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Why Are We Still at War?

2009-02-05T17:17:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 03 February 2009

by: Norman Solomon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

At Arlington National Cemetery, William McKeen sits at the grave of his best friend, Kevin Lucas. (Photo: Getty Images)

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. "The war on terror" has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on September 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological "sophistication" and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

Stanley Kunitz: "In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking."

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington's certainty, Richard Farina wrote: "And death will be our darling and fear will be our name." Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The US war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring "war on terrorism," chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired US Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program and told viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism."

But the "war on terrorism" rubric - increasingly shortened to the even vaguer "war on terror" - kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: "We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war."

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize - or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new US "war on terror" was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we're entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president's escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration's reported plan to double US troop deployments in that country within a year.

"This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced," Norman Mailer wrote in his book "Why Are We at War?" six years ago. "It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void ..."

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: "This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion.... There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist."

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just as there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America - but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the January 30 discussion on "Bill Moyers Journal" with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about "the war on terror." Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.

And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

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Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For recent TV and radio interviews with him about President Obama and war policies, go to: www.normansolomon.com.

Obama Is a Two-Faced Liar. Aw-RIGHT!

2009-02-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

Friday 30 January 2009

by: Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

(Photo: Reuters)

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn't give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as "tax refunds," and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin' man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a "we're all post-partisan friends" BS.

And it's about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama's appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as "Economics Czar," made me fear for my country, that we'd gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama's money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It's as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan's carcass and put a stake through The Gipper's anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S'OK with me.

And here's the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn't compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn't need'm. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama's weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama's "post-partisanship." Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don't know about you, but THIS is the change I've been waiting for.

Will it last? We'll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We'll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We'll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don't know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofuses!)

Look, don't get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new president's ... a Democrat!

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Greg Palast's investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at www.GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Armed Madhouse."

Afghanistan: Losing a No-Win War

2009-02-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Thursday 05 February 2009

by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Locals cross a river after a bridge was destroyed in the Pakistani tribal area of Khyber. The bridge served as a major supply route for US troops in Afghanistan. (Photo: Mohammad Sajjad / AP)

"Our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. But, he offered something less than a rousing defense of the new Afghan plan that he and Gen. David Petraeus will formally give President Obama. As one pundit put it, Gates's call to arms sounded more like "pre-emptive CYA."

Gates and Petraeus, chief of Central Command, want to commit as many as 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan by summer. But Gates was "deeply skeptical" about sending any more than that in the future, setting a ceiling that could later come back to haunt him.

Gates said he favored "modest" and "realistic" objectives, notably preventing the Taliban from ruling the country and providing a safe haven for al-Qaeda. He pointedly rejected any major nation-building, democratization efforts, or economic and social development. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money," he declared.

He also talked of the need to put "an Afghan face on this war" by training as many as 50,000 more soldiers for the Afghan National Army, bringing the total to 130,000. Without a strong local force out in front, Gates worried that the "Afghans [will] come to see us as the problem, not the solution, and then we are lost." We would, he said, "go the way of every other foreign army that's ever been in Afghanistan."

All this from the man George W. Bush appointed to run the Pentagon. How far we've come from the unrestrained fantasies of the neocons, or the neo-liberal call from candidate Obama to bring all elements of American power, soft and hard, to bear on Afghanistan. If, as many observers believe, no plan will produce an American victory in "the graveyard of empires," the less treasure and fewer troops Washington commits, the easier we will find it to walk away when good sense finally prevails.

Why will the new plan fail? Let me count the ways.

1. How long? Gates says it will be "a long slog," while Petraeus repeats what he said in 2005, that "Afghanistan would be the longest campaign in the so-called 'long war.'" In other words, our top military minds have no idea how long the war might take. They are clueless and the war they propose will be endless. How long will the American public accept that, especially at a time when the billions of dollars a month could better be spent at home?

2. How many? The number - 30,000 more troops "for the next few years" - came from Gen. David McKiernan, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. At best, his proposal seems a bad compromise between the number of troops the Pentagon has available and the number of troops that might be needed.

Afghanistan has a land area 50% larger than Iraq and a slightly larger population of 30 million. According to counter-insurgency strategists, success requires some 20 counter-insurgents for every 1,000 people, which would be 600,000 troops. Cut that to 400,000 if you're feeling lucky. With the new total of 62,000 US troops and the hoped-for 130,000 Afghan soldiers, NATO and other allies would have to provide over 200,000 troops to fill the gap. No way, not even close, no matter how charming Barack Obama might be.

3. Exit strategy? Gates, Petraeus, and Obama all say that there will have to be "regional negotiations" with India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China and "a political settlement" among the Afghans themselves. But, as yet, no one has suggested any convincing diplomatic and political outcome that would let the troops come home. In other words, we have no exit strategy.

4. Afghan allies? No doubt, General Petraeus and his subordinates can buy the temporary support of tribal chiefs and their militias, as they did with the Sunni Awakening Councils in Iraq. Petraeus can similarly win over various Taliban chiefs for various periods of time. But, in Afghanistan, dividing is not conquering. Just the opposite. It will force US and allied troops to remain in the country paying off their clients, while destroying any chance of building a strong national authority or rooting out the endemic corruption that plagues the country.

5. Hamid Karzai? Hand-picked by the CIA, Kharzai has never been more than "the mayor of Kabul," and his associates are highly corrupt, including his half-brother who has been accused of smuggling drugs in Kandahar. Many on Team Obama talk of withdrawing support from Karzai in Afghanistan's "democratic elections" this year, while a few pundits are recalling what the Kennedy administration did to our man Diem in Saigon.

I could go on, but it all boils down to the one lesson of Vietnam that Robert Gates and his Pentagon brass do not want to accept - that Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and other people in Asia, Africa and Latin America will no longer accept the United States and Europe occupying and running their countries. Counter-insurgency can prolong the pain, but it will never overcome the anti-colonial dynamic, as the British Empire, the French Empire and others all learned before us.

Calm Iraqi Election Marred as Thousands Were Denied Vote

2009-02-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

Saturday 31 January 2009»

by: Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers

An Iraqi policeman searches a voter. There were reports that thousands of Iraqi's were not allowed to vote. (Photo: Reuters)

Baghdad - Iraqis cast ballots in 14 of the country's 18 provinces Saturday, selecting among 14,500 candidates for 440 seats on new provincial councils.

The day was free of election-related violence, but thousands of Iraqis were unable to vote because their names were inexplicably missing from voter lists. Some confused Iraqis even wandered neighborhoods looking for a polling place that would accept their vote.

The extent of the no-vote could not be determined, but thousands of Iraqis in some locales took to the streets to protest.

McClatchy reporters located across Iraq also noted that turnout was not as sizable as previous elections.

Nonetheless, election monitors deemed the election, which essentially selected local government officials, a success and even President Barack Obama congratulated the citizens of the war-torn nation on the balloting.

Preliminary results will not be known for some five days. Final results would take weeks.

By 7 p.m. Iraq time, all the polls were closed and the United Nations envoy to Iraq Staffan de Mistura along with the head of the Independent High Electoral Commission Faraj al Haidari congratulated themselves and Iraq on a successful election.

"This is your success and the success of all Iraqis," de Mistura said in a press conference. "This is probably one of the most observed elections in recent years."

In Washington, President Obama also praised the election.

"I congratulate the people of Iraq on holding significant provincial elections today," Obama said in a statement. "Millions of Iraqi citizens from every ethnic and religious group went peacefully to the polls across the country to choose new provincial councils. It is important that the councils get seated, select new governors, and begin work on behalf of the Iraqi people who elected them."

Saturday's balloting allows Iraqis to select provincial council members who in turn chose the governor of each Iraqi province. They are the equivalent of a state legislature.

Under Iraqi law, the power of provincial councils remains unclear. They have control over local security forces, public facilities and influence over the appointment of senior ministry officials in their province. But the Baghdad national parliament can remove governors and other provincial officials and the provincial budget will come from the federal government.

More than 500,000 local and party observers watched Saturday's election and hundreds of international observers came from outside of Iraq including from the European Union and the Arab League.

Vehicular traffic was banned for much of the day as a security precaution, and many voters walked as much as three hours to reach their assigned polling stations. Children took over the empty streets and turned them into makeshift soccer fields. The goals were made of shoes and bricks.

Many other Iraqis apparently chose not to vote at all, and in Baghdad the polling centers, which surrounded by concertina wire, saw only a trickle of voters. The commission said there would be no numbers on voter turnout for another day.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki lifted the vehicle ban in the afternoon and urged people to get out to vote. Turnout was far less than previous elections, when Iraqis stood in line for hours across the country, except in the disputed areas in Nineveh province where Arab and Kurdish tensions are most visible. These areas were packed with voters.

The biggest complaint among potential voters was that their names were missing from the rosters at polling stations. Some walked from station to station searching for a polling place that had their names. Iraqis were to vote where their ration card was registered.

"I am looking for my name and I've been to five polling stations in the neighborhood and I still can't find my name," said Saleh Talib Kadhim, a resident of Jamiaa, a mostly Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the city's west. "I will not give up my right to vote. I will keep looking."

It would be Kadhim's first time to cast a ballot. The Sunni Arab boycotted the last election, which many perceived as a fraudulent because it was influenced by Iran and the United States.

In Haswa just west of Baghdad, thousands of the displaced demonstrated because they wouldn't find their names on the list. Record numbers of people turned out to vote in the Sunni area just west of Baghdad.

"We want our rights," they chanted. "This is a conspiracy."

It was unclear who would win in the elections with so many candidates and parties competing for the same votes. Familiar faces like Prime Minister Maliki seemed to be getting votes across the country. Secularist Ayad Allawi, an ex-CIA operative and former Prime Minister of Iraq, was popular among Sunni Arab voters.

Many Iraqis said that parties had offered them cash and gifts in exchange for a vote.

In Adhamiyah, Safiya Jassim, 40, voted and exited a polling station. After she passed the Iraqi and American tanks outside the school she proudly announced her family's association with Saddam Hussein's Baath party.

She voted for Allawi, who the U.S. installed as prime minister in 2004. Many Iraqis have grown disenchanted with the religious parties that came to power in the last election.

"I came here so our sons might be something, get jobs and stand by us," she said. "Every vote counts."

Even in the Shiite holy city of Najaf where religious sentiments are at an all time high in the midst of 40 days of mourning for Hussein, the grandson of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, slaughtered in nearby Karbala almost 1,400 years ago, voters showed disgust for religious parties.

"We were cheated by Islamic parties in the previous election," said Mohammed Hassan, 27. "They've been discovered. I will not make the same mistake so I voted for a secular party because this is the best. I voted for Ayad Allawi."

Tensions were greatest in Nineveh in the country's north as Kurdish and Arab parties vie for seats and control. The current provincial council is dominated by Kurds in the mostly Sunni Arab province.

Sheikh Abdullah al Yawar, a member of the Hadbaa slate in Rabiaa near the Syrian border, accused Kurdish parties of fraud in his area and the district of Sinjar a mixed area of Yazidis and Arabs.

He said members of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Kurdish intelligence were forcing people to choose the Kurdish slate, the Fraternity of Nineveh, with threats and intimidation.

The electoral commission said it was investigating, but the province's deputy governor, Khasrow Goran, denied the accusations.

Kurdish parties in Nineveh and Diyala province, both areas of mixed Arab and Kurdish populations, said that nearly 30,000 Kurds were not on polling center lists and could not vote. The Electoral commission said those that couldn't vote had relocated their place of residence tracked by a ration card late last year making them ineligible

In Diyala province in the mostly Kurdish area of Khanaqeen, Kurds marched in front of the local office of the Independent High Electoral Commission because some 16,000 weren't allowed to vote.

"Khanaqeen will stay Kurdish despite not letting us vote," they shouted.

Yasir Baqir, 28, withheld his vote in his city of Mosul. Every promise politicians made to Iraqis were left unfulfilled.

"I didn't participate in this election because I don't trust any list," he said. "We read and see many promises but nothing real and we still have crisis, there is still no security."

Many Iraqis from Baghdad to the southern city of Najaf voted for one reason. They didn't want someone to steal their ballot and cast a vote for someone else. The elections in 2005 were rife with fraud. Iran was accused of wide interference including bussing in fake ballots from across the border. The biggest fear is that this could happen again.

In Ameriyah Mohammed Allawi, 25, laughed when asked why he came to vote.

"We are an occupied country," he said. "I am voting only so that my vote will not be stolen by the corrupt people who are willing to do anything to remain firm on their seats."

His name was not on the roster's list and he left dejected.

After polls closed, Maliki who'd cast his own ballot on Saturday morning called the elections a success.

"It remains ahead what we will know of winning and not winning," he said. "I hope this will be a reason to continue the competition...and to head as loving brothers and partners to build the provincial councils and the local governments so we can raise our country."

