NORTH KOREA PLAYS NUCLEAR POKER

North Korea has once again resorted to its preferred game of nuclear blackmail, telling the United States and its allies that it plans to resume development of missiles for carrying nuclear warheads.
The threat comes at a time when the N. Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il is reported to have suffered a stroke, leaving the rest of the world to wonder who is now running a nation that relies as much on deception and secrecy as it does on lies and threats. In its latest power play, North Korea told the U.S. that it was restarting the production of enriched uranium at its Yongbyon plant, which had had been shut down this past year following international talks in which the Koreans were promised monetary aid and much needed fuel for their ailing power plants and declining industrial base.
Observers now reckon the shutdown of Yongbyon was yet another example of North Korea’s tendency to deceive because recent reports have confirmed that even while the facility was closed work went ahead on building a new missile engine capable of delivering a warhead into the continental United States. Tests on the engine were carried out in secrecy at a site on Korea’s western coast. That has concerned not only the U.S. but particularly N. Korea’s neighbors, South Korea and Japan, who are aware that when the North declared itself a nuclear state in 2005 it possessed enough plutonium for five nuclear warheads. At that time, however, the Pentagon felt N. Korea lacked the delivery systems for nukes and the real danger it posed was that it might share its stocks of plutonium with terrorist supporting states such as Iran.
As a consequence, the Bush Administration felt it had to make every effort to engage with North Korea diplomatically to persuade it to abandon its nuclear program in return for an economic embrace from the West. The thinking in Washington was that Kim Jong-Il needed to end his country’s isolationism if it was to survive economically. Since 2005, there has been a diplomatic dance between the U.S. and North Korea, with the latter constantly using threats to get what it wants and from time to time acting so erratically it has been difficult to determine exactly what motivates Kim and his inner circle.
The latest reversal of policy by Pyongyang was announced with the justification that Washington had not acted in a timely fashion to remove it from its terrorism blacklist. In Washington, Tokyo and Seoul there was astonishment at that statement yet many observers pointed out that the unpredictable character of the North’s regime should not have surprised anyone. Still, it left many Pentagon experts wondering what exactly the North Koreans hoped to achieve from their latest turn around.
In truth, it may be yet another power play by Pyongyang based on the belief that real bargaining power in a nuclear blackmail game requires having pieces that translate into real threats. For example, without the ability to show that it can target the U.S. with missiles carrying nuclear warheads, the regime’s hand in a dangerous nuclear poker game is a weak one. The ace card is missile technology, which would make North Korea not just a country with a stock of enriched uranium but a nation that was truly part of the nuclear club, capable of striking targets thousands of miles from its own shores. That would suggest North Korea has no intention of relinquishing its nuclear ambitions and it going to up the ante in negotiations with Washington and its allies. If that is the reality, the West is going to have to find some other way to deal with the regime. There is an argument that the more the West accedes to threats and rewards N. Korea economically for its lies, the more it enables Kim Jong-Il and his henchmen to thrive while they continue to build a nuclear arsenal.
The Japanese have made it clear to Washington that they have the most to fear and will not stand idly by if North Korea acquires nuclear missiles. In order to silence a growing clamor from the Japanese to get into the nuclear weapons business Washington has boosted Japan’s air defenses though that may not be enough in the long run to keep Japan from considering the nuclear option.
While the nuclear threat from N. Korea is one that keeps people awake in the Pentagon at night there is also the constant risk of a conventional conflict on the Korean peninsula. If that occurred, the North would have a decided edge. While many North Koreans have lived with starvation, the country’s military has always been well cared for, especially its Special Forces. It has the world’s largest Special Operations Forces, said to number close to 100,000 operatives, and most military analysts agree that they are highly trained. They are divided into 22 brigades, some of which are trained for chemical and biological weapons’ dispersal. There are also brigades that have trained snipers, explosives experts and infiltration teams. At least two brigades of agents are ready for insertion into South Korea to pose as South Korean military or civilians once a war begins. In keeping with the kind of terrain Special Forces will be aside to fight in, there are four sniper brigades assisted by seven independent reconnaissance battalions.
