welsh is the chief of staff of the Air Force.
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Is China Inserting Itself Into the Taiwan-Philippines Spat?
By Zachary Keck
May 24, 2013
Comments 22

This week a Chinese warship and a couple of maritime agency vessels conducted a patrol in the areas of the Spratly Islands that the Philippines claims, prompting an official rebuke from Manila.

According to Philippines officials, at least three Chinese ships and 10 fishing boats were spotted near the Ayungin Shoal, which is part of the Spratly Islands and about 200 kms off the coast of the Philippine island of Palawan.

Briefing reporters this week, Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said, “We saw a frigate. We saw CMS (Chinese maritime surveillance) maritime ships. We have pictures and we have sent them to the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA). Based on [the photos] that I saw yesterday, there were two CMS and one frigate.”

Gazmin added that the presence of a Chinese military ship was “unusual.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs struck an even more defiant tone with a spokesperson from the department declaring, “They should not be there. They do not have the right to be there… no-one should doubt the resolve of the Filipino people to defend what is ours in that area.”

“Our Navy and our Coast Guard are mandated to enforce the laws of the (Philippine) republic,” Raul Hernandez, the spokesperson, added.

The Philippines stations a host of Marines on the Ayungin Shoal which is also called the Second Thomas Shoal. They operate from a WWII-era U.S. tank-landing vessel. Manila has said that its military was not deploying more ships to the area but that an unarmed, resupply ship is in route to replenish the deployed Marines.

The Philippines filed an official protest with the Chinese embassy in Manila, calling the ships deployment “provocative and illegal.” Beijing largely brushed aside the charges, restating its claims to sovereignty of the area.

Referring to the Spratlys by their Chinese name, a spokesperson from the China’s Foreign Ministry said: “China has indisputable sovereignty over the Nansha Islands and their adjacent waters…. Patrols by Chinese official ships in the waters are justified.”

The Foreign Ministry also called on the parties of the South China Sea dispute to, “fully and earnestly” implement the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and seize taking actions that could “amplify or complicate the issue,” according to a report in the state-affiliated Global Times.

Although China and the Philippines have long contested sovereignty of the reefs and shoals in the Spratlys, the timing of the patrols suggest they may have been motivated by the recent spat between the Philippines and Taiwan, which China considers an integral part of China.

Last week a Philippine Coast Guard vessel fired on a Taiwanese fishing vessel, killing one of the crew members. The incident led to a full-blown diplomatic crisis between the Philippines and Taiwan in which China has enthusiastically joined Taiwan in condemning the Philippines.

China and Taiwan have analogous claims of sovereignty over waters in the East and South China Seas and Beijing has often used this fact to try and strengthen its ties with Taipei. In the East China Sea this strategy dates back to the 1970s, according to the global private intelligence firm Stratfor.

However, Beijing recently suffered a setback in this strategy when Taiwan reasserted its autonomy in handling sovereignty disputes by signing a fishing agreement with Japan. When the spat between Taiwan and the Philippines first developed last week, some observers speculated that Beijing would seek to use it to revive its strategy of tacitly cooperating with Taiwan in sovereignty disputes.

It’s unclear if the two events are related at all, however. The shooting of the Taiwanese fisherman took place near the Philippines’ northern island of Batanes, while the Chinese patrols occurred much further to the south. In this sense, the Chinese ships were patrolling areas much closer to the Scarborough Shoal that Beijing seized following a prolonged standoff with Manila in the waters in early 2012.

Moreover, the dispute between Taiwan and the Philippines appeared to be winding down about the time that Manila went public with the Chinese patrols, when Taipei announced it was allowing Manila to send an investigation team to review the evidence of the shooting incident.

In any case, the recent flare-ups with Taiwan and China have clearly rattled the Philippines, which announced on Tuesday that it will spend US$1.8 billion to beef up its defenses in order to “resist bullies” as President Benigno Aquino put it.

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...n-just-about-the-most-unsafe-place-they-could


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http://qz.com/87482/next-years-wint...st-about-the-most-unsafe-place-they-could-be/


Next year’s Winter Olympics are being held in just about the most unsafe place they could be
By Josh Meyer @JoshMeyerDC 2 hours ago



With nine months to go before the 2014 Winter Olympics, the biennial sport of Olympics-bashing has begun in earnest. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is being criticized for cost overruns and the other usual problems. And as always, the host country, this time Russia, is taking heat for cronyism, corruption, environmental concerns and construction delays.

But this time there is another, bigger set of worries. At several recent gatherings around the world, experts have wrung their hands publicly about how the XXII Winter Games pose the biggest security threat of any games in memory.

The Olympics, which will run from February 7th to the 23rd, are going to be held right in the middle of one of the world’s hottest conflict zones, the North Caucasus. Sochi, the host city, is a lovely resort town on Russia’s Black Sea coast. But the region around it is a cauldron of ethnic hatred and anti-Russian separatist movements. And then there is all of the organized crime, Islamist militancy and terrorism.

​

Some experts have been warning about security risks ever since the IOC picked Sochi in 2007 over bids from Austria and South Korea. But recent developments have alarmed Caucasus watchers. The two Boston Marathon bombers had ties to the region, and one of them spent six months last year in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where a virulent Islamist insurgency has been gaining strength. And a spat between Washington and Moscow, which this month accused a US diplomat of recruiting spies, has threatened to undermine what little counter-terrorism cooperation the two countries had.

“Unfortunately, security and the Caucasus do not go together. You might say the two words are a contradiction in terms,” Thomas De Waal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the Georgian Parliament in a speech last month. Last week, Paul Goble, a former CIA and State Department expert on the Caucasus who now runs the blog Window on Eurasia, spoke at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington, warning that a confluence of events have made the Sochi Olympics a “disaster” in the making.

“In recent months it has become increasingly clear that Sochi is very much the wrong place for holding a winter Olympic games,” Goble told the crowd, which included officials from the State Department, FBI and the US military’s Central Command. He told Quartz: “The Sochi Olympics are being staged in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and by the wrong people. In terms of security, it is one of the least secure places on earth. It would be like holding the games in Beirut.’’

The potential for turmoil is virtually limitless. Southern Russia teems with ethnic groups that suffered massacres and exiles at Russia’s hands in the 19th century, and still chafe at the often repressive regime in Moscow. One of those groups, the Circassians, marks the games as the 150th anniversary of an alleged genocide. Chechnya, whose people were exiled en masse under Stalin, spent much of the last two decades as a battleground between separatist rebels and Russian forces. And neighboring Georgia is still smarting from Russia’s military invasion, which occurred during the 2008 Olympics.

There are fears that Islamist groups from nearby Chechnya and Dagestan could be plotting attacks already—on the Olympics, or elsewhere while Moscow’s security forces focus on the games. Such fears intensified last month when the Tsarnaev brothers—of ethnic Chechen origin—detonated home-made bombs at the Boston Marathon. Fighting between Russian forces and various militant groups has killed thousands in recent years, including a handful of guerillas in Dagestan in early May.

Perhaps Russian counter-terrorism official Oleg Nechiporenko summed it up best back in May 2010, in response to a car bombing in nearby Stavropol. The blast killed seven and wounded 40 others, and suspects included local mafia groups, separatists, Islamist militants, or even fighters from the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. “The region is such a muddied and bloodied aquarium of conflict that to pick out any one fish is impossible,” Nechiporenko said.

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http://www.france24.com/en/20130524-syria-regime-agrees-attend-peace-conference

24 May 2013 - 09H38

Syria regime 'agrees' to attend peace conference

AFP - Russia said on Friday that the Damascus regime had agreed "in principle" to attend an international peace conference on the Syria crisis that is expected to take place in Geneva in June.

"We note with satisfaction that we have received an agreement in principle from Damascus to attend the international conference, in the interest of Syrians themselves finding a political path to resolve the conflict, which is ruinous for the nation and region," Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told reporters.

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http://www.france24.com/en/20130524-cars-schools-torched-fifth-night-stockholm-riots-sweden

Latest update: 24/05/2013
- immigration - riots - Sweden

Cars, schools torched in fifth night of Stockholm riots

Cars, schools and a police station were torched Friday after a fifth night of riots in Stockholm's immigrant-majority suburbs following the fatal police shooting on Sunday of a 69-year-old wielding a machete.
By News Wires (text)


At least nine cars were torched and two schools and a police station were set ablaze as riots swept through Stockholm's immigrant-dominated suburbs early Friday for the fifth straight night, police and firefighters said.

The riots, which have shattered Sweden's image abroad as a peaceful and egalitarian nation, have sparked a debate about the assimilation of immigrants, who make up about 15 percent of the population.

Many of the immigrants who have arrived due to the country's generous refugee policy struggle to learn the language and find employment, despite numerous government programmes.

Early Friday, police told Swedish news agency TT eight people had been arrested so far for the night's rioting, but no injuries were reported.

In Rinkeby, one of the city's immigrant-dominated areas, firefighters rushed to put out flames that engulfed six cars parked alongside each other. Five cars were totally gutted, and one sustained more moderate damage, according to an AFP photographer on the scene.

Three more cars were torched in the Norsborg suburb, and a police station in Aelvsjoe was set on fire but quickly extinguished, police said.

Firefighters meanwhile said a school in another immigrant-heavy suburb, Tensta, was set ablaze but quickly extinguished, and a nursery school in the Kista suburb was also on fire.

And police in Soedertaelje, a town south of Stockholm, said rioters threw stones at them as they responded to reports of cars set alight.

The previous night, the fire brigade had been called to some 90 different blazes, most of them caused by rioters.

"We are gradually becoming more like other countries," said Aje Carlbom, a social anthropologist at Malmoe University.

The troubles, which began Sunday in the Husby suburb, are believed to have been triggered by the fatal police shooting of a 69-year-old Husby resident last week after the man wielded a machete in public.

The man had fled to his apartment, where police have said they tried to mediate but ended up shooting him dead in what they claimed was self-defence.

Local activists said the shooting sparked anger among youths who claim to have suffered from police brutality. During the first night of rioting, they said police had called them "tramps, monkeys and negroes."

Police meanwhile downplayed the scale of the events.

"Every injured person is a tragedy, every torched car is a failure for society... but Stockholm is not burning. Let's have a level-headed view of the situation," Ulf Johansson, deputy police chief for Stockholm county, said Thursday.

