Asia-Pacific Archive

While transnational illicit flows of people, goods and technology are not a new phenomenon, it has been widely recognized that the volume of these flows has increased dramatically in the globalizing era that has followed the end of the Cold War. This increase has largely been a result of the technical innovations associated with globalization, combined with the popularization of “free trade” ideals. Simply put, the sheer volume of international trade has meant that even states of the developed world increasingly cannot control their borders. What effect has this increase in illicit flows had on states and their power in […]

By participating in the Yadana gas pipeline project in Burma, Western oil giants Total and Chevron are financing the country’s brutal military junta, Earth Rights International charges in two new reports on the pipeline. That in turn allows the junta to continue its ongoing campaign of repression and siphon off billions of dollars in income, the group maintains. “Total and Chevron have essentially provided the military regime with its single largest lifeline, that being the revenue generated from the project,” Matthew Smith, coordinator of ERI’s Burma project told the BBC. ERI’s reports allege that the two companies have ignored abuses […]

Elements of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division are engaged in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province, southwest of Kabul. The division’s Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry, lost 8 killed and 25 wounded in just three months in mid-2009. Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Justin Pellerin, who was killed by a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan Aug. 20, is one such casualty. In the days following his death, Pellerin’s friends remembered him, and mourned his loss. David Axe and Jason Reich report for World Politics Review.

During the last several weeks, Americans have found themselves back in the middle of a fierce debate over our continuing military effort in Afghanistan. What was Bush’s forgotten war had, until recently, seemed quite safely transformed in public opinion into Obama’s “war of necessity.” Now, because of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for significantly more troops, coming on the heels of his public declaration that the Taliban are essentially “winning,” the ruling Democrats have suddenly been thrust back into “quagmire” mode. Predictably, we are once again awash in feverish Boomer analogies to Vietnam, despite the pronounced absence in Afghanistan of any […]

Last week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) issued a report calling for sweeping changes in the international financial and monetary order. Arguing for a reduced role for the dollar, the report advocated for a global reserve bank with the power to issue its own currency, to monitor its members’ national exchange rates, and to prop up or push down their currencies. In other words, UNCTAD is making the case for a global central bank. The U.N. is not alone in calling for such a move. Since the eruption of the global financial crisis last fall and […]

Just a few followup items I thought I’d get into the habit of posting: – With regard to my observation about the lack of Iraq or Afghanistan War literature or cinema, Jonathan Bernstein makes the obvious point, which I myself had noticed on reading the post afterwards, that all the novels and films I mentioned with regard to WWII and Vietnam were published or released well after the end of those wars. He also makes a less obvious, but just as astute, observation about the relation between a war’s popularity and the kind of works of art (propaganda vs. critical) […]

Naval rivalries have been a recurrent theme of recent Asia coverage, with China, India and the U.S. maneuvering for position and influence in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. But everyone, it seems, has overlooked another global force, quietly engaged in its own naval buildup (via Barry Ritholz).

I’m going to go way out on a speculative limb on this one. But that UAE cargo plane carrying weapons to China that was detained while refueling in India suddenly seems like more than just a simple case of bad timing. The plane was detained while the Indian internal security minister was visiting Washington for talks on security (and counterterrorism) cooperation. It’s now emerging that there were some suspicions that the weapons on the plane included U.S.-manufactured Harpoon missiles sold to the UAE. And all this goes down at the same time a UAE crown prince is “making the rounds” […]

A panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Sept. 2 examinedthe Japan elections and their consequences for Asia and the UnitedStates. The panelists included Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, and Michael Green of CSIS. Related from WPR: Japan Elections: DPJ Promises Change, But Can it Deliver?Likely LDP Defeat Has Implications for Japanese Defense

James Joyner tackles one of the more irritating refrains used to argue for the need to succeed in Afghanistan — namely, the claim that NATO’s credibility will not survive failure there. I’d add that to the extent that NATO tried to reinvent itself as an alliance that would project force in out-of-theater operations, there’s a kernel of truth to the claim that Afghanistan has damaged its credibility. But it’s not so much success or failure in Afghanistan that are to blame, but rather NATO’s dismal failure to create a unified chain of command with uniform rules of engagement of the […]

Two news items from Afghanistan made quite an impact yesterday, offering a moment of clarity in what had become a largely theoretical debate over both tactics and strategy. The first is the increasing certainty that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s election victory will not withstand the taint of widespread voting fraud. The second is a riveting account from Jonathan Landay of an extended firefight between Afghan Army troops supported by embedded U.S. Marine trainers and Taliban insurgents. With regards to the election, while fraud is almost inevitable in such a context, the problem arises both from what turnout revealed about popular […]

One circle I’ve yet to see squared is why Pakistan would share its nuclear technology — both uranium enrichment and weaponization — with Iran, when that technology is widely believed to have been financed, in part, by the Saudis? Indeed, rumors of an already done Pakistan-Saudi deal for the purchase of warheads in the event Iran achieves nuclear weapon status are so widespread that the Pakistani capacity is often referred to as the “Saudi bomb.” Pakistan’s claims that AQ Khan was a solo rogue operator were greeted with huge skepticism. And Khan — who, as a scapegoat with an axe […]

BERLIN — The German public and many left-leaning members of parliament have expressed shock and anger over Germany’s role in an airstrike in Afghanistan last week that killed an as-yet-undetermined number of Afghan civilians. The airstrike on two hijacked gas tankers was called in by a German commander in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, reportedly based on grainy video footage and the assurance of just one on-the-ground informant that those surrounding the trucks were all Taliban insurgents. The German people, deeply pacifist since the end of World War II, are largely opposed to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, as well as Germany’s […]

Kenneth Payne flags something I’ve noted before as well: No significant works of art have yet emerged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If that seems like a trivial observation, consider the impact of “All Quiet on the Western Front” or WWII-era literature (Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut) on American society and culture, or Vietnam-era cinema (Deer Hunter, The Boys of Company C, Apocalypse Now, even Platoon) and TV (MASH). Part of this has to do with structural changes in the media. Publishing is now overwhelmingly dominated by memoirs and non-fiction, both of which we’ve seen with regard to these wars. […]

File this one under B, for Bad timing: Laura Rozen, from her new digs over at Politico (great pencil-drawing portrait!!), reports that the U.S.-UAE 123 nuclear agreement is due to escape congressional limbo in mid-October. The only potential wrench is concern over the UAE’s past history of lax export controls, in particular regarding potential diversion of controlled materials and technology to Iran. In other words, probably not the best time for a China-bound UAE cargo plane, stopping over for refueling in India, to not declare its cargo of arms and explosives. Apparently, the omisison resulted from a “technical error.” The […]

The Taliban is running out of money. That was the conclusion some observers reached when the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported last week that Afghanistan’s poppy crop is down nearly a quarter compared to last year. But other experts caution against declaring financial victory. If anything, the behind-the-scenes campaigns to dry up Taliban funding are only now catching up to the extremist group’s sophisticated financial operations. Poppies, the basic ingredient in opium, represent Afghanistan’s biggest export — albeit an illegal one. They “fund the activities of criminals, insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere,” according to the UNODC […]

The U.S. is determined to implement a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and one of the most important concepts of counterinsurgency is securing the people: Insurgents and counterinsurgents alike must appeal to the people they’re fighting amongst in order to deny the other popular support. But what does it mean to “secure the people” of Afghanistan? Some of the U.S. government’s best thinkers about defense policy and counterinsurgency, many of whom cut their teeth on the urban battlefields of Iraq, have finally begun to consider this question. But although Iraq is vastly different from Afghanistan, there seems to be no end […]