The danger of the fighting in Afghanistan spilling across the mountainous western borders of Pakistan confronts a society that’s also in a perpetual standoff with India and roiled by simmering discontent everywhere. The overwhelming sentiment, as seen in the Pakistan media and comments from the government, is the U.S. should maintain a military presence in Afghanistan lest the forces of the Taliban, and others, spread like wildfire around the region.
Yet Pakistan leaders would seem to like nothing better than to negotiate with “the good Taliban” – across the line in Afghanistan – in hopes of reaching a modus vivendi under which all sides can live and let live. Talks may happen, but the chances of living happily ever after would not appear bright for a number of reasons, notably whatever the Afghan Taliban, “the good Taliban,” are doing to aid and abet the Pakistan Taliban, definitely “the bad Taliban.”
Just how you tell them apart, how you can be sure that elements on the Afghan side are not providing arms and inspiration for their Pakistani brethren, and vice versa, is a question that no one can really answer. Such is the impression I’ve gotten after four weeks in Pakistan, almost all of it in the capital of Islamabad. Built in the 1960’s as a special capital district with broad avenues and lots of empty fields and parkland, Islamabad is a relatively safe haven surrounded by a countryside that’s never immune from terrorism and odd acts of violence.
In Peshawar, strategically near the Afghan border, the U.S. maintains a consulate from which diplomats are forbidden to venture except on official business at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, shielded on a vast estate in the capital’s diplomatic enclave. Travelers are warned against going not only to Peshawar but also to Lahore, the historic city southeast of Islamabad near the Indian border, and of course to Karachi, the vastly overpopulated, teeming southern port city where violence and terrorism are every day occurrences.
That sounds like good advice in the aftermath of the bombing of an army school in Peshawar that killed 134 people, mostly kids, in December. Then, while I’ve been in Islamabad in February, the many TV news channels have interrupted their diet of Bollywood and Pakistani movies and talk shows for “breaking news” of the bombing of a Shiite mosque, also in Peshawar, killing 22 people, another anti-Shia bombing that killed six in Lahore. and three more killed in a bombing of a mosque in Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s ancient “twin city.”
A Pakistani university student holds a rifle during a training session with Pakistani Rangers in Karachi
Considering the hatred of the Sunni-dominated Taliban for Shiites, such acts of terrorism seem separate from the much larger struggle extending from the bloody depredations of ISIS in Syria and Iraq and the resurgence of Al Qaeda. If ISIS seems remote from Pakistan, it is only because Afghanistan and Iran stand in the way. The Taliban, good or bad, may flourish in Afghanistan, but Shiite Iran is not going to let the ISIS terror spread east of Iraq, where Iran, in a weird historical twist, is supporting the fight against ISIS along with the U.S.
In Pakistan, the good news about the bombings is that people in the army and the ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence, the amorphous entity that’s supposed to be under the thumb of the army chief of staff, no longer are operating in cahoots with friends in the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other mysterious groupings. Or so it’s widely believed.
How much credence to give to such wishful thinking is never clear, but the Peshawar bombings should have been a wake-up call. The warlord in charge of the Pakistan Taliban not only boasted of the December bombing, calling it revenge for the killing of Taliban fighters, but vowed much more against the Taliban’s foes – as seen in the latest carnage. While the Pakistanis talk about talking to the Afghan Taliban, American emissaries have been chatting with Taliban emissaries in the Gulf state of Qatar – talks viewed with deepest suspicion in India and by many in Pakistan as well.
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Donald Kirk Contributor
Asia news from Korea's nuclear crisis to Indian foreign policy.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
FORBES ASIA 2/20/2015 @ 5:56AM 3,494 views
Iran's Partnership With North Korea On Nukes And Missiles May Scuttle Any Deal
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The agreement the U.S. is hammering out with Iran for downsizing Iran’s nuclear program seems to be leaving one wild card out of the deal. That’s North Korea’s long-term partnership with Iran on everything from missiles to nuclear technology and components.
While negotiators haggle over the number of centrifuges Iran should keep in its inventory, North Korean engineers, technicians and laborers remain in Iran assisting in constructing and operating the facilities that are the point of all the debate. South Korean intelligence sources estimate hundreds of North Koreans are in Iran as part of an exchange of nuclear know-how as well as missiles made in North Korea.
Whether North Korea can maintain the relationship with the same impunity with which it’s been dealing with Iran for more than 20 years is not clear. Sanctions, intensified by President Obama in early January after North Korean cyber warriors got into Sony Entertainment’s system, may have made it more difficult to ship Ro-dong and Scud missiles to Iran via Beijing, as the North had been doing for years.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un waves during a military parade celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)
Still, North Korea and Iran are believed to be exchanging critical stuff – North Korean experts and workers remaining in place while Iran sends observers to check out intermittent North Korean missile launches and see what North Korea is doing about staging a fourth underground nuclear explosion.
The nuclear exchange revolves around North Korea’s program for developing warheads with highly enriched uranium – with centrifuges and centrifuge technology in part acquired from Iran. At the same time, North Korea is able to assist Iran in miniaturizing warheads to fit on missiles – a goal the North has long been pursuing – and also can supply uranium and other metals mined in its remote mountain regions.
“North Korea continues to supply technology, components, and even raw materials for Iran’s HEU weaponization program,” says Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s military and political ambitions. Moreover, he says, “They are even helping Iran to pursue a second track by helping them to build a plutonium reactor.”