Residents of areas largely populated by immigrants are suffering from segregation, anthropologist Carlbom told AFP.

"Living as a young person in these segregated areas can be very hard in many ways. You have virtually no contact with other Swedes and a lot of times I don't think you have a good understanding of Swedish society," he said.

For example, some 80 percent of the 12,000 residents in Husby are immigrants.

Due to its liberal immigration policy, Sweden has in recent decades become one of Europe's top destinations for immigrants, both in absolute numbers and relative to its size.

In the past decade it has welcomed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and the Balkans, among others.

This is not the first time the Scandinavian country has seen riots among immigrants.

In 2010, up to 100 youths threw bricks, set fires and attacked the local police station in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rinkeby for two nights.

And in 2008, hundreds of youths rioted against police in the southern Swedish town of Malmoe, sparked by the closure of an Islamic cultural centre in the suburb of Rosengaard that housed a mosque.

Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag attributed the violence to high unemployment and social exclusion in Sweden's immigrant-dominated areas.

"We know that there is discrimination in these areas, and these events don't improve the image of these areas, where there is a lot of positive stuff going on but which is totally eclipsed right now," he told TT.

In Husby, overall unemployment was 8.8 percent in 2012, compared to 3.3 percent in Stockholm as a whole, according to official data.

And a total of 12 percent in Husby received social benefits last year, compared to 3.6 percent in Stockholm as a whole.

The riots have received international media attention, with some comparisons being drawn to similar problems assimilating immigrants in other European countries such as Britain and France.

(AFP)
Date created : 24/05/2013

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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...eath-in-woolwich/story-e6frg6n6-1226649608708


Copycat warnings after Drummer Lee Rigby's death in Woolwich

From: AAP
May 24, 2013 4:32AM

SECURITY experts are warning of copycat attacks, following extensive media coverage of the brutal murder of a British soldier in suburban London.

Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, was hacked to death in a knife attack on Wednesday just yards from the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich.

The two suspects in the killing were shot and wounded by police and are now in hospitals under armed guard.

Two other people - a 29-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman - have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.

Rigby, who had a two-year-old son, had last been deployed to Afghanistan in 2009.

Soldiers have long been seen as targets by Islamic extremists.

In Australia, three men were jailed in late 2011 over a terror plot to kill soldiers at the Holsworthy Army Base in Sydney.

"It's not the first time there has been a plot to go specifically after soldiers, but obviously this is the first successful one from an al-Qaeda-inspired point of view," terrorism expert Andrew Silke, from the University of East London, said of Wednesday's attack.

"A lot of the terrorists very much see themselves as soldiers fighting a war."

Last month, three British men were jailed for planning terror attacks at a town which for years was the first to receive soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Another pair were jailed the same month over an al-Qaida-inspired plot to send a remote-controlled toy car into an army reservist centre.

And in 2008, another man, Parviz Khan, was jailed for life for plotting to kidnap and kill a British Muslim soldier. He admitted he intended to film his beheading.

Professor Silke says so-called lone wolf attacks using simple methods have become more common as al-Qaida is weakened.

And he warns there could be more to come.

"We know from research whenever a terrorist attack gets an awful lot of media attention it leads to copycats and we get a lot of other groups being inspired by it saying 'Why don't we do something similar'," the academic said.

The University of Reading's Dr Christina Hellmich agrees "individualised jihad" is likely the kind of attack we will see in the future.

Defence analyst Matthew Henman argues the suspects' failure to flee on Wednesday and their politically-fuelled rants afterwards, suggest "an effort to maximise publicity".

News outlets have named one of the attackers as 28-year-old Michael Adeboloja, a British citizen of Nigerian descent, who was reportedly raised a Christian but became interested in Islam as a teenager.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said the Woolwich attack was "a betrayal of Islam" and the best approach was to "go about our normal lives".

"We will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms," he said on Thursday.

The Australian National Imams Council has urged clerics in Australia to use their Friday sermons to condemn the attack "in no uncertain terms".

Muslims Australia's Keysar Trad said "it takes a sick and twisted mind to hack another person with a meat cleaver".

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http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/20130523.aspx

The Flaw In North Korean War Plans

May 23, 2013: North Korea is often described as having the fourth largest military on the planet. That’s quite an accomplishment for a country of 24 million but the numbers are achieved at the expense of quality and sustainability. The 950,000 personnel in the active military are four percent of the population. When you include reservists who can be called to service in wartime, over 25 percent of the population gets involved. That means the economy, as shabby as it is, pretty much shuts down until the war is over. Fortunately, that won’t take long.

Since North Korea has drawn on its war reserves of food and fuel over the last decade (because of bad harvests and little cash to buy oil), it’s likely that North Korea would be out of fuel for military operations after about a month and food shortages for the entire population would quickly become catastrophic. That’s because the military takes over much of the vehicle transport in wartime and enemy (South Korean/U.S.) air attacks would cripple the railroads. Without transportation, food cannot be moved to areas that don’t produce much of it.

North Korea keeps its data on “war reserves” (food, fuel, ammo, and other supplies stockpiled for wartime) a secret. But many more North Korean refugees have reached South Korea in the last decade and most have served in the military, many quite recently. They all tell a similar tale of low reserves and little new material to replace stuff that is withdrawn to deal with severe food or fuel shortages, or simply goes bad because of age. All this helps to explain the North Korea eagerness to build some nuclear bombs that can be used as weapons. The nukes are rapidly becoming the only effective wartime weapon available but the nukes are not yet ready for prime time.

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Keeping The Chinese Blind

May 23, 2013: As China sends more long-range maritime patrol aircraft out over the West Pacific (to search for American warships, especially carriers), the U.S. is reviving some Cold War era practices it used against Russian maritime patrol aircraft. Mainly this involves sending land-based P-3 maritime patrol aircraft out to keep track of their Chinese counterparts. This task could be done with carrier aircraft, but this would confirm that an American carrier was less than 500 kilometers away.

During the Cold War the U.S. Navy was fairly confident that the Russians couldn’t find American warships at sea, especially the carrier task forces, very well. U.S. aircraft that regularly shadowed Russian patrol aircraft already knew where the ships were and noticed that much of the time the “Red Eagles” hadn’t a clue as to where the American vessels were. That was the main reason for using P-3s or other land-based aircraft shadow the Russian patrol aircraft.

China now has a growing number of radar satellites that can search for ships at sea, but this is not a perfect solution because the Pacific is vast and radar satellites can only monitor a small portion of that ocean.

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?429092-Tokyo-Seoul-hold-ugly-nuclear-option

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http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KOR-01-230513.html

Korea
May 23, '13
SPEAKING FREELY
Tokyo, Seoul hold 'ugly' nuclear option
By Tahir Mahmood Azad

The strategic consequences of a sustained North Korean nuclear weapons program are immensely troublesome. As neighbors such as South Korea and Japan consider possible countermeasures, they might consider it time to reassess whether nuclear weapons are an option to maintain an "ugly stability" in the region.

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

North Korea's nuclear weapons program is undermining regional stability in Northeast Asia, with the present crisis on the Korean Peninsula again prompting the neighboring states into seriously reconsidering their national security policies. This is particularly the case for Japan, against which North Korea has deployed, or so it is widely believed, approximately 200 Nodong missiles.

The policy and strategic consequences of a sustained North Korean nuclear weapons program are immensely troublesome, both for future regional security and the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Resisting calls to abandon its nuclear weapons program, doubt has been cast on whether North Korea has any intention of coming back to the table to negotiate in good faith.

Regardless of nuclear weapons, the possibility of highly destructive military conflict on the Korean Peninsula remains very high. But with nuclear weapons added to the mix, the potential consequences of renewed conflict for Japan, South Korea, and the United States forces stationed there are incalculably greater.

North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons is aggravating security concerns and uncertainties in the region. Uncertainties could generate unpredictable developments that strategies of deterrence might not be able to contain, particularly in conditions of crisis. North Korea's principal adversaries - of which Japan is one - should therefore be expected to pursue countermeasures with the attendant danger of an arms race appearing in the region. While this has been a longstanding worry, the current crisis in the region has renewed debate in Japan over how to deal with North Korea.

Japan at present maintains a peaceful nuclear power program that generates high-grade plutonium, possesses a space launch capacity providing advanced ballistic missile capabilities, and has the technical expertise and materials to reorient these activities toward making sophisticated nuclear weapons.

In fact, despite the country being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an investigation by the National Security News Service has revealed that Japan's stealth nuclear weapons potential has been quietly abetted by "tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax-paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since 1980".

While Japan has always supported the agenda of a world free of nuclear weapons, the regional security dynamics as they are now could persuade the Japanese leadership to change its mind in the near future and revoke Article 9 of its constitution that forbids the acquiring of nuclear weapons. Indeed, senior Japanese leaders have occasionally noted Japan's capacity - and right - to exercise this option, particularly in the context of a heightened sense of crisis over North Korea's activities.

A growing North Korean nuclear arsenal could also spur nuclear ambitions in South Korea and even Taiwan; governments in both Seoul and Taipei have in the past demonstrated nuclear ambitions (albeit their respective civil nuclear programs are less advanced than Japan's) that were ultimately restrained by the United States. It might be time to reassess whether nuclear weapons could in fact be an option to maintain an "ugly stability" in the region.

Domestic opinion in Japan is largely against going nuclear. Back in 2006, public opinion polls showed that even after North Korea's first nuclear test, about 80% of the Japanese population did not want their country to acquire nuclear weapons. In spite of this, the current political elites and administration do believe in a self-defense system.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, regarded as a right-wing nationalist, has called for a "strong Japan" and a "strong military". Although he has not openly supported the building of nuclear weapons, he has called for the restarting of Japan's nuclear industry, which was largely shut down after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In the Sixth US-Japan Strategic Dialogue in Maui, Hawaii, on February 7-8, 2013, moreover, a Japanese representative identified that "North Korea is a primary near-term threat to Japan and the region - failure to check North Korea's capabilities could shift Japanese public opinion [toward] the desirability of developing indigenous power-projection capabilities and perhaps even nuclear weapons."

The head of Japan's Defense Agency has also threatened that Japan might be forced to start a nuclear weapons program if North Korea's efforts are not curtailed.