While the North does not possess the most advanced radar, it has a multi-layered system that could prove difficult to penetrate. It also possesses enough small to medium range missiles to target South Korean cities and the 28,000 US military personnel stationed along the DMZ between the two parts of the country.
Dating from 1993, Kim Jong-Il has been his country’s sole leader in charge of a military totaling 1.3 million people under arms. That does not include a paramilitary force of 115,000 under the control of the Ministry of Public Security and an internal security force of 145,000. While Kim Jong-Il, also known as “dear leader” has absolute control of the armed forces, there is a National Defense Committee of senior party members and it may now be running the country if Kim has been impaired by a stroke.
The Defense Committee is part of what is known as the ruling elite, an inner circle that surrounds Kim and keeps him informed about events inside and outside the country. It is composed of approximately fifty trusted Party members, most of them in their late 60s. They are from the same generation and share similar social connections. The majority of them are from the capital, leaving much of the country underrepresented at the decision making level. Overall, it is estimated that no more than 100 people have a role in formulating policy. Little is known about many of those figures, making it difficult for outside intelligence agencies to determine what might happen in the event of Kim’s death or his inability to function after a serious illness. Like so much about North Korea, the less that is known about only it serves to make it a more dangerous adversary.

WAR BENEFITS THE PRIVATE SECTOR

When the next president takes office he will find that private contractors have not only benefited from the war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but they have become an integral and expanding part of America’s military-industrial structure.
While it is difficult to determine the exact amount of tax payer dollars that flow annually into the coffers of corporate contractors, the GAO – Government Accountability Office – says there has been a 78% increase in Department of Defense spending on private sector services since 2001. The money spent has exceeded by a wide margin DOD spending on supplies, equipment and weapons systems. This expanding role of the private sector has led to a diminishing government-employee workforce and less oversight of contracts, resulting in numerous examples of fraud and wasteful spending. Since 2003, the Army’s hiring body, the CCE - Contracting Center of Excellence – has begun to rely on contractor specialists, with the result that contractor employees now represent more than 42% of the CCE workforce. That reality has worried many in Congress, who fear contractor employees within the CCE may too often be perceived to be speaking for government. They are also paid considerably more than their government counterparts.
A major concern for those investigating fraud is that contractor employees are frequently the point of contact for the DOD when dealing with private sector contracts. According to a GAO report in July 2007, the DOD’s growing dependence on private sector goods and services has doubled in seven years and is a trend likely to increase over time. In 2007, the DOD signed $270 billion in contracts and, according to the GAO, “faced vulnerabilities to contracting fraud, waste and abuse due to weaknesses.”
A critical weakness was the growing lack of government control over the massive dollar amount paid private companies. In many instances, the specialists determining the value and terms of contracts were specialists hired from the private sector. One of the most egregious examples of waste was the way the DOD used a technique offering financial incentives to improve the performance of private companies. In effect, the technique resembled rewarding a child for an excellent school project but in this case it wasn’t a matter of a star attached to a project but billions of dollars paid out as performance awards. As a result, an estimated $8 billion in awards was shared among contractors.
“Furthermore, the DOD gave contractors a second opportunity to earn an estimated $669 million of initially unearned or deferred fees on approximately half of the award-fee contracts,” said a GAO report.
The problems of waste and the unregulated growth of the private sector in relation to defense spending has been an issue for decades but the sharp spike in the expansion of the contractor work force, and the shrinking numbers of government employees, were particularly striking in the 1999. From 1992 until 1999, DOD contracts with the private sector expanded from $39.9 billion to $51.8 billion. The services provided included repair to equipment, medical care, technical and clerical support and management oversight. As a consequence, the government workforce declined from 966,000 in 1996 to 682,000 by 2000 but even then it was almost impossible to get accurate figures for the value of contracts awarded to private companies. In 1999, a figure of $96.5 billion was reported by several Government employees’ unions but was not confirmed by government.