That assessment supports the view of analysts that Iran is counting on North Korean expertise in constructing a reactor that produces warheads with plutonium. The reactor would be a more powerful version of the aging five-megawatt “experimental” reactor with which the North has built perhaps a dozen warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, including three that it’s tested underground — in October 2006, May 2009 and February 2013, two years ago this month.
A South Korean intelligence analyst likened the North’s program to its previous attempt at building a nuclear plant for Syria a number of years ago. Israeli air warplanes destroyed that plant while it was still under construction, complete with a plutonium reactor, in September 2007, effectively ending the drive of President Hafez al-Assad for Syria to become a nuclear power well before civil strife swept his country.
North Korea’s partnership with Iran is far more extensive and durable than with Syria though the North still maintains close ties with the Assad regime. Evidence of the North’s ongoing relationship with Iran is that two North Koreans based there are named in the latest U.S. sanctions among ten worldwide with whom there should be no dealings.
The two, according to the sanctions, are representatives of the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, cited as “Korea’s primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons.” Earlier listed “for its role in North Korea’s proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” KOMID was sanctioned by the UN in April 2009 a few weeks before the North’s second nuclear test.
“KOMID has offices in multiple countries around the world,” says the sanction order, “and facilitates weapons sales for the North Korean government.”
The implications of North Korea’s partnership with Iran rank high among Israel’s concerns – and may come up when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3 expresses his misgivings to Congress about the deal the U.S. is negotiating with Iran.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz has cited the Iran-North Korean connection as a critical stumbling block to a real deal on Iran’s nuclear program.
“If this loophole is not closed, and if Iran under an agreement can have some kind of research and development, knowledge exchange and participation in other countries like North Korea,” he was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as telling a briefing, “then this is also the way to bypass an agreement by simply not doing it alone in Iran, but by cooperating with North Korea or other rogue countries.”
The Iranian and North Korean positions differ, however, in one critical respect. Iran insists it’s only interested in producing nuclear power and denies it’s on the way to producing a nuclear warhead. North Korea, showing no signs of building a nuclear power plant, boasts of its prowess as a nuclear weapons power.
While negotiations are going on with Iran, North Korea has ruled out talks on its nuclear weapons program and is often rumored to be preparing for a fourth underground test – possibly with highly enriched uranium and centrifuges fabricated with the help of Iranian engineers.
To read more of my commentaries on Asia news, click onwww.donaldkirk.com, and the details of my books are available here.
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Donald Kirk Contributor
Asia news from Korea's nuclear crisis to Indian foreign policy.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
FORBES ASIA 2/12/2015 @ 2:31PM 6,228 views
For Korean Air 'Nut Rage' Lady -- No Mercy For Being 'Nutrageous'
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Heather Cho Hyun-ah speaks to the media upon her arrival for questioning at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in Seoul. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
The case of the disgraced Korean Air executive might be described as “nutrageous” except for one problem – the Hershey HSY +0.14% chocolate people already manufacture a candy bar with the same name.
Even so, the saga of Heather Cho, the daughter of the Korea Air chairman and granddaughter of its founder, has found its place in corporate history as “nut rage” for the furious outburst in which she ordered the pilot of a Boeing BA -0.58% 747 to turn around while taxiing for takeoff and let the purser off the plane. That was for gross dereliction of his duty to have macadamia nuts served for her in first class on a plate, not inside the original wrapper.
The airline’s initial efforts to protect her, to cover for her, all fell apart as word of the incident spread on the internet. Ms. Cho, forced to resign as executive vice president in charge of Korean Air service, stands convicted of “obstructing the safety” of the plane. She faces a year in prison while a lesser executive got eight months for trying to obstruct the investigation by asking the purser and other witnesses not to talk to investigators. The only one to get out of jail was a bureaucrat in the transport ministry. His six-month sentence, for spilling out details of the ongoing investigation, was suspended.
If the type of justice meted out to other miscreants in high places is any guide, Cho might have been expected to be let off with a suspended sentence. Far more often than not in recent years, chaebol executives have not only had their sentences suspended but have eventually received presidential pardons while carrying on much as before.
The difference between her case and that of the others, of course, was the type of offense. It was one thing to be thoroughly corrupt, to skim money off your various companies’ accounts, to manipulate records, to lie, cheat and steal. Actually causing mayhem inside a moving plane, however slowly it was taxiing, was another.
A lot of Koreans, though, aren’t making that distinction. Ms. Cho has now earned her place as a symbol of the spoiled heir to a great fortune – living proof of the life styles of the heirs to the chaebol when given a chance. And the way Korean Air managers tried to cover up the crime as salaried professional executives battled to preserve the honor and good name of the ruling family also is seen as typical of chaebol behavior.
Koreans often know the chaebol chieftains and their many relatives as “royalty” with the power to rule their empires as their absolute fiefdoms with no rights for anyone to question their authority, integrity or judgment. Parallels between the absolutism of chaebol rule and that of North Korea’s ruling dynasty are obvious and comparisons common – the Korean mentality is the same on both sides of the demilitarized zone that’s divided the country since the Korean War.
Ms. Cho’s worst offense, in the eyes of her family, those who control Korean Air and the Hanjin empire, was to inflict loss of face on the organization. For Korean Air, Korea’s flagship carrier, to have to suffer all the d