While Japan has up until now eschewed the nuclear option and maintained its respect for the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, if it decides to invest efforts into acquiring nuclear weapons it will do so in defiance of the nuclear non-proliferation regime that currently stands imperiled.

It would potentially face international sanctions for doing so, but it should be able to absorb the costs of these. In fact, in light of a hostile and erratic North Korea, Tokyo may deem it as a price worth paying.

Tahir M Azad is a PhD scholar at the Department of Strategic & Nuclear Studies, National Defence University Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a guest researcher at ISDP, Stockholm, Sweden. His areas of interest are nuclear security, nuclear terrorism, South Asian nuclear politics, and nuclear strategies.

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

(Copyright 2013 Tahir M Azad)

Related Article:
Japan tips its hand via North Korea
(May 21, '13)

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http://www.france24.com/en/20130524-lebanese-president-cautions-hezbollah-over-syria

24 May 2013 - 16H51

Lebanese president cautions Hezbollah over Syria

AFP - Lebanese President Michel Sleiman cautioned Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah on Friday over its militants' intervention on the side of the regime in the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

"The resistance is more noble and more important than anything, and should not get bogged down in the sands of dissension, whether in Syria or Lebanon," he said in a statement, referring to Hezbollah's traditional focus on fighting Israel.

"The resistance has fought and liberated (Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon) because it acts for a national cause and not a confessional one," Sleiman added.

The statement came as the militant group battled Syrian rebel fighters in the central town of Qusayr near the border, where Syrian troops launched an assault on Sunday.

The fighting has left dozens of Hezbollah fighters dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and sources close to the group.

Lebanon is officially neutral in the conflict, but the fighting has exacerbated tensions among its myriad of religious and ethnic communities.

Hezbollah and its allies have backed the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in its efforts to crush the uprising that began in March 2011.

But Lebanon's opposition parties largely support the Sunni-led rebellion against the Syrian regime.

Hezbollah has acknowledged that its fighters are inside Syria, and several Lebanese Sunni clerics have urged members of their community to join the conflict on the side of the rebels.

Sleiman, elected in 2008, is seen as a neutral figure who sides with neither camp. His comments Friday were his first on Hezbollah's role in Syria.

They come on the eve of Liberation Day, which marks the Israeli army's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is expected to deliver an anniversary speech on Saturday.

The Shiite group's intervention in the conflict has drawn international criticism, particularly from the United States, which blacklists Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama called Sleiman to discuss Hezbollah's intervention.

"We have condemned and condemn again Hezbollah's direct intervention in the assault on Qusayr where Hezbollah's fighters are playing a significant role in the regime's offensive," White House spokesman Jay Carney said after the call.

"Hezbollah's occupation of villages in Syria and its support for the regime and pro-Assad militias exacerbates and inflames regional sectarian tensions and perpetuates the regime's campaign of terror against the Syrian people".

As the group's role in Syria grows, France announced on Wednesday that it would propose that Hezbollah's military wing be added to the European Union's blacklist of "terrorist" organisations.

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http://www.france24.com/en/20130524-gunfire-suicide-bomb-explosions-kabul-afghanistan

Latest update: 24/05/2013
- Afghanistan - suicide bombing - Taliban - terrorism - unrest

Taliban launch attack in downtown Kabul
© AFP file
Gunfire and explosions rocked central Kabul on Friday after at least two suicide bombs tore through the Afghan capital, the second attack to hit the city in just over a week. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the blasts.
By Luke SHRAGO (video)
News Wires (text)

Explosions and gunfire rocked central Kabul Friday as the Taliban launched an attack close to an Afghan intelligence facility and the headquarters of a government force that protects foreign firms.

The attack comes a week after a suicide car bomb targeting a foreign military convoy killed 15 people including five Americans in the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital for nearly a year.

The Taliban announced their annual "spring offensive" on April 27, opening a crucial period as local security forces take the lead in the fight against the insurgents.

At least two blasts hit the centre of Kabul at about 4:00 pm (1130 GMT) on Friday, the second day of the Afghan weekend, and gunfire erupted as security forces rushed to the scene.

Kabul police spokesman Hashmat Stanikzai told AFP the initial blast came close to a hospital run by the NDS intelligence agency and the headquarters of the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF), a government force that provides security for clients including international firms, supply convoys and aid groups.

He said gunmen had occupied a building in the attack, which is ongoing.

Jawed Kazem, a local shopkeeper, said: "I was sitting in my shop when the explosion happened. It was a big explosion which threw me off my chair, minutes later another explosion happened.

"Smoke is rising and gunfire is continuing."

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told AFP that his group was responsible and added that the attack began with a suicide car bombing.

"A group of other mujahideen armed with heavy and light weapons then took position in a building and are firing on several targets including a building in which the foreigners and members of spy agency stay," he said.

The suicide bombing last Thursday was the first major attack in Kabul since March 9 when a bomber on a bicycle killed nine people outside the defence ministry during a visit by US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

The attacks further underline the capital's vulnerability to militant assaults as 100,000 NATO troops gradually withdraw from Afghanistan ahead of the end of international combat operations next year.

Local forces are increasingly coming under attack from the Taliban as they take over from foreign forces, who will pull out of Afghanistan by the end of next year.

Six members of the APPF were killed on Tuesday in a roadside bombing in western Afghanistan as they travelled to a hydroelectric dam that is under protection from insurgent attack.

More than 11 years after the Taliban regime was ousted in 2001, efforts to seek a political settlement ending the violence have so far made little progress, but pressure is growing ahead of the NATO withdrawal.

(AFP)

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http://www.france24.com/en/20130524-turkey-build-wall-syrian-border-hurriyet

Latest update: 24/05/2013
- diplomacy - Hurriyet - Syria - Turkey

Turkey to build wall on border with Syria

Turkey will build a 2.5-kilometre wall along its border with Syria to prevent illegal crossings, officials announced Thursday. The Cilvegözü checkpoint lies less than 10 kilometres from where a twin bomb attack killed 51 people on May 11.
By Hürriyet Daily News (text)

Turkey will build a 2.5-kilometre-long wall along the Cilvegözü post on the border with Syria to prevent illegal crossings, Trade and Customs Minister Hayati Yazıcı announced Thursday. The border crossing lies less than 10 kilometres from Reyhanlı town center, where a twin bomb attack killed 51 people and wounded more than 100 on May 11.

A protocol with the Turkish Armed Forces has already been signed for the construction of the wall, Yazıcı said.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/24/us-sweden-riots-idUSBRE94N0LN20130524

Stretched by riots, Swedish police call reinforcements

By Ilze Filks and Mia Shanley
STOCKHOLM | Fri May 24, 2013 12:58pm EDT

(Reuters) - Police in Stockholm called in reinforcements on Friday after youths set cars and a school ablaze in a fifth night of rioting, the worst to hit Sweden for years.

Pupils at a primary school in Kista - an IT hub that is home to the likes of telecoms equipment maker Ericsson and the Swedish office of Microsoft - arrived to find the inside of the small red wooden building had been completely burnt out.

While Thursday was slightly calmer than the four nights before, about 30 cars were torched and eight people, mostly in their early 20s, were detained, police said.

In a country with a reputation for openness, tolerance and a model welfare state, the rioting has exposed a fault-line between a well-off majority and a minority - often young people with immigrant backgrounds - who are poorly educated, cannot find work and feel pushed to the edge of society.

"In the short run, the acute thing is to ensure that these neighborhoods get back to normal everyday life. In the long run we need to create positive spirals in these neighborhoods," Erik Ullenhag, Sweden's integration minister, told Reuters.

The police said they were calling in extra backup from the cities of Malmo and Gothenburg.

"Now it's Friday, the weekend, and we usually have more to do. We think there's going to be a lot of work and many have worked hard these last few days, so we are calling in extra police," spokesman Anders Jonsson said, without giving numbers.

MASKED YOUTHS

The spree of destruction has seen masked youths vandalize schools, libraries and police stations, setting cars alight and hurling stones at police and firefighters.

It was sparked by the fatal police shooting earlier this month of a 69-year man, reported by local media to be a Portuguese immigrant and suspected of wielding a large knife, in a Stockholm suburb called Husby.

Though far from the scale of riots in London or Paris in recent years, the violence has shocked a nation which has long taken pride in its generous social safety net.

Some seven years of center-right rule, however, have chipped away at benefits, while some communities have struggled to cope with the heavy wave of immigration they are seeing from war-torn countries like Syria.

Youth unemployment is especially high in immigrant neighborhoods like the ones where the riots have taken place.

Kicki Haak, head of the small Montessori school that was set alight in Kista, said she did not know if it would be able to reopen. The 94 students will move into improvised classrooms in nearby office buildings from Monday.

"Five nights in a row - it's incomprehensible," said Faisal Lugh, whose two children are pupils at the school.

"My children asked about the things they had there: 'How about my books? My rain jacket? My pictures? Are they all gone?'" said Lugh, who works for an unemployment office and often helps new immigrants find jobs.

FRUSTRATED RESIDENTS

There are signs that residents in the affected areas are getting fed up with the violence. Many community leaders, dressed in fluorescent jackets, have taken to the streets to try to calm things down.

"When will it stop?" said Maryam Rahimi, who works at a school in Husby that was vandalized earlier this week.

Risto Kajanto, brother-in-law of the man who was shot dead, told Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet he condemned the violence.

"I want to say to all those who are burning cars that it is totally wrong to react that way," he said.

The incident prompted accusations of police brutality, and violence spread from Husby to other poor neighborhoods.

One recent government study showed up to a third of young people aged 16 to 29 in some of the most deprived areas of Sweden's big cities neither study nor have a job.

The gap between rich and poor in Sweden is growing faster than in any other major nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, though absolute poverty remains uncommon.

(Additional reporting by Simon Johnson and Patrick Lannin, Writing by Mia Shanley, Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Mark Trevelyan)

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But how well will this sort of dealing transfer to the groups on the ground within Syria doing the fighting?.....

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Syria opposition seeks to unify as momentum for talks builds

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
ISTANBUL | Fri May 24, 2013 12:07pm EDT

(Reuters) - Syria's fractious opposition scrambled to agree a new leadership on Friday in a bid to present a coherent front at peace talks which the United States and Russia are convening to seek an end to more than two years of civil war.

