By Ryan McMaken*

When the US government decides it doesn’t like a foreign regime, it’s become something of a tradition for US politicians — with the help of a compliant media — to portray those leaders as irrational, unhinged, or even downright insane.

This was true of Saddam Hussein, and it was true of Slobodan Milosevic. In both cases, a foreign head of state was condemned as irrational in order to help justify US invasions and bombings of foreign nations that were no threat to the United States.

The US narrative usually goes something like this — as described by Ronnie Lipschutz:

Why would so-called rogues — and these are the only countries that, according to Washington, threaten US forces, allies, or interests — choose to [threaten the US]? No rational reason can be given, and so irrational ones are offered instead. They hate us, but for no reason since we have no designs on them. They desire vengeance, but for no reason since we have never offended them. They wish to injure us, for for no reason, since they have only been injured through their interference with our pusuit of order.

This narrative helps to reinforce the credulous American public’s naive acceptance of the idea that the US government is an untrammeled force for good in the international sphere, and that any opposition to the US must be based on irrational, evil motives.1 If any other head of state is angry with the United States, it’s simply because he absurdly desires world conquest, or to massacre innocents. Or he may even be insane.

Why We Must Claim They’re Crazy

But there’s an even more important motivation behind portraying “rogue” nations as being run by crazy people. It allows advocates for war to claim that deterrence via America’s huge nuclear  and conventional arsenals will not work — and thus these leaders present a grave threat to the American public. Lipschutz notes: “if insanity or irrationality are to blame for wars, deterrence cannot work to prevent them.”

A rational head of state, of course, would understand that any existential threat to the US could mean total nuclear annihilation for the offender. On the other hand, if the head of state is just insane, then all bets are off.

It is not surprising, then, that this narrative is being trotted out yet again in the case of North Korea.

Nuclear deterrence may have worked against Joseph Stalin — who apparently was a super-reasonable and level-headed guy — but Kim Jong-un is just crazy.

Naturally, ultra-hawk John McCain has been at the forefront of this rhetorical effort, calling Kim Jong-un a “crazy fat kid.” Later, McCain’s daughter got in on the act, calling Kim a “total absolute maniac.”

These attempts at portraying Kim as immune to deterrence are so common, in fact, that Isaac Fish from Foreign Policy magazine has declared “there is widespread belief in the US that North Korea is so hard to deal with because Kim is insane.” Fish, on the other hand, concludes Kim has understandable motives just like most everyone else.

Certainly, in social media, it’s not uncommon to encounter pro-war commenters who insist — without proffering any evidence — that Kim is simply impervious to nuclear deterrence, and thus must be killed (along with millions of other North Koreans) in a pre-emptive nuclear holocaust.

Kim is Sane — and Predictable

Those who have actually bothered to study Kim and his regime, however, often take a rather more moderate position.

Charles Peña begins with the obvious question and provides the obvious answer: “But isn’t Kim Jong-un an unpredictable—even crazy—leader who can’t be deterred? The same was said of Stalin and Mao in their time, yet both those leaders were deterred. Moreover, Kim Jong-un would have to be suicidal to launch a nuclear weapon against the United States since the United States has the ability to retaliate with utter devastation.”

David C. Kang also concludes: “Kim Jong-un may be many things, but he is not suicidal. Deterrence will continue to work.”

Contrary to the idea that Kim and the North Koreans are crazed loose cannons, the North Koreans behave exactly as any other regime bent on maintaining its regime. Far from seeking to die in a blaze of glory, Kim wants to go on living as a dictator indefinitely.

As Peña notes, Kim wants “to secure his own survival and that of his regime, much like his father and his father’s father before him. That would certainly explain the executions and assassinations of those who might usurp him, which include family members.”

The regime wants to survive — and not be a victim of “regime change” which is exactly why, as Kang writes, “North Korea isn’t unpredictable; rather, it is the most predictable country on earth.”

Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — perhaps the most reasonable person on Trump’s foreign policy team — admits “He may be ruthless. He may be a murderer. He may be someone who in many respects we would say by our standards is irrational. But he is not insane.”

It’s Rational to Want Nuclear Weapons

But why would the regime want nuclear weapons if not to use them? Kim wants nukes as protection against “regime change” imposed by the US, since, as Pena notes, “Having nuclear weapons would seem to be an effective deterrent against regime change. After all, other dictatorial leaders who gave up their weapons programs—such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi—paid a high price for those decisions.”

Jacob Hornberger has explained how Fidel Castro was one of the first to figure out the need for nuclear weapons as protection against American-sponsored regime change: “[Cuba’s success in the Cuban Missile Crisis] showed that if an independent, recalcitrant Third World regime wants to protect itself from a US national-security-state regime-change operation, the best thing it can do is secure nuclear weapons.”

Thus, North Korea’s behavior in this regard has been utterly predictable, rational, and what we would expect from a head of state in his position.

Kim understands nuclear deterrence perfectly well. He knows that it is the only thing that works against the US’s plans for yet another regime change operation.

However, in order to justify a first-strike nuclear war or a pre-emptive war against the North Koreans, the John McCains of the world must convince the world that Kim is simply insane and is not subject to deterrence.

North Korea Is Not Unique

This “he’s crazy!” strategy is then mixed with endless ominous news reports about what new missile Kim’s regime is testing this week, and just how many nuclear warheads he may or may not have. Indeed, the evidence is rather spotty in this regard. For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the regime has nuclear warheads, and it has the ability to deliver them to the North American mainland.

Okay, well, then it’s a good thing nuclear deterrence works. After all, we know for sure that the Chinese regime has many nukes, and the ability to deliver them. In fact, the Chinese have had nuclear capability for decades, and will continue to have it.

While Russia and the US both have more than 7,000 warheads and enough nuclear firepower to destroy the planet many times over, the French have 300 warheads, and China has 260 warheads.

Why the Silence about Chinese Nuclear Capabilities?

Moreover, it was just last month that China rolled out new ICBMs, including the DF-31AG, which puts most of the North American mainland within reach — and undoubtedly with far greater precision and reliability than anything the North Koreans have. And yet, all we heard about in the news was about North Korea’s low-rent, often-failing missile system.

So, the Chinese can almost certainly deliver multiple nuclear warheads to North America. So why aren’t we talking about a pre-emptive strike on Beijing? Why not strike now before the Chinese strike us? Is it just because the Chinese leadership — a faceless entity headed by people whom virtually no American can name — is so eminently sane? The Chinese heads of state are almost certainly sane, but unlike the North Koreans — and like the Americans — they seek expansion. This can be seen in the continued shows of strength by the Chinese state in the South China Sea and elsewhere. So why not talk about a war to stop this quest for global dominance?2

In all likelihood, few talk about pre-emptive war on China precisely because it is known that a war against China would be an unmitigated global disaster. North Korea is small enough that the US military establishment can still flatter itself with the idea that it can pull off yet another regime change without having to face a real nuclear arsenal such as that held by China. Sure, Seoul might be totally destroyed, but that is a price the Pentagon is willing to pay.

Indeed, the vast nuclear capability of the Chinese, not to mention Pakistan’s growing ICBM capability, illustrates the absurdity of the claim that any country that has nuclear weapons is about to use them on the US, and thus requires a pre-emptive war.

Yes, North Korea is currently involved in efforts to expand its ICBM capability. But we’re only hearing about it because China, Russia, and others already have the capability. They don’t have to fire test missiles into the ocean. They can already nuke North America, and everyone who’s paying attention knows it. We’ve already been down this road with the the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and others.

What to Do

So what is a reasonable response to nuclear proliferation? President Dwight Eisenhower can offer some useful insights here.

The Soviet Union conducted its first successful nuclear tests in 1949. By the early 1950s, the Soviets were testing air-dropped bombs — which made sense for a country with a sizable air force. By 1956, the Soviets were testing medium-range ballistic missiles.

What did Eisenhower do? Did he threaten a pre-emptive war with the Soviets? Did he massively increase military spending?

No. In fact, during the early fifties, Eisenhower cut military spending, and by the end of Eisenhower’s term, military spending had still not matched the levels built up by Harry Truman during the Korean war. This all occurred while the Soviets expanded their nuclear capability.

Naturally, if Eisenhower were president today, he’d be denounced by neoconservatives as a Russian tool and a traitor for both his military budget-cutting and his reliance on nuclear deterrence. Fortunately for Eisenhower, however, Lindsay Graham and John McCain were not yet in the Senate.

The larger point, of course, is that Eisenhower understood that nuclear deterrence works, and that, while it is an unfortunate option in a nuclear-armed world where much is beyond the control of the US military — it is the most reasonable and low-risk option.

Unfortunately, the current US regime is practicing what looks like the opposite approach.

With his constant “tough talk” about invading or attacking North Korea, Trump and his aides are courting the type of situation that leads to actual nuclear war. After all, for very bad things to happen, North Korea has to only believe that the country is about to be invaded and the regime annihilated. Constant threats of invasion are just the sort of things that lead to misunderstandings, human error, miscalculation, and disastrous wars.

Moreover, its unclear that Trump is taking seriously the possibility that China could act to defend the North Korean regime from destruction. As John Mearshimer recently noted, the Chinese regime views North Korea as an essential buffer state against Western encirclement. The Chinese regime is unlikely to sit around and do nothing while the US adds North Korea to its list of Asian client states.

On the other hand, why talk about any of this when it all can be be dismissed with a wave of the hand, and one need only declare “they’re crazy!” In that case, the possibility of World War III with China and others need not even be weighed. If Kim is “crazy” then prudence dictates we must “do something” before his suicidal insanity takes over and he nukes San Francisco.

The “he’s crazy!” claim thus acts as a magical talisman of warhawks who can denounce all caution and strategic concern that speaks against “taking out” the bad guy who will bomb us any second.

It’s easy to see why John McCain is so fond of the tactic.

About the author:
* Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

Notes:
1. This devotion to the idea of American innocence in a dangerous world is so common, that it is the central point of discussion in Reinhold Niebuhr’s seminal book on foreign policy The Irony of American History. Americans, Niebuhr writes, cling to the idea that human imperfection — an idea captured in the now passe idea of “original sin” — is reserved only for foreigners and other misfits. Americans, on the other hand, are moving ever upward toward worldy perfection.<
2. Contrary to US talking points, of course, the Chinese are no where near seeking global dominance. They are seeking regional hegemony and continued growth in strategic buffers against American aggression.

By Munish Sharma*

In the wake of burgeoning instances of cyber-attacks on its governmental apparatus, the United States (US) has elevated its Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) to the status of Unified Combatant Command. The head of the organization will now report directly to the Defence Secretary.

The USCYBERCOM was earlier subordinate to the US Strategic Command. The decision, made on August 18, has sent a strong signal to entities and countries inimical to its interests to recalibrate their security calculus.1 The US has faced massive attacks targeting its Office of Personnel Management, healthcare system and other critical infrastructure over the last couple of years. The alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s election campaign during the 2016 Presidential elections is currently a subject of two Congressional investigations.

USCYBERCOM integrates expertise to ensure resilient and reliable information and communications networks. Above all, it counters the wide cross-section of threats in cyberspace from disruptions, intrusions and attacks. As a unified combatant command, CYBERCOM is slated for a larger role, not just in coordinating military-led cyberspace operations, but also in devising the strategy for the changing nature of warfare, enmeshing interoperable cyber forces with the other nine geographic and functional combatant commands.

The decision is expected to more effectively address the threats spanning across geographical and functional boundaries of the existing structure of the US armed forces. Also, as a combatant command, USCYBERCOM will ensure integration of cyber operations with all future military plans.

Cyberspace, deemed to be the fifth domain of warfare, has transformed the way armed forces conduct their day-to-day operations, and brought in a paradigm shift at the strategic, doctrinal and tactical levels of warfare.2 The USCYBERCOM was established eight years ago, envisioned to fuse the full spectrum of cyberspace operations of the US Department of Defense (DoD). It was tasked to defend and protect information networks, and most importantly, to conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations.3

The USCYBERCOM, with its 6,200 of personnel (military, civilian, and contractors) spread across 133 mission teams, has been headed by a four-star rank officer, in a dual-hat arrangement with the National Security Agency (NSA), co-located within a common headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.4 While the USCYBERCOM has been elevated to the status of a Unified Combatant Command, reports note that the decision to separate it from the NSA is still under consideration.5

The USCYBERCOM and NSA have been drawing synergy from each other, on the grounds of common technologies, methods, tools and skill-sets for cyber exploitation. They also draw human resources from the common pool of expertise spread across the armed forces, government and the private sector. However, intelligence gathering in cyberspace, and cyber operations in response to an ongoing conflict, are fundamentally different practices. Intelligence gathering entails prolonged and persistent monitoring of targeted information systems and networks, where the intruder stays under the radar to escape detection or avoids raising any alarms.

On the contrary, cyber operation(s), particularly in response to a geopolitical conflict, might necessitate deliberate attribution to demonstrate its capability, expound its intent or even to establish the deterrent effect. Additionally, intelligence gathering and cyber operations execute different mandates.

While the NSA, being a signals intelligence agency, has a different mandate and modus operandi, the operational competence of USCYBERCOM will tilt further towards cyber offense, with elevated and honed cyber deterrent capabilities. Irrespective of the outcomes of the decision over the existing dual-hat arrangement however, both the NSA and the USCYBERCOM would continue to have a close working-relationship, given the inherent commonalities among intelligence and military activities in cyberspace.

With the creation of the first operational Cyber Command, the US armed forces had already unequivocally prioritised cyber offence, sending a clear geopolitical message of massive retaliation to any act of aggression in either of the natural or cyber domains.

The USCYBERCOM, now ranked equivalent to the US Strategic Command and eight other unified combatant commands, will be better placed and equipped to deter cyber attacks at the first place, and if deterrence fails, then to retaliate or punish the perpetrators.6 Given that the operational mandate of the USCYBERCOM extends to the domains of land, sea, air, space and cyberspace, a conflict in one of these domains could attract a retaliatory punitive response not just in one, but a few or in all of these domains.

The US decision has strategic implications for every nation state with modernised or modernising armed forces. The growing importance of cyberspace in the doctrines and strategies of modern armed forces have raised the stakes for nation states to recalibrate their security calculus, in accordance with these inevitable changes. This decision of a unified combatant cyber command is going to fuel the prevailing vigorous race to prioritise cyber offence at the one end, and raise its deterrence potential on the lines of space and nuclear commands, at the other end. Therefore, the cyber element is slated to play a predominant role in the arithmetic of deterrence. This will also raise the stakes for both China and Russia, both of whom have a steadfast approach to the role of armed forces in cyberspace, definitely inclined towards offence.

India is not immune to these developments either. A Cyber Command for the Indian armed forces, first mooted by the Naresh Chandra Task Force report in 2012, is yet to see the light of the day. The absence of a statutory cyber command not just limits the options but jeopardises the country’s cyber deterrent capability as well. Therefore, there is the need for an appropriate response, both at the strategic and operational levels.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.

About the author:
*Munish Sharma is Consultant at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.

Source:
This article was published by IDSA.

Notes:

• 1. Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by President Donald J. Trump on the Elevation of Cyber Command”, The White House, August 18, 2017, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/08/18/statement-donald-…, accessed August 24, 2017.
• 2. Munish Sharma, “Raising a Cyber Command for Indian Armed Forces: Requisites and Organisational Considerations”, Synergy – Journal of the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, July 2017, New Delhi, p. 106.
• 3. US Army Cyber Command, “US Cyber Command”, at http://www.arcyber.army.mil/Organization/USCyberCommand, accessed August 24, 2017.
• 4. US Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Cyber Strategy”, April 2015, at http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/2015/0415_cyber-strategy/Final…, p. 6, accessed August 24, 2017.
• 5. Jim Garamone and Lisa Ferdinando, “DoD Initiates Process to Elevate U.S. Cyber Command to Unified Combatant Command”, DoD News, August 18, 2017, at https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1283326/dod-initiates-proce…, accessed August 25, 2017.
• 6. Carlos Barria, “Trump lifts Cyber Command status to boost cyber defense”, CNBC, August 18, 2017, at https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/18/trump-approves-plan-to-boost-military-cy…, accessed August 24, 2017.

Around 270,000 Rohingya refugees are reported to have entered Bangladesh from Myanmar, in the wake of the ongoing violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine province that has triggered an exodus of refugees. Some of the refugees have entered India also. More number of refugees are reported to be waiting to cross over.

Justifiably, Bangladesh is highly concerned about this influx of refugees, since Bangladesh itself has dense population and is an economically weak developing country. Bangladesh is well justified in expecting that the United Nations and other countries should interfere in the matter and ensure that the crisis in Myanmar would be sorted out immediately. So far, Bangladesh has handled the refugee influx situation with compassion and understanding but it has to necessarily make a choice between compassion and national security now.

The illegal immigrants and refugee issues have been creating problems for several countries. The United Nations, which has a separate section dealing with the refugee problems, cannot do anything worthwhile to find a lasting solution for this global issue.

Refugee crisis in Europe

A few months back when refugees started entering Europe in a big way from middle east countries and Africa, Europe was caught unaware with no strategy to face this grim issue. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel accepted the entry of refugees into Germany, saying that it would be a matter of compassion and human rights issue. With such tacid encouragement from the German chancellor, more refugees started flowing in from different countries such as distant Afghanistan.

After entering into Germany, many of the refugees have now placed themselves in other European countries also. With the entry of these refugees into Europe whose background and even nationality are not known in many cases and whose education and skill level are very poor compared to the European standards, Europe now has a huge problem on it’s shoulders, threatening to destabilize Europe and change the face of European life to some extent in the coming years apart from posing security threat. Social tension is already evident due to settlement of refugees in some pockets in Europe.

Anti-immigrant policy in USA

During the last Presidential election in the USA, Donald Trump advocated an anti-immigrant policy that received wide acceptance in the US and perhaps, this was the one big factor that catapulted Donald Trump to the post of US President. Now, he wants to construct a huge wall between USA and Mexico as a proof of his commitment to anti-immigrant policy.

Sri Lankan refugees in India

In Sri Lanka, at the time of the ethnic war between Sri Lankan government and the separatists, hundreds of Sri Lankans of Tamil origin left the country and reached India. They continue to stay in India for several years now , maintaining their refugee status and many of the Sri Lankan refugees in India born in the last few years have not seen Sri Lanka at all.

Tibetan refugees due to China’s oppressive action

Of course, one cannot forget that thousands of Tibetan refugees that left Tibet and entered India in the wake of the forced occupation of Tibet by China and now the Tibetan refugees have spread themselves around the world and are trying to integrate themselves into the mainstream of the countries to which they have migrated legally or illegally.

How long Canada’s refugee friendly policy?

Perhaps, Canada is the only country in the world today which is extending an almost open invitation to the migrants and refugees from across the world, calling it as its commitment to humanitarian and compassionate principles. As of now, Canada is able to adopt such policy as it is an under populated country with large land area and huge natural resources. However, even within Canada, there is emerging difference of opinion as to whether such receptive policies towards migrants and refugees should be continued to be adopted in Canada, as there are already indications that some of the migrants and refugees who have entered in recent times may have questionable background.

Whither Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh

The human rights activists around the world, who are mostly arm chair critics and commentators from the gallery, argue that the influx of refugees and migrants from one country to the other due to oppression and unsecured conditions should be viewed as a humanitarian problem and it will be cruel to drive them back with least consideration for their pitiable conditions.

The UN General Assembly that will convene on September 12 may adopt a motion condemning Myanmar’s actions for creating a situation that caused the exodus of Rohingya refugees. But, this will not help the cause of Bangladesh in tackling the present refugee issue, as most resolutions and recommendations of United Nations are not viewed seriously anymore by any country in the world.

The refugees from Myanmar pose a dilemma for the world conscience to judge as to whether Bangladesh should accept the refugees at the cost of it’s security. With no refugee problem having been solved conclusively in any part of the world, Myanmar refugees will remain as talking point for sometime for the global media, until the next refugee crisis would happen in any other part of the world.

By Giancarlo Elia Valori*

North Korea’s military strength is the strength of its nuclear potential. As the North Korean Foreign Minister stated at the ASEAN Forum in early August 2017, the United States must be “blamed” for wanting to bring “the nuclear war into the Korean peninsula”. He also reaffirmed that North Korea would never discuss the issue of its missile and nuclear arsenal at the negotiating table with the United States and its allies.

At the time China said that a critical point had been reached, but it could also be the beginning of new and more effective negotiations between North Korea, the United States, China and the Russian Federation.

It is therefore obvious that the two missiles launched by North Korea on July 4 and 28 last are certainly capable of reaching the US territory, but they were fired at such an angle as to avoid the impact on the ground.

It is further evident that North Korea launches missiles towards the United States because it wants to prevent it from permanently mobilizing for a regime change in North Korea.