In subsequent years, the role of the private sector has increased beyond anyone’s expectations. In 2007, $254 billion was funneled directly to approximately one hundred companies with ten of those companies awarded the lion’s share, estimated at approximately $130 billion. The smallest contract awarded to any company was approximately $500 million.
The GAO has softened its stance on the DOD’s growing reliance on the private sector, telling Congress earlier this year that the services provided have helped the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, there are now 196,000 contractors in those two war zones. In Iraq alone, there are three brigades of security contractors with another brigade providing them with support. Other contractors work as interpreters, weapons systems analysts, depot-level maintenance crews, communication specialists and food and housing suppliers. Contractors are also working for the DOD in parts of South East Asia. In essence, GAO reports and statements tend to imply that the modern US military cannot function adequately without a massive private sector input.
Nonetheless, the GAO has admitted it may be time to examine whether the Pentagon needs to be so dependent on contractors to provide essential services. It may also be an opportune time to improve the surveillance of the contracting system because the DOD, in the words of the GAO, “will continue to be vulnerable to contracting fraud, waste and abuse.”
In May 2008, Mary Ungone, Deputy Inspector General of Defense, admitted in evidence to Congress that the DOD “did not maintain adequate internal controls over commercial payments and that $7.2 billion out of a pool of $8.2 billion “did not meet all statutory regulations.” She conceded that approximately $1.4 billion “lacked the minimum documentation for a valid payment” and 28 transactions worth $35 million appeared to involve criminal activity. The Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, (D. Calif.), was not satisfied with her evidence and suggested there were probably 7,000 potentially criminal cases of fraud to be examined. Waxman also claimed that the IOTC – International Oil Company Ltd - was charging the Pentagon $1.08 over the market price of each gallon of jet fuel delivered to the U.S. military in Iraq.
In the public mind, the most striking examples of fraud have involved companies like Kellogg Brown and Root, which was a subsidiary of Halliburton when Vice President Dick Cheney was its CEO. KBR has made huge profits with no-bid contracts that were negotiated without definite time frames and on the basis that cost overruns would be met no matter how high they were. In other words, if KBR were to bill for tens of millions beyond the initial estimate of a contract the DOD would pay up. In one instance, KBR was judged to have fraudulently billed for $1 billion, yet attempts to stop the payment were thwarted with approval from the White House.
Critics of the growing role of contractors argue that the use of a massive private sector army and the expenditure of hundreds of billions for other services are creating a new, out of control military-industrial juggernaut. They point to the late general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned when leaving office in 1961 that Americans should be alert to the growing influence of the arms industry within the military. It was the Cold War and an arms race was under way yet he saw the danger of private weapons companies acquiring what he called “unwarranted influence” on America’s political and military policy making. He became the first person to use the term, “military industrial complex,” suggesting that its growth could impact not only the military but the spiritual and economic life of the nation.
Some members of Congress are deeply concerned about the growing privatization of the DOD and argue it is a trend that could have the outcome President Eisenhower spoke about. Any decisions on whether to change course on how the U.S. military functions, and how it is financed, will be a task for the next White House incumbent. Ultimately, accountability lies at the heart of the matter, following a decade when there has been little oversight of the hundreds of billions of tax dollars that have flowed into the coffers of private corporations, some of whom continue to outsource work to hundreds of companies abroad and rarely provide their books for scrutiny. At the apex of government there is a need for transparency that will allow the American public to learn the true financial cost of the expanding contractor phenomenon. Only then can a debate be launched to examine whether this is the right course for the future of our military.

AFGHAN INSURGENTS THE DEADLIEST

Afghan insurgents are not the deadliest guerilla fighters in the world because the US and Pakistan helped to train them, or because they fought and defeated a Soviet army. The fact is that Afghanistan for hundreds of years has bred generation upon generation of warriors who have traditionally been prepared to stop fighting each other in order to turn repel foreign armies.