Thirteen McClatchy Special Correspondents contributed from all over Iraq.

World Health Problems Bigger Than Terrorism

2009-02-04T17:15:00.000-08:00

By Carolyn Hansen

The biggest threats of terror we face globally are right on our own doorstep, right in our own backyard. They do not make bombs, hijack airplanes or take hostages. But they kill in record numbers that make 9/11 pale in comparison, in terms of large volumes of deaths.

These killers that are more serious, determined, more stealthy and deadly than any terrorist group the world has ever encountered. But World governments are hell-bent on focusing on fighting terrorism; while a silent epidemic of obesity and other "lifestyle" diseases are killing millions of people. Global terrorism is a real threat but poses far less risk than heart disease, cancer and diabetes that account for 60 percent of the world's deaths.

These "big three" terrorists kill more than 2,600 Americans per day, creating sorrow and sadness to families every day of every week. The World Health Organization estimates that 388 million people will die from chronic illness over the next decade and this is not likely to improve unless urgent action is taken. This action can only come from governments and big business to avert millions of premature deaths due to chronic disease.

The extensive medical services that will be needed in the future to care for this epidemic of sick people will be unaffordable to even the richest nations in the world. Health care systems in developing countries will be overwhelmed sending economies to the wall. These facts are causing many governments to simply ignore this looming threat.

It is well known that these diseases are preventable, how is it that we have allowed ourselves to become so unhealthy? It doesn't help much that our modern technology driven society has removed most physical activity from our lives. We have access to food, shelter and heat without us hardly having to lift a finger. How can it be that we have created these labor saving devices but have neglected to consider that our bodies need this "work" or "manual labor" to stay healthy? When this essential movement is removed and not replaced with intentional physical exercise we begin a downward spiral of declining health.

Without the physical "work" to maintain strength, between 300-500 grams of muscle tissue is lost per year. This change in body composition not only siphons away our strength, but lowers our metabolism and weakens our immune system exposing us to disease and illness.

Up until recently the scientific and medical communities has taken muscle strength and mass for granted. The steady loss of muscle as one gets older didn't even have a name until 1988. In the coming years, sarcopenia is predicted to be one of the biggest health problems the world faces. It is suddenly a very hot topic in aging research as it has a devastating effect on the quality of the last 10 -20 years of a person's life.

One of the toughest problems facing public health officials is how to get the nearly 70 percent of the world's population who don't regularly exercise to start moving. By now everyone knows exercise is good for them, but many don't realize it's a matter of life and death. In other words do it or die!

Within developing countries, shifts to urbanization, non-manual labor, high calorie foods, and higher levels of inactivity and sedentary living are all contributing to this growing problem. Unless we can re-design an environment and develop a lifestyle that systematically restores exercise to our daily routines, this burgeoning, self inflicted world health problem will continue to increase.

Carolyn Hansen has worked in the Fitness Industry for over 30 years. Currently the co-owner of 2 Fitness Centres in Northland New Zealand. A National Champion Bodybuilder with over 25 years competition experience. Enjoys writing health and fitness articles for local newspapers and magazines. If you want a second chance to right the wrongs you have committed against your body, you can be rejuvenated. You can regain vitality, muscular strength, endurance and a higher quality of life. Go to http://www.over50looking30.com for a FREE Report "I've Found the Fountain of Youth"- Let Me Show You Too!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Carolyn_Hansen

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Pakistan, & the Myth of Islamic Terrorism

2008-09-15T01:03:00.000-07:00

President Musharraf has supposedly been fighting Islamic terrorism since he took control of Pakistan in a coup eight years ago. Benazir Bhutto repeatedly justified her role in a future Pakistan by claiming to be a champion of democracy; Nawaz Sharif is also citing to his highly dubious democratic credentials at every opportunity on the campaign trail.

In Washington, both Republicans and Democrats regularly reiterate the link between Islamic radicalism in Pakistan and the safety of the American homeland. Across the porous border in Afghanistan, NATO forces also claim to be fighting Islamic insurgents. And just recently, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that India was facing a common threat with Pakistan, the threat emanating from religious extremism.

But who exactly are these Muslim men (and women, in some instances) who have been painted with the broad terrorist brush since 9/11?

Following a recent trip to the restive Swat Valley, a student leader of the Peshawar-based Awami National Party said that “virtually every single armed follower of Mullah Radio [Mullah Fazlullah] comes from the most marginalized section of society; these men don’t have jobs, their families find it difficult to put two meals on the table, and they have been in some form of bondage—to warlords, landowners or smugglers—for decades. They are the ones being killed in the face of a brutal onslaught by the Pakistani army.”

So let’s get the facts out first; we will get to religious fanaticism later. Which segment of the Pakistani population do these “terrorists” come from?

Firstly, the armed fighters in the North West Frontier Province are essentially landless and unemployed men who are caught up in the vicious nexus of deeply-entrenched commercial interests representing the Pakistani army, large landowners, market traders, village mullahs and drug kingpins.

Secondly, those taking orders from warlords in the neighbouring tribal areas are not only landless and unemployed; they are, for all practical purposes, living under the worst form of modern-day feudalism, whether in Pakistan or in Afghanistan. In fact, in the days following the Taliban’s downfall in late-2001, a veteran spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) had warned that “the complete failure of governments in this part of the world to resolve basic issues like land titles, and to implement genuine land reforms, has already created an economy which is entirely conditioned by the trade in drugs and arms; our young men have nowhere else to go in order to find work and to fend for their families.”

In effect, the so-called Islamic militants are, in fact, unwilling mercenaries, within the context of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre. They may or not be devout Muslims, but they certainly are not committed to the destruction of Pakistan, India or the West. As harsh and alarming as it may seem, more than 95% of them are paid, directly or indirectly, to protect or further vested commercial interests.

Shortly after the Soviet Army marched out of Afghanistan, a veteran Peshawar politician (who dare not speak on the subject openly today) was left wondering whether anybody in the West understood that “the Great Jihad of the 1980s was a myth, and that people like Osama Bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmateyar were basically running mercenary operations and protection rackets with money from the Gulf and from Saudi Arabia, with arms provided by the CIA and MI6, and with the protection of Pakistan’s notorious Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency.”

To take the example of Swat, there are some disturbing underlying economic issues which have been demanding urgent attention ever since the establishment of Pakistan. It is common knowledge that nearly 85% of the 1.7 million residents of Swat’s seven sub-districts live below the poverty line. Unemployment rates exceed 75% in many parts of Swat, if underemployment (casual and seasonal labour) is adequately recognized, regardless of misleading government data. Agricultural productivity has actually diminished during the previous three decades, dictated no doubt by minimal inputs in infrastructure in low-lying areas and by the exploitation of forests in the mountains. Swat’s relatively small market centres are in a state of total decay. Corruption in the police and bureaucracy has deep roots.

In the midst of this already depressing scenario, the rebel cleric, Mullah Fazlullah, allowed his gangs to collect tariffs and taxes, to organize Sharia courts and to impose strict restrictions on women. Mullah Fazlullah himself obviously claims to be implementing God’s laws, but the facts suggest otherwise. Mullah Soofi Mohammed, Mullah Fazlullah’s father-in-law, was known to have the backing of powerful local smugglers. “The same smugglers who backed Mullah Soofi are now backing Mullah Radio,” the Awami National Party student leader confirmed. “The battle in Swat is nothing but a turf war, between the alliance of smugglers, loggers and clerics on one hand and the collective interests of the bureaucracy, the police and small-city businessmen and traders on the other.”

Outside observers have been questioning why the Pakistani Army delayed entering the fray to restore a semblance of order for so many months; interestingly, today, the snowbound mountains to the west and north of Swat have already curtailed mobility, and the route leading to the Karakoram Highway is under the control of armed criminal groups [also called Islamic militants] owing allegiance to renowned Swat-based smugglers and loggers. As a result, the much-publicized drive to bring peace to Swat by the Pakistan Army is unlikely to produce anything sustainable.

For that matter, over 10 long years, the West has failed to recognize that, that the Islamabad establishment and Pakistan’s mainstream political parties have been fundamentally misrepresenting the true nature of the social fabric in the badlands of Waziristan.

The reality of Swat speaks for itself. “Nobody expects anything to change out here,” a Swat sub-district official, who is currently packing up to go back to his hometown of Lahore, told an Al Jazeera stringer last week. “The Army is not going to dismantle the power structures here, a few hundred armed men and civilians will die, and then the local, low-intensity conflicts will continue, like nothing ever happened.”

Now for the critical question: Is the West pursuing phantom terrorists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre? The answer is an unequivocal YES.

An overwhelming proportion of those pitted against regular military forces are not Islamic militants; in fact, Islam has got nothing to do with their compulsion to work for warlords, smugglers, intelligence agencies or the Pakistan Army’s vast industrial empire. Devout, mosque-going Muslims they might be; but it is not religion which is driving them to kill and destroy.

If anything, the terrorism which we need to be concerned about is the terrorism to which the people of Swat, the rest of the North West Frontier Province, the tribal areas and, to set the record state, the rest of Pakistan are being subject to in their daily lives; the kind of terrorism only poverty can bring---malnourished children, abused women, dismal healthcare, impaired education, high unemployment and ever-rising levels of household debt owing to local money lenders.

The true nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban needs to be thoroughly reviewed, without spin and propaganda. Are these loosely knit outfits, at the end of the day, mercenary outfits using religion simply as a convenient cover for personal gains?

The threat from the phenomenon of Political Islam—i.e. from parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami—is an entirely different type of threat altogether, rooted in the lower middle classes in the towns and cities of Pakistan. That threat can easily, and only, be countered if the struggle of impoverished Pakistanis in the countryside gathers momentum.

India offers a unique insight into that threat: without a genuine and powerful indigenous movement to resolve poverty and marginalization in the rural context, nothing can stop right-wing Hindu groups, backed by huge sections of the urban middle class and led by people like Narendra Modi, from sharply increasing their influence over Indian society within the next 1-2 years.
by Rakesh Saxena

The move to preferential trade on the Western Pacific Rim: some initial conclusions

2008-09-15T00:33:00.000-07:00

Author: John Ravenhill*
DOI: 10.1080/10357710802060519
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 62, Issue 2 June 2008 , pages 129 - 150
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Abstract
Since the turn of the century the Asia-Pacific region has become the most active location for the negotiation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs)—a dramatic change from the period before the financial crises of 1997-98. Substantial variance in scope exists among the more than 80 PTAs currently being implemented, negotiated or which are under study in the region. Those involving the United States are by far the most comprehensive. At the other end of the spectrum are those involving ASEAN and China, which are largely 'aspirational' in their provisions. This variance points to the range of economic and political objectives that PTAs serve. Regardless of the comprehensiveness of their coverage, the overall economic effects of the new PTAs is likely to be small given the prevailing low level of tariffs, the intervention of other factors such as fluctuating exchange rates, the proliferation of agreements (which removes the advantages they accord individual partners), and the unwillingness of governments to liberalise 'sensitive' sectors. Few of the agreements move substantially beyond existing WTO provisions. The proliferation of PTAs not only has tended to shift attention and resources away from negotiations at the global level but also runs the risk of fragmenting the 'pro-liberalisation' coalition in countries that have signed multiple agreements.
Article>> http://www.findthelinks.com/articles/western pacific rim.htm

Questions of deception: contested understandings of the polls on WMD, political leaders and governments in Australia, Britain and the United States

2008-09-15T00:24:00.002-07:00

Author: Murray Goot
DOI: 10.1080/10357710601142492
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 61, Issue 1 March 2007 , pages 41 - 64
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Abstract
The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Saddam Hussein was said to possess were central to the justification the Australian Prime Minister gave for Australia's decision to go to war in Iraq. When no WMD materialised, poll data suggested that the public felt misled. But the same data suggested that support for both the government and the Prime Minister was unaffected. Among critics of the war, this generated a moral panic about Australian democracy and the Australian public—its commitment to the end justifying the means, its failure to receive a lead from the Labor Party, its widespread apathy. It also led to an intense debate about why the charge of not telling the truth had weakened public support for Blair and Bush but not for Howard. This article explores the concerns expressed by critics of the war in the face of polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government and its leader that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise. It raises questions about the contrasts drawn between polled opinion in Australia, Britain and the United States. And it argues that the differences in the pattern of opinion across the three countries were not marked and that what had cost governments support were views about how the war was going, not the failure to find WMD.
By May 2003, when the war in Iraq appeared to have been won, whatever interest the Australian press had in commissioning polls on Australia's engagement appeared to be over. Winning the peace, a much more difficult and prolonged process, was only likely to send the media back to commissioning polls if there were Australian casualties, if Australia's continuing commitment became a major source of debate between the Coalition government and the Labor opposition, or if it were clear that the public had not, in the words of the Prime Minister, John Howard, 'moved on'. But there were few Australian troops in Iraq—for all the coverage they got, one might have been excused for thinking that there were none—and no Australian casualties. Labor, fearful lest it be seen as weak on security, was not keen to re-engage in any very robust debate. And with few if any demonstrations on the streets and evidence that defence had slipped as an issue in the polls,2 there were grounds for concluding that the interest of the public had indeed declined. The only surveys that continued to include items on the war were those conducted for organisations not connected with the press.