On the other hand, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson maintains that -before sitting at the negotiating table – North Korea must not only put an end to the nuclear military tests, but even begin a genuine, stable and definitive denuclearization process.

Incidentally, although officially keeping NATO as a “nuclear alliance”, the US obsession with Europe’s denuclearization did not bring luck to the countries like Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey which had been heavily denuclearized by the United States between the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the Atlantic Alliance.

The Atlantic Alliance which, according to Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, had “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down”.

It is not possible to figure out what would have happened if Italy had had a small, albeit credible nuclear military system, but certainly the Mediterranean situation would be better today.

Turkey’s nuclear threat to the USSR would have changed and limited its Middle East policy. The nuclearized West Germany would have not experienced the penetration of the DDR intelligence services that later tormented it. The Netherlands would have had a role to play in the North Sea and Belgium would have had more stable and less factional governments.

Italy experienced all this, but that is another story.

Just to quote Henri Bergson, the philosopher who developed the concept of vital impulse (élan vital), the nuclear power is “the force that is not used.”

A force which, however, we must show to have and be able to use – not on the ground, because it is of no use, but in the decisive phases of foreign policy.

A country without nuclear power, however, is a country without a foreign policy and strategy.

Nevertheless, reverting to the ASEAN Forum held last July, all the Foreign Ministers present condemned the “missile tests and urged a complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea”.

At this juncture, without imposing an either-or deal, we could say that North Korea cannot accept to resume the Six Party Talks, which began in 2003 and ended in December 2008, without clarifying a single and central point: maintaining a nuclear armament share for North Korea, but fully verifiable by IAEA.

And also without further ascertaining that the new IAEA agreement applies to both Koreas at the same time, so as to later foster North Korea’s economic integration into the regional system – hence including Japan, Vietnam (an old friend of North Korea) and obviously South Korea and India.

The economic and humanitarian instruments of the Six Party Talks were significant, also on the part of the United States: one million tons of heavy oil or oil equivalent – the expenses of which had to be shared among the six parties; support for North Korea’s energy spending and supplies; the US funding for the denuclearization costs; assistance to IAEA; 12.5 million tons of food – from 1995 to 2003 – with a view to alleviating the very harsh conditions of the North Korean population.

Hence support to North Korea is expensive, but it is better to help it now rather than triggering a military spiral that can only be solved by a limited and, ultimately, nuclear war, which is in no one’s interest.

Not to mention the damage that – hopefully in a very distant and even impossible future – the strategic wound between the United States, Russia and China could cause in Southeast Asia, as well as the block – also for the EU, the Asian region, India and the Gulf countries – of all the routes from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea.

It would be one of the deepest global destabilizations occurred in the modern era, even worse than the two World Wars which Asia has always seen as regional conflicts.

Hence limiting the North Korean strategic pressure area and concurrently reducing the perception of strategic encirclement and impoverishment currently felt not only by the North Korean leaders, but also by the local population.

North Korea’s nuclear system, however, is needed: 1) to ensure the survival of the regime; 2) to support its military prestige and its weight, also at economic level; 3) to achieve an asymmetrical strategic superiority over South Korea.

South Korea has more and better trained armed forces, but it has a nuclear power system of which only the United States has the access keys.

Therefore it would be rational to shift from the rhetoric of North Korea’s total denuclearization – which is impossible to achieve and is strategically dangerous even for the United States – to a more rational “classic” negotiation for the strategic control of nuclear weapons, which we deem would be acceptable also for North Korea.

Since 2013 Kim Jong Un’s policy line has been to link economic development to nuclear projects, thus focusing all the North Korean Armed Forces’ efforts on the nuclear arsenal.

As all well-informed ruling classes do, the North Korean regime interprets its own choices on the basis of the recent history of the world’s leading strategic actors. Kim Jong Un knows all too well what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar El Gaddafi, although the Iraqi dictator had accepted the US “advice” and weapons to begin his ten-year war against the Iranian ayatollahs.

Furthermore, the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine is regarded by North Korea as the final break with the 1994 OSCE Agreement of Budapest, which mainly regarded Belarus’, Ukraine’s and Kazakhstan’s accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The agreement reached in the Hungarian capital city was guaranteed by the United States, Russia and Great Britain, while China and France had provided less precise assurances in separate documents.

Hence, against this general background, what does it mean and what is the point of sending an Italian general and MP to negotiate with North Korea?

What could Italy say to the leaders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, considering that Italy is a country blindly repeating the US and EU strategic mistakes?

Surely it could say something if it had some autonomous residual voice in the matter.

For example could it inform of the fact that – in a new context of resumption of the Six Party Talks for a policy designed to control North Korea’s nuclear potential – Italy would take the initiative (in the legal sense of the term) and the lead for North Korean economic development, jointly with China, where Italy is operating well?

Do you believe that two – albeit titled – quisque de populo can convince both the United States and Kim Jong Un? Or that the funny TV comedian Razzi can be enough?

Italy could also ensure that an agreement with Russia, China and the United States is reached for the progressive reduction of North Korean nuclear potential – not to be destroyed, but to be used together with investments for a new Korean industrialization.

Do we really want to entrust Federica Mogherini or General Rossi, the Defence Junior Minister of former Renzi’s government, with the task of saying so?

Everything can be done, only to later maintain that North Korea’s missiles can reach the EU “ahead of time” – as French Defence Minister Florence Parly said. Furthermore the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, has announced a new, unspecified “EU programme of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” – a programme which, indeed, has been existing since 2006, in line with and implementing the sanctions decided by the United Nations.

Let us simply look at data and statistics. In 2016 trade between the EU and Korea was worth 27 million euros.

The current share of European investment is very low.

The restrictive measures – namely those already taken between 2006 and 2016, without Mogherini obviously knowing anything about them – regard the sale of technologies somehow related to the nuclear system, as well as any kind of computer software, dual use techniques, luxury goods and financial assistance.

As always happens, sanctions favour two equally dangerous actions for those who impose them: the development of internal substitution economies – often with lower production costs than those already recorded on imported goods – and intensified trade with friendly countries, which are really glad to gain the new market shares abandoned by those who moralize at people’s expense.

In fact trade between North Korea and China increased by ten times between 2001 and 2015.

In April 2016, however, China temporarily stopped coal imports from North Korea, with the only exception of the amounts connected with the “people’s wellbeing”.

Formal prostration – namely a kowtow – to the sanctions decided by the UN and also approved by China.

China, however, supplies North Korea with much of its food and with 90% of its total trade.

Moreover, in the first half of 2017, bilateral trade between China and North Korea has been 37.4% higher than during the same period of 2016.

Since September 2015 both countries have opened a fast cargo and container line for Korean coal exports, while a high-speed rail line is already operational between the border towns of Dandong and Shenyan.

Dandong is the town through which 70% of China-North Korea’s trade transits.

Obviously, for China, the primary goal in the Korean peninsula is political and strategic stability.

China deems that if there were any clash between South Korea, the United States and North Korea, no one could be declared the winner and, above all, China would see a huge number of migrants coming from the North Korean border, which would destabilize its Southern region.

Who would take advantage of it?

Moreover, with its missile programme, North Korea wants to play for time in order to solve the issue of its geoeconomic equilibria. It must still dispel some reservations on the resumption of the Six Party Talks, with specific reference to South Korea’s denuclearization – as this is not the strategic equation between the two Koreas – but a genuine Peace Treaty between North Korea and the United States would be really welcome.

This is what Kim Jong Un really wants.

This would put an end to the armistice and would create the conditions for a new negotiation between the United States, North Korea, Russia and China.

South Korea would have a Protection and Military and Civilian Aid Pact on the part of the United States, also signed by the other four participants in the Six Party Talks.

After signing the future Treaty between the United States and North Korea, a further South Korean protection treaty, including nuclear protection, should remain in place. In a new geopolitical context it could become an autonomous Region of a peninsular State that would include some Northern Russian and Chinese areas.

Hence weaken, control and again weaken. A careful regional geopolitics knows how to operate on Korean tensions.

The mistakes made in the previous negotiations with North Korea are now evident: the 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea was based on the fact that the Americans were asking North Korea to stop its nuclear programme – a request which, however, was met.

In 2002 it was discovered that North Korea has an uranium-enrichment programme.

At that juncture, Bob Gallucci – a still unparalleled expert of relations between North Korea and the United States – admitted that the US real aim was to stop the plutonium operations rather than the enriched uranium ones.

Two different things, two different strategic lines.

That was the solution.

Instead of hoping for an impossible collapse of the North Korean regime, it was better to let it have a share of operations – at the time even accepted by IAEA.

Obviously, after 1989, the collapse of Communist regimes in the world and of their reference parties in the “capitalist” West created an understandable tension in North Korea.

The regime had supported Yasser Arafat and North Vietnam. It had a very special relationship – also at nuclear technological level – with East Germany and actively supported Somalia and other “Socialist” African States. It loved the Soviet Union that helped it with nuclear power, which in fact began there in the 1950s. It also had good and unavoidable relations with China which, however, could not materially help North Korea at least until the 1970s.

Ceausescu was one of the family in Pyongyang, as many leaders of the “Mediterranean Eurocommunism” of the time.

Nothing is as it may seem.

North Korea’s Communism and Kim Il Sung’s, in particular, was a comprehensive and global platform for effective negotiations between the East and the West.

It is worth recalling that the Six Party Talks started in 2003 and ended on September 19, 2005.

The final text made reference to the procedures for North Korea’s denuclearization. North Korea clearly stated its desire to formally stabilize its relations with the United States and the other Western countries. Mention was also made of the creation of a peace organization for the whole Korean peninsula, which should be the first issue for a smart and brilliant Italian mission to North Korea. In 2005 North Korea accepted and implemented the Six Parties’ agreement.

Hence forget about the rhetoric of “human rights” – more or less accurately identified, which happens seldom – and the further vilain” rhetoric – as Shakespeare’ vilain who embodies all evils and hence must be destroyed.

The issue lies in thinking about the strategy and carry out the rational operations it entails.

About the author:
*Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. Mr Valori has lectured on international affairs and economics at the world’s leading universities such as Peking University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva University in New York. He currently chairs “La Centrale Finanziaria Generale Spa”, he is also the honorary president of Huawei Italy, economic adviser to the Chinese giant HNA Group and member of the Ayan-Holding Board. In 1992 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la République Francaise, with this motivation: “A man who can see across borders to understand the world” and in 2002 he received the title of “Honorable” of the Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France.

Source:
This article was published at Modern Diplomacy

By Dr Palitha Kohona*

It was another sunny September morning. The sky was a brilliant blue. As I gazed out of my kitchen window while having breakfast, in Mid Town Manhattan, the twin towers were glistening in the morning sun. I noted, as I often had, that they were still there, a familiar reassuring sight. The cute young blonde in the apartment across the street was drying her wet hair, as usual, by her plate glass window. The walk to the UN and my office on the 32nd floor of the Secretariat was uneventful. Not that I expected anything untoward to happen. A pre-scheduled closed-door management meeting began on time.

Just then there was a knock on the door, and Tony M put his head in and nonchalantly informed us that some black smoke was rising from one of the towers. None of the participants paid much attention to this intrusion and the meeting continued. A few minutes later there was more insistent knocking. It was Tony again who blurted out the Tower may actually be on fire. Both USG Corell and I went round the corner to a window, more to keep Tony happy than because we thought something was amiss. What we saw sent a shiver down my spine. Black smoke was billowing out of the top of one of the towers. We both looked at each other and Corell said, “Let us suspend the meeting and find out what is going on.”

I walked down to the 32nd floor and decided to ask my staff to leave the building although I had no instructions to that effect from anyone. But I felt that their safety was my responsibility. I went from room to room. Some staff were just beginning to settle in. Some were having breakfast at their desks, some were writing personal emails, My deputy was actually playing cards on the computer. I insisted that all assemble in the courtyard below and return when instructed. By the time I had locked up my office, the lift had been stopped and I had to walk down 32 flights of stairs to the bottom.

On the way down I passed the UN media Centre and found a few people assembled in front of a TV screen. Then, as we watched, an aeroplane came streaking across the screen and slammed in to the other tower. A massive ball of fire and smoke gushed out of the other side of the building. Someone behind me commented that it looked like a Cessna. I said no. That was a big passenger plane.

By the time I reached ground level, most people working in the Secretariat building were milling around, uncertain and fearful. My secretary, who was there, asked what she should do. I told her that I was going back to my apartment, just five minutes away, and that she should call me when the security services permitted us to go back in to the building. (I DID NOT KNOW THEN THAT THE BUILDING WOULD REMAIN CLOSED FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS).

On reaching home, I went on to my balcony and ominous clouds of black smoke were billowing from the top of the two towers. As an amateur photographer, I could not resist the temptation to take a few shots with my long lens of the burning buildings. I turned on the TV and sat down when to my utter disbelief, the first tower began in crumble down, first in slow motion and then gathering speed in a cloud of cascading dust and smoke. It took a while to grasp what had happened.

Then, I grabbed the camera and went on to the rooftop and took a series of photos. Unknown to me at the time, I was taking pictures with the clock on the Woolworth Tower in between me and the towering inferno that was the Twin Towers, now reduced to one. The exact time was recorded in each photo. (Sadly, the camera was left behind in a NY taxi and the photos were lost to me. But some have appeared in various publications from time to time.)

A few minutes later the second tower crumbled in a giant swirling cloud of smoke and dust. The enormity of what had just happened was difficult to grasp at first. Thirty thousand people worked in the two towers and it was possible that thirty thousand lives had been snuffed out in those awful minutes. But it later transpired that for various reasons only about 3000 had died, including 800 first responders.

The tragedy immediately reduced this previously well ordered humming city, New York, in to utter chaos. The phones stopped working and took me hours to get through to Sri Lanka and Australia to reassure those close to me that I was OK. At least one person in Australia who switched on the TV following my call thought that a cheap Hollywood movie was playing, but the same horror flick was on all the channels!

A Chinese friend’s wife who was working in the Xin Hua office on the 30th floor of Tower 1 had been on the phone with her husband who was in Kingston, Jamaica, at the time. She had felt the thud of the plane hitting the building but thinking that it was a malfunctioning lift had kept on talking. She understood the gravity of the thud only when he husband screamed for her to leave the building. He was watching TV.

Ling Ling ran down the stairs past firemen climbing up with their equipment. When she reached ground level and saw the terror and chaos, including people leaping out of top floor windows, she had joined hundreds of others and run blindly over the Brooklyn Bridge until she reached the other side. In the process she lost her shoes. Then she realised that her young daughter was at school in Manhattan. Her efforts to get back were prevented by the police who had blocked all the bridges by than. It took her several hours to get back to Manhattan to recover her daughter.

The city went in to lockdown mode. All the bridges and tunnels in to Manhattan were closed. All ferries, trains and subways were stopped and the US airspace was cleared of all aircraft. This situation remained for days.

Fighter jets began roaring above the city. Civilian aircraft due to land in the U.S. were diverted to Canada and other neighbouring countries, stranding travellers for days. We did not know at the time but another aeroplane had been crashed in to the Pentagon and a fourth, possibly heading for the White House, had crashed in to a field in Pennsylvania, either as a result of passengers taking action against the hijackers or because it was shot down.

The streets of Manhattan were soon log jammed with cars trying to leave the island and food stores, including supermarkets were emptied pretty quickly by people wanting to ensure supplies in their homes. Thousands of people who relied on public transport to get to work, were fleeing on foot. One of my staff members took seven hours to reach her home in Queens on foot. The phones remained dead for hours. Heavily armed soldiers appeared threateningly at all strategic locations.

As we watched from our roof top, seven high rise buildings collapsed in the area of the Twin Towers during the course of the day as a result of the vibrations caused by the collapsing WTC Towers. The last, in the evening at around 7 PM. Many were seriously damaged. Others were covered in inches of dust. A friend, a night owl, remained asleep through the noise and vibrations in the Marriott Hotel until forced to leave in late morning.

A giant pall of smoke and dust covered lower Manhattan for almost three months and fires burned while the twisted steel of the once magnificent Twin Towers remained, stoking deep and complex emotions in every one who visited the area. The smoke and the smell spread towards Queens and spared the rest of Manhattan.

Large parts of lower Manhattan had to be evacuated. My friends, Denise and Espen, had to leave their loft with their pet African Grey, Nelson, Alsatian dog, Mickey, and a cageful of birds they were minding. Battalions of firemen and para medics searched the rubble for months for body parts and personal items which were later stored in Queens and meticulously identified and returned to the claimants.

Total confusion and uncertainty prevailed in the city for days before the authorities were able to restore confidence in the population. The city which touts itself as the capital of the world, certainly of the financial world, and the cutting edge of everything modern and dynamic, was gripped by fear and uncertainty. Mayor Giuliani played a critical role in providing leadership and portraying a defiant image of a beleaguered New York. Some men thrive in adversity. He was one of them.

As confidence returned to a shaken New York, people started to search for missing friends, relatives and lovers in large numbers. Walls were covered with notices asking for information of missing persons. Visiting a wall covered with these notices near ground zero, I watched a pretty young woman in red clutching a bunch of roses so tightly that her fingers had turned a ghostly white and tears were welling in her eyes as she stared blankly at the notices. The cute blonde across the street never reappeared by the window again to brush her wet hair. But someone placed two candles on that windowsill two days later.

President Bush, whose presidency was sinking into oblivion, was given a massive opportunity to boost his standing that morning and he and his advisors grabbed it with gusto. His statements gave a sense of confidence and reassured a nervous nation. His address to the Congress was inspiring and provided firm leadership to the country. The United States will henceforth be uncompromising and defiant in confronting terrorism.

Global politics would also be seriously impacted by the U.S. crusade against terror. The U.S. under George Bush successfully mobilised the world, including the UN, in to adopting an uncompromising stance against terrorism.

The UN General Assembly expressed its sympathy with the U.S. and the 9/11 victims. The Security Council adopted Res 1368 on September 12, 2001 condemning the attacks on the U.S. and recognising the right of self-defence against acts of terrorism. On September 28, the Security Council adopted Res 1373, an unprecedented act of international legislation, obliging member states to take a range of detailed measures proactively against terrorism. Crucially, Res 1373 was not focused on Al Qaeda but on international terrorism.

American diplomacy and influence, coupled with an uncompromising leadership, was successful in galvanising the international community to take action within days of 9/11. The rest of the world, especially countries such as Sri Lanka for whom terrorism was almost a daily experience, had not been able to command such a reaction. Importantly, Res 1373 did not pay attention to human rights in the context of terrorism.

That year, the UN Treaty Event during the UN GA and a special event held in October, focused specifically on encouraging participation in the 12 UN treaties against terrorism. These were exceptionally successful events.

Sri Lanka missed a golden opportunity to mobilise international support, strengthen its security forces and deal decisively with the LTTE post 9/11. Misguided in to believing that negotiations and appeasement would solve its terrorist problem, it concluded a ceasefire agreement with the LTTE in 2002 and recognised a part of the country as a no-go area for its security forces. The result was the LTTE blatantly using the CFA to further arm and strengthen itself (it even developed an administrative structure with police and courts and naval and air capabilities) and its murderous terrorist campaign and carnage continued for another eight years.

The U.S. under President Bush opted for a military response to Islamic terrorism which had deep roots and demanded the extradition of Osama Bin Laden and the expulsion of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. Although Afghanistan made overtures to discuss these demands, the U.S. along with the UK launched a massive bombing campaign against Afghanistan followed by an invasion in October 2001. They were later joined by NATO countries and others.

While many criticised the invasion as illegal under international law, the U.S. justified its action as self-defence authorised under the UN Charter. In December, the UN Security Council authorised the creation of an International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan. As former President Musharraf describes in his autobiography, Pakistan was monstered in to supporting the U.S. invasion with a threat of being bombed itself. Sri Lanka, among others, offered logistical support to the U.S.

The expected quick and clean conclusion to the war that the U.S. launched in Afghanistan never happened. Although, Osama Bin Laden was killed only in 2011 in Pakistan by U.S. Navy Seals, sixteen years after the invasion, the U.S. continues to be bogged down in Afghanistan. The Taliban remains unconquered. Over 3400 Americans have died and in excess of 19,000 have been injured. Thousands of Afghan civilians have perished. The cost to the U.S. so far exceeds $700 billion.

Like an inevitable row of falling dominoes war after war began to engulf the U.S. The U.S. with the UK invaded Iraq, ostensibly because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, it was supporting Al Qaeda and it was a threat to peace and stability of the region.

The UN Security Council was shown photographs in proof which later turned out to be bogus. France, Germany and New Zealand steadfastly opposed the invasion and Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it illegal. Millions around the world, including in the U.S., rallied against it.