A major assault by President Bashar al-Assad's forces on a rebel held town over the past week is shaping into a pivotal battle. It has drawn in fighters from Assad's Lebanese allies Hezbollah, justifying worry that a war that has killed 80,000 people would cross borders at the heart of the Middle East.

Washington and Moscow have been compelled to revive diplomacy by developments in recent months, which include new reports of atrocities, accusations chemical weapons were used and the rise of al Qaeda-linked fighters among rebels.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet privately in Paris on Monday to discuss their efforts to bring Syria's warring parties together, U.S. and Russian officials said.

Russia said the Syrian government had agreed in principle to attend the planned peace conference, which could take part in Geneva in the coming weeks, and had "expressed readiness" to find a political solution.

Under intense international pressure to resolve internal divisions so it can play a meaningful role in the talks, Syria's Western-backed opposition National Coalition met in Istanbul to elect new leaders and broaden its membership.

Senior opposition figures said the coalition was likely to attend the conference, but doubted it would produce any immediate deal for Assad to leave power - their central demand.

"We are faced with a situation where everyone thinks there will be a marriage when the bride is refusing. The regime has to show a minimum of will that it is ready to stop the bloodshed," said Haitham al-Maleh, an elder statesman of the coalition.

There was more heavy fighting on Friday in Qusair, a town controlling access to the coast which Assad's forces and Hezbollah allies have tried to take in a battle that could prove an important test of Assad's ability to withstand the revolt.

Assad wants to secure the coastal region which is the homeland of his Alawite minority sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. He is backed by Shi'ite Iran and Hezbollah against mainly Sunni rebels supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition London-based monitoring group, said Syrian army and Hezbollah forces at Qusair were trying to cut off rebels in the nearby village of Hamidiya. State media said the army had destroyed "terrorist dens" in Hamidiya and also killed eight "terrorists" in another village, Daba, close to Qusair.

COALITION STRUGGLES TO AGREE

Much to the frustration of its backers, the coalition has struggled to agree on a leader since the resignation in March of respected cleric Moaz Alkhatib, who had floated two initiatives for Assad to leave power peacefully.

Alkhatib's latest proposal - a 16-point plan which foresees Assad handing power to his deputy or prime minister then going abroad with 500 members of his entourage - won little support in Istanbul, highlighting the obstacles to wider negotiations.

"He has the right to submit papers to the meeting like any other member but his paper is heading directly to the dustbin of history. It is a repeat of his previous initiative which went nowhere," a senior coalition official said.

Washington threatened on Wednesday to increase support for the rebels if Assad refused to discuss a political end to the violence, a sentiment echoed on Friday by British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who has been pressing the European Union to amend a weapons embargo to allow arming the rebels.

"We do think it is important ahead of any negotiations ... for the Assad regime to understand that the pressure on it will intensify in the absence of successful negotiations," he told a news conference in Jerusalem.

Concerned by the rising influence of Islamists in the rebel ranks, Washington has pressured the opposition coalition to resolve its divisions and to expand to include more liberals.

"The international community is walking a little faster than the opposition. It wants to see a complete list of participants from the Syrian side for Geneva and this means that the coalition has to sort its affairs," a European diplomat said.

Looming large over the Istanbul meeting, which began on Thursday, is the shadow of Saudi Arabia, which according to opposition sources will lead an Arab drive to back the new government financially, after differences with Qatar on how to deal with the coalition were largely settled.

Saudi Arabia is backing a proposal being debated at the three-day meeting to expand the 60-member coalition to 95 by bringing in members of a new liberal political bloc being set up by veteran opposition campaigner Michel Kilo.

The coalition is currently dominated by two blocs: the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies in the Syrian National Council, and a faction loyal to Mustafa al-Sabbagh, a businessman close to Qatar.

"The Kilo bloc, if it is admitted, will end the era of the coalition being decided by Sabbagh and the Brotherhood," a senior coalition source said.

Criticism has mounted against the coalition for failing to provide a credible democratic alternative to the four-decade family rule of Assad and his father.

Assad has vowed to defeat what he calls terrorists and foreign agents behind the uprising, which began with months of peaceful protests and evolved into an armed revolt after months of military repression.

More than 80,000 people have been killed in what is now a full-scale civil war that has dragged in Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas and is spilling into other neighboring countries.

Burhan Ghalioun, a strong candidate to become the new head of the opposition, said the coalition was likely to agree to go to Geneva because it did not want Assad to gain political advantage from the meeting, although, he said, it was unlikely to produce any deal for a transition of power.

Other possible candidates include Ahmed Tumeh Kheder, a prominent opposition campaigner from the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland; Louay al-Safi, a professor who has taught in the United States; and acting coalition president George Sabra, a Christian who led pro-democracy demonstrations early in the uprising.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Thomas Grove and Alissa de Carbonnel in Moscow, Arshad Mohammed in Amman, Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Peter Graff)

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Algerian jihadi mastermind claims Niger suicide attacks

By Abdoulaye Massalatchi
NIAMEY | Fri May 24, 2013 12:19pm EDT

(Reuters) - French special forces and Niger troops shot dead on Friday the last two Islamists involved in a twin attack on a military base and a French uranium mine in Niger, which was claimed by the mastermind of January's mass hostage-taking in Algeria.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a one-eyed veteran of al Qaeda's north African operations, said in a statement that his Mulathameen brigade organized Thursday's raids with the MUJWA militant group in retaliation for Niger's role in a French-led war on Islamists in Mali.

The coordinated dawn attacks killed 21 people and damaged machinery at Areva's Somair mine in the remote town of Arlit, a key part of France's energy supplies. They raised fears of Mali's conflict spreading to neighboring West African states.

Niger Defence Minister Mahamadou Karidjo said French special forces had helped to end the siege by two Islamists fighters who were holed up inside the army barracks in the desert town of Agadez early on Friday.

"Everything is over in Agadez. Everything is calm," Karidjo told RFI radio. He said eight Islamists in total had been killed in Agadez and two more in Arlit, adding: "All of them were wearing belts packed with explosives."

The minister said two military cadets had been killed by the cornered Islamists. However, a military source, who asked not to be named, said the cadets were shot dead in Friday's raid.

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told BFM television that special forces had intervened at the request of Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou. France stationed special forces in northern Niger to help protect its desert uranium mines, providing one-fifth of the fuel for France's reactors.

Niger has emerged as a firm ally of France and the United States in the fight against al Qaeda-linked groups in the Sahel. It has deployed 650 troops in neighboring Mali and sought to shut its porous desert borders to Islamist groups, believed to have shifted their bases to southern Libya.

Belmokhtar, signing his statement with his pseudonym Khalid Abu al-Abbas, said the raid was a response to Issoufou's public claims that the Islamists had been defeated in Mali.

"We will have more operations by the strength and power of Allah and not only that, but we will move the battle to inside his country if he doesn't withdraw his mercenary army," the communique, whose authenticity could not be verified, said.

SHOCKWAVE FROM MALI

Belmokhtar's brigade claimed responsibility for January's attack on the In Amenas gas plant in southeastern Algeria in which 37 foreigners were killed, saying it was retaliation for the French-led campaign in Mali.

MUJWA and al Qaeda's North African wing AQIM have also pledged to strike at French interests across the region after Paris launched the ground and air campaign in January that broke their 10-month grip over Mali's vast desert north.

Recent MUJWA suicide attacks around the northern city of Gao - where the group imposed harsh sharia law during a 10-month rule - have caused relatively little damage. Analysts said the strong impact of Thursday's attack appeared to reflect Belmokhtar's bold strategic thinking.

Belmokhtar has links with MUJWA, having spent time in GAO when it was controlled by the Islamist group last year.

"This attack is part of the shockwave from the war in Mali," said Yvan Guichaoua, an expert on Niger at University of East Anglia. "I am not surprised at all that it took place in Niger ... Militarily effective groups are fleeing Mali."

The MUJWA, which split off from AQIM in 2011, is a largely black African jihadi group with recruits from several West African countries which has claimed previous attacks outside Mali, including the kidnapping of aid workers in Algeria.

Chad's army claimed Belmokhtar was killed in northern Mali this year but Western intelligence services had played down reports of the veteran jihadist's death.

Mauritania's Alakhbar news website, which has contacts with Islamist groups, cited what it said was a spokesman for Belmokhtar's brigade saying the Niger raid was carried out by a mix of Islamist fighters from Sudan, Western Sahara and Mali.

(Additional reporting by Joe Bavier in Abidjan, Laurent Prieur in Nouakchott, Daniel Flynn in Dakar, Marinne Pennetier and Brian Love in Paris; Writing by Daniel Flynn; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Michael Roddy)

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May 24, 2013
Moscow Fills the Superpower Vacuum
By Daniel McGroarty

In a world measured by 140-character bursts and 60-minute news cycles, it's often hard to see the quiet but inexorable forces that will define what sort of world we'll see by mid-century and beyond.

But those factors are no less real. Take the contest for superpower status -- a competition several contenders are waging in earnest, while the world's indisputable member of the superpower club, the United States, seems unsure whether it can retain the title, or even wants to.

War-weary, strapped for cash and beset by serial scandals, America is beguiled by decidedly non-super concepts like "soft power," and "leading from behind." But while the U.S. may long for an international sabbatical, other major powers understand that the plate tectonics of the next global order are grinding into place today -- with consequences that may well shape the global power equation for a generation and more.

It often seems that America has been a superpower so long that we tend to discount its benefits and fixate on its burdens. And yet it's likely that the only thing worse than being a superpower in our uncertain world is no longer being one.

Consider Russia, more than 20 years after the Soviet demise. Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton brought on her first trip to Moscow the famously mis-translated Russian Reset button -- the State Department version of Staples' "This is Easy" button -- as the symbol for a rebooted U.S.-Russian relationship. The U.S. may have been ready to turn the page on the Cold War past, but it's now clear that Russia -- whose leader termed the collapse of the Soviet empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century" -- had a different sort of reset in mind, one in which a core element of Russian strategy seems to revolve around one-off confrontations that sap America's strength and monopolize its strategic attention.

Witness Iran, where, on the wholesale level, Russia functions as the ruling mullahs' heat-shield, repeatedly blocking any tightening of the "biting sanctions" at the United Nations. At the retail level, Russia's Gazprom lumbers ahead in its long-term plan to help Iran modernize its oil and natural gas fields, while state corporation Rosatom is now finalizing Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant, with plans to put the commissioned facility in Iranian hands "in mid-2013."