What brought Australia's involvement back as a poll item was not any debate in Australia or setback in Iraq, but an accusation in Britain that in making its case for war the office of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had been involved in 'sexing up' the evidence handed to it by its intelligence agencies. Reported by the BBC's Andrew Gilligan on the morning of 29 May 2003, and elaborated by him in the Mail on Sunday on 1 June, the accusation that Alistair Campbell, Blair's media advisor, had been a party to deceiving the British people produced not only a crisis for the Blair government—a parliamentary inquiry, a judicial investigation led by Lord Hutton, and the suicide of the scientist Dr David Kelly, Gilligan's source—but also raised questions about what the other partners in the 'coalition of the willing' had known and to what extent they may have been involved—wittingly or otherwise—in retailing information to the public that was of doubtful validity or simply untrue.

In Australia, the question of whether the government had deceived the public took a while to find its way on to the pollsters' agenda; and, for reasons that have to do with which polls get noticed, it took even longer to feed back into the political debate. When it did, the debate—conducted largely within the elite media3—turned partly on how the figures were to be understood, partly on what they meant for the standing of the leaders and the state of the parties, especially compared to the impact perceptions of dishonesty were said to have had in Britain and the United States, and partly on what they implied about Australian attitudes to politics more generally.

This article traces this debate and offers a critique of the terms in which it was conducted. It raises questions about the comparisons made between polled opinion in Australia and polled opinion in Britain and the US. It works through the implications for public opinion of Howard's view that what mattered was whether his government had sought to deceive or had just inadvertently misled the public. And it documents the moral panic induced by polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise.

Two misses and one hit

The first poll on whether the public had been misled received very little publicity. Conducted by UMR Research for Hawker Britton (HB) at the end of the third week in June 2003, it suggested an even split between those who thought Howard had 'mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction' (44 per cent), and those who thought he had not (44 per cent). Released to the Sydney Morning Herald, the results appeared, somewhat belatedly, on 10 July not as a front-page story, as Hawker Britton had hoped, but on an inside page with readers invited to register their own answer to the question 'was Howard misleading?' on the Herald's website (Riley 2003a).4 The rest of the press ignored the poll. Nearly two weeks later, when the Canberra Times reported the results (Peake 2003), the Prime Minister was fending off accusations of deceptive behaviour registered by a new poll—this one conducted by Newspoll for Rupert Murdoch's flagship in the antipodes, the Australian.

Newspoll conducted its poll on 18-20 July, and both the question it posed and the results it reported were different from those associated with the HB-UMR poll, a month earlier. Newspoll offered respondents three options, not just two. Just over one-third (36 per cent) of those questioned agreed that the Howard government 'knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction', just under one-third (31 per cent) preferred to say the government had 'unknowingly misled' the public, while a slightly smaller proportion (25 per cent) said the government 'did not mislead the Australian public'.

If the comment occasioned by the HB-UMR poll was little more than a trickle, the discussion generated by Newspoll came as a torrent: only the one mention of the UMR poll in the press after its release; nearly 50 explicit references to the Newspoll in the first five days after its release. Published on the front page of the Australian on Tuesday 22 July, and the subject of an editorial inside, Newspoll's results were noted on the same day by two other papers in the News Ltd group; by the ABC's news service, as well as by the national broadcaster's radio programs AM and The World Today, and its television program, Lateline; by the wire services AAP, Reuters, and Agence France Presse; and by London's Financial Times, the Kyoto News, and Asia Pulse. The following day, the poll was reported or discussed by a string of News Ltd reporters and columnists; by the Melbourne Age, in two separate pieces, and by the Canberra Times; by news agencies and by the overseas press. Most of the weekend papers discussed it, too—the Weekend Australian referring to the poll in no fewer than three articles, and the Courier-Mail in two. And the poll continued to be cited, if not by name, through August (on nine occasions), September (four), October (two), and November (once).

The difference in the treatment of the Newspoll and the HB-UMR poll is easily explained. It has nothing to do with the merits of the two polls. Rather it has to do with three other factors. First, the Australian commissions Newspoll—News Ltd is a half-owner—and polls that papers commission are always given space. No paper commissions or has an interest in promoting the HB-UMR poll. Second, in Australia the amount of comment generated by a poll is not a function of the 'improbable' nature of its findings, as appears to be the case in Britain (Crewe 1982: 122-5; 1986: 250-1), but of its general reputation (Goot 1996: 37; 2000: 41-2, 45); and among political commentators Newspoll was the best regarded of the polls even if its record did not wholly justify its rank (Goot 2002a: 83). In addition, while Newspoll polls for a paper that was a strong supporter of the war it does not poll for any political party. UMR, by contrast, had no track record and, as the Herald noted in reporting its results, it conducts polls for Labor, a party that opposed the war; Hawker Britton, too, is a public affairs organisation with Labor connections. Third, Newspoll's results were much more dramatic—and more probable—than those produced by HB-UMR. Whereas the HB-UMR poll suggested an even division between those who thought the Prime Minister had misled the public and those who thought he had not, what Newspoll showed, in the words of the Australian, was that 'two-thirds of Australians' thought they had been 'misled over the war against Iraq' (Shanahan 2003a); only one-quarter thought they had not.

Two months later ACNielsen, polling for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, produced another three-way split. According to the front-page of the Herald, 'Almost 70 per cent of Australians' believed 'John Howard misled them on his case for war'—the figure, 68 per cent, being almost identical to the corresponding figure reported by Newspoll. Partly because it hardly seemed new, the ACNielsen poll received little coverage outside the Fairfax press: a mention in the Canberra Times, on Melbourne's 3AW (during one of Howard's regular appearances with radio host Neil Mitchell), in the Green Weekly (which picked up the Mitchell interview from the PM's website), on ABC News Online, and in the 'Editor' supplement to the Weekend Australian—this last reflecting the reluctance of News Ltd to acknowledge any poll not its own.

While the ACNeilsen and Newspoll results may seem similar, there are important differences. About a quarter (26 per cent) of those interviewed by ACNielsen felt 'deliberately misled' about 'the reasons for going to war with Iraq'—rather fewer (by ten percentage points) than the proportion that told Newspoll they felt misled over whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A greater proportion (42 per cent) felt 'unintentionally misled' about the reasons for going to war—unintentionally misled, in this case, because Howard 'was misled by others'; this was 11 percentage points more than the proportion in the Newspoll that felt Howard had 'unknowingly misled the Australian public' over whether Iraq possessed WMD.

Another intriguing difference is the proportion of respondents registered as 'don't know': 12 per cent in the HB-UMR poll; 8 per cent in the Newspoll; and just 2 per cent in the ACNielsen poll. One might speculate that the 'don't know' figure is higher in the HB-UMR poll because the options presented to respondents in that poll were fewer than the number offered in the Newspoll or the ACNielsen poll; that the figure is lower for both Newspoll and ACNielsen because both organisations repeated the question to respondents who gave a qualified answer, like 'it depends'; and that ACNielsen may have recorded the lowest proportion of 'don't knows' because it spelled out why the Prime Minister may have behaved in a way that unintentionally misled people. It is also likely that between June and September more respondents had simply made up their minds.

Polls apart? Australia, Britain and the US
The news that most respondents felt misled by Howard was not the only element of drama in the way the Australian chose to report its findings. When the Newspoll results were published readers were invited to compare the distribution of opinion in Australia with the distribution of opinion in Britain and the US, Australia's principal partners in the 'coalition of the willing'. According to the Australian, a poll conducted in Britain on 10-12 July by ICM Research for the Daily Mirror found that 67 per cent believed that Tony Blair had 'knowingly or unknowingly misled his country about the presence of WMDs in Iraq'. In the US, a poll conducted on 27-29 June by Gallup for CNN and USA Today reported 37 per cent believing that 'the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction'; of the rest, 61 per cent thought 'they had not been misled at all'.

If the figures across Australia, Britain and the US seemed comparable, the political consequences for the countries' leaders, the Australian argued, were not. 'Two-thirds of Australians' may have felt that they had been misled over the war, knowingly or unknowingly, yet it had 'not changed how they would vote'. This contrasted with 'the US and Britain, where Mr Bush's popularity has fallen and Mr Blair is facing disastrous polling and calls from within the Labour Party for his resignation'. On Newspoll's figures, the Liberal-National Coalition enjoyed a lead over Labor of ten percentage points, 45:35; Howard's approval rating was still high, having dropped from 60 per cent a fortnight earlier, to 55 per cent; and, as preferred prime minister, he maintained a lead over the Leader of the Opposition, Simon Crean, of 40 percentage points. By contrast, 35 per cent were said to have lost faith in Blair (Shanahan 2003a, 2003b).

The contrast between Howard's continuing popularity, on the one hand, and the ratings of Blair and George W. Bush, on the other, was picked up and reproduced across much of the media, notwithstanding that for Blair and Bush the levels of support indicated by the Australian were either difficult to understand (Blair) or not reported at all (Bush). Thus, in foreshadowing a discussion of the poll, the ABC's Lateline informed viewers that, unlike Howard's popularity, support for the British and American leaders had 'slumped' (ABC 2003a); Cameron Stewart (2003), writing a few days later in the Weekend Australian, asserted that Blair and Bush had 'suffered deep declines in their ratings in the face of claims they misled their publics over Iraq'; and in the Sunday Age, Ray Cassin (2003) sought to explain the difference between Australia and its two Anglophone allies in terms of Australia's 'low' expectations of public officeholders (see also ABC 2003c; Adams 2003a; Farr 2003a; Seccombe 2003a). The publication of the ACNielsen poll was accompanied by similar comparisons. In the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, Geoff Kitney (2003a) opined that the 'key' to understanding how the Australian Prime Minister had come out of the war in better standing than Bush or Blair—he gave no figures and cited no polls—lay in the fact that 'Australians appear to believe that he acted honestly' (see also Riley 2003b).5

Reasons for going to war and WMD
While the Australian presented the results of the questions on Iraq, asked in each of the three countries, as if they were directly comparable, they were not (see Table 1). The ICM Research question was closer to the one that would be asked by ACNielsen than to the question Newspoll asked. And the one asked by Gallup was more like the one used by HB-UMR than the one asked by Newspoll. It follows that if comparisons are made between the Australian polls and the two polls from Britain and the US, they have to be pair-wise rather than three-way comparisons, they have to involve polls other than Newspoll, and they have to exclude one of the comparisons with Newspoll made by the Australian itself.

Table 1. Whether the Blair, Bush or Howard governments misled the public over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or the reasons for going to war, June-September 2003 (percentages)

Weapons of mass destruction
Reasons for war

HB-UMR 20-22 June
Gallup 27-29 June
Newspoll 18-20 July
ICM Research 10-12 July
ACNielsen 19-21 Sept
Misled …
Australia
USA
Australia
Britain
Australia
na: not asked
Questions:
'Do you think John Howard mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?' (UMR Research for Hawker Britton)
'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or not?' (Gallup)
'In the lead up to the war in Iraq, do you think the Howard government knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, unknowingly misled the Australian public, or did not mislead the Australian public?' (Newspoll)
'In his decision to go to war, do you think Tony Blair: misled the British people but not knowingly; did not mislead the British people; knowingly misled the British people?' (ICM Research)
'Which of the following statements best describes your views about the reasons given for going to war in Iraq? [READ OUT AND ROTATE]
a. Prime Minister Howard deliberately misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq.
b. Prime Minister Howard unintentionally misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, because he was misled by others.
c. Prime Minister Howard did not mislead the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq'. (ACNielsen)
Sources:Hawker Britton 2003; Australian 2003, for Newspoll; Gallup 2003; ICM Research 2003; ACNielsen 2003.
Deliberately
na
37
36
27
26
Unintentionally
na
na
31
39
42
TOTAL
44
37
67
66
68

No
44
61
25
27
26
DK
12
2
8
5
2
n
(1,000)
(1,003)
(1,200)
(1,012)
(1,423)
The Newspoll question was about the Howard government's misleading the Australian public about Iraq's WMD. The ICM Research (2003) question was about Blair's 'decision to go to war with Iraq', and whether in making it he had 'knowingly misled the British people' (27 per cent), 'misled the British people but not knowingly' (39 per cent) or 'not misled the British people' (29 per cent). Not only was the ICM Research question closer to that which ACNielsen was to ask; so, too, were the results—notwithstanding the absence of a scandal in Australia, at least one of British proportions, about the 'sexing up' of the government's case.6

In America, as Newspoll was asking its question about WMD, Gallup (2003) asked: 'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (39 per cent), or not (58 per cent)?' The question was rather like the one used by HB-UMR a week earlier, though the American split on the proposition that the public was 'deliberately misled' was more favourable to the government than the Australian split (44:44). Those who said the Bush administration had 'deliberately misled' the public were then asked whether 'the Bush administration was generally accurate in describing the threat Iraq posed to the US, but exaggerated some of the specific details' (14 per cent) or 'greatly exaggerated the threat posed to the US in order to justify a war with Iraq' (24 per cent)? Those who said the administration had not 'deliberately misled' the American public were asked whether the administration had 'provided information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was accurate' (25 per cent) or 'provided information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction it thought was accurate but turned out to be inaccurate' (30 per cent)?