The Taliban has tapped into that genetic fighting streak among the Sunni, Pashtun tribe that numbers close to 13 million, amounting to approximately two fifths of the country’s population. There are an equal number of Pashtuns living in the tribal areas of Pakistan close to the border with Afghanistan and many of them can trace their male ancestry back hundreds of years. The tribe is divided into clans and sub-clans, each with their own hierarchical structure.
Throughout their history they have fought other clans in Afghanistan and have earned the reputation of being the most accomplished and ruthless fighters. They faced the brunt of the fighting against the Soviets with the help of the US and the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence agency – ISI – and in return received specialist military training and several billion dollars in weapons.
But for all their training in the use of new, sophisticated US weaponry such as ground to air missiles, the mujahideen, as they were known in the 1980s, were as tactically adept at guerilla tactic s as the Vietcong were in Vietnam. Like the Vietcong, the mujahideen had several distinct advantages. They trained with the same weapons, relying on the Soviet AK 47 assault rifle and the shoulder fired Soviet anti-tank weapon known as the RPG7. It is still used by the Taliban today because it is highly portable and effective in close quarter combat in the mountainous valleys of Afghanistan. The CIA supplied the mujahideen with up to one thousand highly-advanced Stinger missiles to bring down Soviet aircraft and years later offered a reward of $175,000 for every Stinger that was returned to them. To this day, a fear remains within NATO that there may be Stingers in the hands of the Taliban even though Pakistani intelligence agents recovered many Stingers and collected huge rewards.
What made the mujahideen exceptional fighters was that young men within the clans throughout Afghanistan learned from an early age how to fire weapons and as a rule families were attached to a warlord and had their own weapons, including pistols, automatic rifles and sub-machineguns. Young men also learned how to cope with the harsh climate of a country that was mountainous, with extremes of heat and cold. More importantly, like any good guerilla force the mujahideen had a supportive population to help them with logistics and intelligence. One of the critical factors that made the mujahideen an exceptional guerilla army was the fact they had allies on their borders, especially in the tribal lands of Pakistan and also within the “Stans," including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There was also a constant flow of foreign fighters from across the Middle East, many of whom had served in their countries’ armies or in terrorist movements.
The fact that Afghanistan has seen nothing but conflict for hundreds of years has conditioned the population to expect and react to violence with the same resilience and determination. The Taliban have proved to be a tough enemy for the US and its NATO allies for much the same reasons the mujahideen were successful against the Soviets. Like the mujahideen of old, the Taliban fighters have support from the tribal lands of Pakistan and have a ready supply of young fighters trained in Madrasah schools in that country. Many of those schools have long been funded by Saudis. The Taliban also has no need for a regular supply of weapons since Afghanistan is awash with guns and explosives.
NATO has found it hard going facing traditional guerilla tactics of hit and run and the recent use of foreign fighters as suicide bombers. The Taliban has learned from Sunni insurgents in Iraq how to employ deadly roadside explosives and has no conscience when it comes to using violence to keep the civilian population its side. Fighters will hide within a civilian population, inviting NATO to use airpower to dislodge them, thereby creating civilian casualties. The increase in civilian deaths from US bombing has alienated large sections of the Afghan population, making it easier for the Taliban to demonize the “western invaders.”
As a killing machine the Taliban is ruthless as shown on the morning of August 8, 1989 when its fighters arrived in the northern city, Mazar-i-Sharif, which housed Shia Muslims. For 48 hours, Taliban units toured the streets, slaughtering as many as 8,000 men, women and children. In contravention of Muslin principles, they left the corpses to rot in the streets for almost a week.
Like the Soviets before them, NATO troops and the Afghan army regulars know if they are captured they will be tortured and beheaded. During the Soviet occupation there were terrible atrocities committed by both sides in a conflict that may well have so traumatized the population to the extent Afghans today appear immune to the awful nature of conflict.