Shift to Syria, where Vladimir Putin props up Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad without the slightest qualms at the body count he racks up or the weapons he employs to do it. As the U.S. and its allies reluctantly mull the necessity of aiding Syria's rebels, Russia counters with a vow to deliver Assad's forces not only S-300 air defense missiles, but also Yakhont surface-to-ship missiles, handy against efforts to deliver arms to the rebels by sea. In case that doesn't do the trick, Russia's Pacific Fleet has redeployed 12 warships to the eastern Mediterranean -- a sight not seen since Soviet days.

Nor is that the only instance of Soviet nostalgia. Consider the flights of Russian Bear-H nuclear-capable bombers to the edge of Alaskan airspace in late April -- just days after U.S. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon visited Moscow in an attempt to smooth frictions with Russia over U.S. missile defense systems.

May alone has seen Secretary of State John Kerry kept waiting for three hours before he had his audience with President Putin, for discussions on Syria -- a word that Putin failed to utter even once in their post-meeting press conference. That was May 7; three days after Kerry's mission, Russia's defense chief announced they would move ahead with delivery of the S-300s to Syria, three days after that came the very-public arrest of an alleged U.S. spy, broadcast reality TV-style for the Russian public, complete with spy-gear less sophisticated than what's on sale in Washington's International Spy Museum gift shop. Three days after the spy snatch -- in a sharp departure from state-to-state spy-protocol -- Russian authorities outed the CIA's Moscow station chief.

It seems that Vladimir Putin has his own Reset Button, and it may just be set on November 8, 1989, the day before the Berlin Wall fell.

Visions of Russia regaining its lost Soviet-era superpower status may strike some as farfetched, and indeed the effort -- if that is truly Putin's goal -- to find Marxism's reverse gear could lead to a calamitous collapse for Russia. But America's diffidence toward global power and China's long march to the same may have convinced Putin that superpowerdom is his world-historical mission, and that Russia may just have the resource base and residual nuclear arsenal to pull it off.

If Russia is the unlikely candidate, China is the opposite -- the bookmaker's prohibitive favorite to rule the world, solely or in an uneasy condominium with a gracefully aging U.S. In this view, it's only a matter of time.

And China seems even now to be resuming its new role. In 2010, China turned a spat with Japan over territorial claims in the East China Sea into a test firing of its economic resource weapon, conducting a de facto embargo of the Rare Earth elements Japan relied on for its high-tech manufacturing. More recently, China is systematically extending its blue-water reach, aware that no superpower worthy of the name can exercise global sway without an open-ocean navy.

Even so, China shows signs that it's new to the superpower game. China's assertions of its territorial claims in the East China Sea -- against Japan and Taiwan -- and in the South China Sea -- against 10 regional neighbors, have lacked for subtlety, sparking a scramble by China's smaller neighbors to shelter under the U.S. security umbrella. Add a nuclear-armed North Korea that seems to have slipped China's leash, and Asian nations had yet another reason to seek strategic insurance from a powerful patron. Case-in-point: the recent emplacement of the U.S.'s THAAD on Guam and the rescue of the COBRA Dane radar in Alaska's Aleutian Island chain from the budget sequestration list in response to Kim Jung-un's missile flexing. If those systems stay in place -- as they may well -- China's failure to rein in young Kim may have strengthened America's Pacific presence.

But China legendarily plays the long game, and they may be forgiven if they want to test the staying power of Washington's vaunted "Pacific pivot." After all, it's hardly a state secret that the sequester decrees such sharp cuts in Navy budgets that the U.S. fleet could well shrink by 56 ships in the next eight years.

It is said of a former superpower -- Britain -- that it acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness. Let's hope that 21st Century America isn't demonstrating that hard-won superpower status can be lost the same way.

Daniel McGroarty, principal of Carmot Strategic Group, an issues management firm in Washington, DC, served in senior positions in the White House and at the Department of Defense.

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May 24, 2013
What Is the Point of an Election in Iran?
By Arch Puddington

With the exceptions of the few remaining absolute monarchies and communist dictatorships, most authoritarian regimes feel compelled to hold elections in which different candidates or parties seem to compete for power, campaigns are conducted, and, occasionally, a measure of suspense precedes the ballot counting. With the president-for-life model no longer acceptable and rule by decree frowned upon by the international community and multilateral financial institutions, authoritarians face the relatively new challenge of manipulating elections before the votes are cast, in order to avoid the messiness, embarrassment, and logistical difficulties of outright fraud.

Indeed, it is important for these regimes to maintain a baseline of plausibility in their elections, partly to protect an illusion of popular consent and legitimacy. While some put more effort into this illusion than others, most offer some public explanation for their preelection maneuvers. One method of election fixing is to arrest the opposition leader on trumped-up criminal charges, as was done in recent years to Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia and Yuliya Tymoshenko in Ukraine. Another common technique is to use the same pliant legal system against private media owners, gain control of the principal outlets-usually national television networks-and transform them into instruments of regime propaganda, as has been done in Russia and Venezuela. Gerrymandering can be a useful tool; the ruling coalition in Malaysia fared poorly in recent elections, but retained a parliamentary majority thanks in part to cleverly drawn districts. In all of these cases, the system-on paper, at least-ultimately rests on the principal of popular sovereignty, the notion that the people have the power to choose their leaders.

And then there is Iran. This week's announcement that the Guardian Council had disqualified Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as a candidate in the June 14 presidential election is an especially pointed reminder of the unique and uniquely preposterous election system devised by the Islamic Republic's leaders to ensure their hold on power.

Much of the commentary triggered by the disqualification has focused on Rafsanjani's history as a leading figure of the Iranian revolution. He was rejected despite having been a confidante of the republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; a two-term president (1989-97); and chairman of important bodies like the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council. In fact, he continues to lead the Expediency Council, which arbitrates disputes between the Guardian Council and the parliament. The Guardian Council has offered no formal explanation for its decision, though a spokesman hinted that Rafsanjani's physical stamina and age (79) were factors. This has failed to convince Iranians, given that Khomeini himself was nearly that age when he began his 10 years as supreme leader, and many of the clerics who hold positions of authority in the country are in their 80s.

It is, however, difficult to muster sympathy for Rafsanjani or, for that matter, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the favored candidate of outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also disqualified. Both men rose to prominence in a system that was set up to exclude anyone who displeased the supreme leader, only to find themselves excluded as well.

Rafsanjani played a key role in creating this system, adding to the absurdity of his disqualification. He lost an earlier bid to return to the presidency in 2005, when he advanced to the runoff but was defeated by Ahmadinejad. The regime's approach to the current election may be a reaction to what happened when Ahmadinejad sought a second term in 2009. The Guardian Council allowed two important reformist candidates-Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi-to participate, but the authorities apparently resorted to fraud to ensure the incumbent's victory. Here is how the election was described in Freedom in the World:

Despite polls that indicated a close race, Ahmadinejad was declared the winner soon after the election, credited with over 63 percent of the vote. Mousavi officially received only 33.75 percent, while [Mohsen] Rezai and Karroubi reportedly garnered 1.73 percent and 0.85 percent, respectively. All three challengers lodged claims of fraud, and subsequent findings by independent analysts reinforced suspicions that irregularities had occurred. According to official data, the conservative vote increased by 113 percent compared with the 2005 election, and several provinces registered more votes than the number of eligible voters. In 10 provinces won by Ahmadinejad, his victory was only possible if he had secured the votes of all former nonvoters and all those who had voted for his main conservative opponent in 2005, as well as up to 44 percent of those who had previously voted for reformist candidates.

In other words, the system is rigged, through the Guardian Council's power to eliminate candidates who might question the authority of the clerics, and then rigged again, through poll manipulation, to ensure that even moderate reformists who are loyal to the revolution cannot prevail. Faced with such implausible results in 2009, hundreds of thousands of voters took to the streets in peaceful protests, which were crushed only with great difficulty by security forces. Mousavi and Karroubi remain under house arrest.

Rafsanjani cautiously voiced support for the moderates' cause in the wake of the 2009 elections, and he has recently called for a more pragmatic approach to domestic governance and foreign policy, making him a new potential rallying point for reformist and other discontented voters. His disqualification seems designed to ensure that no popular alternative appears on the ballot, lowering the stakes and blatancy of any subsequent fraud, and reducing the possibility of new protests.

But with so much decided before a single vote is cast, many Iranians are wondering aloud why the leadership bothers to hold elections at all. Aside from the fraudulent nature of the process, there is the fact that the president lacks any real power, as his office is hemmed in on all sides by the real source of authority, the supreme leader. Here is how the system is outlined in Freedom in the World:

The most powerful figure in the government is the supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is chosen by the Assembly of Experts, a body of 86 clerics who are elected to eight-year terms by popular vote, from a list of candidates vetted by the Guardian Council. The supreme leader, who has no fixed term, is the commander in chief of the armed forces and appoints the leaders of the judiciary, the heads of state broadcast media, the Expediency Council, and half of the Guardian Council members. [The other half are nominated by the head of the judiciary, who is himself appointed by the supreme leader.] Although the president and the parliament, both with four-year terms, are responsible for designating cabinet ministers, the supreme leader exercises de facto control over appointments to the Ministries of Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence.

And, of course, the supreme leader can overrule the Guardian Council, which is why Ahmadinejad has pledged to appeal to Khamenei on Mashaei's behalf. Rafsanjani has made no such move, no doubt understanding that the council would not have acted against the supreme leader's will.

Nearly all of the remaining eight candidates have close personal or professional ties to Khamenei or the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the one or two reputed moderates on the list lack the stature of past reformist champions. Notably, two of the candidates approved by the Guardian Council-Ali Akbar Velayati and Mohsen Rezai-have been implicated in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires. The bombing, believed to have been planned in Iran and carried by Hezbollah agents, killed 85 people and injured 300.

Iran now finds itself in a disastrous situation. The electoral apparatus, designed to give the system a façade of popular legitimacy, has been abused well beyond the point of credibility, and voters are increasingly insulted by the sham. More importantly, they now have little or no hope of peacefully changing government policies that have led to international isolation, domestic repression, and economic collapse. The regime's leaders may have wanted to avoid the turmoil of 2009, but they seem capable only of making things worse.