In short, in both Australia and Britain only a quarter of those interviewed thought their government had deliberately misled the public over its reasons for going to war—though two-thirds agreed that their governments had misled the public either deliberately or unintentionally. And in both Australia and the US more than a third of those interviewed thought the government had deliberately misled the public over Iraq's WMD.7 The difference between the proportion that felt the public had been deliberately misled about the reasons for going to war and the proportion that felt the public had been deliberately misled about the WMD is as one would expect: fewer respondents felt the public had been deceived about the reasons for going to war than felt the public had been deceived about WMD.

Support for leaders and parties
What of the standing of the respective leaders and their parties? In Australia, the war itself—the period from the invasion to the defeat of Saddam Hussein—boosted the level of satisfaction with the Prime Minister, worked against the Leader of the Opposition in the head-to-head polling with the Prime Minister, and lifted the Coalition's electoral support. What damage subsequent accusations of deceit did to the standing of the Prime Minister is less clear. But if the government was damaged the impact appears to have been slight.

On Newspoll's figures, the invasion of Iraq saw the level of satisfaction with Howard's performance as Prime Minister rise from 48 to 56 per cent. The end of the war saw it edge up a little further. Not until mid-July—in the poll in which respondents were asked about the public being misled about WMD—was there any sign of a turndown, with satisfaction slipping from 60 per cent to 55 per cent. In response to the question of who would make the better prime minister the pattern was slightly different. Howard jumped to a lead of 41 (from 29) percentage points at the beginning of the war, stretched this to 50 by the second half of June, before dropping back to lead by 41 at the beginning of July—after Crean had withstood a challenge to his own position as Labor leader—a margin that was barely affected by the five-point decline in his satisfaction rating in the poll of 18-20 July. Changes in the Coalition's support trace a slightly different path: a rise from 42 to 45 per cent with the beginning of the war (Morgan showed a rise from 39.5 to 44.5 per cent) to a peak of 47 per cent in mid-May (though Morgan recorded no rise); a temporary dip at the end of May and beginning of June (also reported by Morgan)—coincidentally, the weekend on which the BBC story broke—before moving back up to 46 per cent in mid-June (Morgan, 45 per cent) and 45 per cent (Morgan, 44.5 to 43.5 per cent) throughout July (Morgan 2003b. Morgan did not ask about the leaders).

In Britain, too, the beginning of the war saw a rise in both the level of satisfaction with the Prime Minister and the level of support for the Labour government. In the ICM Research poll, the proportion of respondents expressing satisfaction with Blair's performance as prime minister rose from 38 per cent in mid-March, just after the war started, to 49 per cent in mid-April, shortly before Bush declared it won. The proportion saying they would vote Labour rose more modestly, from 38 per cent to 42 per cent. The only other poll to show a rise in the level of support for the government of this magnitude or more was YouGov, the online poll published by the Telegraph; it had Labour on 35 per cent at the end of February and 40 per cent after the start of the war and near the end of it—a jump of five percentage points. In the other polls, the government's gains were less than half this size. According to MORI, among those declaring that they would definitely vote satisfaction with Blair's performance as prime minister rose from 31 per cent in late February to 43 per cent a month later and to 47 per cent in late April, while the proportion saying they would vote Labour rose from 41 to 43 per cent—an increase of just two percentage points. In Populus, the online poll conducted for the Times, support for Labour also rose by two percentage points, from 34 per cent at the beginning of March to 36 per cent in the first week of May.

But evidence from the same sources suggests that both the level of satisfaction with Blair and the level of support for Labour started to decline well before any accusation from the BBC about the government having 'sexed up' its intelligence; that after the accusation was aired neither the loss in support for the Prime Minister nor the decline in support for Labour was any more marked than it had been before the charge was levelled; and that between May and July the decline in the level of satisfaction with Blair's performance (five or six percentage points) was no greater than it was in relation to the performance of Howard. In the ICM Research poll, the decline in Blair's rating (42 per cent, mid-May; 39 per cent, mid-June; 37 per cent, mid-July) was not as steep as it had been before the accusation was levelled, when it slipped from 49 per cent, in mid-April, to 42 per cent, in mid-May. Support for the Labour Party, by contrast, held up until after the accusation of 1 June. In the polling conducted by YouGov, Labour's support dropped from 40 to 37 per cent in May; by the end of July, it had shed another three percentage points. In the MORI poll, the level of satisfaction with Blair's performance had slipped nine percentage points (47 to 38 per cent) in May before sliding another six points (38 to 32 per cent) by late July; Labor, too, slipped four points after the war and another four by the end of June, but suffered no further loss in July. Populus, however, registered no decline in Labor's support from the beginning of May until the beginning of August, after Dr Kelly's death.8

That the decline in Blair's rating was no greater than that suffered by Howard does not mean that British respondents thought Blair no more dishonest than Australian respondents considered Howard. If anything, Britons were more sceptical of Blair's honesty than Australians of Howard's—though this did not register in the ratings. Asked by YouGov (2003a), at the end of May, whether they felt 'Tony Blair misled the British public on Iraq's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction', 36 per cent of those who responded said he 'did mislead—but not deliberately' while 27 per cent said he 'deliberately misled'. The first of these figures is the same as, and the second is not very different from, the corresponding figures for Howard reported by Newspoll when the furore over the 'sexing up' of intelligence was at its height—just after the death, on 18 July, of Dr Kelly; in the wake of Kelly's death the figures would very likely have been considerably worse than they had been in May. In another poll, conducted by YouGov (2003b) on 3 June, 46 per cent of respondents said that Blair had not 'told the truth as he saw it' but had 'deliberately' distorted 'the information he had' when he said that 'he was certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction'. And asked by Populus (2003), on 10-11 June, whether 'Britain and America deliberately exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to win support for going to war', no fewer than 58 per cent said they had. In the HB-UMR poll taken later that month, no more than 44 per cent reckoned that Howard had misled Australians about WMD—notwithstanding the absence of any reference to its having been intentional.

In so far as the loss of support for Labour or Blair reflected respondents' judgements about the war it does not follow that these judgements were based on their views about WMD or any of the other reasons Britons were given for going to war. Instead, they may have reflected views of how the war itself was going—or other issues unrelated to the war. According to MORI, between the end of the war and the death of Dr Kelly the proportion of respondents that approved Blair's handling of 'the current situation with Iraq' declined from 47 per cent to 32 per cent (Baines and Worcester 2003: 14).

What of President Bush? Support for his handling of the situation in Iraq, according to Gallup, rose sharply (increasing from 56 per cent, 14-15March, to 71 per cent, on 24-25March) when the bombing began, remained high (71 to 74 per cent) for the duration of the war, then fell back to somewhere between 63 per cent and 53 per cent (a mean of 58 per cent) from mid-June to the end of August (Moore 2003). Other sources report in similar terms. In the CBS News poll, for example, approval for the way Bush was 'handling the situation with Iraq' jumped from 55 per cent, on 15-16 March, to 75 per cent in late March, peaked at 79 per cent around the end of the war, then slipped back to 72 per cent in May before falling to 58 per cent in early July and 57 per cent in mid-August (CBS 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2003e).9

To what extent satisfaction with the President's handling of the issue was affected by a sense that the White House had deceived people is another matter. Certainly many respondents did feel misled. In early May, 49 per cent of those interviewed by CBS said that the Bush administration had overestimated Iraq's WMD—a figure that rose to 56 per cent by early July—and, said roughly two-thirds of these respondents, Iraq's arsenal had been exaggerated to build support for the war (CBS 2003c, 2003f).10 In other words, about a third felt deliberately misled—a proportion not ve ry different from that reported, in July, by Newspoll. But neither this sense of the administration's having exaggerated things nor the even more widespread sense that the Bush administration—even Bush himself—had hidden important elements of what they knew about Iraq's WMD necessarily undermined Bush's reputation for integrity. One of the President's 'personal strengths', the CBS analysis argued, was 'the public's perception of his integrity'—a perception that had been 'unaffected' by 'doubts about the administration's honesty' in its account of what it knew about Iraq's WMD.11 The President's reputation might have been damaged if respondents had believed that WMD would not eventually be found. But most respondents believed WMD would eventually be found, and almost as many—though not, by early July, the majority—believed the war was worth fighting even if WMD were never found (CBS 2003c).

As with Blair, therefore, we need to explain the fall in the level of approval for the President's handling of the war without resort to speculation about his reputation for honesty or doubts about the existence of WMD. And as with Blair, the obvious alternative is the state of the war. By early July, the proportion of respondents in the CBS polls that believed the US was 'in control of the situation in Iraq' had plunged from 71 per cent, in late April, to 45 per cent (CBS 2003c);12 and, on the figures produced for the Pew Research Center, the proportion of respondents agreeing that 'the US military effort in Iraq is going very well' had plummeted from 61 per cent, in mid-April, to 23 per cent (Everts and Isernia 2005: 305). As Gallup's analyst was to put it: 'The decline in Bush's rating' for his handling of the war 'paralleled almost exactly the decline in the public's assessment of how well the war [was] going' (Moore 2003).
Contested meanings: deliberately deceived or simply misled?
What do the findings tell us about attitudes to the war? At a press conference, held on the morning that the Newspoll on WMD was released, Howard was asked: 'does it concern you that 66 [sic] per cent of Australians polled think you lied [sic] about Iraq?' Howard had his answer well prepared. Admonishing the journalist for misquoting the poll, he went on to observe that the findings were 'not all that surprising':
36 per cent thought they had been deliberately misled, which is exactly the same number of people who in the final Newspoll on participation in the war opposed Australia's participation, 25 per cent said they didn't think they had been misled knowingly or unknowingly, and 31 per cent said they had been unknowingly misled. And interestingly, those two together is [sic] almost identical to the total number of people who supported our involvement in the war (Howard 2003a).