One of the reasons for the present upsurge in violence is that the Bush administration’s overthrow of the Taliban regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was only a temporary setback for the Taliban. Unfortunately, the White House turned its attention to Iraq and failed to provide the kind of military thrust needed to dislodge the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the parts of the country where they had quickly sought sanctuary. In the intervening years since 2001, the Taliban has regrouped and acquired new fighters, some of whom have been bloodied in Iraq and have learned new tactics from Sunnis insurgents there. It should also be noted that the tendency to see the Taliban as a terrorist creation of the Al Qaeda variety is to underestimate the innate character of Pashtuns and other Afghans who are instinctively inclined to fight to repel foreigners.
Pashtuns will not support the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, preferring to see him and his administration as a western creation. In the background, the ties that bind the Taliban and Pakistan have survived despite years of pressure from the US for the Pakistani regime to sever all contact with Afghan insurgents. The US has failed to see that those ties are multi-faceted and in the interests of Pakistan. The Pakistan military is happy that Pashtuns are anti-Iranian and that the 13 million Pashtuns in Pakistan can be controlled with the help of the tribe’s leaders in Afghanistan. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, the three countries that recognized the Taliban regime were Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That was more to do with religion and ethnicity than politics; elements in a long term relationship that continues to make the Taliban a force that will not be defeated any time soon.
During the Soviet occupation, the US sent over 60,000 tons of weapons and ammunition into Afghanistan every year. A lot of those guns are still there and the guerilla tactics used by Afghan fighters have not changed much since the days of the war against the Soviets. The terrain still favors the guerilla fighter overt the highly armed modern soldier and the insurgents have local support. Ultimately, the Taliban will only be defeated by a sophisticated counter insurgency in which larger numbers of US- NATO troops are used to hold major centers while efforts are developed to change the political dynamics on the ground in order to wean the population away from a violent way of life and heroin production.
The two countries most equipped to contribute to such an effort are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who have religious and ethnic ties to the insurgents. Until that happens, NATO troops will continue to die in a war of attrition that cannot be won by military tactics alone. Iraq has already proved that to be the case. “Mission Accomplished” in Afghanistan is as far off as it was when the US invaded in 2001.

UKRAINE NEXT FLASHPOINT?

Vice-President Dick Cheney knows his history as well as anyone and it has not escaped his notice that Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula could be the scene of a new conflict between East and the West following Russia’s invasion of the Georgian province of South Ossieta.
Before the vice-president’s recent visit to Ukraine he would have known that the Crimea has always had an important place in our history books. At school, many of us learned Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” depicting how 600 British lancers charged Russian guns at Balaclava during the Crimean War of 1854-56. That war was between the Russian Empire and the combined armies of Britain and French, all of them battling for what remained of the Ottoman Empire. While it was a conflict that gave us Florence Nightingale, above all it was a war of folly, epitomized by the Light Brigade Charge, which a French General described as “madness.” But that comment by the general was not the one that historians have chosen to best remember. The general’s most quoted line has always been: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” - it’s magnificent but it’s not war.
Another major event of that war was the siege of Sevastopol where the Russian Tsar had his fleet. Today the port hosts the Russian Black Sea fleet and the city is like a Russian city teeming with Russian sailors. Ukraine, which gained independence in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has leased the port to Russia until 2017 but is threatening it will not renew the lease.
The Ukraine is a mainly Christian nation that looks westward and hopes, like Georgia, to join NATO. Its landmass makes it the 44th largest country in the world with a population of 45 millions, of which 17% claim to be Russian. During World War II, millions of its citizens died and of the almost 8 million soldiers of the Red Army that perished on the Eastern front at least 25% of them were Ukrainians. Later, when the Cold War began, Ukraine achieved greater autonomy than many Soviet Republics and it was hardly surprising that it eventually declared independence from Moscow.