Arch Puddington is the Vice President of Research at Freedom House. Republished with permission.

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Iran denies it has forces supporting Assad in Syria
Statement follows reports that Iranian forces, Hezbollah guerrillas are fighting alongside Syria's army in the battle over rebel-held town near Lebanon border.
By Reuters | May.24, 2013 | 1:36 PM

Iran on Friday denied it has forces in Syria supporting President Bashar Assad's army, one day after foreign backers of the Syrian leader's rebel foes demanded Tehran withdraw its fighters from the country's territory.

"The true enemies of Syria make up these accusations to provoke the people of this country," Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi said, quoted by Iranian state television.

At a meeting in Jordan on Thursday, the Friends of Syria grouping of Western and Arab governments called for the immediate withdrawal from Syria of Iranian fighters and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

They were reported to be fighting alongside the Syrian army and militias loyal to Assad in the town of Qusair, near the border with Lebanon.

"In response to a question about accusations that Iranian and Hezbollah forces were present in Syria, Abbas Araqchi said Iranian forces have never been and are not present in Syria," the state television report said.

Iran, a Shi'ite Muslim nation, is Assad's closest ally and has provided money, weapons, intelligence and training for his forces against a mainly Sunni Muslim uprising in which more than 80,000 people have been killed in two years.

Russia and the United States are trying to arrange an international peace conference to end the war. Moscow has said Iran should attend but Western reservations about a role for Tehran already threaten to derail the conference.

Iran has called for elections and reforms in Syria but does not accept Assad's removal, saying a solution to the crisis cannot be imposed from outside. Tehran has also accused Western and Arab nations of arming opposition groups.

Analysts say that losing its Syrian ally would weaken Iran's ability to threaten its foe Israel through Hezbollah.

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At Last, Germany Secures Total Dominance of Europe
By Jim O’Neill May 23, 2013 3:02 PM PT
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This weekend, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund (BVB) will play in the final of Europe’s most prestigious soccer competition, and for the first time it’s an all-German affair. There’s something a little too apt about Germany’s domination of Europe’s favorite sport this year. As goes football, so goes the European economy? Bear with me. There could be something to it.

This weekend’s match, the 58th UEFA Champions League soccer final, marks the culmination of the steady rise of the German football league in recent seasons. The finalists underlined the point by each eliminating clubs recently seen as the game’s most glittering stars: Barcelona and Real Madrid. German engineering prevails over Spanish flair. The success of German clubs against more glamorous counterparts, not just in Spain but also in Italy and the U.K., seems to say something about backbone and strength in depth.

But that’s not all. Dortmund and Munich are two very different sorts of club. Dortmund represents Germany’s old industrial heartland. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, is the modern center of a remarkably prosperous region. Germany’s economic resilience owes a lot to the diffusion of its strength across a strikingly diverse range of big cities. This is uncommon in the rest of Europe. In addition to well-known economic hubs such as Munich, Stuttgart and many others, Germany has cities like Hamburg -- once written off in the same way many northern English cities have been, it is now a booming economic center, thanks to Germany’s success as an exporter to the big emerging-market economies, China in particular.

Fiscal Metaphors

Fiscal rectitude, as you might guess, comes into it as well. German football has built its success this year on the biggest match-day attendances of the top European leagues, even moving ahead of the British Premier League -- solid revenue. Its clubs, which by the way have to be majority-owned by Germans, operate under tight restrictions on the use of debt for acquisitions -- prudent finance. By global industry standards, wages consume a small share of receipts -- cost control.

By contrast, look at the news from some of the gaudier leagues. Strength in depth? Madrid and Barcelona dominate the Spanish game so completely that La Liga almost resembles the Scottish league these days, with about the same degree of boredom over which club might upset the standings. As for fiscal control, I used to joke that you would know the euro crisis was serious once Spanish banks stopped doling out cash so readily to the country’s football clubs. Actually, that moment has arrived.

Once-almighty Italian football isn’t remotely what it was. Concerning the English Premiership, where to begin? It has enjoyed stunning revenue growth thanks to a global following -- but the money disappears into outlandish pay for far too many ordinary players. Where’s the discipline? The percentage of revenue spent on wages is far higher in the English Premiership than in Germany’s Bundesliga -- and in many clubs it exceeds 100 percent.

Not unlike their finance-sector equivalents, English football regulators prefer a light touch: They are open to all comers in the market for clubs, irrespective of financial standing or commitment to the local community. Strategy seems lacking. Foreign players predominate at the top of the English game, so the talent pool for the national team grows ever smaller. Despite having a lot of foreign players, Germany has a national team that remains one of the world’s best. Somehow, Germany is better at developing its national assets.

Defining ‘Football’

An English soccer star of the 1980s, Gary Lineker, once defined the sport in a way that still makes sense to Englishmen. Football: a simple game in which 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win. Must we accept the corollary? European monetary union: a currency system in which 17 countries strive to stay competitive and at the end the Germans win.

We will see, though the latest data suggest that the German economy isn’t quite as unstoppable as its footballers. Exports to Germany’s struggling neighbors are depressed. China’s growth is slowing as well, shrinking another market vital to German success. With domestic demand, as usual, weaker than it might be -- the ethic of austerity prevails in Berlin and in households across the land -- the German economy has been faltering of late. People forget, but the term “eurosclerosis” was applied to Germany and its inability to adapt in the 1990s. Things move in cycles, so who knows?

Unconvinced? I will leave you with another consoling thought that is going around before the big game. This one you can take to the bank. It’s certain that the loser this weekend will be a team from Germany.

(Jim O’Neill, the outgoing chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Jim O’Neill at joneill62@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Clive Crook at ccrook5@bloomberg.net.

Jim O'Neill
About Jim O'Neill»

Jim O'Neill worked for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. from 1995 until April 2013, serving most recently as chairman of ... MORE

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Missile Defense with Chinese Characteristics
Publication: China Brief Volume: 13 Issue: 11
May 23, 2013 04:16 PM Age: 22 hrs
By: Michael S. Chase

Could the HQ-9 be Precursor for Chinese Missile Defense?

On January 27, 2013, China conducted its second mid-course missile defense interceptor test, leading to considerable speculation among Chinese and Western analysts about Beijing’s motives and intentions as well as its plans for further development of mid-course intercept technology and possible deployment of its own missile defense system. Given Beijing’s longstanding and vehement opposition to U.S. missile defense programs—which it charges damages strategic stability and undermines China’s security by raising doubts about the effectiveness of its nuclear deterrent—it would seem logical that China would refrain from pursuing similar capabilities (“China Steps Up Rhetoric Against U.S. Missile Defense,” China Brief, October 19, 2012). Somewhat ironically, however, even as Chinese officials have continued to criticize the United States for conducting research on and activities related to missile defense, China has been developing its own missile defense technology. Indeed, over the past three years, Beijing has conducted two missile defense interception tests—both of which were accompanied by brief official statements—and Chinese analysts have suggested a number of potential directions for China’s missile defense program.

China’s Missile Defense Interception Tests

China conducted the first of its two missile defense interception tests on January 11, 2010. China’s official Xinhua News Service released a brief statement that provided only very limited information on the test. The statement read “On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country” (Xinhua, January 11, 2010). At a Foreign Ministry press conference the next day, a spokeswoman repeated the themes contained in the brief official statement that followed the test. In an attempt to distinguish it from China’s January 2007 ASAT test, the spokeswoman added that the missile defense test did not leave any debris in space or pose a threat to the safety of any orbiting spacecraft (Xinhua, January 12, 2010). Beijing’s strategic communication plan following the January 2010 missile defense interceptor test clearly represented a major improvement compared to the confusion and awkward silence that followed China’s January 2007 ASAT test, but Chinese official and unofficial statements still left many key questions unanswered [1].

Following China’s second missile defense interception test, which was conducted in January 2013, Chinese official media carried a brief report confirming that it had taken place, but the statement provided only limited information on the results and almost no insight into China’s rationale for the development of its own missile defense technology. The report stated that China “again carried out a land-based mid-course missile interception test within its territory.” It quoted a Ministry of National Defense spokesman, who stated the test was “defensive in nature” and not targeted at any other country, and indicated the test “reached the preset goal” (Xinhua, January 28). The report also described the test as similar to the one that China successfully carried out in January 2010, but offered no further details. Other official media reports echoed the theme that the test was defensive and was not targeted at any specific country.

Another theme highlighted by some official media reports was the technical complexity of China’s missile defense tests. One Xinhua report stated that such tests demonstrate “highly complicated technologies in detecting, tracking and destroying a ballistic missile flying in the [sic] outer space.” The report described the successful anti-missile test, “together with a string of other military equipment progress,” including the sea trials of China's first aircraft carrier and the test flight of a developmental large transport aircraft, as a reflection of China’s growing military power. Specifically, it stated these developments “demonstrated the country's fast-growing ability to defend its own national security and deter any possible threats" (Xinhua, January 28). In addition, separate media reports lauded Beijing’s disclosure of the test as a sign of China’s “increasing transparency in military affairs” (Xinhua, January 28). Yet the official reports provided no insight into the strategic rationale for China’s investment in missile defense technology, the PLA’s plans for future tests or Beijing’s thinking about the potential operational deployment of missile defense systems.

Motives and Implications

Although China publicly announced both of its missile defense tests, it has not provided any official explanation of its motives for the development of missile defense technology or its plans for the deployment of missile defense capabilities. Chinese official statements thus have raised more questions than they have answered. Nonetheless, knowledgeable Chinese observers suggest there are at least three paths Beijing could follow in the future: (1) continue to refine its missile defense technology while refraining from deploying an operational system; (2) deploy a national missile defense system intended to protect the entire country, at least from a small-scale ballistic missile attack (like the current U.S. national missile defense system); or (3) deploy a small number of missile defense interceptors in a point defense role, to provide some level of protection for key strategic targets such as its ICBMs or strategic command and control facilities [2].

As for the first potential way forward, following China’s second missile defense test, Li Bin, a well-known Chinese scholar who specializes in nuclear strategy and arms control issues, suggested that Beijing was likely focusing on technology development in an attempt to “assess capabilities” rather than planning to deploy a national missile defense system. Furthermore, in Li’s words, “China’s 2010 and 2013 missile intercept tests demonstrated that the country had acquired [hit-to-kill] technology, but that does not mean China has a conceptual missile defense system that can target incoming missiles from any specific country.”