Two months later, on 3AW, Howard's host alluded to the ACNielsen poll published in the Age the day before: 'Are you concerned by the poll that shows that … half of Australians believe the war wasn't justified and more than that think that you misled them about the reasons for sending troops?' Again, Howard, a keen poll-watcher, was ready: 'of course' he had noticed the poll; 'and interestingly 70 per cent of people in that poll … believe that I acted in good faith, 70 per cent' (Howard 2003b).13
For Howard, what mattered was not how many of those interviewed felt that the public had been deceived but the number that believed he had deceived the public deliberately. Not only did he stress it, so did his deputy, John Anderson, his former advisor, Graeme Morris, and—less predictably—former Labor Party pollster, Rod Cameron. Appearing on the ABC's AM program, the morning the Newspoll results were released, Anderson insisted that 'there was no deliberate misleading by the government', that Howard was not the sort of prime minister that did 'that sort of thing', and that even if he had been tempted to lie 'he knows the Australian people' would 'see through something that's not genuine.' On Lateline, Morris made this point more bluntly: 'If they [voters] think somebody is telling a porky deliberately they'll kill you.' Interviewed alongside, Cameron expressed his amazement that 'only a third' had realised that 'we' were 'being dudded'; for two-thirds of those interviewed, he declared, Howard was 'virtually blameless' (ABC 2003d, 2003e).14
However, what most commentators stressed was not the fact that about a third of Newspoll's respondents felt deliberately misled, but the fact that two-thirds felt misled.15 This much larger figure was then set against the poll's other findings—widespread approval for Howard's performance as prime minister, his big margin over Crean as the preferred prime minister, and the high level of support for the Liberal-National Party coalition he led.16 So stark a contrast invited a different way of framing the findings: not around consistency, as Howard had argued, with those who doubted his honesty, those who opposed the war and those who would never vote for him being essentially the same group; but around paradox, the paradox of having most respondents register what was widely seen as a damning indictment of the government's handling of a key issue yet not prepared to mark down either the Prime Minister or his government for it.
The dominant way of framing the data was established by the Australian. Under the heading '“Misled” voters stay loyal to PM', the paper argued that while a third of respondents believed they had been 'knowingly misled' over the war against Iraq and another third believed they had been 'unknowingly misled' this had not changed 'how they would vote'. Indeed, in 'the past two weeks' Howard had maintained his 40-point lead over Crean as the preferred prime minister and the position of the government itself had 'marginally improved' (45:35 compared with a lead of 45:37 a fortnight earlier), so that if an election had been held 'now' Labor (which had polled 37.8 per cent of the vote in 2001) 'would actually lose seats'. 'I don't need a poll to tell me that truth matters in politics', Crean remarked (ABC 2003e). But what the poll suggested was that the truth did not matter. Support for Howard remained 'stronger than for his coalition invasion partners, George W. Bush and Tony Blair'.
The sense of paradox was almost certainly heightened by the Australian's failure to indicate the order in which the questions were asked. Readers could well have assumed that the question about Iraq's WMD had been asked before the questions on support for Howard, Crean and their respective parties. Mark Day (2003) columnist, was quite explicit. 'Something very odd' was 'taking place in the Australian electorate', he observed. Two-thirds of those polled believed that Howard had 'misled us over the reasons for going to war in Iraq' [sic], yet 'in the next question, a clear majority says that deception, knowing or unknowing, was not a reason to change our vote, and John Howard leads Simon Crean as preferred Prime Minister 59 to 19 per cent.' Judgements about leaders and parties had not changed, he was saying—the use of Iraq to prime respondents notwithstanding.
In fact, the voting intention question was not 'the next question': just the reverse. The question about voting intention came first, questions about the leaders followed; only later was there a question about whether the public had been misled about WMD. Nor was this order accidental. On the contrary, for Newspoll (and ACNielsen) this is standard practice designed to ensure that responses to questions about party preference and the performance of party leaders are not influenced by prior questions about particular issues or events.17 Had there been any effect it could only have run the other way, with support for the Coalition dampening criticism of its conduct over Iraq.
Taken at face value, what sort of paradox did the poll results establish? In arguing that a sense of being misled over Iraq had not damaged the Prime Minister or the government, commentators overlooked the possibility that the fall in Howard's lead as 'preferred prime minister'—50 percentage points, 20-22 June, down to 41 percentage points by 4-6 July—was attributable to it. While it is true that the gap between Labor and the Coalition was 10 percentage points on 18-20 July, compared with eight points on 4-6 July, this was not because of any growth in the Coalition's support; rather it reflected a loss in Labor's support—to the most anti-war party, the Greens.
There are more general problems, too, in arguing the idea of a paradox. First, commentators conflated gross change (the total who changed their party support) with net change (changes in the overall level of party support). If there was no change in the level of Coalition support, this may have been because the number rewarding the Coalition for other reasons balanced the number of respondents punishing the Coalition for its having misled the public. Certainly, there is evidence that at the subsequent election Labor gained votes on Iraq even as the Coalition gained votes on other things (Goot 2007: 299). Second, the Coalition may have suffered a net loss but one that sampling variance simply masked. In electoral terms, a loss of just one or two percentage points would have been substantial; but given that what the polls produce are only estimates of a party's support no one can say for sure whether an estimate that remained unchanged between two surveys shows that party support itself remained unchanged. Third, while everyone knew the direction in which support for the Prime Minister or the Liberal-National Party should have moved if a sense of paradox were to be avoided, no one knew how large such a shift would have needed to be. Would a shift of any size have been sufficient? Or should the movement have been as great, say, as the movement to which the polls testified when the war commenced? A report in the Courier-Mail (2003) noted that Howard was 'still the preferred prime minister', as if a poll that showed two-thirds of respondents believing the public had been misled should also have shown that Howard's 40 point lead over Crean had been entirely wiped out.
Those who pointed to a paradox assumed not only that respondents should judge the Coalition and its leader in terms of the truthfulness of the facts they adduced in arguing the case for war, but also that they should judge Howard's decision to go to war solely by the truthfulness of his initial pitch. Neither assumption is persuasive. Respondents judge the performance of the parties and their leaders on various grounds, not just one. And prime ministers who mislead in arguing part of their case do not necessarily destroy their entire case. Told, in February 2004, that 'the governments of the United States and Britain now say there appears to be little or no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction', the majority of respondents interviewed by Ipsos not only in the US but also in Britain, Canada, Mexico, France and Italy endorsed the proposition that 'there were other reasons besides WMD to justify going to war in Iraq' (Goot 2004: 250). Had the same question been asked in Australia—certainly in June or July—it might have generated a similar result. In May, when Morgan asked whether the US was 'right or wrong to invade Iraq', the majority (53 per cent) said it was 'right' (Morgan 2003a).
Explaining the paradox
If there was a paradox, what might explain it? Journalists and other commentators advanced a range of explanations. Some focused on what had been achieved by the war in Iraq, deceptions notwithstanding. A similar number emphasised Labor's failure to leverage the widespread scepticism about the government's case for war. Others argued that when it came to being misled Australians did not care, some simply accepting that politicians lie. For critics of the war, this last raised real concerns about the state of Australian democracy. However, these were concerns that others challenged.
Ends justifying the means
Explanations that focused on the war itself noted that the allies had won, no Australians had been lost and that, whatever reasons Howard might have given at the beginning, for most Australians the end had justified the means (Day 2003; Kitney 2003b; Ruehl 2003; Stewart 2003; Don Watson in ABC 2003c). Writing before July's Newspoll had been conducted, Malcolm Farr (2003b) observed that Howard appeared to be 'bulletproof'—a tribute to the fact that the public saw Australia's mission as the removal of Saddam Hussein and it was not about to 'quibble over the original justification for the war'. Australia had suffered no casualities, and with the mission accomplished the public had now 'moved on' (see also Day 2003; Ruehl 2003; Peter Maher, of the media monitors Rehame, quoted in Seccombe 2003b).18
Certainly among those who were to tell ACNielsen that the war was justified many more (34 per cent) volunteered the toppling of Saddam Hussein as their reason for thinking this than volunteered any other reason; only 5 per cent, for example, nominated Iraq's loss of its ability to use WMD (Dodson 2003).19 And asked, in the Mitchell interview, whether 'in retrospect' going to war was 'the wrong thing to do', since most people felt misled about the reasons for going to war, Howard gave—as the first of 'a number of reasons' for not thinking it wrong—the answer most commonly given in the poll. 'We have rid Iraq of somebody who was responsible for mass murder and torture over three to four decades', he reminded his audience. 'If the advice that the [leader of the Opposition] … had been followed Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq' (Howard 2003b).
Prominent political scientist, Robert Manne (2003a), put the point about ends and means in a more negative way. He described Australians, in the tradition of W. K. Hancock (1930), as 'genuinely interested in consequences and outcomes and unusually indifferent to principles and ideals'—though how the former might be judged without recourse to the latter he did not say.20 For Raimond Gaita, concerned to make a similar point, all this was relatively new. Australia's culture had 'become vulnerable to simplifying philosophies—notably consequentialism, the philosophy which says the moral character of an action is determined solely by its consequences' (2004: 56). One consequence, stressed earlier by Howard, was the reinforcement of the American alliance and with it a way of ensuring Australia's own defence. Bob Hogg (2003) former Labor Party national secretary, thought this the key to why Howard had 'not been worn down by the post-war flak'.
The weakness of Labor's counter-mobilisation
A second set of explanations centred on the Labor Party. 'The secret of Howard's success is, as always', Miranda Devine (2003) was pleased to note, 'his enemies'. Howard, said Mike Seccombe (2003c), faced 'a weak opposition' (see also Megalogenis 2003b: 202), or what Manne (2003a) decried as a 'feeble opposition'—one that 'spectacularly failed in its quasi-constitutional duty to interrogate and oppose'. Labor, said Geoff Kitney (2003b), was weak on 'two issues voters care about most: stopping boat people and enhancing Australia's security'. On national and international security, Rod Cameron (ABC 2003e) remarked, 'Labor hasn't got a position'. It suffered, said Mark Day (2003), from a 'total lack of credibility'. Perhaps that was why it had failed, as Newspoll's Sol Lebovic put it (ABC 2003g), to gain 'traction'. The Howard government 'is under nothing like the scrutiny that the Blair Government and the Bush Administration face', Michelle Grattan (2003) observed. Some pointed not to Labor's weakness but to the cast-iron discipline Howard exercised over his own party, something Blair could only dream of in relation to his party (Shanahan 2003b).
Party certainly figured more prominently than the press, though when the press was mentioned it was with feeling. News Ltd's Malcolm Farr (2003a), somewhat bravely, rounded on 'a large squad of journalistic supporters, publishers and flunkeys, who quickly mobilise against the fanatics'. Manne (2003b), writing for the Fairfax press, was more pointed. If Iraq had caused Bush and Blair 'political headaches', but not Howard, this was partly because of the 'successful intimidation of the ABC and the Murdoch stranglehold over the tabloid press'. Certainly the support of the Australian press for the war—and not just the Murdoch press—stood out by comparison with the press in Britain.
Apathy
But the most despairing set of explanations was organised around the idea that while respondents were prepared to endorse positions critical of the government, deep down '[n]o one seemed to care' (Manne 2004: 49). Australians 'appeared not at all disturbed, not at any rate in ways that showed in opinion polls' (Gaita 2004: 49).21 They were, or had become, apathetic; they did not want to know; worse, they were actually comforted by lies.

Some support for the view that the public did not care much is provided by an analysis of comments made by callers to talkback radio. Conducted between 26 May and 31 July by media monitors Rehame, the analysis found that while the majority (54 per cent) of comments relating to claims of deception involving WMD were 'negative' and few (17 per cent) were 'positive', only 374 of the callers put to air during those nine weeks talked about the topic. By comparison, over 5,000 calls were logged in relation to the arrival of asylum seekers on MV Tampa in 2001 and over 2,000 in relation to the Bali bombing in 2002.22

One journalist thought the Newspoll results pointed to 'a palpable apathy in middle Australia over once fundamental questions of accountability' (Stewart 2003). For Hugh Mackay (2003), social researcher and newspaper columnist, the results provided 'another glimpse into the meaning of disengagement: a government can be perceived as lying to the people and the people, by and large, won't care' (see also Rod Cameron, ABC 2003b). Or as Tariq Ali, put it: 'It's as if [the Australian public] expect politicians to lie—and when they do it's greeted with a shrug of the shoulders' (cited in Fraser 2003; see also Charlton 2003). According to Mackay, the poll figures would not have surprised 'anyone': they were simply 'further proof' of voters 'disengaged' not only from the 'political' agenda, but also from the 'social and economic agenda' (Mackay 2003; see also Mackay 1999: chapter 26, 1993: part 2.7; Lappeman 2003; Adams 2003b; Malcolm Mackerras cited in Julie Macken 2003).23
For some, explanations of this kind became occasions to shift responsibility from the politicians to the public, and from the arena of international politics to the realm of individual psychology. Thus, for Mackay (2003) 'the real explanation' for the government's increased lead over Labor was 'also the simplest: we have taken our eye off the big picture. We don't want to know.' Elaborating on this view, broadcaster and columnist Phillip Adams (2003b) insisted that the devaluing of Australian democracy by those who were 'disengaged' was compounded by the public's ignorance 'on almost every issue', and the determination of those who 'now know they were conned' to not 'want to know'. The public was 'complicit in letting the system down.' Rather than 'being outraged by the lies of our leaders and the gutlessness of the Opposition, we excuse our failure as citizens by saying, “We're not to blame; they've made us cynical.” Sorry, that's not good enough. The public has to lift its game' (Adams 2003a).

On religious programs and among ethicists this line of argument encouraged even darker conclusions about voters proving unequal to the burdens of citizenship and politicians failing to rise to the challenge of responsible government. Chairing a discussion on the ABC's religious program, Geraldine Doogue thought that things had 'got pretty serious', that voters may have been given the impression 'that all politics stinks', and that there may have been 'a fundamental shift in the public's expectation of what they ought to know, the truth' (ABC 2003c). Asked by another ABC journalist to comment on the Newspoll results Dr. Simon Longstaff, of the St. James Ethics Centre, was said to have found the result 'dispiriting'. The 'level of trust in the political class', he remarked, had 'reduced to such a degree that people constantly discount what they're being told'. In a 'state of despair' their support for the government meant they were 'merely clinging to what they know' because they lacked any faith in the Opposition. This risked 'grave potential results', since 'if you don't trust the people who make the laws you run the risk of not trusting the laws they make.' Speaking on the same program, Mackay thought the mood 'very dangerous' for 'the health of our democracy', since 'in a sense politicians can get away with murder' (ABC 2003h; see also Seccombe 2003c).