One of its first moves after independence was to hand back to Moscow a massive nuclear arsenal and to sign up to a nuclear non-proliferation agreement. However, it kept its large military and naval forces, making it second to Russia in the number of men it had under arms – some 445,000. Its economy remains strong and it can claim to have an edge over many countries in missile and satellite technology. Many of the Soviet space and nuclear missile experiments were designed and carried out by Ukrainians.
Overall, the country’s vulnerability, like many European nations, lies in its reliance on Russia for energy, especially oil and gas. It also uses nuclear power but again has to rely on Russia for fuel to run its nuclear power plants. Ironically, the vast majority of Russian gas piped to Western Europe is routed through the Ukraine, making it a vital energy hub for East and West.
A sign that Moscow sees Ukraine, and especially the Crimea, as important to its national interests is that Russian leaders have made it clear they have no intention of vacating the port of Sevastopol in 2017 no matter what the Ukrainian government decrees. That has encouraged observers in the West to conclude that Russia intends to expand its presence in the Crimea. Should Russia launch the type of military action it undertook in Georgia, the Ukraine would be effectively split, depriving it of a major port and a strategic economic corridor. The Ukrainian authorities have been warning Washington and the EU for some time that Russia has been secretly issuing Russian passports to people in the Crimea. The aim, say the Ukrainians, it to permit Russia to argue that the Crimea has a large Russian population, which Moscow is obliged to defend it; an argument similar to the one Russia used for invading South Ossieta.
The West has close relations with the Ukraine because Ukrainian forces have been involved in peacekeeping in Kosovo and in Lebanon and have been assisting the US Coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan. As soon as the US and its NATO allies realized they were blindsided by Russia’s invasion of Georgia, where it appears Russia intends to maintain a military presence, Western leaders turned their attention to the Ukraine, focusing on its Crimean peninsula. NATO cannot afford to allow Russia to take control of the Crimea because that would further weaken the transatlantic Alliance and would indicate that Moscow cannot be stopped from continuing a strategy to regain territory lost during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Vice-President Dick Cheney on his visit to the region bluntly warned that Russia was acting provocatively and that Ukraine’s security mattered to the West. That latter assertion implied the West will not stand idly by if Russia tries to repeat its South Ossieta strategy by sending is military into the Crimea. The Ukraine would be no military push over and any conflict there could expand into a much larger confrontation between Russia and the West.
Russia says it is angered by the presence of US warships in the Black Sea, which the Pentagon claims have been bringing much needed humanitarian supplies to Georgia. In recent weeks the Russian president has twice warned that Russia will find a way to respond to what it sees as this US military presence at its backdoor, without specifying what the response will be. A hint of what it could be came in the form of a television address given by the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. He said he had been told by Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev that the Russian Fleet hoped to visit Venezuela for a “friendly and working visit” before the end of 2008. In other words, the Russian Fleet will soon be in the Caribbean at America’s backdoor. Russia has developed an ongoing relationship with Chavez and has increased its links to Cuba. In recent years, Chavez agreed to purchase billions of dollars of military equipment from Russia, including fighter planes and ground to air missiles. He was one of the few world leaders to publicly support Russia’s invasion of South Ossieta.
It is unlikely, however, that Russia will seek to develop the kind of Cold War relationship it had with Cuba by putting missiles onto Cuban soil. Instead, it will probably use Cuba as and Venezuela as a way of saying to the United States: “If you can come into my back yard I can visit yours too.”
While those kinds of games can get out of hand, the most pressing issue is what is likely to happen on the ground in the Ukraine. The West’s military and political leaders are watching the Crimea for the slightest hint of a sudden Russian military move against the peninsula. This time NATO does not intend to be taken by surprise. But, as we all know from reading Tennyson’s poem about the charge of the ill-fated Light Brigade, the Crimea is a place where wars can follow a pattern of madness as that French general learned in 1854.