Defense & Security Archive

In South Korea immediately after the end of the Beijing Olympics, Chinese President Hu Jintao and his South Korean counterpart, President Lee Myung-bak, reaffirmed their mutual support for achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through the Six-Party talks. The joint statement issued at the end of the two-day summit underscored their shared commitment to promoting Korea’s denuclearization and improving relations between the two Korean states. “The South Korean side expressed its position to push for co-existence and co-prosperity (with North Korea) through inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation,” the declaration read. “The Chinese side reaffirmed its support that South and North […]

SWAT DISTRICT, Pakistan — The Swat valley, a picturesque region in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, was once a tourist destination. Two years ago, however, it became a Taliban haven when Maulana Fazlullah, a hardline cleric turned militant Taliban commander, launched a vicious campaign against the education of girls. Unlike much of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to the east, along the 1,400-mile border with Afghanistan, the Swat valley has historically been known for the relatively liberal values and traditions of its people, as well as its mesmerizing natural scenery. When Buddhism was the primary influence in […]

GEORGIAN BLAME GAME . . . — Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili may excoriate Russia for invading his country in interviews with Western media — such as his Financial Times interview Monday — but for local consumption he does not spare the West from responsibility for Georgia’s current crisis. In a major speech in Tbilisi last week, he said the Russian military build-up in South Ossetia was well underway before Georgian forces attacked the breakaway province, but Western leaders wouldn’t believe him, and Western intelligence failed to detect it. “When we were asking our Western partners [read: the United States] did […]

On Aug. 21, the Russian Defense Ministry announced its decision to halt military cooperation with NATO members. The Russian announcement comes only a week after Moscow tried to convene a special meeting of the NATO-Russia Council to discuss the situation in Georgia, but was rebuffed by the alliance. Instead, NATO foreign ministers met independently of Moscow on Aug. 19, when they threatened to curtail military cooperation with Russia. When asked about the Russian decision, U.S. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe observed that, “For all practical purposes, military-to-military cooperation had really already been ended with the Russians. I can’t imagine […]

SAN JOSÉ DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — At a military base in this eastern town on the edge of the jungle, Juan Manual Santos, Colombia’s defense minister, recently delivered a triumphant appraisal of the country’s fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Just a few years ago, it would have it would have been hard to imagine staging such an event here, for fear of a guerrilla ambush. “We have chosen San José del Guaviare because it symbolized the old Colombia, a country ridden with narcotraffickers, paramilitaries and guerrillas,” said Santos as he addressed the country’s generals and elite troops […]

When all was said and done, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got scant comfort from NATO on her mission to press punitive action against Russia following its armed incursion into Georgia — and its slowness in leaving it. True, the North Atlantic alliance foreign ministers meeting in Brussels Tuesday did manage to adopt a united position — but at the price of tepid language and of retaliatory steps that fell short of what the Bush administration had urged. President Dmitry Medvedev signed an agreement that requires Russian troops to return to positions held before the fighting broke out on Aug. […]

Earlier today, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski signed an agreement negotiated last week that will position 10 American-controlled interceptor missiles at a U.S.-manned missile defense base in Poland. Both governments reached the deal despite strenuous Russian opposition to the move. During the past year, Russian political, military, and other leaders have stridently denounced American efforts to establish a comprehensive ballistic missile defense (BMD) network that extends beyond the United States. In particular, Moscow has objected to U.S. plans to deploy ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to supplement the […]

When war broke out in the Caucuses between Russia and Georgia, the government of Israel immediately knew it had a difficult situation in its hands. The early phases of the conflict forced Israel to walk a difficult diplomatic path. Before long, Israelis realized that the new global reality reflected by the conflict meant an even more challenging environment in which to handle threats to their security. The rumblings of a new Cold War could well mean that cooperation between the West and Russia on matters crucial to Israel, particularly Iran, is coming to an end. Even worse, a possible new […]

CONTINUING CONCERNS ABOUT CHINESE HUMAN RIGHTS — The spectacular Olympic picture China has sought to paint for a world audience continues to be marred by human rights abuses, as media outlets, human rights groups and international diplomats put pressure on the Olympic host to ease controls on the Chinese people. U.S. President George W. Bush made several public calls for China to end repression during his high-profile visit to Asia and the Games, including an appeal outside a Beijing church, where Bush told journalists “God is universal and God is love, and no state, man or woman should fear the […]