This despair, however, did not pass without challenge. If voters felt misled but still supported the government perhaps this was because, as the columnist Gerard Henderson argued, the media do not always allow politicians to be honest and 'basically the electorate recognises that' (ABC 2003c). Certainly the polls provided no evidence that most Australians wanted to hear lies. Far from demonstrating their distrust of government, said Hugh White, a defence analyst, Australians were 'showing a unique willingness to trust the government on security issues' (Megalogenis 2003a).24
However, the willingness of voters to support governments that had misled them was hardly new. As George Megalogenis (2003a) noted 'Australians have a history of sticking with governments they felt may have deceived them'. His list of relatively recent examples included: Malcolm Fraser's electoral triumph in 1980, notwithstanding his misleading the electorate over tax cuts—the 'fistful of dollars' as Liberal Party advertisements put it—in 1977; the victories of Bob Hawke in 1990 and Paul Keating in 1993, despite the promised 'soft landing' turning into a 'hard recession'; and Howard's electoral triumph of 1998, after assuring voters in 1996 that there would 'never ever' be a Goods and Services Tax (see also Megalogenis 2003b: 203). To these he might have added: Hawke's 1987 pledge that 'by 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty' (Mills 1993: 119); the distinction between 'core' and 'non-core' commitments, drawn by Howard after the 1996 election, as he stood by some of his undertakings and scuttled others (Goot 2002b: 24-25, 45 n.14); or any number of other promises made but not kept by governments re-elected over the years.

If governments had acted deceitfully in the past and survived it was difficult to see the polls on Iraq as particularly puzzling, especially when there was widespread acceptance that in relation to Iraq the government had achieved a worthwhile end. 'I don't accept the argument that society's alienated or disenchanted or disengaged', Henderson insisted. 'I think sections of the media feel that people should be more engaged than they are. But I don't see any reason why people should be engaged if they don't want to be' (ABC 2003c). Another columnist on the Right was more direct. The Newspoll results, said Peter Ruehl (2003), were 'killing the leftie pundits, several of whom', he said, 'were reduced to trashing the voters for … well … voting'. The poll, he happily conceded, had thrown up 'a contradiction, but [only] in the sense that liking the Rolling Stones but hating their last seven albums is a contradiction, too.' That most, if not all, of the hand wringing was done by opponents of the war, of Howard, or of both may help explain why Newspoll's findings were so widely misrepresented—taken as a comment on politicians who 'lie' or a government that 'deliberately misleads' (see, for example: Mackay 2003; Tariq Ali, cited in Fraser 2003; Waterford 2003: 7).

Conclusion
At almost every turn most commentators were either mistaken or their conclusions open to doubt. Polls were compared that were not comparable. Contrasts were drawn between public opinion in Australia and public opinion in Britain and the US—in relation to government dishonesty, the standing of the leaders, and party support—that are difficult to support. And a paradox was created—based on the idea that whereas voters felt misled by the government over Iraq support for the government itself had been unaffected—that was less puzzling than was commonly believed.

The polls, interpreted as showing a widespread sense that the public had been misled, created a problem for the government. Howard, skilled at reading the polls, addressed the issue with expedition. His insistence that only those who thought the government had misled the public deliberately could be considered real critics of his position on WMD set the bar very high—much higher than he had set it in opposition when he ruled out 'inadvertence' as a defence (MacCallum 2005: 97). Since the things governments say about their intentions are difficult to disprove, even by those (like Wilkie) who provided the information on which the policy was ostensibly based, this made the bar very difficult to jump.25 The effect of Howard's response was to circumscribe severely the notion of government accountability, notwithstanding his concession that voters could still hold him responsible at the next election if they felt misled; Howard's invocation of the ballot may have been one of the moves Paul Kelly had in mind when he noted that Howard 'invokes public approval to legitimate any changes to governance that might diminish accountability' (2006: 4). In any event, far from Howard thinking the public didn't matter, as Alison Broinowski suggests (2003: 27) in relation to Australia's joining the US in the war on Iraq, Howard's determination to defend his reputation over WMD was based precisely on the premise that the public did matter.

The alternative to the reading of the polls argued by Howard—the one set in train by the Australian—produced a kind of moral panic: a disproportionate reaction, within the media, to what was perceived to be a sudden or unexpected threat, directed at established norms or institutions, and felt by those who traditionally regard themselves as guardians of these institutions or norms (Critcher 2006). In this case, a panic among professional middle class critics of the war in the face of evidence that large numbers of Australians—despite their sense of having been misled—were willing to support the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular, while Britons and Americans were not prepared to let their government or their leader so lightly off the hook. The panic was heightened by a failure to recognise three things: that the problems confronting Blair as a consequence of the charges over 'sexing up' the material he placed before the British public were always going to be more dramatic—especially after the death of Dr Kelly—than those that confronted Howard or Bush over the way they had handled the case for war; that, even so, the British poll against which the Australian chose to compare its own poll showed a loss of government support considerably greater than that shown by any other British poll; and that an explanation for the fall in support for either the government or its leader had to factor in possibilities other than a widespread sense of government by deceit—above all, the electorate's frustration, by the middle of 2003, with the progress of the war.

Notes
1. My thanks to Deb Brennan, Bill Tow and the Journal's referees for comments on an earlier version of this article. The Australian Research Council supported the writing of the article under Grant DP0559334.
2. According to Newspoll, the proportion of respondents that rated 'defence' as 'very important' to how they 'would vote in a federal election' declined from 63 per cent, on 18-20 October 2002, to 53 per cent on 20-22 June 2003, <www.newspoll.com.au>.
3. While this fits Alan Gyngell and Michael Wesley's broader observation that in relation to international affairs 'interested generalists' or the 'attentive public' constitute 'a relatively small minority' and 'are usually … regular consumers of the broadsheet print media and quality electronic media', it is difficult to square this observation with the simultaneous claim that 'twelve or fourteen of Australia's forty federal elections... have featured strong divisions on and reactions to foreign policy issues' (Gyngell and Wesley 2003: 192-3).
4. Other HB-UMR results from the June poll, all of them ignored by other media, are reported in Stephens (2003) and Wade (2003).
5. More recently, John Langmore (2005): 67) has noted that 'Blair's popularity declined, in part because he concealed and misrepresented information about the war'; but he makes no attempt to test this claim against the fate of Howard or even of Bush.
6. The resignation of an intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, on 11 March, before the war (Wilkie 2004: 11ff), had much less of an impact on Australian politics than the suicide of David Kelly, after the war, had on British politics; see Runciman (2004).
7. In the US, it seems, there were no questions about whether the public had been deliberately or unintentionally misled; Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia (2005): 282-3) document the findings on whether respondents felt there was deliberate deception, but they do not discuss the findings.
8. The data on voting intentions are available at <www.mori.com/polls/trends/voting-allpub-trends.shtml>, except for the YouGov poll of 22-24 July.
9. Curiously, the review of US polls on Iraq by Everts and Isernia (2005) ignores this question.
10. These data, too, are overlooked by Everts and Isernia (2005).
11. See CBS (2003g) for the remarks about Bush's integrity; and CBS (2003c, 2003h), for the data on whether Bush and/or the administration told all they knew.
12. These data are missing from Everts and Isernia (2005).
13. The proportion that thought Howard had 'unintentionally misled' (42 per cent) or did 'not mislead' (26 per cent) was 68 per cent, not 70 per cent. Implicit in Howard's gloss was a rejection of the view that 'those who... accept government policy … remain largely without influence on the foreign policy process, chiefly by virtue of their low numbers', though Gyngell and Wesley (2003: 192-3) also say that 'public opinion sets the essential parameters of the political and policy process between elections.'
14. A variation on Howard's line was also run by Atkins (2003).
15. Among the relatively small number of commentaries generated by the ACNielsen poll, a much greater proportion accepted—if only implicitly—Howard's point (see Kitney 2003a; Riley 2003b; Hewson 2003). Compare the claim that 'The poll findings on Iraq will give encouragement to the Opposition in its attack on the Government's credibility—in particular its reliance on the warnings about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for sending troops' (Dodson 2003). The Labor leader had a different take, arguing that the poll exposed Howard's disregard for the truth ('deliberately misled') and his incompetence (having allowed himself to be 'misled by others'); Canberra Times (2003) and ABC (2003f).
16. Compare the argument that 'Any meaningful regime of accountability requires that politicians take responsibility for what they say' and that resort to 'evasions' results 'inevitably' in 'an increase in public cynicism as the truth emerges, and a decline in public trust in political leaders' (Barker 2003: 91). However, Geoffrey Barker also argues (2003: 20) that the war was conducted against the 'backdrop' of 'a largely disengaged electorate'. Clearly, the idea of a disengaged electorate being made more cynical by the truth creates a paradox of its own.
17. The reverse may also be true. Glynn et al. (1999: 75-6) warn that asking about voting intentions first may affect responses to subsequent questions but don't consider the consequences of asking about voting intentions after the questions on issues.
18. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Fox TV that 'Australians are comfortable with what we've done' (Sydney Morning Herald 2003). After the Newspoll was published, Farr (2003a) described Howard as someone who 'knows to the finest calibration how far he can take voters'.
19. Only the first reasons respondents gave were coded. Curiously, opponents of the war were not asked for their reasons.
20. A similar sentiment is expressed by Don Watson (ABC 2003c). For Hancock's influence in spreading the view that 'Australian politics is virtually devoid of ideas', see Connell (1968/1974: 38).
21. But compare his subsequent remarks 'that though [Howard] should have been voted out of office … nothing substantial can be inferred about … the invasion of Iraq from the fact that so many people thought differently' (Gaita 2005: 108).
22. For these data, I am grateful to Matthew Mitchell, Rehame's Sales and Communications Director (Victoria); personal communication 8 December 2003. See also Peter Maher, quoted in Seccombe (2003b).
23. Mackay's emphasis on apathy was not new. He had identified it as 'a dominant theme in social research'—whether 'over the past couple of years', as he was now saying; since the late 1990s, as he had said in 1998; or since as far back as 1972, as he argued in 1983. Australians, having faced 'too many changes coming too quickly', were 'tired of “issues”, disappointed in our leaders and disturbed by our own sense of powerlessness.' Being 'scared', they had 'switched off'. One 'might even say we would prefer to be lied to if that would comfort us' (Mackay 2003). In a subsequent article, Deidre Macken (2003) argued that 'disengagement with politics, broadly, and public ethics in particular, has been gathering pace for at least the last decade'.
24. But compare Brian Fitzpatrick's conclusions about 'a gullible Australian electorate', based on the results of the general election held in December 1955, after the (Petrov) Royal Commission on Espionage:
It is unlikely that any Prime Minister but an Australian Prime Minister, being asked again and again publicly, in parliament and otherwise, to answer accusations of falsehood and bad faith, should simply refrain from answering. And only in Australia, perhaps, would a majority of the electorate, by testimony of votes cast, indicate that the refusal to answer, refusal to so much as notice sworn evidence given by high officials in contradiction of the Prime Minister, was of no account (1956: 100).