The invasion went ahead and has reduced Iraq to tatters. Some have suggested that the real goal was Iraqi oil and the need to dominate the Middle East, in the process remove a dangerous challenge to U.S. allies, especially Israel. Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussain, who was an undoubted irritant, was captured, hastily tried and executed while the country was engulfed in sectarian and anti-American violence. U.S. troops on occasion responded with extreme brutality, as demonstrated by the Abu Graib photos.

The UN’s station chief, Sergio Vierra De Mello along with 19 UN staff, was killed in a bombing of the UN office. I was to have joined Sergio that week.

Over 4400 Americans have died in Iraq and a much larger number have been maimed. Some estimates suggest a civilian death toll exceeding 500,000. The Yasmin Sookas and Collum Macraes of this world are not seen wringing their hands in exaggerated agony and demanding justice for this carnage.

Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, has blamed the 2008 recession mainly on the Bush administration’s decision to wage war with borrowed funds rather than raised taxes. And the chaos generated by the invasion has not come to an end. While terrorism has prospered, a new extremist Islamic group, ISIL, has emerged to challenge Western interests. They even set up a Caliphate in the lands that they controlled which has required additional military action to subdue.

The invasion of Iraq was followed by NATO-led military action in Libya in 2011, another oil rich Arab country. The Libyan leader, Qaddafi, who had earlier surrendered his weapons of mass destruction to the UN, was ousted and brutally murdered in public. Today Libya is a splintered failed state, where terrorism flourishes and has become a jump off place for thousands of illegal immigrants to Europe.

In 2012 the U.S. intervened in the Syrian internal conflict along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and later Turkey. That conflict has for the first time attracted direct Russian intervention on behalf of the Syrian leader Assad. Syria, which was a relatively liberal Arab state, has also been reduced to chaos and the ISIL’s caliphate extended to large areas within it. Syria is a major source of the thousands of refugees flooding into Europe.

Yemen has also followed the path to sectarian violence.

The 9/11 attacks on the twin towers, whether orchestrated by Al Qaeda or, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, by elements intent on provoking U.S. military intervention in the Middle East to advance their own interests, has had multiple consequences. Some may not even have been envisaged by the 19 Twin Tower jihadists.

Islamic terrorism has become widespread and does seem to abate. Volunteer jihadists have sprung from around the world. It has now engulfed a nervous Europe as never before and South East Asia, including Australia. A flood of refugees has engulfed Europe causing serious socio-economic challenges.

Border controls have become rigorous and oppressive. Surveillance of individuals has increased. Much of the Middle East region which was relatively stable, even under obnoxious rulers, is now in chaos. Pro-Western Arab regimes live with an uncertain future. The U.S. has become bogged down in a Middle Eastern quagmire, bleeding it of its wealth and young men and women, unable to extricate themselves. Ominously, a resurgent Russia has become a militarily active player in the region. If Al Qaeda, and its 19 Saudi born suicide bombers, sought to cause increased Islamic militancy and chaos and uncertainty in the Western world, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

*Dr Palitha Kohona is the former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in New York, Co-Chair of the UN Committee on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction 2010 – 2015, President, of the Sixth Committee (Legal) of the UN General Assembly, 2014, Vice President, UN Oceans Regular Process 2014, President, UN Indian Ocean Commission 2010 – 2015.

By F.M. Loewenberg*

Few beliefs have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of Israelis and Jews, than the perception of the Western Wall as Judaism’s holiest site, the place where they feel the greatest sense of sacredness, “the holy of holies of Jewish national unity” to use the words of the Wall’s rabbi, Shmuel Rabinowitz. Chief rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar has similarly asserted that “no one can annul the holiness of the Western Wall, not the government, not the courts.”[2]

But when did the Western Wall become the holiest Jewish site? Historical evidence suggests that the Temple Mount was actually Judaism’s “holy of holies,” and that the Western Wall’s venerated position is a relatively late development with a more prosaic and even non-Jewish origin. Would these facts change the tenor of the debate about the Western Wall’s future status? And can they help ameliorate the widening schism between Israel’s Orthodox religious establishment and the Diaspora Conservative and Reform movements over this holy site?

Worship Sites, Post-Temple

The Second Temple in Jerusalem was for centuries the central site for Jewish worship, which was mainly sacrificial at that time. Although the temple itself was built and completed in 515 B.C.E. by Judeans who had returned home from the Babylonian exile, a major refurbishing of the temple was begun by the Roman client-king Herod the Great around 19 B.C.E. Today’s Western Wall is actually only a small portion of the retaining wall erected by Herod to encase the natural hill known as Mount Moriah or the Temple Mount in order to allow for the creation of an enormous platform upon which the revamped temple stood.

Once the Second Temple was demolished by the Romans in the year 70 C.E., prayer replaced sacrificial worship. Most scholars agree that Jews offered prayers on the Temple Mount even after the destruction of the Second Temple. “During the first period after the destruction of the Temple of Herod, the Jews continued to go and weep at the ruins of it,” read a report by the British Royal Commission, established in 1930 to determine the claims of Muslims and Jews at the Western Wall. The report also noted that “the Jews’ wailing-place at that time seems to have been the stone on Mount Moriah where the Mosque of Omar [in the Christian Quarter] now stands.”[3]

But before long, all this changed. Early in the second century the Roman emperor Hadrian prohibited Jews from worshipping on the Temple Mount. They were permitted to assemble for prayer only on the Mount of Olives from where they had an unobstructed view of the ruins of the Second Temple. The prohibition to ascend the Temple Mount was strictly enforced during Hadrian’s lifetime, but the periodic need to re-issue the decree by subsequent emperors suggests that enforcement was often lax after his death. In fact, Jews did pray on the Temple Mount during the remainder of the second and most of the third centuries, but even when they were prohibited from doing so, there is no indication that they chose instead to pray at today’s Western Wall.[4]

Once the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official state religion in the fourth century, the situation of Jerusalem’s Jewish community became precarious. During most of the next three hundred years, Jews were not permitted to live or visit Jerusalem, but there were periods when this anti-Jewish policy was relaxed, and Jews were permitted to live in or visit the city. Yet there are no records of Jews praying at the Western Wall during those years. After the Persian and Arab conquests of the city in the seventh century, Jews were again allowed to reside in Jerusalem. They chose to live on Mount Zion where they had a number of synagogues. They even had a synagogue on the Temple Mount but no prayer services were conducted at the Western Wall.[5]

An eleventh-century document, found in the Cairo Geniza describes how Jewish pilgrims frequently circled the Temple Mount (from the outside), stopping at each of the gates to recite specific prayers. Moshe ben Yitzhak, a mid-11^th-century pilgrim, is reported to have prayed daily at one of the Temple Mount gates. At that time, Jews prayed at all of the retaining walls of the Temple Mount. The Western Wall was not accorded any preference. When they prayed at the Western Wall, they did not worship at the site that nowadays is known as the Western Wall Plaza but rather north of this area because, at that time, buildings prevented access to the area currently used. This same geniza manuscript from 1057 confirmed that the Jews paid special taxes for the privilege of praying at the Temple Mount gates and on the Mount of Olives.[6]

Until the thirteenth century, prayer on the Temple Mount was sporadically possible. Benjamin of Tudela (1130-73 C.E.), the famous Jewish traveler who visited Jerusalem during the Crusader years, wrote in his travelogue:

In front of the [Dome of the Rock] is the Western Wall. This is one of the [remaining] walls of what was once the Holy of Holies. … All the Jews come there to pray before this wall.[7]

The wall that Benjamin described was not the present Western Wall (which, as previously noted, is part of the outer retaining walls of the Temple Mount) but the ruins of the western wall of the Second Temple, which were apparently still standing in his days. Maimonides, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1165, also prayed on the Temple Mount, but his letters make no mention of praying at the site where the Western Wall is now located.

Rabbi Shmuel ben Shimshon, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1211, describes in great detail his first days in the city. He ascended the Temple Mount soon after arriving and often prayed on “the Mount of Olives, the place where they used to burn the [Red] Heifer.”[8] But on “Shabbat we prayed the afternoon prayer [on the Temple Mount], on the very place where the uncircumcised used to erect their idols.”[9] Again, no mention is made of praying at the Western Wall of our days.

Early in the fourteenth century, Jews were barred from entering the Temple Mount by the Mamluks, who ruled Jerusalem from 1250 to 1516. Ishtori Haparchi (1280-1366), author of one of the earliest books of the geography of the Holy Land, Kaftor v’Ferah, wrote that in his day, Jews prayed at the eastern wall and outside the gates of the southern wall. He describes the geography of Jerusalem in great detail but makes no mention of a holy site at the western wall.[10]

An Italian Jewish pilgrim, Meshulam Da Volterra, visited Jerusalem in 1481. He reported that on Tisha b’Av, the annual day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple, the Jews of Jerusalem went “up to Mount of Olives from there they see the Temple Mount, and there they weep and lament the destruction of this house.”[11]

What is currently known as the Western Wall then is not mentioned in any source prior to the sixteenth century. It was not mentioned even once in either the Babylonian Talmud (completed in the fifth century C.E.) or the Jerusalem Talmud (completed about a century earlier). There exists an ancient tradition that “the Shechina [God’s presence] will never move from the Western Wall.”[12] This saying could not refer to the present Western Wall but, instead, described the ruins of the western wall of the Second Temple building mentioned by many pilgrims, including Benjamin of Tudela. Over time, as the visible ruins of the original temple walls disappeared, this saying was applied to the current Western Wall.

The Western Wall Becomes a Prayer Site

In 1517, the Ottoman Empire captured the city of Jerusalem, bringing to an end almost three hundred years of Mamluk rule. Sultan Suleiman I the Magnificent, whose reign from 1520 until his death in 1566 was the longest reign of any Ottoman ruler, was among the most prominent monarchs of his day. He conquered many Christian strongholds in Europe and was stopped only in 1529 when he failed to conquer Vienna. He subsequently turned his attention toward consolidating his gains in the Middle East. In 1536, he ordered the restoration of Jerusalem’s city walls, which had been in ruin since the thirteenth century. Later, he undertook an extensive renovation of the Dome of the Rock.

Suleiman adopted a positive attitude toward the Jews of his realm. He persuaded many who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal a generation earlier to settle in Jerusalem. Some believe that he encouraged Jewish immigration in order to limit the influence of the local Arabic-speaking population.[13] Whatever his motives, Jerusalem’s Jews benefited from his benevolence toward them.

Fourteen years after he had ordered the rebuilding of the city walls, Suleiman instructed his court architect to prepare the area that came to be known as the Western Wall as a place for Jewish worship. Such a move became possible because on January 14, 1546, a severe earthquake hit the region. Hundreds of people were killed. The flow of the Jordan River was stopped for two days by a landslide. A tsunami battered the Mediterranean coast from Acre to Gaza. The area hardest hit by this earthquake in Jerusalem was the Temple Mount and the quarters surrounding it, including many of the houses that had been built along the western wall.[14] These were the houses that had prevented access to most of the western wall. Now that the approach was blocked by ruins rather than by houses occupied by many people, Suleiman felt ready to instruct his engineers to clear the ruins and to prepare a Jewish prayer site at the western wall.[15]

This was a brand new prayer-site that Jews had not known previously. As noted earlier, Haparchi, an early Holy Land geographer, in his comprehensive survey of fourteenth-century Jerusalem, did not mention the Western Wall as a Jewish prayer site because it did not then exist as such. A footnote by Abraham Moshe Lunz, the editor of the 1899 edition of Haparchi’s book, states:

in the author’s day, and for many years thereafter, the Western Wall (where we pray nowadays) was covered with earth, and all the Jews went to pray at the eastern wall of the Temple Mount and outside the gates of the southern wall.[16]

Once the Western Wall had been properly prepared as a prayer site, Suleiman issued a firman (decree) that established the right of Jews to pray there for all times. There are those who claim that this royal decree was issued to compensate the Jews for relinquishing their legal rights to pray on the Temple Mount, but there is no record that Jews ever relinquished those rights voluntarily. This firman was still in effect in the nineteenth century. In 1840, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt (who was also the governor of Jerusalem) allowed the Jews “to pay visits to [the Western Wall] as of old” but forbade them to pave the area in front of it and cautioned them against “raising their voices and displaying their books there.” Subsequent governors reissued this firman in 1841, 1889, 1893 and 1909.[17] The nineteenth-century geographer Joseph Schwartz noted the importance of this decree even in his days, three hundred years later:

No one is molested … by the Mahomedans, as we have a very old firman from the Sultan of Constantinople that the approach [to the Western Wall] shall not be denied to us, though the Porte [the Ottoman government] obtains for this privilege an especial tax, which is, however, quite insignificant.[18]

Although Sultan Suleiman designated the Western Wall as a central locus of Jewish prayer, for more than four hundred years, this site was quite unlike the Western Wall that we know today. From the time of its inception in the sixteenth century until 1967, the site was only a narrow alley—on one side were the houses of the thickly settled Arab neighborhood known as the Mughrabi Quarter and, on the other, the retaining, western wall of the Temple Mount. The prayer area was only 4 meters wide and 28 meters long, occupying less than six percent of the western wall’s total length of 488 meters. This small area could barely accommodate a few hundred people.

Prayers at the Western Wall

In the first few centuries after the designation of the Western Wall as a place of prayer, it was utilized infrequently by its intended users. Early descriptions indicate that people came to the wall to pray for divine help only when they faced very critical problems.[19] Another early custom was for some Jews to assemble at the wall during the nine days prior to the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples (Tisha b’Av) to recite the evening prayer and elegies.

Others had the custom to come to the Western Wall on Thursday nights to recite tikkun hazot, a special prayer recited at midnight to ask for God’s mercies. Another practice reported by some nineteenth century European travelers was for the pious to assemble on late Friday afternoon near the Western Wall to welcome the Sabbath. All of these customs make it clear that for many centuries the Western Wall was not used as regularly as it is nowadays when it is a bustle of activity, every day, all day long, and into the late evening hours.

A pilgrimage account from October 1700 provides a description of the role that the Western Wall played in Jerusalem’s Jewish life at the beginning of the eighteenth century. According to Reb Gedalyah, the author of Massa’ot Eretz Yisrael, some Jews, especially women, came to the wall to pray on the eve of the new moon, on fast days, and on Tisha b’Av. However, there were no regular daily prayer services at this site in his time—not even on the Sabbath. Instead, in Gedalyah’s words:

Every Shabbat morning, immediately after leaving the synagogue, [Jerusalem Jews] walked to the Western Wall, but actually [they did] not walk to the Western Wall because it was far away, and it was necessary to walk through the alleys and market places in white Shabbat coats … but [they] walked to a certain alley where Jews live and, from a high spot one can see, beyond the Western Wall, the place of the Temple … and there [they recited] those psalms that mention Jerusalem and Zion.[20]

By the nineteenth century, there appeared to be a greater use of the Western Wall for prayer, but still, for the most part, not for regular, organized, daily public services. As Joseph Schwartz wrote:

This wall is visited by all our brothers on every feast and festival; and the large space at its foot is often so densely filled up that all cannot perform their devotions here at the same time. It is also visited, though by less numbers, on every Friday afternoon and by some nearly every day.[21]

Albert Rhodes, U.S. consul in Jerusalem in 1863-65, described the prayers at “the wailing-place of the Jews … [as] a spot of interest to every traveler” on Friday afternoon when “every available spot along the foot of this wall is occupied by weeping Jews.” He added that “the greater part of these are women, who often sit in little circles around a Talmud-learned Jew, who reads to them … portions of the Jewish chronicles.” He also noted that “those [women] who arrive early … commence at one end of the wall and kiss and touch every stone within reach, from one end of the wall to the other.”[22]

Regular, daily, public prayer services, three times a day, did not take place at the Western Wall until late in the nineteenth century or early twentieth century.[23] By 1941, they had become established and so popular that British-appointed chief rabbis Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog and Ben Zion Uziel felt it necessary to issue regulations for proper behavior at the wall. These rules included a prohibition against riding a bicycle through the alleyway; the strict separation of men and women (even though the Mandatory government did not permit the erection of the traditional barrier that separates the sexes in Orthodox synagogues); and an admonition not to start a second prayer service while a prior prayer service was already under way.

After the Six Day War

The importance of the Western Wall as the most sacred Jewish site grew immeasurably in the days and weeks after the June 1967 Six-Day War. During Israel’s 1948 war of independence, the Jordanian army occupied East Jerusalem and the Old City. The armistice treaty between Jordan and Israel required free access to the Western Wall for everyone, including Jews.[24] However, between 1949 and 1967, Jordan violated this provision and prevented any Jew from approaching the Western Wall. An entire generation of Israeli Jews grew up without access to this holy place. The Israeli government tried to provide alternate sacred sites, such as King David’s tomb on Mount Zion and the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, but the inability to access it made the Western Wall an even more venerated place.

Then all of a sudden, in June 1967, the Israeli army recaptured the Old City, and the Western Wall once again became accessible to Jews. On June 7, 1967, the third day of the war, Israeli paratroopers recaptured the Temple Mount and immediately afterward descended to the Western Wall. They were soon joined by Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the chief army chaplain, who blew a resounding blast on the shofar (ram’s horn) and said a prayer: “This is the day we have been yearning for. Let us rejoice in it.” A few hours later, Israel’s two chief rabbis and other senior rabbis came for a festive thanksgiving divine service. On this day, everybody who came to the Western Wall came by way of the Temple Mount because most of the Old City had not yet been cleared of Jordanian snipers.

On the following day, while Israeli paratroopers were clearing the last pockets of resistance, David Ben-Gurion, who had retired four years earlier as Israel’s first prime minister, came to the Western Wall accompanied by Jerusalem’s mayor Teddy Kollek and Yaakov Yanai, the chairman of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority. Ben-Gurion, the mythological founder of the state of Israel and an avowed secularist, laid his head on the Western Wall and wept bitterly. Once he calmed down, he ordered one of his bodyguards to remove the sign reading “al-Buraq,” the Arab name for the Western Wall. He then turned to Yanai and asked him, “Aren’t you ashamed? Look—toilets next to the Western Wall.” Yanai told Kollek about Ben-Gurion’s comments and added, “We need to clean up this place. We need to get the Wall in shape.” Kollek promised to take care of it. And he did. Within days the houses of the Mugrabi Quarter were leveled by bulldozers, and the narrow alleyway was turned into the open area known today as the Western Wall Plaza. Instead of the small area that could barely accommodate a few hundred worshippers, a new site had been prepared to accommodate many thousands. Some 370,000 people visited the new site during its first week.[25]

A week and a half after the Temple Mount and the Western Wall were recaptured, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister, met with the Muslim religious authorities of Jerusalem in al-Aqsa Mosque. At this meeting, he announced that the Muslim authorities would be in complete charge of all religious activities in the mosques on the Temple Mount. Jews would have free access to the Temple Mount but would not be allowed to pray there. Instead he directed Jews to pray at the Western Wall.[26] The Israeli government subsequently accepted Dayan’s decision that forbade Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. The rule was that Muslims pray on the top of the mountain while Jews pray below at the Western Wall.

Conclusion

As has been made abundantly clear, there is no ancient Jewish tradition that designates the Western Wall as a sacred site. Instead, it was designated as a place of prayer less than five hundred years ago by a Muslim ruler. It took more than three centuries for the wall to attract the Jewish masses, and only in the last 150 years, has it become Judaism’s “most sacred site.” Yet, even if this place was not intrinsically holy (let alone as holy as the Temple Mount), or even if it had not been so designated by Suleiman the Great, it has become sanctified over time as Jews have increasingly utilized it for prayer.[27]

Whether this historical survey can help resolve the intra-Jewish dispute over the Western Wall, and whether it will affect the far more bitter feud between Israel and the Palestinians over the future of Jerusalem’s holy sites remains to be seen.

About the author:
*F. M. Loewenberg is professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University’s School of Social Work. Since his retirement, his research interests have focused on the history of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

Source:
This article was published in the Middle East Quarterly’s Fall Edition 2017.

[1] The Jerusalem Post Magazine, Sept. 16, 2016, p. 21.

[2] Ibid., June 15, 2016.

[3] “Report of the Commission Appointed by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with the Approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to Determine the Rights and Claims of Muslims and Jews in Connection with the Western or Wailing Wall at Jerusalem, (Dec. 1930),” League of Nations, Geneva, pp. 10-1.

[4] F. M. Loewenberg, “Where Jerusalem Jews Worship: Tracing the changing location of the ‘holiest’ site in Judaism,” Hakirah, Winter 2013, pp. 213-31.

[5] F.M. Loewenberg, “A synagogue on Har Habayit in the 7^th century: Dream or historical fact?” Hakira, Summer 2016, pp. 253-62.