ELDORET, Kenya — As he stands amid the rows of mud-strewn tents, Eliud Njoroge recounts a familiar tale in the narrative of this country’s recent post-election crisis. Njoroge, an ethnic Kikuyu, had lived for 32 years in the Kalenjin town of Soy, a stronghold of Raila Odinga, the opposition candidate in last December’s presidential election. When violence erupted following the contested victory of the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, Njoroge’s house was burned by machete-wielding youth, and his life threatened by neighbors who demanded that he and his family return to Central Province, the Kikuyu ancestral homeland, where they’d never […]

As the world was fixated on the Beijing Olympics and Russia’s incursion into Georgia, a fledgling peace process between the Philippine government and Muslim rebels fighting for autonomy in the country’s restive south was beginning to unravel. The Philippine Supreme Court’s suspension of a key peace agreement fanned the flames of violence in the region, sending insurgent factions storming into villages. One hundred fifty thousand people fled their looted and torched homes, while the Philippine military pounded rebel hideouts with heavy artillery fire. The United Nations expressed alarm, while the International Red Cross said more than 80,000 people were displaced. […]

TOKYO — Reports last week that Georgia was hit by a coordinated cyber attack that compromised government Web sites offered a reminder of the additional front governments must protect when diplomatic or military hostilities break out between nations. Last year, high-tech Estonia suffered a sustained cyber attack that one Pentagon official described at the time as a “watershed” in terms of society’s awareness of its vulnerability. Over several weeks, numerous government Web sites and the country’s two largest banks came under sustained attack from abroad, overwhelming some sites and forcing some to block access from abroad. It is with these […]

The War in Georgia has seriously exacerbated relations between Russia and Ukraine’s pro-Western government. On Aug. 12, Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko joined the leaders of four other former Soviet states in Tbilisi to show solidarity with Georgia and its embattled president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Yushchenko told the crowd that had assembled in Tbilisi’s central square: “You will never be left alone! . . . We have come to reaffirm your sovereignty, your independence, your territorial integrity. These are our values. Independent Georgia is and independent Georgia will always be!” The following day, President Yushchenko boldly imposed severe restrictions on the movement […]

AUGUST BLUES — “August is the month when wars start,” wrote the late Al Aronowitz, the rock writer. Both World War I and II started in August, and now the Georgia-Russia conflagration has followed suit. In planning their attempt to retake South Ossetia, did the Georgians think the Russians would all be on vacation and not notice? Their second miscalculation was to forget the lesson of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and somehow believe that their patron, the United States, would step in. That’s what the Hungarians believed when they launched their revolution against the Soviet presence, based mainly on […]

Lost in the news cycles of presidential politics, the Olympic Games and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is a brewing crisis in South Asia. The United States’ strategic posture toward South Asia has largely focused on terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan and on nuclear proliferation. This approach has largely ignored the historical conflict over Jammu and Kashmir, which has sparked two major hot wars in the last 60 years. Growing unrest in Kashmir is threatening to cause open conflict between India and Pakistan once again, and American policy makers can’t afford to sit this one out. For almost seven years, […]

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled his first (and presumably last) National Defense Strategy (NDS) on July 31, he argued that the best single word to describe it would be “balance.” Although the document is comprehensive and eclectic in its listing of possible security threats to the United States, its real function is to counterbalance what the secretary sees as the U.S. Defense Department’s natural tendency to focus excessively on winning conventional conflicts rather than “irregular wars” such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NDS also aims to promote a more balanced U.S. national security policy by bolstering […]

ABOARD THE U.S.S. KEARSARGE — There was something strange about the U.S.S. Kearsarge amphibious assault ship as she left Norfolk, Virginia, last week for a four-month South American cruise. Instead of the usual solid ranks of white-clad sailors lining her huge flight deck, the size of two football fields, there were hundreds of military medical personnel in the green, blue, gray or tan uniforms of the Canadian Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the Brazilian and Dutch militaries — not to mention scores of civilian aid workers in blue jeans and t-shirts. For decades, the U.S. Navy’s […]