25. Compare the rhetorical question posed by the Australian (2003) in an editorial on its Newspoll result: 'Why would three seasoned political operators [Howard, Blair and Bush] have lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, when such lies are bound to be unmasked?'
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51. Grattan, Michelle (2003) Alston's dangerous obsession. Age — 23 July
52. Gyngell, Alan and Michael, Wesley (2003) Making Australian foreign policy Cambridge University Press , Cambridge
53. Hancock, W. K. (1930) Australia Benn , London
54. Hawker, Britton (2003) June 2003 Omni results (part 1). — conducted by UMR Research Pty Ltd, 20-22 June
55. Hewson, John (2003) Politics is a dodgy business. Australian Financial Review — 26 September
56. Hogg, Bob (2003) Making the most of Crean. Australian Financial Review — 30 October
57. Howard, John (2003a) Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP press conference, Canberra. www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/Interview382.html — 22 July
58. Howard, John (2003b) Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP interview with Neil Mitchell, Radio 3AW. www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/Interview494.html — 25 September
59. (2003) Iraq survey. www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2003/mirror-iraq-poll-july-2003.htm — July
60. Kelly, Paul Cater, Nick (ed) (2006) How Howard governs. The Howard factor: A decade that changed the nation Melbourne University Press , Melbourne
61. Kitney, Geoff (2003a) Howard avoids Iraq war curse. Sydney Morning Herald — 24 September
62. Kitney, Geoff (2003b) PM is safe provided voters feel otherwise. Sydney Morning Herald — 15 August
63. Langmore, John (2005) Dealing with America: The UN, the US and Australia University of New South Wales Press , Sydney
64. Lappeman, Sue (2003) Stunt signals poll. Gold Coast Bulletin — 23 July
65. MacCallum, Mungo (2005) Breach of trust: Correspondence. Quarterly Essay 17 , pp. 96-97.
66. Mackay, Hugh (1993) Reinventing Australia: The mind and mood of Australia in the 1990s Angus & Robertson , Pymble, NSW
67. Mackay, Hugh (1999) Turning point: Australians choosing their future Pan Macmillan
68. Mackay, Hugh (2003) Don't just get even—get very mad. Sydney Morning Herald — 26-27 July
69. Macken, Deidre (2003) The new Australian. Weekend Financial Review — 15-16 November
70. Macken, Julie (2003) PM powers ahead, but for how long?. Australian Financial Review — 27-28 September
71. Manne, Robert (2003a) High premium to insure our security. Sydney Morning Herald — 28 July
72. Manne, Robert (2003b) A year of eroding precious values. Sydney Morning Herald — 29 December
73. Manne, Robert (2004) The Howard years Black Inc — in
74. Megalogenis, George (2003a) PM risks his reputation. Weekend Australia — 26-27 July
75. Megalogenis, George (2003b) Fault lines: Race, work and the politics of changing Australia Scribe
76. Mills, Stephen (1993) The Hawke years Viking , Ringwood, Vic
77. Moore, D. W. (2003) Public steady on Iraq. www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=9661&pg=1 — Poll Analyses, 7 November
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80. Peake, Ross (2003) We didn't mislead anyone, says PM. Canberra Times — 23 July
81. (2003) —
82. Riley, Mark (2003a) Nation split on Howard's Iraqi weapons evidence. Sydney Morning Herald — 10 July
83. Riley, Mark (2003b) Most say PM misled them. Sydney Morning Herald — 24 September
84. Ruehl, Peter (2003) Back in Oz and it's situation normal. Australian Financial Review — 29 July
85. Runciman, W. G. (2004) Hutton and Butler: Lifting the lid on the workings of power Oxford University Press for the British Academy — (ed.)
86. Seccombe, Mike (2003a) How the war was spun. Sydney Morning Herald — Spectrum, 2-3 August
87. Seccombe, Mike (2003b) A different sort of truth. Sydney Morning Herald — 16-17 August
88. Seccombe, Mike (2003c) Anything goes in stonewall world. Sydney Morning Herald — 22 August
89. Shanahan, Dennis (2003a) “Misled” voters stay loyal to PM. Australian — 22 July
90. Shanahan, Dennis (2003b) Forget Bush and Blair, PM is war leader. Australian — 22 July
91. Stephens, Tony (2003) We're still a nation of mates, but the fair go is going fast. Sydney Morning Herald — 8 July
92. Stewart, Cameron (2003) The secret life of us. Weekend Australian — 26-27 July
93. (2003) Australians accept Iraq war: Downer. — 27-28 September
94. Wade, Matt (2003) RBA between a rate cut and a hard place. Sydney Morning Herald — 1 July
95. Waterford, Jack (2003) The boy who cried wolf. Eureka Street — September
96. Wilkie, Andrew (2004) Axis of deceit: The story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq Black Inc. , Melbourne
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List of Tables
Table 1. Whether the Blair, Bush or Howard governments misled the public over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or the reasons for going to war, June-September 2003 (percentages)

Weapons of mass destruction
Reasons for war

HB-UMR 20-22 June
Gallup 27-29 June
Newspoll 18-20 July
ICM Research 10-12 July
ACNielsen 19-21 Sept
Misled …
Australia
USA
Australia
Britain
Australia
na: not asked
Questions:
'Do you think John Howard mislead [sic] Australians about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?' (UMR Research for Hawker Britton)
'Do you think the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or not?' (Gallup)
'In the lead up to the war in Iraq, do you think the Howard government knowingly misled the Australian public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, unknowingly misled the Australian public, or did not mislead the Australian public?' (Newspoll)
'In his decision to go to war, do you think Tony Blair: misled the British people but not knowingly; did not mislead the British people; knowingly misled the British people?' (ICM Research)
'Which of the following statements best describes your views about the reasons given for going to war in Iraq? [READ OUT AND ROTATE]
a. Prime Minister Howard deliberately misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq.
b. Prime Minister Howard unintentionally misled the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq, because he was misled by others.
c. Prime Minister Howard did not mislead the Australian people about the reasons for going to war with Iraq'. (ACNielsen)
Sources:Hawker Britton 2003; Australian 2003, for Newspoll; Gallup 2003; ICM Research 2003; ACNielsen 2003.

A nuclear North Korea and the stability of East Asia: a tsunami on the horizon?

2008-09-15T00:24:00.001-07:00

A nuclear North Korea and the stability of East Asia: a tsunami on the horizon?
Author: Dong Sun Lee
DOI: 10.1080/10357710701684906
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 61, Issue 4 December 2007 , pages 436 - 454
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Abstract
This article aims to assess the strategic implications of North Korea's nuclear development. It calls into question the conventional wisdom that Pyongyang's atomic weapons will not only undermine the state of deterrence on the Korean peninsula, but also will trigger a nuclear domino effect throughout East Asia. A nuclear-armed North Korea, I argue, still cannot win a major victory over the South and the United States; Pyongyang's bombs somewhat decrease—rather than increase, as many believe—the risk of US preventive attack. And the regional US military presence as well as the available missile defence technology is sufficient to persuade Seoul and Tokyo not to pursue nuclear arsenals for the foreseeable future. While I reject the alarmist view, I find that North Korea's armament nevertheless carries two significant—albeit less grave—risks that have received little scholarly scrutiny. First, I argue that the risk of inadvertent war through pre-emption will increase with Pyongyang's armament. I also argue that the strengthening of US alliances in the region as well as the US development of a missile defence capability in response to the North Korean threat could exacerbate the security dilemmas among major powers. I conclude, however, that these potential dangers do not markedly threaten regional stability.
North Korea's nuclear development has received a great deal of attention for its potential strategic consequences. Many experts and laypersons anticipate that Pyongyang's arming, if continued, will have immense and largely negative impacts on the stability of the Korean peninsula as well as East Asia—just as would a tsunami. This alarmist outlook is essentially based on two widely accepted assessments. First, the pessimists fear that North Korean nuclear development will drastically undermine the state of deterrence that has contributed to the precarious peace on the peninsula for more than five decades (Perry 2005). They anticipate that nuclear development will likely either embolden the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to attack the Republic of Korea (ROK) or will invite a US preventive war against Pyongyang. The second presumption is that North Korean armament will lead Seoul and Tokyo—and possibly Taiwan—to seek independent nuclear deterrents, prompting a domino effect of proliferation in this volatile region (Carter et al. 2003; Chanlett-Avery and Squassoni 2006; Li 2006; McGregor 2006). Such a spread of nuclear weapons would increase the risks of preventive war and a nuclear arms race.

This article aims to critically examine this conventional wisdom and precisely assess the strategic implications of North Korea's nuclear development. I argue that the alarmist view exaggerates the dangers associated with the DPRK armament. A nuclear North Korea is not as dangerous as the pessimists assume it is. The North's nuclear development alone does not undermine deterrence on the Korean peninsula. Nuclear weapons do not enable North Korea to win a major victory over the South and the United States. Indeed, contrary to common expectations, they actually decrease the risk of a US preventive attack against North Korea to some extent. Nor is North Korean armament likely to set in motion a nuclear domino effect in East Asia. The regional US military presence and available missile defence technology are sufficient in the short run to persuade Seoul and Tokyo from pursuing nuclear arsenals.

While discounting the risks that the pessimists frequently point out, I find that North Korea's armament nevertheless has two potentially destabilising—albeit less far-reaching—political effects that have received less scholarly and public attention. The risk of inadvertent war through pre-emption, I argue, will increase as Pyongyang develops nuclear bombs. Also, the strengthening of US alliances in the region as well as the US development of a missile defence in response to the North Korean threat could exacerbate the security dilemmas between Japan and China and between the United States and China.1 These potential dangers, however, pose no pressing threats to regional stability. Since all states in the region have strong interests in avoiding an open conflict—not to mention a nuclear war—they will go to great lengths to keep escalating tensions under control, probably with considerable success. Thus North Korean nuclear development will likely produce a ripple rather than a tsunami in the international political scene.

The remainder of this article is organised into three parts. The first investigates how North Korea's nuclear development affects deterrence on the Korean peninsula and explores the presumed danger of a nuclear domino effect. In the second section, I address the issues of crisis instability in the Korean peninsula and the security dilemma in East Asia more broadly. The final section highlights key arguments and offers future projections and policy implications.

False dangers

North Korean aggression
Aggression by a nuclear North Korea is no less deterrable than aggression by a non-nuclear North Korea. Credible studies on deterrence indicate that North Korean aggression is likely when two conditions are present. First, the DPRK must anticipate military success—whether total or limited—against the ROK army and US forces in Korea (USFK). This means that North Korea should expect to defeat the South Korean defence swiftly through a blitzkrieg (Mearsheimer 1983). Alternatively, North Korea must be able to fight a successful limited war—quickly seizing strategically important portions of territory (e.g. Seoul) and attaining a fait accompli of at least limited victory (Paul 1994). If North Korea fails to obtain either objective and a war of attrition consequently ensues, South Korea and the United States will mobilise their superior war potential and defeat the North with near certainty.
Second, Pyongyang must be able to deny a forceful, timely intervention by the United States. If sizable US reinforcements arrive in the peninsula before the Korean People's Army (KPA) overruns the ROK defence, North Korea will have little chance to make or consolidate any substantial territorial gains. Nuclear weapons cannot provide Kim Jong Il with these critical capabilities, and therefore do not increase the likelihood of a North Korean aggression significantly.

North Korea presently appears to have a handful of nuclear explosives of only limited destructive power. Its October 2006 nuclear test, which reportedly consumed six or so kilograms of plutonium, merely produced an estimated yield of less than one kiloton (Hecker 2006; Squassoni 2006). Assuming that 34 kilograms to 44 kilograms of plutonium are remaining in stock, Pyongyang may be able to build up to seven nuclear explosives of equivalent potency. A one-kiloton nuclear weapon, if detonated in the air, can inflict 50 percent casualties on troops in open earthworks in an area of 1.5 square kilometres and on armoured vehicles in an area of 0.6 square kilometres (Dunnigan 1993; Sessler et al. 2000). Given this level of lethality, the small tactical nuclear weapons possessed by Pyongyang, in combination with its conventional artillery, might be able to punch a narrow hole into the frontline defence. Alternatively, the Kim Jong Il regime might use the nuclear bombs against command centres and other military infrastructures in the immediate rear area and then defeat stunned frontline forces with conventional arms. In either scenario, the ROK army might not be able to swiftly reinforce the threatened sector with its reserves because its tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and self-propelled artillery are not equipped with adequate protective gears (Hankook Ilbo2006a). Therefore, such nuclear attacks could create opportunities for the DPRK forces to produce breakthroughs.

Even in such a favourable event, however, the KPA probably lacks sufficient capability to exploit those offensive opportunities and fight a successful blitzkrieg. The use of nuclear weapons will slow down the DPRK advance by producing debris and, more importantly, radiation. These lingering obstacles will hinder the attackers' movement and increase their potential for combat fatigue: operating in the radiated zone requires time-consuming decontamination and adds greatly to emotional stress (Dunnigan 1993). Even if North Korean armoured spearheads manage to pass through the contaminated areas filled with debris, their supply trucks would have enormous trouble travelling back and forth through this radiated zone, and serious logistical problems would arise as a result.

Another potential military problem created by a nuclear explosion is caused by its electromagnetic pulse. It can damage electronic components of the DPRK's weapon platforms and communication systems (as well as those of their ROK counterparts), thereby complicating coordination of initial attacks. Consequently, the tempo of the DPRK offensive operation will be reduced, and the Allied forces will gain time to recover from shock and bring lethal firepower upon the attacking forces, which would be moving slowly through the broken and radiated paths. As a result, the offensive will soon lose momentum and come to a halt, failing to deliver a quick, decisive victory through blitzkrieg.
Tactical nuclear weapons also would not enable the KPA to fight a successful limited war. Such a war aims to grab a strategically valuable territory quickly and then deter or defeat counterattacks, thereby forcing a fait accompli (Mearsheimer 1983; Paul 1994). Nuclear attacks against headquarters and airfields can temporarily diminish the Allies' ability to coordinate defensive efforts and employ superior air power to its maximum efficacy, thereby assisting the initial offensive operation by the North Korean forces. However, nuclear weapons do not help North Korea achieve a fait accompli or defend territorial gains—the keys to a successful limited war. The use of such weapons will cause large civilian casualties due to the proximity of major military targets to South Korean population centres. For example, key military infrastructures are located near Seoul and Daejeon, and airfields are close to major cities such as Kunsan. As civilian casualties mount, the Allies will find it politically difficult to accept a fait accompli without serious resistance.