[6] Dan Bahat, “L’zehui sha’arey har habayit batkufa hamuslemit hakduma v’ha’me’ara’,” Catedra, 106, 2002, p. 72; Bahat, “L’toldot hitkadshuto shel hakotel hama’aravi,” Ariel, 2007, p. 33.

[7] Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1960, based on 1907 ed.), p. 24.

[8] The red heifer or cow was burned on the Mount of Olives and its ashes used in a ritual purification ceremony. See Mishna Para; Maimonides, Hilchot Para Aduma.

[9] Avraham Ya’ari, Igarot Eretz Yisrael, 2^nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1950), p. 78.

[10] Ishtori Haparchi, Kaftor v’Ferah, ed. J. Blumenfeld (New York: Beit Hillel, 1964), ch. 6.

[11] Avraham Ya’ari, Massa Meshulam m’Volterra b’Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1959), p. 68.

[12] Midrash Exodus, Rabbah 2:2. Leopold Zunz dates the composition of this midrash to the 11^th or 12^th century while others date it two or three centuries earlier.

[13] Bahat, “L’toldot hitkadshuto shel hakotel hama’aravi,” p. 35.

[14] Y. Barselvi, “The earthquake in Eretz Yisrael in January 1546,” Bulletin for Study of Eretz Yisrael and Its Antiquities, 19 (1956), pp. 29-34.

[15] Bahat, “L’toldot hitkadshuto shel hakotel hama’aravi,” pp. 38-40.

[16] Haparchi, Kaftor v’Ferah (Jerusalem: n.p., 1899), pp. 94-5.

[17] “Report of the Commission (Dec. 1930).”

[18] Joseph Schwartz, A Descriptive Geography of Palestine, trans. I. Leeser (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850), p. 260.

[19] See, for example, Ya’ari, Igarot Eretz Yisrael, pp. 205-6.

[20] Avraham Ya’ari, Massa’ot Eretz Yisrael (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1976), pp. 345-6.

[21] Schwartz, A Descriptive Geography of Palestine, p. 260.

[22] Albert Rhodes, Jerusalem As It Is (London: J. Maxwell, 1865), pp. 363-4.

[23] Keter Shem Tov, cited in Yaakov Gliss, Minhagei Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1968), pp. 35-6.

[24] Jordanian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, Apr. 3, 1949, art. 8.

[25] David Ben-Gurion, “Archives for 1967,” Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba; “The secret of the disappearing Wall,” Israel Hayom (Tel Aviv), June 3, 2016; Mordechai Naor, ed., The Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1987), p. 112.

[26] Moshe Dayan, Story of My Life, (New York: Morrow and Company, 1976), pp. 387-90.

[27] See R. Meir Simha HaKohen (1843-1926), Meshech Hochma (commentary on the Pentateuch), Exodus 32:19.

By Stephen E. Webber and Donald E. Vandergriff*

Building partner capacity has been recently recognized as a key mission set of the U.S. Armed Forces. It has received a great deal of verbal and written attention from military leaders and policymakers due to its centrality to ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The recent political and strategic direction has emphasized military, diplomatic, and civil coordination with other nations worldwide.1

A full explanation of U.S. diplomatic, development, and military approaches to capacity-building, and the evolution of the military’s current role and conceptualization of these operations, would undoubtedly be relevant and useful, but remains beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we examine one critical component of this broad mission set: the building of institutional capacity in host-nation ministries. Then we offer a scientifically and historically sound methodology for military advisors working at the ministerial level. By improving how we plan and execute our train, advise, and assist missions, and rethinking the role of the military advisor, we can more effectively enable our partners around the world.

The missing link in capacity-building is education. It is not the education of our personnel or counterparts exclusively; it is the role of mutual learning in advisory engagements and an understanding of the importance of the education discipline to the capacity-building mission. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) use the term train, advise, and assist (TAA) as a catchall that encompasses virtually all our interactions with host-nation forces. Rarely do we stop to consider the fact that this is a three-word phrase, and not a single verb (for example, “We’re going to TAA our Afghan partners in institutional reform today”). But what form should this training take? Toward what end do we advise our partners, and what sort of assistance should we be offering them? All too often, our advisors focus on conducting “engagements,” sitting down for lengthy meetings with host-nation counterparts. Meetings with key leaders are necessary to develop a common operating picture and to establish goals, just as time with counterparts can start to build the trusting relationships upon which all else hinges.

Unfortunately, this falls short. Except for the small talk and pleasantries required in many cultures, meetings remain highly structured and rigid. An American (or NATO) officer often sits across from his counterpart and proceeds through a script of “to-dos” and a review of manufactured milestones. As advisory assistance is almost always linked to financial and materiel support, the host-nation counterpart offers little pushback to the advisor’s assertions. Both parties leave the engagement at best satisfied with the status quo and at worst disillusioned with one another and the possibility of progress.

The advisor’s chain of command and higher headquarters remain unsure of how to quantify progress. They focus reflexively on shallow metrics such as the number of engagements conducted per week or the submission of boilerplate reports. Despite sending men and women from across the joint force to advise foreign forces on complex issues, the U.S. military has yet to produce a strong body of work on how we advise.2 The joint force has scratched the surface by producing guidance on the basics of advising: helping troops build the communication, interpersonal, and cultural skills to interact with their counterparts. This may be doing more harm than good because we risk creating checklists and artificial scripts that oversimplify the task at hand.

Now we must consider the advisor mission in context and understand how the interaction between advisors and host-nation counterparts could be used to achieve our broader goals. To use familiar terms, what advising tactics do we employ, and how do we structure train, advise, and assist operations to achieve our strategic outcome of building capacity in host-nation institutions? In response to these vital questions, we offer an approach to capacity-building based on human interaction and learning. First, we consider the importance of institutional capacity from the standpoint of a system of human interaction. Second, we explain how our view of the strategic goal affects the planning and execution of advisory operations, and lastly, we provide a real-world example of innovative advising tactics recently employed in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The Strategic Goal: Developing Institutional Capacity

Only recently has the U.S. military placed a proper emphasis on institutional capacity. In the initial approaches to stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, NATO called for the rapid creation of military and police forces to protect the populace and fight the enemy. The mixed bag of successes and failures achieved by the international community in raising the Afghan and Iraqi security forces is well documented and discussed at length by many scholars.3 U.S. military doctrine reflects learning on the part of the military to embrace stability operations and enabling civil authority (Phases IV and V of a joint campaign) as critical to strategic success.4

Afghanistan in particular provides a good example. To put things simply, no matter how many Afghans stepped forward to defend their country, how well international forces trained them, or how much money and material poured into the country, the nation is unable to manage the resources at its disposal.5 While Afghanistan, with its historic lack of governance and central authority, is a glaring case, the importance of developing the capacity to lead and manage applies to every case of security assistance or joint military training. The United States is currently working with police and military forces around the world to counter the threat of global terrorism.6

Even in the absence of kinetic action, if U.S. advisors conduct combined tactical training in a foreign country, the relationships built and the skills communicated will not be maintained and carried on if the host nation lacks the institutions to retain them. If the United States grants a large sum of money to another nation to man, train, and equip its armed forces, these funds will not provide optimal capability if the country lacks a bureaucracy to manage a large budget, logistics, and human resources. Recent years have illustrated the fact that paying for a nation’s military or teaching valuable skills to its troops is not nearly enough to enable a partner nation’s military. Advising within a country’s governmental organizations is critical to any man, train, and equip effort.

The United States and NATO are currently placing military, government, and contracted advisors among the upper echelons of host-nation forces and within government departments. Prior to the deployment of advisors, we as a force must first consider the political and strategic outcomes for these institutions and how to measure success. If it is decided that advisory missions are an effective way of achieving our desired endstate, we must first consider how we intend to shape conditions. Ideally, this discussion would occur prior to the decision to deploy advisors. As we are already employing advisor efforts, we must take a step back and reconsider how they fit into the bigger picture, while changing the way we conduct them.

Our train, advise, and assist efforts at the ministerial level should shape systems that will accomplish our near-term goals of enabling host-nation partners against dynamic threats while becoming self-perpetuating in order to continue to strengthen institutions with time, ideally well after the detachment of advisors from their counterparts.

Institutional capacity is a system, and systems emerge through repeated human interaction. Theories of education, management, and especially international relations tell us that human interaction causes learning, which in turn shapes the nature of repeated interaction.7 The way people and organizations interact with one another over time creates institutions, or the rules that govern interaction.8 We all understand this seemingly complex concept intuitively; in the United States, we refer to the “democratic institutions of our government.” As military professionals, we talk a lot about “command climate and Service culture” that we can influence by the policies we enact, how we lead, and how we interact with our people.

Consider our goals for ministerial development within partner nations. We want our partners to manage their own military forces, which requires everything from rule of law, to fiscal responsibility, to administrative effectiveness.9 How do we even begin to consider these broad concepts? By thinking of them in terms of systems with an outward focus, not on processes with an inward focus (getting bogged down in shallow metrics, cultural constraints, control, disregard of the intangibles). We are trying to shape patterns of interaction between people so that they create the outcome we want.10 This is far from simple, but the importance of learning and educational theory is plain to see. It must be mentioned that this learning cannot occur in a vacuum—the small part of capacity-building we address in this article is only of value if it is part of a comprehensive policy and strategic approach. Our broader diplomatic, military, and development efforts toward a certain problem-set must complement and reinforce one another in achieving the desired endstate if a train, advise, and assist effort is going to be successful. It is critical, however, to devise our train, advise, and assist operations based on an understanding of the mission that addresses the importance of learning.

Train, Advise, and Assist Operations

How do you create a system? Systems are shaped by people and how they do things. To put it simply, people + processes = systems. As stated, we cannot create a system as we wish and implement it; it must emerge over time through repeated interaction. The two parts of the equation that we can influence are people and processes. A train, advise, and assist effort must look to achieve an effect on people and an effect of processes that will without a doubt influence the systems at play. We do not, nor will we ever, have complete control of how a system develops or all of the outcomes of our actions to influence others.11 What we can control is our approach to the people we work with and the processes we devise with them to manage their organizations.

People must come first in everything that we do. Carl von Clausewitz reminds us never to underestimate the “human factor” in war,12 and if we trace our strategic goals back to our national purpose, we realize that the ultimate purpose of our military efforts is the preservation of human life and human freedom. Joint special operations doctrine defines irregular conflict (within which many of our advisor missions fall) as a “struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over relevant populations.”13 We cannot coerce or bribe capacity into a host nation. Moral and ethical considerations aside, what we fund or force on a group of people will only be as effective as they are. Also, there is no exit strategy with this line of thought. The only way to influence an individual or group in the long term is through education.

Education is a vital part of an advisor’s mission, and any train, advise, and assist operation should consider how we will educate our host-nation partners. Education is too often thought of as the conveying of knowledge from a teacher (who knows something) to a student (who knows nothing). This is not education (or effective training); it is simply communication between a leader and subordinate. Decades of progress in the education field have shown that this misunderstanding of education is completely ineffective in any context. To have any chance of success, the advisor must completely abandon any inclination toward this approach, as it is grounded in out-of-date learning models refuted by scholars and educators such as Dr. Robert Bjork, distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Psychology.14

People learn through interaction and experience. Simply conveying information as we have in our training courses since the industrial age will never be as effective as empowering people to understand something on their own. The advisor is both a teacher who has entered a situation with goals and desired outcomes for his counterparts, but more importantly, a facilitator who allows students to apply what they already know, receiving new information and understanding it in their own way. A tactical concept, such as marksmanship or patrolling, is best understood if students practice on their own, being allowed to make mistakes and adapt their technique. The same is true for administrative procedures or operational concepts. Anyone can learn to recite a definition, but there is no way to effectively convey how to manage a defense budget or plan a military campaign. People always learn best when they understand things in their own way, describe them in their own terms, and interact with others to inform their understanding.

In our approach to train, advise, and assist, the advisor is as much a student of his counterpart as the counterpart is of the advisor. To achieve success, advisors must proceed with abject humility knowing that they enter a host nation knowing little of how things work. An advisor may or may not have a strong background in his subject matter from previous service, but there is no better way to learn than to teach. Also, the way one person understands something will always differ in some way from how another understands it. This is true for members of the same immediate family, let alone people from different places who have been educated in different cultures. An advisor has as much (if not more) to learn from his counterpart as he does from his advisor.

It goes without saying that a foreigner who arrives among a host-nation military force will be instantly rejected if he proceeds with arrogance, trying to “teach” his ways to another group of people who have good reasons for what they do and a lifetime of learning behind them. At the very best, the advisor might receive a polite nod from a group of students who will revert to their original ways as soon as advisors leave the room. Formal meetings and key leader engagements will, without a doubt, be part of any advisor operation. During these engagements, in which international advisors and host-nation partners communicate intent, review progress, and make important decisions, the advisor should keep in mind that mutual learning is occurring. Every meeting is an opportunity to influence a counterpart, as much as it is an opportunity to learn something new about the counterpart as an individual, his organization, and the systems currently at work within the host nation.

Education with right teaching methodology, whether field exercises at the tactical level or joint working groups at the operational/strategic level, presents an opportunity for mutual learning. Here, advisors should not only know the key points that they intend to communicate, but also be careful to listen to their counterparts, allowing all participants to learn from one another. It is important to view oneself as a facilitator of learning. Frankly, an advisor is present in each country because local nationals do not know something that the advisor needs them to know. At the same time, local nationals know and understand things that their advisors could never hope to, and often intuitively know and understand the information that an advisor is trying to convey, but in their own way.15

The conclusion that advising techniques must change is grounded in learning theory and modern educational methods. Recent insight into the human mind demands a shift from “competency-based” learning to “outcomes-based” and “discovery” learning.16 Competency-based learning is the norm for many Americans, as it has long been prevalent in the U.S. education system at all levels. The U.S. military has institutionalized a competency approach to learning based on the education and management philosophies of the early 20th century.17 Based on the research of psychologists and educators such as Dr. Bjork, innovators have worked to reform education in all contexts. Whether teaching math to children in a public school or advanced tactics to Soldiers, teachers are most effective when they act as facilitators, and students learn more when they are encouraged to take ownership of the learning.18 This blurs the traditional line between teacher and student. A new approach to military advising that properly emphasizes the importance of mutual learning requires a shift from the influence of competency-based education to engagements focused on discovery and outcomes.

Processes must be implemented in order to create systems and build capacity. A group of individuals can learn something, and perhaps pass this knowledge on to some extent in a “train the trainer” model, but advisor engagements must focus on shaping processes nearly as much as they focus on educating individuals. In a sense, processes are the product of learning within an organization. A process is a framework for how things are done. The U.S. military understands process well; so much of our work and even our lives are governed by instructions on how things are to be done. Where the U.S. military is absent is in not explaining the “why” behind a process. Education explains the “why.” If a system is going to become self-perpetuating, people must be given a framework for the training and education, one that will give shape and direction to their repeated interaction.

The advisor often begins her work with a process in mind. With varying degrees of success, we often seek to impose blueprints on foreign forces based on what has worked for our organizations. This is neither all good nor all bad; after all, our counterparts lack the ability to do something, and we are providing a way of doing it from our own experience. At the same time, this approach can be disastrous. People shape processes, and processes shape people as they guide their interaction. This is how a complex, adaptive system works. How and why things are done in a host nation is influenced by a myriad of factors, most of which we have no control over. Introducing a process developed by the U.S. military and expecting that it will be successfully adopted by a host nation without modification is a recipe for failure. A military force may already have processes in place that an advisor is unaware of, individuals come from different cultures and have entirely different perspectives, and our processes are often built over time and partner nations are often incapable of implementing them as they are right away.19

Instead, advisors must understand what processes are already in place within a host nation. How do people do things, and why? This comes with understanding the whole system and how it has developed. Is there an ineffective process in place that must be changed, an effective process that can be improved, or is the lack of a codified process what is preventing the development of capacity? Before trying to influence the rules of someone else’s game, we must first learn his rules. Sometimes, published guidance is in place that the advisor can obtain, study, and use as a starting point for engagements with counterparts. Often, no such guidance exists and an advisor must learn how things are done from counterparts as they train and learn together. As training is conducted, what is learned can start to form a base from which codified doctrine can be developed. An effective advisor seeks to understand her operating environment and gently shape conditions toward the desired endstate. Ideally, the advisors will leave their counterparts with formal guidance that is somewhere between how things were done prior to their arrival and how things are done by the advisor’s home country.

Case Study: Kabul, Afghanistan

Our theory of train, advise, and assist operations was shaped by real-world experience with the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), particularly the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), which oversees the Afghan National Police (ANP). We sought to apply these concepts as we learned them by implementing adaptive learning as part of our train, advise, and assist operations. For our theory to be truly tested and proven, it must be given time. Also, similar methods must be applied across a range of cases and data collected. Unfortunately, capacity-building takes time and hard metrics are often scarce when it comes to irregular warfare. This case, however, is instructive because it realized qualitative results at the tactical level and has helped us to understand how similar efforts may be designed and implemented in the future.

As part of Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan’s (CSTC–A’s) Capabilities Development Directorate (CDD), our team was tasked to train, advise, and assist the Ministry of Defense (MOD) and MOI in all aspects of force management. It was our mission to help the Afghans manage their force structure: delivering the right combat and policing capability to a dynamic battlespace while developing the capacity to manage their own forces in the long term. Force management is an important discipline, as it encompasses virtually all aspects of how an organization structures itself to achieve its mission.

Force management is a useful example of a critical capacity as the ability to effectively determine force structure has both immediate impact and great importance to the long-term growth and development of the organization. We were essentially helping our Afghan partners define the capabilities that are needed to defend both their people and their nation, develop their own solutions to resolve gaps in their police and military capabilities, and determine their requirements based on this analysis. The close linkage to fiscal/budget capacity and human resources systems is impossible to miss. We collaborated closely with our CSTC-A and Operation Resolute Support teammates advising on budget and force generation, while we focused on “spaces, not faces,” that is, the authorizations for personnel and equipment, and how to determine them.20

Force management capacity serves as a useful starting point for a discussion of ministerial capacity, as it exemplifies a system that must endure for the Afghan MOI to effectively manage its police forces. Like many systems at the ministerial level, force management is complex, involving codified administrative processes as much as careful analysis and creative thinking on the part of groups and individuals. It is critical that Afghan force managers can properly document personnel and equipment authorizations with the help of their coalition advisors. This important task relates directly to the resources that the international community is using to resource the ANP. It also allows all components of the nation’s police forces to effectively, man, train, and equip themselves.

As importantly, Afghan ministries must begin to take the lead in managing their force structure and determining future requirements. This requires far more than administrative procedure; Afghan leaders must possess the skills to analyze their military and policing capabilities. Not only do Afghan ministries require analytical capacity, but also those tasked to lead and manage them must be critical and creative thinkers. In developing Afghan force management capacity, we are trying to build people as much as we were working to build processes.21

As our military and civilian advisors were working hard to bring order to the disparate records that documented the Afghan force structure, our team took its first steps toward educating Afghan force managers with an 8-week course for our counterparts titled “Force Management: The Basics.” Course objectives were built on material that force management advisors had used for their counterparts, and included U.S. Army force management doctrine. Our advisors then applied adaptive learning to shape the course based on an Adaptive Course Model (ACM), a revolutionary model that has achieved success when applied to U.S. Army training.

This “discovery-based” learning model is grounded in Adaptive Soldier Leader Training and Education methodology (ASLTE), designed to instill adaptability within students at all levels by engaging them as active participants in learning. Under ASLTE, ACM emphasizes outcomes over metrics by using discussion, open-ended problem-solving, wargames, and free play exercises to push students mentally and physically. These methods proved effective in the U.S. Army Reconnaissance course, and were adapted to a new context of advising at the ministerial level.22

Previous course slides were stripped down and used to make hardcopy handouts, leaving key points and broad concepts, discarding specific doctrinal terms and restrictive, step-by-step processes. Our host-nation interpreters, whom our team and leadership have elected to refer to as the technical advisor team, reviewed and actively contributed to the class materials. Not only did the technical advisors translate and edit, but they also reviewed course outcomes and improved the content to make it useful and relevant to their countrymen. During the course, there was no distinction between coalition advisors and host-nation translators; both were equal facilitators of learning.

ANP and ANA officers selected for the first course were distinguished in their profession, and, except for two junior officers, the majority were colonels, along with several lieutenant colonels and majors. Follow-on courses included members of mid-level and junior officers and some senior noncommissioned officers. Each session would begin with an introduction by either an Afghan or coalition general officer (key leader engagements with our counterparts and meetings with our chain of command were critical to organizing these efforts), and then our contracted advisors would begin to facilitate discussion.