Perhaps the least likely outcome would be deployment of a full-scale national missile defense system. As Li Bin puts it, “In the U.S.-Chinese context, it would be very inefficient for China to deploy a national missile defense system to counter U.S. offensive nuclear forces. If the Chinese want to use a national missile defense system to limit the damage caused by U.S. strategic missiles, they will need many more interceptors than the United States would need for the same purpose. China would have to pay much more money than United States to build up its capability. Moreover, such a missile defense system, if it contained enough interceptors, would have broader costs as well—the same negative impact as the U.S. national missile defense system currently does on U.S.-Chinese strategic stability.” Even one modeled after that of the United States and capable only of intercepting a small number of incoming warheads would seem to be a poor fit for China’s strategic circumstances.

If Chinese leaders intend to deploy an operational missile defense system, a point defense system designed to defend a handful of small areas against ballistic missile attack would seem a more logical and affordable approach. According to Li Bin, a point defense system would represent “a much more reasonable choice than a national missile defense system for China if it decides to develop its hit-to-kill technology into a missile defense system.” Li suggests that a point defense system could be used to protect Chinese command and control centers, and thus to ensure that “Chinese political and military leaders would survive a surprise preemptive nuclear strike so that they could direct a retaliatory nuclear strike.” According to Li, such a system “could also be used to protect some of China’s strategic nuclear weapons and increase their survivability.” Indeed, Li’s earlier work has highlighted the possibility that point defense systems could enhance the survivability of China’s silo-based ICBMs.

In contrast to the potentially destabilizing effects of a broader national missile defense system, Li writes, “a point defense system would make China’s nuclear deterrent more credible and ensure its strategic stability with other nuclear-armed countries.” This assessment appears to track closely with the post-test comments of military officers who suggested that defensive capabilities would improve the survivability of China’s strategic nuclear forces. Although none of these comments specified an exact role for China’s mid-course missile defense interceptors, they would appear to be consistent with their employment in a point defense role, probably protecting Chinese ICBMs. China’s approximately 20 silo-based ICBMs would seem to be the best candidates for this purpose, given that China presumably sees them as much more vulnerable to a first-strike than its road-mobile ICBMs. In addition, employing missile defense in this role could be less difficult—and less expensive—than trying to deploy even a limited national missile defense system. Indeed, Li Bin suggests that compared to a national system, a point defense system would have more modest technical requirements and a much lower cost.

If China pursues the deployment of a missile defense system, it will need more than ground-based interceptors. As Chinese analysts have noted, Beijing also will need complementary capabilities, such as ballistic missile early warning satellites (Hubei Daily, January 28). China currently lacks early warning satellites like the U.S. Defense Support Program (DSP) and Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellites.

As for the broader implications of China’s missile defense program, Chinese analysts suggest it will strengthen, rather than undermine strategic deterrence. Beijing continues to object to missile defense systems it sees as strategically destabilizing (most notably, those of the United States), but it apparently does not see its own missile defense system as problematic from this perspective. Indeed, Chinese analysts do not appear to be concerned that China’s development of missile defense will trigger an arms race. So long as China limits its missile defense deployments to a point defense role, continues to adhere to its longstanding “No First Use” (NFU) policy and maintains a nuclear force posture clearly oriented toward retaliatory missions, this thinking does not contradict China’s broader position on missile defense. Thus, Beijing can make the case that its own missile defense program is not inconsistent with its argument that missile defense systems potentially capable of negating an adversary's strategic deterrent are destabilizing, especially when coupled with first strike doctrines and capabilities.

Underscoring the extent to which Beijing’s development of missile defense technology is linked to China’s other strategic weapons programs, some Chinese analysts have characterized China’s missile defense program as an emerging element of China’s overall strategic deterrence posture. For example, after the January 2013 missile defense test, Senior Colonel Shao Yongling of the PLA Second Artillery Force Command College told the official Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily that China’s development of mid-course missile intercept technology shows “the country’s strategic deterrence system is shifting from relying merely on offensive weapons to integrating offensive and defensive weapons.” Shao suggested that missile defense would allow China to continue to “maintain a relatively small number of nuclear weapons given its increasing defensive capabilities.” Specifically, in Shao’s words, “as long as enough nuclear weapons survive first-strike attacks, China can carry out nuclear retaliation against the attacker. Therefore, strong defensive capabilities are of great significance to the country's national security” (People’s Daily, January 30).

China’s development of missile defense technology has received less attention from scholars who follow Chinese military modernization than Beijing’s modernization of its nuclear force and its development of offensive counter-space capabilities [3]. China’s two missile defense intercept tests—and the comments of Chinese analysts linking them to Beijing’s ongoing attempts to strengthen its strategic deterrence capabilities—however, suggest that U.S. analysts should pay very close attention to Chinese missile defense developments.

Notes:

James Mulvenon, “Evidence of Learning? Chinese Strategic Messaging Following the Missile Defense Intercept Test,” China Leadership Monitor, No. 31, available online <http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM31JCM.pdf>.
Li Bin, “What China’s Missile Intercept Test Means,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 4, 2013, available online <http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/02/04/what-china-s-missile-intercept-test-means/fa45>.
For one notable exception, see Kevin Pollpeter, “China’s Second Ballistic Missile Defense Test: A Search for Strategic Stability,” SITC Bulletin Analysis, February 2013, available online <http://igcc.ucsd.edu/assets/001/504391.pdf>.

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Hot Issue: Libyan Militias Shape Country’s Future
Publication: Volume: 0 Issue: 0
May 24, 2013 12:06 PM Age: 2 hrs
By: Jamie Dettmer

Libyan Militias Shape Country’s Future (Source: The Nation)

Summary

Libya’s quasi-parliament recently approved a political isolation law prohibiting a range of Qaddafi-era officials from political office or taking government jobs. The law was passed over the objections of the government and after revolutionary militias blockaded key ministries, refusing to leave until the measure was approved. The standoff with the government demonstrated the power of the militias, who have refused to disband since the ouster of Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi. It also exposed the links between militia leaders and Islamist parties who fared badly in last July’s elections. The failure of moderate politicians to rally ordinary Libyans behind the government suggests the country’s top militias and Islamist leaders operating in concert probably will dominate the political landscape for the foreseeable future.

A Leadership Deficit in Libya

Libya’s uprising and revolutionary militias that overthrew Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi continue to add to instability in the country, which is experiencing an erratic and at times doubtful transition to more democratic politics. That transition has now been endangered gravely by what militia leaders like to call a “correction to the revolution” but one dubbed by Western diplomats a “legal coup” (Interviews with author, February 19, Tripoli).

Militia intimidation resulted on May 5 in the approval by the General National Congress (GNC), the quasi-parliament Libyans voted for last July, of a sweeping political isolation law that will see a range of officials who worked for the regime of the late dictator being disbarred from political office or from government jobs—even if they contributed to the downfall of the late dictator. The ban on them will last for ten years.

Their exodus from the ministries and from government is unlikely to improve bureaucratic efficiency or competence. Even before the moves against Gaddafi-era officials, some GNC members, including Muhammad Saad, worried the exclusion law was too broad and would add to a “leadership deficit” in Libya when it comes to running government and political administration. He argued that exclusion should be reserved to those who were involved in provable misdeeds during the Gaddafi era, and not based on the positions people occupied (Interview of Muhammad Saad, February 19, Tripoli).

That leadership deficit is bound to increase: many top civil servants will be forced out when the law comes into effect next month and, so too, approximately 40 to 60 GNC members, most of whom are moderates. Key ministers will have to resign as well as GNC President Muhammad Magarief, weakening the already shaky authority of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan—a onetime Qaddafi diplomat who broke with the regime more than 20 years ago and who was crucial in gaining the support of Western powers for the uprising. In his few months in office, Zeidan has tried to move the country forward more rapidly by developing reform plans and attempting to bring more order to government, but he has clashed frequently with the GNC, especially with the Islamist parties.

Political Isolation Law Benefits Islamists

The beneficiaries of the political isolation law are not only the major militias who besieged key ministries and threatened to storm the GNC unless the law was passed, but also their allies in the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller Islamist parties. They will control an unassailable, overwhelming majority of seats in the GNC.

Most international press coverage missed the connections between Islamist politicians and the Islamist-tinged militias behind the standoff, even though at times it was an obvious show. On May 3, two days before the GNC passed the political isolation law, Sami al Saadi, a former leader of the now defunct anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, spoke at a rally in Tripoli’s Martyrs’ Square urging support for the law.

The Misrata brigades, the backbone of the militia push for the political isolation law, have strong links with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party, and in the weeks before the militia siege of the ministries, the party’s GNC members argued strongly for the law in meetings. Justice and Construction party members never condemned the militias for the intimidation (Several interviews with GNC members, April and May, Tripoli).

In an interview with the author Nizar Kawan, a senior Congress member from the Justice and Construction Party, likened the isolation law to a cleansing action, saying that other countries have pursued similar courses following oppression or conflict. “The United States also had its political isolation after the Civil War and a lot of those who fought with the South were politically isolated. It was very harsh, even harsher than this. So sometimes this does happen in history,” said Kawan. He said that those banned had to be sacrificed for Libya’s good (Interview with Nizar Kawan, May 5, Tripoli.)

A European diplomat, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the following:

“Saadi and the Muslim Brotherhood on the political level coordinated with the militias. They did poorly in the July GNC elections and this was their way of tugging back some control by politically eliminating moderates. What is worrying was and is their willingness to threaten force to get their way. They have not used force yet but the threat is always there and they use it to strong arm and to appear to represent more people than they do. They don’t feel democracy paid off for them. The government has to take some of the blame for that and Ali Zeidan probably should have tried to include them more in government” (Interview with European diplomat, May 13, Tripoli).

Militias Are Now Emboldened

The hope among many politicians was that once the law was passed the militias would start to disband. Instead, they have been emboldened and their appetite for power increased; the political isolation law has not satisfied powerful Islamist-tinged militias who want to shape the new Libya and have the arms to back up their threats and entrench their power. They are demanding the removal of Zeidan, who has tried to encourage the militias to disband and opposed the political isolation law in the form that it was passed.