Class usually began with a problem, or an open-ended question: “How do I build a brigade?” Students would then work in groups to think creatively about the given problem. After collaborating, groups were asked to brief their solution to the class. This generated further discussion, during which our counterparts, many of whom had spent their whole lives at war, began to think critically and practice the cognitive skills of senior leaders and managers. Rather than using our handouts to drive the learning, we let the class drive itself, connecting students’ ideas and assertions with key force management concepts as understood by the U.S. military.23

Student enthusiasm for the course was remarkable. These were seasoned veterans who may have begun their officer development under Russian advisors, or in the mountains opposing them. Some had been formally educated in Western schools. Others had little formal schooling. Every one of the students in surveys stated they had not experienced this type of learning, where they were involved in every aspect of the course, and not just briefed endlessly with PowerPoint slides. Students were eager to contribute, asking questions, connecting course material to their everyday experiences and challenges as officers, and respectfully challenging one another in vigorous debate. Advisors, who were optimistic about the course, had their moderate expectations far exceeded by the climate of the classes. The reason for this was clear, as one senior Afghan officer confided to his advisors: the students did not feel “talked down to” or “talked at.” They were not bombarded with foreign concepts, or lectured by others on “the right way”; they led the way and learned from each other.24

The success of the first joint MOD-MOI class demanded the facilitation of a second course, this time for junior ANP officers only. Based on a careful after action review of the first class, CDD advisors decided to keep this class smaller and to focus on rising leaders. Now that their leadership, often set in their ways, had been exposed to adaptive learning and more advanced force management concepts, it was safe to train their subordinates who now had a better chance to apply their learning on the job with the approval of their chain of command. These students, mostly junior officers, had more formal schooling than their superiors and were even more open to improving their problem-solving skills and learning new concepts from each other and our advisor team. Group problems and exercises such as the “build a brigade” exercise generated endless discussion. At one point, a young lieutenant lectured the class on the importance of thinking strategically and holistically about problem-sets before determining solutions. His comments would not have been out of place in a U.S. War College seminar.

As these classes, supported by our coalition chain of command and our Afghan general-officer principals continued, our advisor team persisted in its day-to-day work. We still worked with advisor organizations across Resolute Support to facilitate the approval of new requirements, ran the funding approval process for capability enhancements, and engaged our Afghan counterparts in formal meetings. After two successful classes, much of our time became devoted to the documentation and validation of force structure authorizations, an important task for the success of our directorate and our Afghan counterparts. These conditions enabled a critical evolution in our methodology. Working together, we found ways to continue learning from our counterparts and training them. We devised ways to combine educational efforts with formal workshops and engagements, using them to drive our understanding of an effective ANP force structure while empowering our counterparts to lead the process and learn from it. We began to work together to determine the requirements for the police force, while simultaneously setting conditions for our counterparts to institutionalize this knowledge.

Our coalition military and civilian advisors worked together and with other advisory organizations to analyze the task at hand and requirements for the ANP. Before communicating our thoughts to our counterparts, we allowed them to inform our understanding and tackled the problem-set together. We began to teach classes “guerrilla style,” embracing the chaos and fluidity of the environment. As we were always collaborating among ourselves, we had something to discuss with our counterparts. Classes were almost spontaneous: if we could gather only a few of our counterparts together, we would set up our white board and get to work. As in the more formal classes, we would often begin by introducing a question or problem-set related to a real-world challenge. We would then brainstorm with our counterparts, writing all their input, whether it seemed immediately useful or relevant to us, on the whiteboard. As each workshop included at least one interpreter or liaison, language barriers were not an issue. It was important, however, that students saw their input captured, validated, and used to generate further discussion.

The climate of these engagements would be foreign to most U.S. military officers. There was no program of instruction, no list of enabling objectives, no PowerPoint, and no “foot-stomping, check the block” mentality. When we began a session, we realized that we were out on a limb: with a general idea of an outcome based on problems we were trying to solve as an organization, we would let our students lead the way. Often, classes would depart from our initial concept and take an entirely different route. These “rabbit holes” were often productive, teaching us more about our counterparts and their world. A formal military course or even most classes in the American public education system would not have enabled this kind of learning. Sometimes, it would take us three classes to accomplish what we had intended in one class (determining a specific equipping scheme, for example), but we realized that this was not only acceptable given the environment, but also necessary.

It has only been a short time since these efforts began, and they continue to evolve. A scientific evaluation of our approach is impossible now. However, the response we received from our counterparts, and the increase in our ability to perform our core functions in support of ANDSF force management, indicated that we had struck gold. It is important to note that our training activities were enabled by our culture as a team and approach to advising. Prior to and throughout these initiatives, we made it a priority to bond with our counterparts. The U.S. military has come to understand the importance of building rapport; our team embraced this philosophy and took it a step further.25 We built professional working relationships, and often true friendships with our hosts. Prior to and after formal engagements with general officers, we spent time in the offices of their staffs, drinking tea, practicing one another’s languages, discussing family, our homes, and perhaps more than anything else, telling jokes. At times, we could gently guide these conversations to force management, at others we just appreciated them for what they were: an opportunity to meet new friends and connect with those who had readily welcomed us into their homeland.

The advisor must understand the importance of human connections and trusting relationships in enabling everything from military training to formal negotiations. Still, we must treat our relationships with counterparts as ends in themselves. Just as we bond with our fellow Servicemembers, we must bond with host-nation personnel. Like our brothers and sisters wearing the uniform of the United States, they are serving alongside us. By putting on their uniform, they risk everything to defend their homeland and their families. Only by embracing our hosts, becoming a part of their world, and fully immersing ourselves in the operating environment can we conduct effective train, advise, and assist operations.

Moving Forward

The U.S. military and our allies will continue to engage partner forces around the world in pursuit of our strategic interests. When the decision is made to build capacity within a foreign institution, we must take a methodical approach to the situation while enabling those at the operational and tactical level with the freedom to make decisions and adapt to their surroundings. Our understanding of capacity-building must be informed by the education discipline and learning theory. After considering to what end we intend to influence a foreign institution and how, we must apply the principals of learning and an effective educational methodology to our advising operations and tactics. Without a means to effectively engage counterparts, our broader strategic goals will not be realized. Engagements, even at the highest levels of command and host-nation governmental institutions, are the “tactical level” of capacity-building. The methods with which we engage our counterparts will determine whether train, advise, and assist methods are effective in building partner capacity.

*About the authors:
Lieutenant Stephen E. Webber, USNR, is assigned to Maritime and Air Operations Headquarters, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, Naval and Amphibious Liaison Element Cell. Major Donald E. Vandergriff, USA (Ret.), is a Mission Command Consultant with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Andrew Hill is a Professor in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the U.S. Army War College. Colonel Heath Niemi, USA, is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College.

Source:
This article was published in the Joint Force Quarterly 86, which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes:
1 Robert Gates, “Helping Others Defend Themselves,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 3 (2010), 2–6; Harry Yarger, Building Partner Capacity (Tampa: Joint Special Operations University, 2015).

2 This issue has received some attention from the military and has been the subject of excellent scholarship that remains to be operationalized. See also Terrence Kelly, Security Force Assistance in Afghanistan: Identifying Lessons for Future Efforts (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2011); Austin Long, Building Special Operations Partnerships in Afghanistan and Beyond (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2015); Todd Helmus, Advising the Command: Best Practices from the Special Operations Advisory Experience in Afghanistan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2015).

3 T.X. Hammes, “Raising and Mentoring Security Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq,” in Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War, ed. Richard D. Hooker, Jr., and Joseph J. Collins (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2015); Obaid Younossi, The Long March: Building an Afghan National Army (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009); Leslie Payne, Leveraging Observations of Security Force Assistance in Afghanistan for Global Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2013).

4 Lauren Fish, “Painting by Numbers: A History of the U.S. Military’s Phasing Construct,” War on the Rocks, November 1, 2016, available at <https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/painting-by-numbers-a-history-of-the-u-s-militarys-phasing-construct/>.

5 Joseph J. Collins, Understanding War in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2011), 75–78.

6 Gates, 2–6.

7 Jonathan Raskin, “The Evolution of Constructivism,” The Journal of Constructivist Psychology 21, no. 1 (2008), 16–24; Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (April 1992), 391–425.

8 Gary Shiffman and James Jochum, Economic Instruments of Security Policy: Influencing Choices of Leaders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14–15.

9 Hammes, 279, 283.

10 See also David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Kilcullen applies a “systems logic” approach to problems of development and conflict that shaped the authors’ thinking on these matters.

11 Ibid., 255–260.

12 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 94.

13 Joint Publication 3-05, Special Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, July 16, 2014), 28.

14 Robert Bjork, “How We Learn Versus How We Think We Learn: Implications for the Organization of Army Training,” unpublished briefing presented at Science of Learning Workshop, University of California, Los Angeles, August 1, 2006.

15 Kilcullen, 255–260.

16 Donald E. Vandergriff, “The Missing Link: How to Develop for Mission Command,” unpublished working paper, December 17, 2016, 1–3; Phil Hill, “Competency-Based Education: An (Updated) Primer for Today’s Online Market,” available at <http://mfeldstein.com/cbe-an-updated-primer-for-todays-online-market/>.

17 Vandergriff, 1–3.

18 Paul Howe, Leadership and Training for the Fight (New York: Skyhorse, 2011); Bjork; Vandergriff, 1–11.

19 Kilcullen, 255–260.

20 See also Garrett Heath and Stephen E. Webber, “Developing Afghan Force Managers,” Army AL&T Magazine (October–December 2016), 59–63.

21 See also “Establishing Enduring Systems,” Defense Video Imagery Distribution System, May 27, 2016, available at <www.dvidshub.net/news/199634/establishing-enduring-systems-afghan-leaders-shape-new-policies-cstc-workshops>.

22 Vandergriff, 5–8; see also William R. Burns, Jr., and Waldo D. Freeman, Developing an Adaptability Training Strategy and Policy for the DOD (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, October 2008), 1–87.

23 See also Stephen E. Webber, “Afghan Leaders Celebrate Achievement in Force Management Course,” Operation Resolute Support, July 2016, available at <www.rs.nato.int/article/news/afghan-leaders-celebrate-achievement-in-force-management-course.html>.

24 Dan Grazier, “Military Reform Through Education,” Straus Military Reform Project, (Washington, DC: Project of Government Oversight, October 18, 2015), available at <www.pogo.org/straus/issues/military-people-and-ideas/2015/military-reform-through-education.html>. Captain Dan Grazier, USMC (Ret.), now a fellow at the Straus Military Reform Project, participated in one of Donald E. Vandergriff’s courses at Fort Benning, GA, and wrote this article about it.

25 Kelly; Long; Helmus.

“While the country’s supply and quality of labor are not major issues, what is imperative is improving the investment climate. The government must streamline procedures and check regulatory measures for consistency to ensure ease of doing business. As for foreign aid, the DFA can mobilize technology transfer and technical assistance for priority areas. ODA-financed projects focused on human resource development, particularly in education and health, can reinforce productivity gains.”

By Rowell G. Casaclang*

A perennial policy challenge facing the Philippines is job generation. Despite the recent trend of economic expansion, the economy has fallen short of creating more and better jobs. For its part, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has crafted its strategic plans to include job generation in line with the economic security pillar.

Back in 2002, former Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople had high hopes that the DFA will be an “effective instrument” to help reduce unemployment from 4 million to 1.5 million by 2013. However a decade later 2.8 million Filipinos remained unemployed. That “target” stays unreached by the end of 2016 as 2.4 million Filipinos are still jobless; thus begging the following questions: Why is stable job creation so difficult to achieve? Where does the DFA’s economic security strategy figure in the country’s development framework?

DFA’s economic security strategies went through many changes as the Department strove to produce favorable outcomes concerning job creation as well as poverty reduction.

In the DFA Strategic Plan 2003-2013, searching new markets for the country’s local goods and services and using official development assistance (ODA) were identified as key strategies. These strategies were part of DFA’s mandate as the main actor in promoting development diplomacy, which entails designing and harnessing foreign relations in the active pursuit of rapid and sustained long-term growth of the Philippine economy.

As in its precursor, the DFA Strategic Plan 2017-2022 also commits to assist the national government in attaining sustained growth and economic development.

However, creating more jobs are expected to come from improving Philippine participation in higher value global value chain, enhancing the country’s competitive edge in services, and promoting tourism and outbound investments. Notably, despite observed uptrends in recent years, ODA and foreign direct investment (FDI) were seemingly given less emphasis on the new plan.

The potentials and pitfalls of aid

Why was ODA omitted in the latest strategic plan? Past experience indicates some explanation. Amid the increase in ODA pledges over the years, projects became rife with implementation issues, one of which is underutilization. From 2003 to 2015 (See Figure 1), the Philippines received ODA worth USD 154.5 billion, of which USD 131 billion are loans and USD 23.4 billion are grants.¹

While total ODA grew steadily at an annual average rate of 2.8 percent between 2003 and 2015, absorptive capacity² remains a challenge. Some ODA-funded projects have also been marred with issues of corruption, mismanagement, and overvaluation. In 2008, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) reported that at least seven in 10 completed projects funded by the Philippines’ biggest lenders³ posted failed or lower actual returns versus estimated returns. These poorly implemented projects failed to generate expected revenues, which could ultimately lead the national government to pass the burden to taxpayers, especially since ODA loans comprise the largest portion of the country’s debt burden.

Just seven months into his term, President Duterte has obtained USD 33 billion (or PHP 1.69 trillion) in aid and investment pledges from China and Japan by January 2017.⁴ These pledges are primarily intended to fund projects to serve areas outside the Greater Manila Area as part of Duterte’s promise to create more jobs to uplift the living conditions of Filipinos. Chinese ODA in particular is eyed for the Agus River project and irrigation projects in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

To improve the performance of agencies utilizing ODA, NEDA established an alert mechanism in December 2009 that identifies priority projects for monitoring and facilitation. The breakout of the NBN-ZTE scandal in 2007 led to the restoration and strict observance of the 15 percent economic internal rate of return requirement, which provides a measure of profitability for prospective investments. Moreover, the Commission on Audit (COA) in February 2017, acting on congressional orders, conducted a special review of at least 20 ODA-funded government projects over suspicions that these projects have yet to be executed or failed to meet project specifications.

Where to invest?

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted that the latest revision of the foreign investment negative list in 2015 has improved the country’s investment climate. Last year, the Philippines received USD 7.9 billion in actual FDI and (albeit a comparatively smaller) USD 4.6 billion (PHP 219 billion) in foreign investment pledges. FDI inflows and pledges show no signs of slowing down (See Figure 2) and in step with the Duterte administration’s promise to make the country “a top FDI magnet” in Southeast Asia by 2022. The Philippines has also been identified as one of top prospective investment destinations of multinational enterprises.

Sectors that take the biggest share of FDI every year are also worth examining. About two-thirds of equity FDI approved between 2005 and 2016 went to manufacturing, finance, utilities, and real estate (See Table 2). In February, President Duterte approved the 2017 Investment Priority Plan to incentivize investment activities in agriculture and other priority areas. Particularly, agriculture’s share was barely 0.25 percent, indicating that this sector has been neglected over the years. Agriculture still employs roughly 30 percent of the population in the past 12 years but suffer from low productivity levels; thus explaining its shrinking GDP contribution.

Corrective measures

Capital is key in making the basic sectors of the economy more productive. The Philippines is still burdened with insufficient domestic capital, hence the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) deciding a debt-to-GDP uptick in the next five years. Arguably, the government appears to have sufficient funds to support its projects. As shown above, external sources such as ODA and FDI increased in recent years and inflows are likely to continue in the future. Implementation bottlenecks and other perennial challenges and corresponding remedies are already identified. Nevertheless, the question remains whether these projects can produce outcomes such as job generation.

Moving forward, the Philippine government should intensify its management and supervision of the use of ODA to improve disbursement rate–fluctuating in recent quarters–and absorptive capacity, as well as mitigate the effects of implementation bottlenecks. The DFA in particular should attract new investors in priority areas such as infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture, fishery, and forestry, especially in underprivileged regions outside the nation’s capital. Investments in these areas will not only create new employment opportunities, but also improve efficiency in producing outputs. While the country’s supply and quality of labor are not major issues, what is imperative is improving the investment climate. The government must streamline procedures and check regulatory measures for consistency to ensure ease of doing business. As for foreign aid, the DFA can mobilize technology transfer and technical assistance for priority areas. ODA-financed projects focused on human resource development, particularly in education and health, can reinforce productivity gains. Additionally, the DFA can also support relevant agencies like NEDA in enabling speedier implementation and monitoring of ODA-implemented projects, such as assisting in the immediate resolution of issues concerning project scope and design with the development partners.

About the author:
*Rowell G. Casaclang is a Foreign Affairs Research Specialist with the Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies of the Foreign Service Institute. Mr. Casaclang can be reached at rowell.casaclang@gmail.com.

The views expressed in this publication are of the authors alone and do not reflect the official position of the Foreign Service Institute, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Government of the Philippines.

Source:
This article was published by FSI. CIRSS Commentaries is a regular short publication of the Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies (CIRSS) of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) focusing on the latest regional and global developments and issues.

Endnotes:
¹  Loans are low-interest, long-term, and concessional funds offered to countries to fund their development projects, while grants are financial assistance with no obligation for repayment.

²  Absorptive capacity refers to recipient’s capacity to use aid for projects with acceptable returns. The Monitoring and Evaluation Staff of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) identifies bidding failures, and delays in procurement and funding as key implementation issues.

³  These lenders were Japan International Cooperation Agency, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.

⁴  Both Japan and China promised the Philippines USD 9 billion and USD 24 billion, respectively. Japan’s pledge will be spread over five years. Meanwhile, China’s pledge comprises USD 9 billion for about 40 proposed government-to-government projects and USD 15 billion for 27 proposed business-to-business or projects.

By Mohammad Al-Sulami

Saudi security forces have foiled a terror plot by the Daesh group targeting the Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense, the Presidency of State Security said on Tuesday.

A source from State Security said a security operation resulted in the capture of two would-be suicide bombers identified as Ahmed Al-Kaldi and Ammar Mohammad, before they could reach their targets.

Initial investigation showed that they are both Yemeni nationals living in Saudi Arabia under fake names.

Two Saudi nationals were also arrested and they are being investigated for possible involvement with the two Yemeni suicide bombers. The names of the Saudi nationals have not been released pending further investigations.

The security operation also resulted in the seizure of two explosive belts, each weighing 7 kilograms, as well as 9 hand grenades and other weapons.

A training site of the terrorists was also discovered in Al-Rimal neighborhood in Riyadh, State Security said.

The presidency also announced the capture of an intelligence cell consisting of a number Saudi and non-Saudi men “working with foreign agencies against the security of the Kingdom in order to stir discord and strife amongst people.”

Both cases are currently under investigation, officials said.

By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty*

In the morning of September 2, 2017, two terrorists carried out an attack targeting Muttahida Qaumi Movement–Pakistan (MQM-P) leader, Khwaja Izharul Hassan, killing two persons, including one of his guards and a child in the vicinity, and injuring another two in the Buffer Zone area of Karachi (Karachi District), the provincial capital of Sindh. Khwaja Hassan, who is also the leader of the Opposition in the Sindh Assembly, survived the assassination attempt unhurt. According to details the assailants clad in Police uniforms and riding on a motorcycle opened fire on Hassan when he was leaving a mosque after offering Eid-ul-Adha [Islamic festival of sacrifice] prayers. Ansar-ul-Shariah Pakistan (ASP) in a Tweet on September 3 claiming responsibility for the attack, alleged that Khawaja Hassan was a “pro-American MQM leader”.

Meanwhile, Police and Pakistan Rangers Sindh raided various houses in the Kaneez Fatima Society of the Gulzar-i-Hijri area of Malir Town, Karachi, on September 4, following information about the presence of the attackers involved in the assassination attempt. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire between the terrorists and Security Force (SF) personnel, one Policeman and a terrorist, identified as Hassan Israr, were killed. The other terrorist, Abdul Karim Sarosh Siddiqui, present at the encounter site, managed to escape. The slain Hassan Israr worked as a lab technician in the Dawood University of Engineering and Technology (DUET) in Karachi. He belonged to an educated family and his father, Ahsan Israr, is a lecturer at an educational institute. According to Rao Anwar, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Malir Town (Karachi District), the fleeing terrorist, Siddiqui, was the mastermind of attack: “He is central commander of banned militant organisation Ansar-ul-Shariah and close associate of killed terrorist, Hassan.” Siddique was a student of Applied Physics at the University of Karachi in 2011.

On September 4, 2017, Police took Sarosh Siddiqui’s father, Sajjad Siddiqui, a retired professor of the University of Karachi, into their custody. On Sajjad’s revelations, Police also arrested ASP Karachi chapter’s ‘spokesperson’ and another dozen ASP cadres during various raids in Gulzar-e-Hijri, Defence Housing Authority, Super Highway, and Sachal areas of Karachi, on the same day.

Further, on September 5, SFs arrested ASP ‘chief’, Dr. Abdullah Hashmi aka Shehryar (28), in an intelligence-based operation conducted at Kaniz Fatima Society in the Gulzar-i-Hijri area of Malir Town in Karachi. Dr, Hashmi is an information technology (IT) expert and was employed in the Computer Department of the Nadirshaw Eduljee Dinshaw University of Engineering and Technology (NEDUET), Karachi. He received a Master’s degree in Applied Physics from the University of Karachi.

During the interrogation Dr. Hashmi told investigators ASP had been formed in 2015 and made several attempts to link up with global terror outfit al Qaeda after establishing contacts with one of its operatives in Karachi, Abdullah Baloch, on an unspecified date. However, the group was advised to generate funds and operate by themselves.

Dr. Hashmi also disclosed that he had been residing in Karachi till 2012 but left for Afghanistan following a raid at his residence. He admitted receiving weapons training in the Shorawak area of Helmand Province, Afghanistan and that his group comprised of 10 to 12 people, mostly students from University of Karachi, DUET, and NEDUET. He confessed his group was targeting Police personnel to ‘receive recognition’ and prove its mettle. Commenting on the slain assailant who attacked MQM-P leader Khwaja Hassan, Shehryar stated that Hassan had also been trained in Afghanistan.

According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) ASP has been found involved in at least five terror attacks, resulting in nine deaths (seven SF personnel and two civilians) and three persons injured (two civilians and one SF) since its formation 2015. SFs have neutralized 10 ASP terrorists. The name of this outfit first emerged publicly on April 5, 2017, when it claimed responsibility for the targeted killing of Army Colonel (Retd) Tahir Zia Nagi at the Baloch Colony, Karachi.

The involvement of young educated youths from the mainstream-education system in terrorism is not a new phenomenon in Karachi and is not limited to ASP. There have been several such instances in the past. Saad Aziz, affiliated to Islamic State (IS), who was involved in the Safoora Goth bus massacre in Karachi, was a student of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi. Aziz was arrested on May 20, 2015, from the SITE area of Karachi and was tried by a military court; he is now on death row for his involvement in Bus massacre on May 13, 2015, in which 47 Ismaili Shias were killed and another 13 were injured. He was also convicted on the charge of murder of the prominent Pakistani women’s rights activist Sabeen Mahmud on April 24, 2015. Two others who were arrested along with Aziz on May 20, 2015, were Mohammad Azfar Ishrat aka Maajid and Haafiz Nasir aka Yasir. Ishrat is an engineer who had passed out from the Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology and had expertise in bomb-making. He was involved in terrorist activities since 2011. Haafiz Nasir, who completed Master of Arts (MA) in Islamic Studies from University of Karachi, had been involved in terrorist activities since 2013.

Similarly, Noreen Leghari (19), a second-year Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) student of Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS) in Jamshoro District of Sindh, was implicated for her ties with the IS. Leghari was arrested on April 14, 2017, during a raid on an IS hideout in the Punjab Housing Society in the Factory Area of Lahore, in which one militant, Ali Tariq (32), was killed while four soldiers, including two officers, were wounded in the exchange of gunfire. The IS terrorists were planning an attack on the Christian religious festival of Easter on April 16. Leghari claimed on May 8, 2017, that she was being held captive by Ali Tariq to be used as suicide bomber. During a confessional interview on Channel 92 News, she said,

When I was told that I was to be used as a suicide bomber, I objected and told them I was only interested in migration [to Syria]. But I was told … You must do it. Just chant ‘Allah o Akbar’ (God is Great) and explode your suicide vest. When the army raided our house, I was rescued.

Noreen Leghari is the daughter of Dr. Abdul Jabbar Leghari, Professor at the Dr. M.A. Kazi Institute of Chemistry in Jamshoro. Noreen Leghari had reportedly run away from Hyderabad (Sindh) to Lahore on February 10, 2017, hoping to join IS in Syria. She came to Lahore to meet Ali Tariq, a resident of Baidian Road, Lahore, whom she had contacted through social media. On reaching Lahore they got married and started living in rented a house in the Punjab Society.

Alarmed over the growing involvement of university students’ in terrorist activities in Karachi, the Sindh Police’s Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) summoned the Vice-Chancellors of 11 universities in Karachi on July 9, 2017, in a bid to counter extremism and terrorism. CTD Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Raja Omar Khattab, however, clarified, “Basically, we have not summoned the vice-chancellors, but invited them to join us so we can brief them on serious matters.”

Later, on July 12, 2017, CTD organised a seminar titled ‘Growing radicalisation in educational institutions’ at the Central Police Office in Karachi which was attended by Vice Chancellors and other officials of around 40 varsities, both private and public. Speaking at the seminar, CTD chief Additional Inspector General (IG) Dr. Sanaullah Abbasi noted,

Radicalisation [is] growing at academic institutes with the CTD assessing that the next generation of militants [is] more likely to have university education rather than a madrassa background. The recent cases of Noreen Leghari and Saad Aziz gave credence to this theory.

CTD Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Operations, Munir Ahmed Shaikh further pointed out, “Small pockets of radicalisation [are] emerging in academic institutes. There [is] a thin line between preaching and radicalisation.”

CTD’s SSP (Intelligence) Omar Shahid Hamid added that the Department had assessed that youth who had been radicalised at academic institutions were “sophisticated and trained” and warned, “Radicalisation is growing and we fear that the militants are more likely to emerge from secular academic institutes.”

During the July 12 seminar, leading academicians had called for a coordinated and strong policy to check the extremism that they believed was not limited to conventional madrasas (seminaries) but could now be found in reputed public and private educational institutions, negating the ‘myth’ that radicalisation was a product of poverty and illiteracy. Questions were raised about the efficacy of intelligence agencies in curbing radicalisation despite their presence on campuses. Dr. Roshan Rashidi Acting Vice Chancellor of of DUET questioned the role of 10-12 intelligence agencies’ personnel operating at each Varsity, if they could not detect extremism and terrorism there. Mohammad Salih, Director of the People’s Medical University in Nawabshah District, argued that agencies’ personnel were ‘interfering’ in their administration and financial affairs, but were not fulfilling their role in preventing militancy on campus.

The State apparatus has long been aware of growing radicalisation among the youth in educational institutions as well as of militant outfits luring educated students to join them. The recent incidents, however, demonstrate the Government’s comprehensive failure to curb the growing menace.

*Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate; Institute for Conflict Management

By Giriraj Bhattacharjee*

The Supreme Court on September 1, 2017, dismissed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) moved by the Meghalaya Government for the cancellation of bail granted to Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) founder ‘chairman’ Pakchara R. Sangma aka Champion Sangma. The Apex Court rejected the plea arguing that, since Sangma was already in jail under other charges, the plea was infructuous.

The Court of the District and Sessions Judge in Shillong had granted Pakchara Sangma conditional bail on February 22, 2017, on the surety of INR 100,000, in one of the cases in which he had been charged. Further, on May 5, 2017, the Meghalaya High Court had upheld the decision, rejecting the Meghalaya Government’s plea for cancellation of bail.

The GNLA ‘chairman’ was booked under the Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act (MPDA) by the District Administrations of East and West Garo Hills after his reported arrest on July 30, 2012, from the Umkrem-Pyrdiwah axis area by the Special Cell of Meghalaya Police, along the India-Bangladesh border in the East Khasi Hills District.

Though no one has replaced Sangma as ‘chairman’ since his arrest, the outfit has since been led by its ‘commander-in-chief’ Sohan D. Shira. Shira, who was earlier with Achik National Volunteer Council (ANVC), broke away after the ANVC entered into negotiations with the Government and, along with Sangma, formed GNLA in 2009. Sangma had joined the Meghalaya Police in 2004, but reportedly deserted the Force in 2009 to join the insurgency.

According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), since its formation GNLA has been involved in at least 184 fatalities (74 civilians, 28 Security Force (SF) personnel, and 82 GNLA cadres, data till September 10, 2017). In the current year, thus far, the outfit has been involved in at least seven incidents of killing resulting in seven fatalities (two civilians, and five GNLA cadres). In the most recent incidents, on August 2, 2017, suspected GNLA militants killed a farmer, identified as Olget R. Marak (53), at Oripur in the Dambuk Aga area of South Garo Hills District. Overall insurgency-related fatalities in the Meghalaya stand at eight (two civilians and six militants) in the current year.

In the corresponding period of 2016, GNLA was involved in at least 10 incidents of killing leading to 10 fatalities (three civilians and seven GNLA cadres). Overall insurgency-related fatalities in the state stood at 20 (eight civilians, one SF trooper, and 11 militants) in the corresponding period of that year. Group identities of the assailants of the lone trooper and the remaining five civilians could not be ascertained.

The menace of GNLA violence, though it persists, has seen significant decline. In particular, the Garo Hills region – consisting of East Garo Hills District, West Garo Hills District, North Garo Hills District, South Garo Hills District and South West Garo Hills District – where the GNLA has been more active and has been the epicenter of insurgency in Meghalaya, is now experiencing relative peace.

In 2017, out of eight fatalities (two civilians and six militants) recorded in the Meghalaya; at least five (two civilians and three militants) were reported from the Garo Hills region, accounting for 71.4 per cent of total fatalities. GNLA was confirmed to be involved in seven (two civilians and five militants) out of these eight fatalities.

In the corresponding period of 2016, out of 20 fatalities (eight civilians, one trooper, and 11 militants) recorded in the state; at least 12 (two civilians, one trooper, and nine militants) were reported from the Garo Hills region, accounting for 60 per cent of total fatalities. GNLA was confirmed to be involved in seven (two civilians and five militants) out of these 12 fatalities.

Indeed, the reign of terror unleashed by the GNLA has been brought under significant control by SFs. The major reason for this dramatic improvement in the security situation has been the sustained multi-phase counter insurgency (CI) campaign codenamed Operation Hill Storm (OHS) launched by SFs on July 11, 2014, and which is still continuing. The fourth and latest phase, OHS-4, was launched on September 22, 2016, to flush out the last remaining leaders and cadres of GNLA in the five Garo Hills Districts and adjoining West Khasi Hills Districts. Six militants (five GNLA cadres and the ‘chairman’ of the disbanded United Achik Liberation Army) were killed in 2017. Also, during this period, four GNLA militants were arrested and 15 GNLA militants surrendered. At least 10 GNLA militants were killed, 37 were arrested and 94 surrendered through 2016. Under sustained pressure, the entire ‘northern command’ of GNLA consisting 13 militants surrendered on May 5, 2016. These operations have drastically affected GNLA, with an estimated strength of just 30 cadres remaining.

Top security officials confirm that GNLA’s influence is fast disintegrating. Chief Security Advisor to the State Government, former Director General of Police (DGP) Rajiv Mehta, asserted on August 2, 2017, that GNLA was ‘well past its prime’ and it was just a matter of time before it is ‘totally obliterated’: “We are getting to sort out the GNLA very soon… I think the Police are giving final touches to their plan to sort these militants.”

Indeed, the vast improvement of the security situation in the State, particular in dealing with GNLA, has principally been due to SF successes. There is, however, little room for complacency as the GNLA commander-in-chief’ Sohan Shira remains at large. Shira had fled to Bangladesh due to SF pressure, following an encounter at Rongsu in South Garo Hills on June 27, 2017, during which his personal ‘bodyguard’, Lukseng Ch Marak, was killed. He has reportedly returned to the Garo Hills.

Meghalaya is augmenting its capacities to deal with militant formations by raising and deploying Special Forces of the Meghalaya Police. The second batch of the Meghalaya Police’s Special Multi-Task Force (SMTF) better known as Special Force-10 (SF-10) commando force was inducted on August 4, 2017. SF-10 is a leading force in the counter insurgency operations in the State and its first batch of 223 commandos and 115 rangers entered the service on October 6, 2016.

Sustained CI operations against GNLA have considerably weakened the militant group though its elusive ‘commander-in-chief’, who remains at large and continues to regroup his cadres, remains an issue of concern. Some 90-kilometres of the Indo-Bangladesh border in Meghalaya are yet to be fenced, and gaps in border management need to be plugged in order to deny the rebels an easy escape into neighbouring Bangladesh. Nevertheless, the gains of recent years have been dramatic and there appears to be a sense of commitment to consolidating operations and operational capabilities among the State political and SF leaderships.

* Giriraj Bhattacharjee
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Aung San Suu Kyi, the “great humanitarian,” seems to have run out of integrity as the UN finally confirms that what is happening to the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar is ethnic cleansing.

Suu Kyi has not even had the moral courage to utter a few words of sympathy for the victims. Instead, she could only say: “We have to take care of everybody who is in our country.”

Meanwhile, her spokesman and other mouthpieces launched a campaign of vilification against the Rohingya, accusing them of burning their own villages and fabricating their own rape stories.

But well documented reports give us more than a glimpse of the harrowing reality experienced by the Rohingya. Fleeing refugees who made it to Bangladesh after a nightmarish journey spoke of the murder of children, the rape of women and the burning of villages. Some of these accounts have been verified through satellite images provided by Human Rights Watch, showing wiped out villages throughout the state.

Certainly, the fate of the Rohingya is not entirely new. But what makes it particularity pressing is that the West is now fully on the side of the very government that is carrying out these atrocious acts. And there is a reason for that: Oil.

Massive deposits untapped because of the Western boycott of Myanmar’s junta are now available to the highest bidder. It is a bonanza, and all are invited. Shell, ENI, Total, Chevron and many others are investing large sums, while the Chinese — who dominated Myanmar’s economy for many years — are being slowly pushed out.

It is this wealth, and the need to undermine China’s superpower status in Asia, that has brought the West back and installed Suu Kyi as leader in a country that has never fundamentally changed, but only rebranded itself to pave the road for the return of ‘Big Oil.’

However, the Rohingya are paying the price. Do not let Myanmar’s official propaganda mislead you. The Rohingya are not foreigners, intruders or immigrants. Their kingdom of Arakan dates from the 8th century. They learned about Islam from Arab traders and, with time, it became a Muslim-majority region.

Arakan is Myanmar’s modern-day Rakhine state, where most of the estimated 1.2 million Rohingya still live. The false notion that the Rohingya are outsiders started in 1784 when the King conquered Arakan and forced hundreds of thousands to flee.
Attacks on Rohingya, and constant attempts at driving them out of Rakhine, have continued. This happened after the Japanese defeat of British forces in Burma in 1942; in 1948; after the military takeover in 1962; and in 1977, when the junta drove over 200,000 Rohingya out of their homes to Bangladesh.

In 1982, the junta passed a law that stripped most Rohingya of their citizenship, declaring them illegal in their own country.

The war on the Rohingya began again in 2012. Every single episode, since then, has followed a typical narrative: Clashes between Buddhist nationalists and Rohingya, often leading to tens of thousands of the latter being chased out to the Bay of Bengal, to the jungles and, those who survive, to refugee camps.

Amid international silence, only a few respected figures such as Pope Francis spoke out in support of the Rohingya. They are good people, the Pope said in a deeply moving prayer last February. “They are peaceful people, and they are our brothers and sisters.”

His call for justice was never heeded.

Meanwhile Arab and Muslim countries remained largely silent, despite a public outcry to do something to end the genocide. With access to the reality through their many emissaries on the ground, Western governments know only too well about the indisputable facts, but ignore them anyway. When US, European and Japanese corporations lined up to exploit the treasures of Myanmar, all they needed was the nod of approval from the US government. The Barack Obama administration hailed Myanmar’s opportunities even before the 2015 elections brought Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy to power. After that date, Myanmar became another American success story, oblivious, of course, to the facts that genocide has been underway there for years.

The violence in Myanmar is likely to escalate and reach other ASEAN countries, simply because the two main ethnic and religious groups in these countries are dominated and almost evenly split between Buddhists and Muslims.

The triumphant return of the West to exploit Myanmar’s wealth and the US-Chinese rivalries are likely to complicate the situation even further, if ASEAN does not end its appalling silence and move with a determined strategy to pressure the Myanmar government to end its genocide of the Rohingya.

People around the world must take a stand. Religious communities should speak out. Human rights groups should do more to document the crimes of the Myanmar government and hold to account those who supply them with weapons.

Respected South African Bishop Desmond Tutu had strongly admonished Suu Kyi for turning a blind eye to the ongoing genocide.

It is the least we expect from the man who stood up to apartheid in his own country, and wrote the famous words: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

By Maria Dubovikova*

Relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia are trapped in a challenge that can hardly be overcome in the short term. A close ally of the US for many years, Saudi Arabia is at the forefront of American influence even as it is being pitted against Russia on many issues in the region.

In the recent Gulf crisis, many considered that Russia appeared to be on the side of Qatar, as Doha and Moscow have succeeded in building strong and successful economic, business and political relations in the past years, which have been mutually profitable for both states. Russia also has strong ties with Iran and is looking forward to strengthening them further.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Saudi Arabia on Sunday came several weeks before the long anticipated visit of King Salman to Russia.

Vladimir Putin has visited Riyadh once, in 2007. The invitation to visit Moscow had to wait for 10 years for different reasons. Previous expected visits were canceled by one side or the other — keeping bilateral relations in a bit of an up and down cycle. The reasons for cancelations were numerous, including the lack of a positive agenda and common ground, and an insufficient number of agreements and projects to discuss that could make the visit useful.

The Syrian conflict, which has had a deep impact not only on the region but the whole world, has placed Moscow and Riyadh on different sides of the spectrum and their positions have not moved closer in the past six years. Even despite what many describe as the visible success of the Syrian Regime, which has achieved victories thanks to significant support of few but influential allies, Riyadh seems stands strong on the same positions that it held from the start: Assad has to step down and he has no political future in Syria.

This position was restated by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir after his talks with his Russian counterpart on Sunday in Jeddah. Al-Jubeir also said Riyadh wants to end what he called Iran’s meddling in the Middle East. Positive evaluations of the Astana peace talks, sponsored by Iran, Russia and Turkey, were nearly subjected to another dose of criticism as Iran has a hand in them. Riyadh was against widening of the list of participants in the talks in the Kazakh capital.

Moscow believes the fate of Assad must be decided in a free and democratic election. Moreover, Iran is a vital partner — regardless of the fact that it is clearly complicating the regional situation and Syria’s war settlement and taking into account the deep concerns of some of its neighbors (that are sometimes expressed with air attacks on Assad’s forces along the borders). These are the toughest remaining contradictions that despite being referred to by Lavrov as surmountable, remain hardly solvable if only one side is willing to make serious concessions.

Moreover, Lavrov’s visit is predetermined by a need to figure out the Saudi stance on the ongoing peace processes in Syria, whether there is room for change in Riyadh’s position, and the possible scenarios resulting from the Saudi position.

Lavrov’s visit to Jordan, which follows his visit to Saudi Arabia, is not accidental. Jordan has gained a unique status in the region as a guarantor of peace and stability, having taken the most pragmatic and reasonable positions. The peace process developing now in Syria has become possible largely thanks to Russia’s cooperation with Jordan establishing the peace zones. With Jordan, Moscow has succeeded in establishing strong and reliable ties, based on mutual respect and cooperation on reaching common interests and establishing vital stability in the region without any conditions.

This outcome has yet to be reached between Saudi Arabia and Russia. At the moment they share common ground in the field of energy resources — with both countries interested in keeping the price of oil at acceptable levels. Both have a strong incentive for cooperation in technology and science fields, as Russia’s achievements and possibilities in these fields may be attractive for developing the science cities, which are one of the pillars of the SaudiVision 2030.

Investment projects and trade agreements are also possible, and may be mutually profitable. But whatever the economically profitable agreements are, the Kremlin will hardly change course when it comes to politics in the region, as this is determined not only by geopolitical ambitions, but also by vital national interests.

Russia is gaining ground in the region and has serious political achievements, having — I believe — outplayed the West and its regional allies. The ongoing rapprochement between Russia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran is becoming a game changer in the region and globally, guaranteeing to the quartet strong positions, even while each is under extreme pressure from the others. And the stronger the pressure on them, the closer they become, forming a truly threatening force for the interests and games of the regional players and the West, which is on the other side of barricades. Their unity is their guarantee for their own safety. And for Russia it is a guarantee for the fastening of its regional positions and, potentially, progressive strengthening of its influence in the Middle East.

Russia-Saudi relations can successfully develop only if both sides learn to put their eggs in different baskets and do not ask for benefits in one field in return for concessions or bargains in the other. Politics is politics. Economy is economy.