According to moderate GNC members interviewed by Jamestown Foundation, they are pressuring behind-the-scenes the committee charged with drafting an electoral law for the planned national elections of a 60-strong assembly to draft a new constitution. “They want the assembly to be ideologically sympathetic,” says a Libyan government official. He says unlike with the July GNC elections there will be no quota, for example, that will guarantee a minimum number of seats on the constituent assembly for women (Interview with GNC members, May 13, Tripoli).

“The correction of the revolution” required smart political staging and considerable coordination between the militias and their political allies as well as between the militias themselves. Their highly efficient coordination contrasted with the failure of Zeidan and his political allies to rally any significant popular groundswell able to see off the militia challenge.

But then the militias had the guns on their side, and Zeidan has not been popular because of the slow pace of change. Politician and journalist Abdulrahman Shater worries that the militias are now firmly in the driving seat. He explained:

“They have more power than the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defense because they have guns and heavy armament and they have more power than the official bodies of the state. Some of them want to be in the government, some of them want to be in the embassies, some of them want to be rich. I wrote several times warning that the revolution will be stolen” (Interview with Abdulrahman Shater, May 4, Tripoli).

The militias blockading the ministries were the ones the government has had to rely on for general law and order and security on the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi for the last 18 months. They were not the irregular militias that have formed since Gaddafi’s ouster but were the hardcore revolutionary brigades from Misrata and Benghazi who see the revolution as their property and envisage an Islamist future for the country.

Standoff Led by Militia Leaders Who the Government Relies on for Security

Who are Libya’s most powerful militia leaders, the commanders able to act with impunity and defy the government?

Western diplomats monitoring militia leadership say Wissam Ben Hamid should be considered primus inter pares (the first among equals). He commanded a Benghazi brigade called Free Libya Martyrs during the uprising against Gaddafi and subsequently became a top commander of Libyan Shield, an umbrella grouping of revolutionary militias ostensibly under the control of the Defense Ministry.

In fact, Wissam Ben Hamid has never been shy of making clear that he and fellow top militia commanders from Benghazi wield more power than the Chief of Staff, Major-General Yusuf Mangush, who they now want sacked. He did not disguise the power he wields from the late U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, the U.S. envoy who died in last September’s assault on the consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.

According to a cable approved by Stevens and sent to the State Department two days before his death, the ambassador met with Wissam Ben Hamid and militia ally Muhammad al-Gharabi, then-head of the Rafallah al-Sahati brigade. They told him they exercise “control” over General Mangush, who “depends on them to secure eastern Libya.” The cable continues “In times of crisis, Mangush has no other choice than to turn to their brigades for help, they said, as he did recently with unrest in Kufra. As part of this arrangement, Mangush often provides the brigades direct stocks of weapons and ammunition” (Benghazi Weekly Report, September 11, 2012; cable from the U.S. embassy to State Department, supplied to author).

Not only weapons have been directed by Mangush to Libyan Shield-aligned brigades, including the Martyrs of 17 February Brigade, which is considered one of the best armed militias in eastern Libya, and the Martyr Rafallah Shahati Battalions. According to members of the GNC, Mangush also diverted operational funds from the fledgling armed forces to the militias in a bid to buy their loyalty (Interviews with two members of the security committee of the GNC and with a member of the budget committee of the GNC, February 19, 20 and 21, Tripoli).

Among the militiamen blockading the Foreign and Justice ministries were men wearing crisp new uniforms with Libyan Shield insignias. Some of those men said they were from Benghazi and members of Libyan Shield Force 1, the brigade commanded by Wissam Ben Hamid. Another Benghazi militia leader eagerly supportive of the ministry sieges was Ismail Sallabi, the current leader of Rafallah Sahati, one of the main Islamist militias in Benghazi. “There should be strict standards to exclude members of the former regime from the military—those who were not involved in the revolution,” he said recently (Interview with Ismail Sallabi, April 24, Tripoli).

Another militia leader who proved important in the standoff with the government over the isolation law was Muhammad Hatroush, the head of the Tripoli Military Council, an umbrella grouping of several militias in the Libyan capital. His role, however, was more of inaction; his brigades stayed out of the confrontation and did not seek to lift the sieges of the ministries.

Fathi al-Ubaidi and Muhammad al-Taib are another two Libyan Shield commanders viewed by diplomats as among the most influential militia leaders in the country and supportive of the “correction of the revolution.” Taib led Shield forces involved in last October’s over-running of the pro-Gaddafi town of Bani Walid, coordinating that assault with militia commanders from Misrata. The attack’s goal was to rid the town of any lingering pro-Gaddafi influence.

Misrata’s militias are run by agreement and consensus by the commanders and the town’s politicians and they have seethed with anger at the course of politics since Gaddafi’s overthrow. They maintain that liberals, former political exiles and former regime officials, are betraying the Islamist roots of the rebellion partly to please the Western powers. There are 236 registered brigades with the Misratan Union of Revolutionaries (MUR), which can call upon 40,000 fighters. Some defense experts estimate that Misrata controls nearly half of the experienced fighters and weapons caches in Libya.

Abd al-Rahman al-Sewehli, a GNC member from Misrata, was a major champion of the isolation law from the start. During the sieges, he dismissed claims that the militias were forcing the law’s adoption under the threat of violence. “The youths went out with their weapons, not with the intention to attack, but to defend themselves if they were to face aggression,” he said. Sewehli comes from a prominent Misrata family and is related to Faraj al-Swehli, the great-grandson of Ramadan al-Swehli, a legendary figure in the armed resistance to Italian colonial rule. The family controls the al-Sewehli brigade, a powerful brigade within the MUR.

From Abdel Rahman al-Sewehli’s perspective, the militias should not be disbanding until the country has broken completely with the past. In an interview with the Financial Times on May 9, he said that the isolation law was a “necessary step.” That begs the question of what further steps may be taken.

The outlook for Libya is one of continuing militia power combining with Islamist parties to become the dominant political influence in the country. The electoral law governing the elections planned for later in the year for a constituent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution is likely to be shaped to favor Islamists.

Jamie Dettmer is an expert on North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe. He writes for Newsweek/Daily Beast, Voice of America and Maclean's. He is also a Senior Media Fellow at the Democracy Institute.

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Taliban Attack U.N. Affiliate’s Compound in Kabul, Testing Afghan Security Forces

By ROD NORDLAND and SHARIFULLAH SAHAK
Published: May 24, 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan — In what appeared to be a concerted effort to test the capabilities of Afghan security forces in the capital, Taliban insurgents sought to penetrate the heavily fortified heart of Kabul, blasting their way into a residential compound of the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations-affiliated agency.

The Afghan forces managed to hold the attackers at bay, and hundreds of international agency employees in nearby compounds escaped harm. But at least two people were killed and 13 wounded, including an Italian woman, and it took more than six hours for hundreds of Afghan police officers to subdue no more than six attackers with suicide vests, guns and grenade launchers.

Explosions continued through the night. The authorities said they were from booby traps the attackers had planted in the compound.

It was the first example of what the military calls a “complex attack,” involving both gunmen and suicide bombers, in the capital since insurgents attacked the headquarters of the unarmed traffic police force in January. It took Afghan forces nine hours to bring that to an end.

There have been other serious attacks in Kabul more recently, including a deadly one just a week earlier in which a suicide car bomber killed six American military advisers, but those have been single bombings, rather than extended engagements.

A coalition official said the Afghan police’s Quick Reaction Force, along with other units, responded quickly and competently on Friday. “This is a high-end Afghan unit that is down there,” he said. “I’d put it against most Western SWAT teams that are out there.”

American officials have in the past expressed concern about the timidity of Afghan security forces in Kabul when faced with determined attacks from bands of insurgents, and advisers embedded with their forces have sometimes had difficulty encouraging them to move aggressively to contain attackers. That has been a focus of training.

In April 2012, for instance, a complex attack on Parliament in Kabul went on for 18 hours before it was subdued. And the previous September, the authorities were embarrassed when it took 19 hours to clear insurgents from a building under construction, which the insurgents used to fire on the American Embassy and nearby NATO headquarters.

“How could a fight prolong for so many hours, even though we have hundreds and hundreds of Afghan forces deployed?” asked Amrullah Aman, a retired Afghan general and a military analyst. “It means Afghan forces need better equipment, better training.” He also questioned how the attackers got so much ammunition, weaponry and explosives into the city center, which is a lattice of police checkpoints.

The compound that the insurgents attacked is close to the main facility of the United Nations in Kabul, as well as guesthouses and offices used by foreigners, a post of the Afghan Public Protection Force and a hospital for the national intelligence service. The Taliban themselves claimed that the building they invaded was a Central Intelligence Agency training center, according to the insurgents’ spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, who was reached by telephone. Police officials denied that was the case.

The dead included an Afghan policeman and a Nepalese Gurkha guard, who apparently had been on the gate at the migration agency’s compound, said Gen. Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, Kabul’s police chief. All “five or six” of the attackers were killed, he said.

The attack began when one of the insurgents detonated his suicide vest to clear a path for the others to force their way into the compound. The initial blast could be heard miles away. Among the 13 wounded were three agency employees and one person working for the International Labor Organization.

Jan Kubis, the top United Nations official here, expressed gratitude for the “quick actions” of the Gurkha guards as well as the Afghan police.

A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with his country’s policy, said: “From the Afghan point of view, it could have been a lot better. From the Taliban point of view, it should have been a lot worse.”

Sangar Rahimi, Azam Ahmed and Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting.

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Nigeria Military Says It Rescued Hostages in North

ABUJA, Nigeria May 24, 2013 (AP)

Nigeria's military says it has rescued women and children taken hostage by Islamic extremists after an attack on a police barracks.

The claim Friday by Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade could not be independently confirmed.

Olukolade said the army freed three women and six children who had been in a propaganda video by the extremist network Boko Haram. A Boko Haram video seen by The Associated Press earlier in May showed 12 young boys and girls.

Olukolade said extremists took the hostages after a May 7 attack on the town of Bama. He said a woman and her two children remain missing.

Nigeria has faced increasingly bloody insurgent attacks by extremists since 2010. President Goodluck Jonathan declared emergency rule in three northeastern states May 14, giving security control to the military.