• Maria Dubovikova is a prominent political commentator, researcher and expert on Middle East affairs. She is president of the Moscow-based International Middle Eastern Studies Club (IMESClub). Twitter: @politblogme

Steve Bannon recently called Trump’s firing of James Comey the biggest political mistake in modern political history. But it was more than that. It was outright obstruction of justice – another impeachable offense to add to the impeachable offenses Trump has already committed (violation of the Constitution’s “emolument’s clause,” failure to faithfully execute the laws, and abuse of power).

Obstruction of justice was among the articles of impeachment drafted against both Presidents Nixon and Clinton. The parallel between Nixon and Trump is almost exact. White House tapes revealed Nixon giving instructions to pressure the acting FBI director into halting the Watergate investigation.

It’s worth recalling that two weeks after Trump told Comey privately “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” he had another private meeting with Comey in the Oval Office. After shooing out his advisers – all of whom had top security clearance – Trump said to Comey, according to Comey’s memo written shortly after the meeting,“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Then on May 9, Trump fired Comey. In a subsequent interview with NBC Trump said he planned to fire Comey “regardless of [the] recommendation” of the Attorney and Deputy Attorney General, partly because of “this Russia thing.” Trump also revealed in the interview that he had had several conversations with Comey about the Russia investigation, and had asked Comey if he was under investigation.

The federal crime of obstruction of justice applies to “[w]hoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law” in a proceeding or investigation by a government department or agency or Congress.

As in Nixon’s case, a decision to support an “inquiry of impeachment” resolution in the House—to start an impeachment investigation—doesn’t depend on sufficient evidence to convict a person of obstruction of justice, but simply probable cause to believe a president may have obstructed justice.

There’s already more than enough evidence of probable cause to begin that impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump.

Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously counseled politicians to never let a crisis go to waste. Sadly, this week President Trump and congressional leaders of both parties showed that they have taken this advice to heart when they attached a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government spending to the over 15 billion dollars Hurricane Harvey relief bill.

This maneuver enabled Congress to avoid a contentious debate over whether to pass a clean debt ceiling increase or to pair it with spending cuts. After all, few members of Congress want to be accused of blocking a bipartisan deal to help those suffering from Harvey over what the media will spin as a “right-wing anti-government” crusade.

Combining hurricane relief with a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government funding had bipartisan support. Days before President Trump sat down with Democrats to hammer out a deal, Capitol Hill was abuzz with talk about a Senate GOP plan to attach a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government funding to the hurricane bill.

If, as was reported in the media, the GOP leadership objected to Trump’s deal, they could have refused to bring it up for a vote. After all, as Senator John McCain wrote this week, Congress does not work for President Trump. But, the deal quickly passed in the House and the Senate with large bipartisan majorities. As is common in DC, the parties agreed on the principle, and they only squabbled over the details.

A refusal to raise the debt ceiling would not cause the government to default; it would simply force Congress to set spending priorities and make real spending cuts. In contrast, raising the debt ceiling allows Congress to continue to run up more debt in order to grow the government. The American people will pay for these deficits either directly through an increase in the income tax and other federal taxes, or indirectly through the inflation tax.

The inflation tax results from the Federal Reserve’s monetization of the federal debt, which devalues the currency. At some point, probably sooner than most expect, this continued dollar devaluation will cause a global revolt against the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The result will be an economic crisis that could make the Great Depression seem like a mild downturn.

There are reports that President Trump may soon seek legislation abolishing the debt ceiling. This would put the growth of government spending and debt on autopilot and make a mockery of his promise to drain the swamp. It would also hasten America’s economic day of reckoning.

No one in his right mind would think it responsible to continuously increase a deadbeat shopaholic’s credit limit, much less eliminate the limit altogether. So why is it considered responsible for the ultimate deadbeat — the US government — to continuously increase its own credit limit and even propose giving itself unlimited credit, especially given the dire consequences of unchecked growth in federal spending and debt?

We are running out of time to avoid a major economic crisis. Congress must immediately begin cutting spending. New spending for legitimate emergencies must be paid for with spending cuts. Overseas militarism and corporate welfare should be the first items on the chopping block. Domestic welfare spending should be gradually deceased so as not to hurt those dependent on the programs. Reducing the size and scope of government is the only way to stop the swamp from draining our prosperity and our liberty.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

China’s growing military profile in Africa is following its economic footprint in the continent as exemplified by the Chinese “logistics support base” in Djibouti. It is moving towards an ever more expansive definition of its global interests, as its business in Africa pushes it to create new mechanisms for securing those interests, including its own growing military footprint abroad. This brief examines the changing nature of China’s involvement with the continent, analysing the present economic priorities and how they have motivated China to play a larger role in African peace and security.

By Harsh V. Pant and Ava M. Haidar*

On 11 July 2017, China sent military troops to Djibouti to help set up its newly constructed naval base in the tiny African nation.^[i] The two vessels, carrying Chinese troops and departing from China’s Zhanjiang port, were the Jinggangshan and Donghai Island; the former is an amphibious transport vessel, able to load helicopters, special troops and serve in protective convoys, and the latter is capable of rescue missions and assistance in ship repair. The construction of the Djibouti naval base—China’s first military base abroad—has generated varied reactions around the world. The base is seen as a move pushing China’s own limits to its foreign policy, and underscores its growing security profile in Africa.

Referred to as a “logistics support base”^[ii] by the Chinese Defence Ministry, this new facility in Djibouti is designed to “carry out cooperation with and provide assistance to Djibouti in the areas of international peacekeeping, personnel training, medical service, equipment maintenance, and emergency rescue and disaster relief.”^[iii] Since 2008, the Chinese Navy has been involved in anti-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden, and the Djibouti base is intended to provide logistical support for those activities. The Global Times has highlighted other benefits derived from the base,^[iv] such as rent money and jobs for Djiboutians, protection for China’s plans under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), provision of food supplies to ships, and an insurance against disruption by the local population.

This new military foray in Africa, as explained by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a press conference in 2016, was part of China’s willingness to “play a constructive role in the political settlement of international and regional issues, so as to create a more secure and stable environment for China’s development overseas”, and to “take on more international security responsibilities.”^[v] “China will not take the old path of expansionism followed by traditional powers”, said Wang at the same event.

Chinese sources have often asserted that the foreign policy of their country is “defensive” in nature, and does not support military expansion. Nonetheless, some countries feel threatened by its new presence in Africa. In India, reports reflect a concern for the country’s vulnerability to its northern neighbour’s military activity in the Indian Ocean region.^[vi] The US, for its part, worries that its own activities are now open to Chinese surveillance.^[vii] Camp Lemonnier, the American military base in Djibouti, is only a few miles away from the new Chinese base.

Indeed, China’s growing military profile in Africa is following its economic footprint in the continent.^[viii] Over the last two decades, Beijing has been investing significantly in developing economic linkages with Africa.

Trade and Aid

One can gauge Sino-African relations by observing the upward trend in aid and trade since the 1990s. From just US$1 billion in 1992, the value of trade between China and Africa was recorded at a huge US$220 billion in 2014, and by 2020, it is expected to grow further to US$400 billion. Of this, US$100 billion is in direct investments.^[ix] The China Exim Bank provided US$63 billion in loans to almost all countries in Africa from 2000-2015,^[x] and the “contractual value of contracted projects” signed by Chinese commercial bodies and African nations between January and November of 2016 amounted to over US$65 billion.^[xi]

The present terms of engagement between China and Africa are perhaps best understood through the Johannesburg Action Plan (2016-18),^[xii] formulated in the 2015 summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). This extensive plan calls for the enhancement of cooperation in various areas including high-level visits and dialogue, infrastructure development, agricultural assistance, trade, financial aid, humanitarian contribution, education, science and technology, environmental protection, cultural exchange and promotion, and military and security. Personnel training, capacity building and exchange of information accompany aid partnership in these sectors.

Two key areas in this bilateral relationship deserve more attention: infrastructural development and energy. While the former is crucial to Africa’s needs, the latter is one of China’s most important imports.

While China and Africa have only tentatively agreed to formulate a China-Africa Railway Cooperation Action Plan (2016-2020), Chinese companies have already been making huge investments in Africa’s railway sector. For example, the China Road and Bridge Corporation, China Civil and Engineering Construction Company, and China Communications, among other corporations, have signed contracts since 2011 for the development of railway lines spanning Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. These connections are expected to boost access to and transport of resources like bauxite, iron ore and uranium, increase convenience of travel, facilitate the transport of goods, open up landlocked regions to ports, and create employment for locals. Beneficial to the African people first, railways will surely serve the interests of other Chinese projects across Africa as well.

Speaking of the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway line, the Chinese ambassador last year stated that the railroad was “built with Chinese standards and technology”;^[xiii] such an assertion is noteworthy in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, where the emerging superpower is opening up new economic opportunities by linking domestic regions with its neighbours, as well as parts of Africa and West Asia. Planning important infrastructure in African nations helps China promote a Chinese way of doing things as intrinsic to its own progress. Perhaps it may be said that China is in its early phases of setting standards for development in Africa.

The appeal of a strong partnership with China is also evident in the decision of countries such as Malawi and Gambia to sever their diplomatic ties with Taiwan to earn China’s favour and, subsequently, opportunities for business. True enough, in Malawi, Beijing constructed a parliament building, a national conference center, a five-star hotel, schools and university buildings, presidential villas, roads and boreholes. Local employment was generated for these projects. Further, China and Malawi signed a memorandum of understanding in 2008 in areas of trade and investment, following the end of Malawi’s official relations with Taiwan the previous year.

Gambia, for its part, ended its diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 2013. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang said in March 2016 that China will “conduct mutually beneficial cooperation in six priority areas including agriculture and fishing, processing and manufacturing, facilitation of investment and trade, infrastructure building, human resources development, and people-to-people exchanges.”^[xiv] Then in July 2017, a free trade agreement was signed between Banjul and Beijing. Thus, China has enticed African countries with funding and developmental expertise to advance its agenda.

In Rwanda, skyscrapers, hotels, hospitals, schools, a building for the Rwandan Foreign Ministry, and an overwhelming 80 percent of roads have all been the work of Chinese engineers. China has built roads and a university in Liberia, as well as a hospital in Chad. Also a gift from Beijing is the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, where Chinese Finance Minister Wang announced in June 2017 new infrastructure projects for the continent.^[xv]

The Oil Factor

African countries are the second largest source for China’s crude imports, with China receiving 1.4 million barrels a day, or 22 percent of its total, from the continent.^[xvi] China currently stands as the world’s largest global importer of oil, biggest producer and consumer of energy, and second largest consumer of oil. Its international oil enterprises include Sinopec, China National Petroleum Corporation, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which have operations in many African countries.

The first major Chinese oil investment in Africa was made in Sudan, in 1996. China expanded to Angola in 2004: it gave the country a grant of US$2 billion in aid to build schools and roads, invested in Angolan telecommunication training, and laid a fibre-optic network. In turn, China obtained a major stake in Angola’s future oil production.^[xvii] In the same year, Petro-China and Sinopec signed contracts with Nigeria’s oil companies for supply of oil and development of oilfields and exploration wells. Sudan, Angola and Nigeria were the three countries that started out as China’s largest African partners in energy cooperation.

Today, Chinese oil companies have stakes in Ghana, Egypt, Niger, Gabon, Ethiopia, Namibia, Republic of Congo, and more recently, Chad and Kenya.^[xviii] China (along with India) is Kenya’s first buyer of crude oil, having signed a deal earlier this April.^[xix] Importantly, in 2016, West Asian countries, China’s largest sources of oil, banded under the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut production of oil, as a worldwide supply glut had caused severe depression in oil prices.^[xx] Given the decision to extend these cuts through the first quarter of 2018, as well as high Chinese consumption that stood at 12.4 million barrels a day in 2016,^[xxi] China’s dependency on African oil is likely to grow further in the coming years.

The Sino-African equation reveals itself thus: Africa is resource-rich and pocket-poor, whereas China lacks natural and mineral resources but has tremendous wealth—the yin and yang of a ‘win-win’ partnership. Certainly, aid and business from China have translated to economic support not only for African nations, but for China itself.

The Security Dimension

The flip side of the coin is security. Increasingly, in several African nations, violence and political instability are creating danger for Chinese nationals living or working in these countries, placing strains on Chinese industrial projects and other economic commitments in the region.

Over the last few years, China has had to carry out several evacuations of its citizens amidst civil conflicts. In 2008, for instance, over 200 Chinese nationals were evacuated from Chad after heavy fighting broke out between rebel forces and the government.^[xxii] Four years later, activities carried out by armed rebels in the Central African Republic (CAR) also prompted China to take action, where its diplomatic mission started its “round-the-clock emergency response mechanism followed closely the situation and coordinated the evacuation of Chinese nationals based on the voluntary principle.”^[xxiii] Some 239 Chinese nationals were put on flights to neighbouring countries like Sudan, Angola and Cameroon.

The most prominent of these operations was carried out in Libya, an energy partner of China’s, following the outbreak of anti-Gaddafi protests in February 2011. On 25 February that year, China deployed a frigate to evacuate its citizens from the region; the deployment of Xuzhou, a modern navy “warship, marked the first time China pressed into service its military to protect citizens abroad.”^[xxiv] The evacuation was coordinated between government agencies and Chinese companies like China Rail Construction and China National Petroleum Corporation. By 3 March 2011, 35,000 Chinese nationals were successfully moved to safety through chartered and military aircrafts, buses and merchant vessels. In 2014, China again had to evacuate citizens from Libya.

For these woes, China has little sympathy to expect in the Western media. Indeed, its activities in Africa have been called nothing short of “economic imperialism”.^[xxv] Amongst the African people, too, China is viewed by some quarters as being responsible for their civil problems. “China is trading petroleum for our blood,” once said Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality movement in Sudan.^[xxvi] Khartoum receives major financial support from China; of this, more than two-thirds are reportedly channeled to Sudan’s military, aiding its forces in suppressing the movement. Ibrahim made this statement after the movement attacked a Chinese-run oilfield, in 2007. In the same year, the Ogaden National Liberation Front in Ethiopia struck at the base camp of the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau, killing nine Chinese and 65 Ethiopian workers.^[xxvii] Five years later, Collum mining workers killed their Chinese boss over a pay dispute in Zambia.^[xxviii] There have been incidents of Chinese workers being kidnapped in several countries, such as in Sudan, where rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement from the north captured 29 of them from the camp of a Chinese hydropower company.^[xxix] They were later released. Workers from China have also been kidnapped in Egypt and Nigeria. Besides facing these direct threats, Chinese nationals are also getting caught in the crossfire between extremists and state forces.

Following the killing of three Chinese railway company executives in Mali by Maghreb terrorists in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that “China will strengthen cooperation with the international community”^[xxx] to tackle terrorism. It has provided arms and funds to governments in Nigeria and Cameroon to take down the Boko Haram, and in Somalia to fight the al-Shabaab. Chinese weapons have also been given to Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Chad—all destinations for Chinese exports and spaces of energy extraction by China.^[xxxi]

China now has reason to move away from its long-held foreign policy of non-intervention to shield its own stakes in Africa from harm. It has to protect its workers and interests in the continent and respond to attacks. Beyond supplying arms to African governments, China is slowly changing how it operates in the continent to combat the issues of anti-Chinese movements, terrorist groups, local opposition, and general political turmoil in order to ensure the safety of its African spoils. Does this mean, however, that it will move beyond its own concerns to incorporate international security as part of a broader approach towards Africa?

In 2000, China established with Africa the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) conference, signaling its intent to give greater importance to its security engagement with the continent. Over the last decade, China has contributed US$11 million for the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, US$1.8 million to the AU’s peacekeeping mission, US$300,000 to the Kenyan Red Cross, and US$300,000 to the AU for the African Union Mission for peace-keeping in Somalia. It has also sent 435 soldiers, nine police officers and 14 observers for the UN Mission in Somalia,^[xxxii] and appointed a special representative to the AU and to Sudan.

It was at the 2012 FOCAC conference that the then President of China, Hu Jintao, pledged measures to “support the cause of peace and development in Africa and boost a new type of China-Africa strategic partnership.”^[xxxiii] He also proposed to launch the “Initiative on China-Africa Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Security”, backing greater cooperation with the AU, funds for forces like the African Standby Force, and training of more officials in peace and security.

Three years later, at the 2015 summit, through the Johannesburg Action Plan for 2016-18, China promised US$60 million in military assistance and support to security mechanisms such as the standby force, as well as crisis response. Among these contributions were joint exercises, expansion of personnel training, exchanges in technology and intelligence, and strengthening cooperation on anti-piracy efforts.^[xxxiv] These new agreements outline China’s official security commitment to Africa today, and demonstrate an expansion of military cooperation between the continent and China.

Further, China is aggressively expanding its arms export market, becoming the third largest exporter of arms after the US and Russia. China’s share of global arms exports rose from 3.8 to 6.2 percent between 2007-11 and 2012-16, a growth rate that is more than that recorded by France and Germany.^[xxxv] This growth is a reflection of the expanding market for Chinese arms equipment and the export-oriented domestic defence manufacturing.  A noticeable trend in this context has been the increasing Chinese arms exports to the African continent. China is increasingly making inroads in the African markets as more than “two-thirds of the entire continent operate equipment of Chinese origin, with at least ten new operators emerging within the last decade.”^[xxxvi] This has been rapidly increasing in recent years, with Chinese arms exports to states in Africa growing by almost 122 percent from 2007-11 to 2012-16.^[xxxvii] Chinese exports seem to be filling a growing void in the African defence market that was once filled, in the post-Cold War era, by cheap surplus Soviet-era systems from the inventories of former Warsaw Pact states.^[xxxviii]  This increasing China’s arms trade with Africa is another reflection of the growing influence of China in the region.

Although China may rank eleventh amongst the largest contributors to UN’s peacekeeping operations, it deploys more peacekeepers than any other P5 member, and is the second largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget. China has dispatched 2,436 troops, 30 military experts, and 173 police—for a total of 2,639 personnel—as per UN statistics as of August 2016.^[xxxix] Since 2008, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has policed the Gulf of Aden to combat piracy with Somalia, and has deployed the ‘Peace Ark’, a medical ship that provides free healthcare to countries like Djibouti, Kenya and Seychelles. President Xi declared in 2015^[xl] at the UN that China would set up a permanent peacekeeping force, and a standby force of 8,000 troops in Africa, and grant US$100 million in military aid over the next five years. China has combat troops in Mali and South Sudan. Namibia is also a consumer of Chinese fighter aircraft.^[xli]

Finally, the crisis in South Sudan showcases an important, albeit isolated case of China’s practice in international peace-making. South Sudan is yet another site of Chinese oil investment. As noted earlier in this brief, China commissioned a Special Representative on African Affairs in 2007, a position currently held by Zhong Jianhua. Since 2012, China has been part of the reconciliation process between the government and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in South Sudan. Chinese officials have made direct contact with the non-state actors in the situation, implying a possible deviation from China’s commitment to non-intervention. This was addressed by Zhong in an interview^[xlii] where he stated that while China was making an effort to sustain its policy of non-interference, it was stepping up efforts in South Sudan by communicating with rebel forces.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang saw things differently; he has asserted that with permission from the South Sudanese government, Chinese officials were talking to the rebels, and that former President Hu’s pledges at the 2012 FOCAC conference were based on the understanding that contributing to African peace was a requisite for African development.

Zhong personally addressed the rebel movement, urging its fighters to place the development of the country first and allow the oilfields to function; at the time of the interview, China had about 300 of its nationals running the oilfields. Zhong said that Chinese efforts in the situation were not only about protecting Chinese interests, and proceeded to mention the various areas of military cooperation between China and Africa.

It is clear that China’s role in Africa is evolving; the naval base in Djibouti is only one example of the increasing Chinese security presence in the continent. There are reports that China is planning to build other naval bases on the African coast, such as in Luanda, Lagos, Walvis Bay, and Mombasa—these will serve to strengthen Chinese efforts in crisis response, including in the evacuation of its citizens.

Conclusion

As a rising global power, China is under pressure to have effective and comprehensive military engagements with the rest of the world. No longer can it repose faith in what it calls a non-interventionist foreign policy; China is commercially involved in many conflict zones such as in Africa, and thus, security in the continent is imperative for its continued economic success. The establishment of a naval base in Djibouti, the contribution of funds to African armed forces, the support of the PLA, amongst other recent forms of diplomacy and security cooperation, potentially mean even more to China. It is moving towards an ever more expansive definition of its global interests, as its business in Africa pushes it to create new mechanisms for securing those interests, including its own growing military footprint abroad.

India’s own perception of China’s role in Africa is also evolving rapidly.^[xliii] China’s Djibouti base is feared to form part of the pattern of Chinese naval bases along the Indian Ocean, or ‘string of pearls’, and given the ongoing hostility over the Doklam plateau, India is likely to view China’s growing military footprint as more of a threat than a source of security. Further, while India has had warm and long-held friendships with African countries—having welcomed many of them, when they were newly-decolonised, into the Non-Aligned Movement and presently maintaining cooperation through the India-Africa Forum—trade between them today is valued at a mere US$ 52 billion,^[xliv] dwarfed by China’s plan to reach US$ 400 billion in African trade this year. As China moves deeper into the continent and scales up its involvement, questions arise as to whether India can remain an important partner of African nations, and if there is space for Sino-Indian cooperation in the continent.

*About the Authors
Harsh V. Pant is a Distinguished Fellow and Head of Strategic Studies Programme at ORF.

Ava M. Haidar is a second-year undergraduate student Ashoka University where she intends to study politics. She worked on this brief while she was an intern at ORF.

Source:
This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation

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Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. “Resumption of Diplomatic Ties between China and Gambia.” News release, 17 March, 2016. http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/t1348635.shtml

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See Harsh V Pant, Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 45-50.

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Endnotes:

^[i] “China sets up base in Djibouti”, Xinhua Net, 11 July 2017, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-07/11/c_136435716.htm

^[ii] “PLA establishes base in Horn of Africa”, Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, 12 July 2017, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/news/2017-07/12/content_4785300.htm

^[iii] “China, Djibouti eyes expansion of military cooperation”, Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, 6 December 2016, http://eng.mod.gov.cn/TopNews/2016-12/06/content_4765851.htm

^[iv] Huang Jingjing. “China’s logistic hub in Djibouti to stabilize region, protect interests”, Global Times, 15 March 2016, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/973900.shtml

^[v] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Foreign Minister Wang Yi Meets the Press”, 9 March 2016, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1346238.shtml

^[vi] “China’s military base in Djibouti: Implications for India and rest of the world”, The Times of India, updated 13 July 2017, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/chinas-military-base-in-djibouti-implications-for-india-and-rest-of-the-world/articleshow/59565210.cms

^[vii] Richard Sisk, “China’s First Overseas Military Base Nearing Completion”, Defense Tech, 13 March 2017, https://www.defensetech.org/2017/03/13/chinas-first-overseas-military-base-nearing-completion/

^[viii] An account of China’s growing engagement in Africa can be found in Harsh V Pant, Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 45-50.

^[ix] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Johannesburg Action Plan (2016-2018)”, 25 December 2015, http://www.focac.org/eng/ltda/dwjbzjjhys_1/t1327961.htm

^[x] David Pilling, “Ports and roads mean China is ‘winning in Africa’”, Financial Times, 3 May 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/65591ac0-2f49-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a

^[xi] Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, “China-Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Makes Steady Progress”, news release, 10 February 2017, http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/article/newsrelease/significantnews/201702/2017
0202515699.shtml

^[xii] Min. Foreign Affairs of the PRC, Johannesburg Action Plan.

^[xiii] “Ethiopia – Djibouti railway inaugurated”, Railway Gazette, 5 October 2016, http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/infrastructure/single-view/view/ethiopia-djibouti-railway-inaugurated.html

^[xiv] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Resumption of Diplomatic Ties between China and Gambia”, news release, 17 March 2016, http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/t1348635.shtml

^[xv] “Addressing poverty, sustainable development common agenda of China, Africa: Chinese FM”, Xinhua Net, 22 June 2017, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-06/22/c_136384472.htm

^[xvi] US Energy Information Administration, Country Overview: China, last updated 14 May 2015, https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=CHN

^[xvii] Cyril Obi, “African oil in the energy security calculations of China and India” in The Rise of China & India in Africa (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010), 181-192.

^[xviii] “The race for oil and gas in Africa”, Al Jazeera, 23 October 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2016/10/race-oil-gas-africa-161020104953200.html

^[xix] “China, India swoop on first barrels of Kenyan oil”, Climate Home, 2 May 2017, http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/05/02/china-india-swoop-first-barrels-kenyan-oil/

^[xx] Jessica Resnick-Ault, “Oil retreats on concerns about OPEC oversupply”, Reuters, 3 August 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-idUSKBN1AJ05F

^[xxi] Statista, Oil consumption in China from 1998 to 2016 (in 1,000 barrels per day), accessed 4 August 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/265235/oil-consumption-in-china-in-thousand-barrels-per-day/

^[xxii] “Chinese FM organizes overseas evacuation out of Chad”, Xinhua Net, 3 February 2008, http://www.china.org.cn/english/international/241878.htm

^[xxiii] Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of Iran, “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying’s Regular Press Conference”, news release, 31 December 2012, http://ir.china-embassy.org/eng/fyrth/t1002945.htm

^[xxiv] Gabe Collins and Andrew S. Erickson, “Implications of China’s Military Evacuation of Citizens from Libya”, China Brief Volume 11, Issue 4, The Jamestown Foundation, 11 March 2011, https://jamestown.org/program/implications-of-chinas-military-evacuation-of-citizens-from-libya/

^[xxv] Mark Esposito, Terence Tse, Merit Al-Sayed, “Recolonizing Africa: A modern Chinese story?”, CNBC, 30 December 2014, https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/recolonizing-africa-a-modern-chinese-story.html

^[xxvi] Alfred de Montesquiou, “Darfur Rebels Claim Attack in Oil Field”, Washington Post, 11 December 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121101384_pf.html

^[xxvii] “9 Chinese workers killed in Ethiopia”, China Daily, last updated 24 April 2007, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-04/24/content_858956.htm

^[xxviii] “Zambian miners kill Chinese manager during pay protest”, BBC, 5 August 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-19135435

^[xxix] Peter Shadbolt, “Kidnapped Chinese workers released in Sudan”, CNN International Edition, 7 February 2012, http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/07/world/africa/sudan-hostages/index.html

^[xxx] “China condemns Mali attack with three Chinese among the dead”, Reuters, 21 November 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/mali-attacks-china-idUSL3N13G04E20151121

^[xxxi] Mathieu Duchâtel, Richard Gowan and Manuel Lafont Rapnouil, “Into Africa: China’s Global Security Shift”, European Council on Foreign Relations, 2016, http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/Into_Africa_China’s_global_security_shift_PDF_1135.pdf

^[xxxii] Kwesi Aning, “China and Africa: towards a new security relationship”, inThe Rise of China & India in Africa (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010), 150.

^[xxxiii] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Fifth Ministerial Conference of FOCAC opens further China-Africa cooperation”, 23 July 2012, http://www.focac.org/eng/dwjbzjjhys/t954274.htm

^[xxxiv] Min. Foreign Affairs of the PRC, Johannesburg Action Plan.

^[xxxv] SIPRI, ‘Increase in arms transfer driven by demand in Middle East and Asia’, February 20, 2017 https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2017/increase-arms-transfers-driven-demand-middle-east-and-asia-says-sipri

^[xxxvi] Joseph Dempsey, ‘China’s increasing inroads into African Markets’, Military Balance Blog, IISS February 17, 2016  https://www.iiss.org/en/militarybalanceblog/blogsections/2016-629e/february-f0ed/chinas-increasing-inroads-into-the-african-defence-market-e8d3

^[xxxvii] SIPRI, ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2016’, February, 2017, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/Trends-in-international-arms-transfers-2016.pdf

^[xxxviii] Joseph Dempsey, ‘China’s increasing inroads into African Markets’, Military Balance Blog, IISS February 17, 2016  https://www.iiss.org/en/militarybalanceblog/blogsections/2016-629e/february-f0ed/chinas-increasing-inroads-into-the-african-defence-market-e8d3

^[xxxix] Dennis J. Blasko, “China’s Contribution to Peacekeeping Operations: Understanding the Numbers”, China Brief Volume 16, Issue 18, The Jamestown Foundation, 5 December 2016, https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-contribution-peacekeeping-operation-understanding-numbers/

^[xl] “Chinese president pledges support for UN peacekeeping”, China Military Online, 29 September 2015, http://english.chinamil.com.cn/news-channels/china-military-news/2015-09/29/content_6703853.htm

^[xli] André du Pisani, “Namibia and China: Profile and appraisal of a relationship”, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2014, http://www.kas.de/upload/Publikationen/2014/namibias_foreign_relations/Namibias
_Foreign_Relations_pisani.pdf

^[xlii] Peter Fabricius, “Should China’s new approach to Africa be labelled ‘non-interference with Chinese characteristics’?”, Institute for Security Studies, 6 November 2014, https://issafrica.org/iss-today/beijings-peacemaking-efforts-in-south-sudan

^[xliii] For an assessment of China’s role in Indian foreign policy calculus vis-à-vis Africa, see Harsh V Pant, Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 45-50.

^[xliv] “Bid to boost India, Africa trade ties”, The Hindu, last updated 21 May 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/bid-to-boost-india-africa-trade-ties/article18519609.ece

In 1974, images acquired from NOAA satellites revealed a puzzling phenomenon: a 250,000 square kilometer opening in the winter sea ice in the Weddell Sea, south of South America. The opening, known as a polynya, persisted over three winters. Such expansive ice-free areas in the ocean surrounding Antarctica have not been seen since, though a small polynya was seen last year.

In a new analysis of climate models, researchers from the University of Pennslyvania, Spain’s Institute of Marine Sciences and Johns Hopkins University reveal the significant global effects that these seemingly anomalous polynyas can have. Their findings indicate that heat escaping from the ocean through these openings impacts sea and atmospheric temperatures and wind patterns around the globe and even rainfall around the tropics. Though this process is part of a natural pattern of climate variability, it has implications for how the global climate will respond to future anthropogenic warming.

“This small, isolated opening in the sea ice in the Southern Ocean can have significant, large-scale climate implications,” said Irina Marinov, a study author and assistant professor in Penn’s Department of Earth and Enviromental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences. “Climate models suggest that, in years and decades with a large polynya, the entire atmosphere warms globally, and we see changes in the winds in the Southern Hemisphere and a southward shift in the equatorial rain belt. This is attributable to the polynya.”

The study appears in the Journal of Climate. Marinov coauthored the work with Anna Cabre, a former postdoc in Marinov’s lab and now an oceanographer with the Institue of Marine Sciences in Barcelona, and Anand Gnanadesikan, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at Johns Hopkins.

Typically, the Southern Ocean is covered in ice during the Southern Hemisphere’s

winter. Polynyas occur when warm subsurface waters of North Atlantic and equatorial origin mix locally with cold surface waters, a process known as open-ocean convection.

Until recently, climate scientists and oceanographers believed that atmospheric and ocean conditions around the tropics were the primary drivers in affecting conditions outside the tropics. But in the last few years, Marinov and collaborators and others have shown that the opposite is also true: the Southern Ocean has an important role in affecting tropical and Northern Hemisphere climates.

In the current work, Marinov and colleagues used powerful models that simulate past and future climate to determine how the effects of polynya ripple out around the globe.

Their model indicated that polynyas and accompanying open-ocean convection occur roughly every 75 years. When they occur, the researchers observed, they act as a release valve for the ocean’s heat. Not only does the immediate area warm, but there are also increases in overall sea-surface and atmospheric temperatures of the entire Southern Hemisphere and, to a lesser extent, the Northern Hemisphere, as well.

Changes in north-south temperature gradients lead to changes in wind patterns as well.

“We are seeing a decrease in what we call the Southern Hemisphere westerlies and changes in trade winds,” Marinov said. “And these winds affect storms, precipitation and clouds.”

Among these changes in precipitation is a shift in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, an equatorial belt where trade winds converge, resulting in intense precipitation. When a polynya occurs, this rain belt moves south a few degrees and stays there for 20 to 30 years before shifting back.

“This affects water resources in, for example, Indonesia, South America and sub-Saharan Africa,” said Marinov. “We have a natural variation in climate that may be, among other effects, impacting agricultural production in heavily populated regions of the world.”

Given these broad-scale implications of a Southern Ocean phenomenon, Marinov underscores the need to increase monitoring in the region. She is part of an effort called SOCCOM, for Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, placing robotic floats in the Southern Ocean to collect data on ocean temperature, salinity, carbon, nutrients and oxygen.

“We’re also urging people to keep a close eye on the satellites to look for other polynyas, this year and going forward,” Marinov said.

Earlier research by Marinov’s group and collaborators suggested that, under climate change, polynyas may become less frequent. As sea ice melts it freshens the top layer of the sea surface, making it lighter and less likely to mix with the heavier bottom waters. Marinov notes that the fact that no significant polynyas opened up from the mid-1970s until last year may have contributed to the so-called “climate hiatus” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when global average surface temperatures appeared to stall in their otherwise persistent upward climb.

“During this hiatus period abnormal amounts of heat were stored in the subsurface ocean waters” Marinov said. “Most research has attributed this hiatus to a prolonged La Niña period, resulting in a storage of heat in the low-latitude Pacific. But I think that a lack of a Weddell Sea polynya also contributed, storing more heat in the Southern Ocean and preventing the additional release of heat to the atmosphere.”

The work raises many new questions, such as how a decreasing sea ice extent, including the recent breaking off of a massive chunk of the Antarctic peninsula, will affect the frequency of polynyas and how the presence or absence of polynyas will affect how much atmospheric temperatures warm in response to anthropogenic climate change.

“This investigating into polynyas and Southern Ocean convection turned out to be a very important and interesting story for the global climate that we think a lot of people will be studying in the next decade,” Marinov said.

By Terri Moon Cronk

When the United States came under attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans turned their sorrow “into an unstoppable resolve to achieve justice” in the names of the fallen, President Donald J. Trump said at Friday morning’s Pentagon 9/11 Memorial observance.

“It was the worst attack on our country since Pearl Harbor, and even worse because this was an attack on civilians — innocent men, women, and children whose lives were taken so needlessly,” the commander in chief said.

Trump noted that for the more than 300 family members at the Pentagon anniversary today, not a single day goes by when they don’t think about the loved ones stolen from their lives. “Today, our entire nation grieves with you and with every family of those 2,977 innocent souls who were murdered by terrorists 16 years ago,” he said.

Sanctified Grounds Prove Unity

“The [sanctified] grounds on which we stand today are a monument to our national unity and to our strength,” Trump said. “For more than seven decades, the Pentagon has stood as a global symbol of American might — not only because of the great power contained within these halls, but because of the incredible character of the people who fill them. They secure our freedom, they defend our flag, and they support our courageous troops all around the world.”

Among the 184 Americans who perished at the Pentagon were young enlisted service members, dedicated civil servants who had worked In the Pentagon for decades and veterans who served the U.S. in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East, he said, adding that all of them loved their nation and pledged their lives to protect it.

“That September morning, each of those brave Americans died as they had lived: as heroes doing their duty and protecting us and our country. We mourn them, we honor them, and we pledge to never, ever forget them,” Trump said.

Flight 77 Passengers Remembered

Trump also paid tribute to those who boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Washington Dulles International Airport that morning, minutes before it slammed into the Pentagon’s west side.

“Every one of them had a family, a story and beautiful dreams. Each of them had people they loved and who loved them back. And they all left behind a deep emptiness that their warmth and grace once filled so fully and so beautifully,” he said.

The living, breathing soul of America wept with grief for every life taken on that day, Trump said. “We shed our tears in their memory, pledged our devotion in their honor, and turned our sorrow into an unstoppable resolve to achieve justice in their name.”

The terrorists who attacked the United States thought they could incite fear and weaken the spirit of the nation, he noted, adding, “But America cannot be intimidated, and those who try will soon join the long list of vanquished enemies who dared to test our mettle.”

Terrorists Can’t Break U.S. Resolve

Terrorists tried to break Americans’ resolve when they attacked the Pentagon, Trump said, adding, “But where they left a mark with fire and rubble, Americans defiantly raised the Stars and Stripes — our beautiful flag, that for more than two centuries has graced our ships, flown in our skies, and led our brave heroes to victory after victory in battle; the flag that binds us all together as Americans who cherish our values and protect our way of life.”

Woven into the American flag is the story of the nation’s resolve, he said.

“We have overcome every challenge — every single challenge, every one of them — we’ve triumphed over every evil, and remained united as one nation under God. America does not bend. We do not waver. And we will never, ever yield,” Trump said.

At the Pentagon 9/11 memorial, he said, with hearts both sad and determined, the nation honors every hero who keeps Americans safe and free, and they pledge to work together, to fight together, and to overcome together every enemy and obstacle in the country’s path.

“Our values will endure,” Trump said. “Our people will thrive. Our nation will prevail. And the memory of our loved ones will never, ever die.”

Speaking on Voice of America on Sunday, Kosovo’s new Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, said he would take a fresh look at the controversial border deal with Montenegro signed in 2015.

He said it wrongly demarcated the border between Kosovo and Montenegro, placing it several miles inside Kosovo below the peak of Mt Cakor.

“The current version of demarcation is wrong … so we will correct it,” Haradinaj told Voice of America.

“Fortunately Montenegro is a neighbouring state and we welcome its progress, especially its NATO membership, which is our goal too, so I don’t see any difficulties on this issue.

“We will find a quick solution to the current situation but I will not be precise now about which steps we will undertake, but a quick solution will be found in order to not delay visa liberalisation,” Haradinaj added.

The EU has demanded resolution to the border issue with Montenegro as precondition for Kosovo obtaining visa-free access to the EU’s passport-free zone.

The mountainous region is the subject of a long-standing border dispute between Kosovo and Montenegro.

While the two former Yugoslav republics signed the demarcation agreement in 2015, Kosovo’s parliament has yet to ratify it.

The deal was set to be put to a vote in parliament last September but ratification was postponed following violent clashes over the issue. Some opposition and ruling party MPs claimed the deal would deprive Kosovo of 8,000 hectares of land.

They claim the true border between Kosovo and Montenegro lies on Zljepska Tower, on top of the Cakor peak.

To resolve the dispute, Kosovo formed an expert commission to map Kosovo’s territory. In February this year, it concluded that Kosovo had not lost any territory when it signed the agreement.

In a joint statement on Monday, the EU Office in Kosovo, EULEX and Heads of EU Missions urged Kosovo not to delay the issue further.

“It is essential that Kosovo delivers on the remaining visa liberalisation conditions by moving forward on the border demarcation agreement with Montenegro, and by taking action against corruption and organised crime,” they said.

Haradinaj was elected Prime Minister of Kosovo by a narrow majority – with 61 of the 120 votes in parliament on Saturday, after a political deadlock that had persisted since inconclusive general elections on June 11.

His first meeting as a Prime Minister was with US Ambassador Greg Delawie. In a statement issued on Monday, the US embassy welcomed the constitution of the Kosovo Assembly and the formation of the new government.

“The United States continues to support Kosovo on its path towards Euro-Atlantic integration, strengthening the rule of law, improving economic development, and normalizing regional relations,” the embassy wrote.

Both Haradinaj’s party, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, and a junior partner in the coalition, Fatmir Limaj’s NISMA, previously fiercely opposed the border deal with Montenegro.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has empanelled 18 persons to assess which monuments and other markers should be removed from city property. He said the panel “will develop guidelines on how the City should address monuments seen as oppressive and inconsistent with the values of New York City.”

It is telling that the mayor did not say that the panel should determine which monuments are inconsistent with American values. Instead, he cited the “values of New York City.” This begs two questions: What are New York City values, and who decides what they are? His past forays into this area are cause for grave concern.

In February 2011, a pro-life group, Life Always, displayed a huge billboard in the SoHo section of New York that showed a picture of a young black girl with the inscription, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Prominent African Americans endorsed the billboard; it was displayed during Black History Month.

The billboard incensed de Blasio, who was then New York’s Public Advocate. He not only failed to be an advocate for the unborn, or for pro-life New Yorkers, he actually recommended censoring it. “The billboard simply doesn’t belong in our city. The ad violates the values of New Yorkers.”

In other words, if an ad offends de Blasio’s values, it offends “the values of New Yorkers.” Not content to criticize an ad he objects to, he sought to muzzle the free speech rights of black pro-life men and women. He succeeded.

De Blasio’s passion for declaring abortion rights to be representative of New York values led him to support Governor Andrew Cuomo’s equally censorial approach to this subject. In 2014, Cuomo railed against what he called “extreme conservatives” who are “pro-life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay.” He said such persons “have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

So New Yorkers opposed to abortion “have no place in the state of New York,” and should get out of town. De Blasio said he agreed with that position “100 percent.”

Let’s be honest about this: De Blasio is not asking the panel to develop guidelines that offend traditional moral values—he is asking them to craft recommendations that offend his trendy political values.

This explains why he is sure not to mess with the New York City street named after Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, despite the fact that she was a notorious racist and an anti-Catholic bigot. While he might be upset with her racism (the latter animus doesn’t even register with him), it is not likely to trump his fondness for Planned Parenthood. Look for the sign to stay.

Contact Eric Phillips, press secretary to Mayor de Blasio:
pressoffice@cityhall.nyc.gov