Even if North Korea threatens further nuclear attacks against possible counteroffensives, such threats will not deter allied military attempts to recover the lost territory. The allies would not find the DPRK threat of escalation credible. Further use of nuclear weapons would increase casualties and erode the 'nuclear taboo' (which would otherwise constrain US responses), thereby raising the risk of an allied massive retaliation. And such a reprisal would bring an end to the North Korean state. Although nuclear escalation is costly to both sides, South Korea values the contested territory more than North Korea does, and is more willing to run the risk of such an escalation. And although repelling a North Korean invasion per se is not an inherently vital interest of the United States, the US concern about its reputation as 'leader of the free world' will proscribe its acquiescence to such an overt aggression (Arreguin-Toft 2001). Moreover, Washington might fear that its inaction would destroy the nuclear non-proliferation regime and undermine world order (Posen 1997). Thus, the Allies would likely counterattack and turn the intended limited war into a conventional war of attrition. North Korea cannot expect to win such a contest of material strength. In short, nuclear weapons cannot help North Korea keep a conquered territory. (Similarly, Iraq's chemical weapons did not deter an allied attempt to liberate Kuwait.)

Of course, North Korea might believe that its nuclear weapons can deter the Allies from carrying their counteroffensive deep into its territory and overthrowing its regime; consequently, the DPRK might calculate there will be little to lose even if its attempt for a fait accompli fails. However, a diminished risk of a catastrophic defeat hardly justifies initiating an unwinnable war. Even absent a counter-invasion, an abortive military adventure in fact can topple a repressive government—as the downfall of Argentinean military dictatorship after the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict demonstrates.

North Korean nuclear weapons also cannot absolutely deter a forceful intervention by the United States, because Pyongyang's threat of reprisal probably will not work. The US territory presently lies outside the reach of direct DPRK attack. Even if North Korea were capable of striking the United States with nuclear weapons, the United States' credible retaliatory capability will probably dissuade Pyongyang from doing so; and the US missile defence system will be in place to cope with a limited attack in case such deterrence fails. Therefore, the United States has little reason to believe that Kim Jong Il would conduct a war of aggression by launching a nuclear first attack, since his survival is not at stake. Such an attack would be of questionable efficacy and would invite a massive retaliation and an end to his regime.

In the case of a first attack, Pyongyang could more realistically expect to delay US reinforcements until it overruns the South Korean defence. Nuclear weapons could assist such attempts by damaging US forward bases on and around the Korean peninsula and coercing Japan to forego or reduce logistical support for the United States (Cha 2002). However, such nuclear missile strikes against military installations would be of only limited effectiveness because of their limited destructive power and accuracy; therefore, they would not seriously hamper US reinforcement efforts. Also, Japan would likely cooperate with the United States in the face of any North Korean threat in order to avoid risking a collapse of the US alliance and/or a reunification of Korea under the hostile Kim Jong Il regime. The belief that a US missile defence and nuclear det errent would protect Japan from North Korean attacks will also facilitate Japan's assistance of a US war effort.

US preventive war
Contrary to the pessimists' expectation, deployable North Korean nuclear armaments would actually decrease the likelihood of a US preventive war on the peninsula. Preventive war—military action to stop adversaries from increasing military capabilities—tends to be a risky endeavour, as demonstrated by the long global history of failed attempts and the recent ordeal in Iraq (Lee 2008). Democratic governments therefore usually face daunting challenges in selling such a war to their publics—unless a swift and cheap victory is anticipated (Levy and Gochal 2001/2; Schweller 1992). Such a victory is a remote possibility, however, when target states are nuclear-armed, because the prospect of nuclear retaliation adds to the associated risks. For this reason, there is no historical case in which a preventive war was fought against a nuclear-capable state, although some states have seriously considered it. (For example, US officials contemplated such an attack against the Soviet Union during the early Cold War (Trachtenberg 1991)).

While North Korea's nuclear arsenal has captured the headlines, the North Korean military does not need it to inflict unacceptable damage to the United States and its allies in the event of a US invasion (Lee 2006). When Pyongyang was believed to possess a meagre arsenal—comprising only one or possibly two untested nuclear devices and no effective long-range missiles—military experts still calculated that a major war on the Korean peninsula would cost the United States approximately 80,000 to 100,000 casualties and $100 billion (Oberdorfer 2001). When damage to other countries was also considered, the estimated cost of such a war increased to as high as 'one million casualties and one trillion dollars in estimated industrial damage and lost business' (Cha and Kang 2003).2 Another estimate calculated that a second Korean War would entail destruction costing 'more than $60 billion and result in 3 million casualties, including 52,000 US military casualties' (Cha and Kang 2003).

It is clear that the prospect of such a costly conventional war suffices to deter the United States (Lee 2006). The US government could not persuade its public to approve such a war. In December 2006, when the number of combat deaths in Iraq surpassed 3,000 and the cost of that war exceeded $350 billion, 61 percent of Americans surveyed said that the war had not been worth fighting (ABC News/Washington Post Poll2006; Associated Press 2007a). In light of such sensitivity to war costs, few if any presidents would be able to sell the US public on an obviously more expensive war on the Korean peninsula—unless North Korea were to directly attack the United States or its key allies first or to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorist organisations. A public opinion poll confirmed this point: Even before the nuclear test that demonstrated North Korea's nuclear capability, 62 percent of Americans opposed military action against North Korea in the absence of grave provocation (Gallup Poll 2005; Balz and Morin 2005).3

Policymakers have recognised the political constraint in using military force against Pyongyang. 'I am not saying we don't have military options', one of President George W. Bush's most senior advisers reportedly admitted in an interview, 'I am just saying we don't have good ones' (Sanger 2003). Similarly, former US Defence Secretary William Perry stated in a 1999 report on North Korean policy that 'the prospect of such a destructive war is a powerful deterrent to precipitous US or allied action' (Perry 1999). In the face of such political constraint, the Clinton and Bush administrations have understandably backed away from the use of force. A North Korean nuclear arsenal would add one additional constraint, but there already have been enough hurdles to dissuade a preventive war. North Korea is able to deter a US invasion with or without nuclear weapons.

Nuclear dominos Despite concerns about falling atomic dominos in the region (Associated Press 2006), a North Korean nuclear arsenal is unlikely to spur countries like South Korea and Japan to go nuclear in the short run. There are several major reasons for this restraint. One is that the US nuclear umbrella reassures these regional allies. Although Kim Jong Il tends to be overconfident and risk-acceptant, US nuclear superiority is too obvious for him to overlook. Washington currently possesses thousands of sophisticated nuclear weapons and an array of advanced delivery vehicles. Tokyo does not want to undercut this robust protection by pursuing a less potent indigenous arsenal in opposition to Washington's policy of global non-proliferation.4 The versatile US alliance also can protect a wide range of Japanese security interests such as sea lanes, while an indigenous arsenal can only ensure territorial integrity. (For these very reasons, the Japanese government had decided against a nuclear option in the wake of China's maiden nuclear test in 1964.) Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the DPRK nuclear test, Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro was quick to reassure US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Japan was 'absolutely not considering' nuclear development, receiving a strong reconfirmation of US nuclear commitment in return (Pinkston and Sakurai 2006). The Roh Moo-hyun government also thinks that the nuclear test cannot destroy the balance of power buttressed by the US military alliance as well as the qualitatively superior South Korean military, and that an independent arsenal is therefore unnecessary (Roh 2006a).

Another brake against a nuclear domino effect is missile defence technology, which provides an apparent alternative to an indigenous nuclear deterrent. Since the North Korean missile and nuclear tests in 2006, Japan has augmented its programs to develop a next-generation missile defence system jointly with the United States, and to deploy current-technology interceptors including Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 systems and sea-based SM-3 platforms (Associated Press 2007b). Tokyo views the missile defence as the least politically burdensome countermeasure to North Korean nuclear weapons. Although the development of the missile defence has drawn protests from Beijing, possible alternatives (such as the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent or a pre-emptive strike capability) would meet even stronger opposition from Japan's foreign neighbours as well as the Japanese public. In a July 2006 poll of Japanese citizens, 48.8 percent of respondents disapproved of an offensive strike capability, while 40.6 percent acknowledged its necessity for national security (Pinkston and Sakurai 2006). Facing similar if lesser political constraints, Seoul also has decided to pursue a missile defence capability instead of a nuclear arsenal, establishing a missile defence command and allocating an emergency budget for procurement of the Patriot missile system and control equipment. Unlike Japan, however, South Korea is building an independent system out of concern that cooperation with potential partners would elicit a negative reaction from China.

Diplomacy presents another appealing alternative to developing a nuclear deterrent against North Korea. Many South Koreans and (to a lesser extent) many Japanese still believe that it is possible to find a diplomatic way of disarming North Korea. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is a notable example. He argues that the North Korean nuclear program—despite the nuclear test—remains numerous steps away from producing a significant operational arsenal. He also argues that the program poses a long-term rather than an immediate threat, allowing the international community adequate time to seek a negotiated solution (Roh 2006b). According to Roh, the concerned parties have not given diplomacy a proper opportunity to work, and their genuine efforts for a negotiated solution still stand a fair chance of realising a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Roh's optimistic assessment is hardly unique: 33.7 percent of South Koreans in a public opinion poll responded that North Korea would eventually abandon its nuclear program (Hankook Ilbo2006b). Kim Dae-jung—a highly influential former president—also shares such an optimistic outlook and supports a continued diplomatic effort (Yonhap News 2006b). Japanese elites, though less sanguine about the prospect for diplomacy, similarly view the window of opportunity as not yet closed, since Pyongyang will probably still need years to acquire the capability of manufacturing effective nuclear weapons and mating them with reliable missiles (Hughes 2007). And these elites understand that actual nuclear armaments will undercut their diplomatic strategy by undermining the non-proliferation regime and eliminating their leverage on China to put pressure on North Korea.

Finally, some normative considerations stop nuclear dominos from falling. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 created a lingering aversion to nuclear weapons in Japanese society. This nuclear taboo has found firm expressions in the widely accepted principles in Japan of not possessing, producing, or allowing nuclear weapons. A nationwide survey of Japanese conducted in November 2006 (shortly after the North Korean nuclear explosion) reported that 80 percent of respondents either supported or somewhat supported upholding these three non-nuclear principles despite the recent shock of the test (Yomiuri Shimbun2006). Such public sentiment is an important political obstacle on the path to a nuclear-armed Japan, although there are some signs of its gradual erosion and possibilities of political manipulation (Berger 1993). (In contrast, the South Korean public shows no comparable abhorrence of having an indigenous nuclear deterrent: 65 percent of respondents viewed the capability as necessary in an opinion survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of the DPRK nuclear test (Joongang Ilbo2006).)

Potential dangers
In the preceding section I showed that North Korean nuclear development does not undermine deterrence on the Korean peninsula, contrary to commonly held beliefs. It cannot give Kim Jong Il sufficient capabilities for successful aggression, and it does not increase the risk of a preventive war by the United States. I also argued that the arming of North Korea is unlikely to trigger regional-wide nuclear proliferation because the US regional security commitment, missile defence technology, and diplomacy provide Pyongyang's neighbours with seemingly potent alternatives to building their own indigenous nuclear deterrents. However, this analysis does not imply that a nuclear North Korea will not pose any potential threat to regional stability. In this section, I scrutinise two potential challenges that arise from Pyongyang's development of nuclear capability but that thus far have attracted little scholarly and public attention. While these potential dangers are noteworthy, I argue that they will not upset regional stability.

The security dilemma among major powers
Although North Korean nuclear weapons production is not likely to produce a regional nuclear chain reaction, the development could exacerbate the security dilemma among the region's major powers and thereby destabilise regional international relations. The North Korean nuclear threat is strengthening the US alliance with Japan in a manner that has significant implications for regional stability. Washington has reaffirmed its nuclear commitment to Tokyo, and these allies are cooperating more extensively in the field of missile defence. Also, Japan is considering improving its surveillance and long-range precision strike capabilities, which could provide Tokyo with an offensive option of pre-emption. There have been some indications that Japan is interested in acquiring such a capability. In July 2006, for instance, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said: 'If we accept that there is no other option to prevent an attack…there is the view that attacking the launch base of the guided missiles is within the constitutional right of self-defence' (Yamaguchi 2006). In August of the same year, the Subcommittee on Defence Policies in Japan's Liberal Democratic Party debated whether a military capability to strike 'a foreign enemy base' is necessary (Pinkston and Sakurai 2006). There also has been discussion in Japan on preparing a constitutional basis for expanded military activities, including 'collective self-defence'.

While these measures are designed primarily for self-defence, they are arousing significant concerns in Beijing, which regards them as potentially detrimental to its security interests. China suspects that the strengthened cooperation between the United States and Japan might be an attempt to contain its growing power and influence, and that the Allies' development of a missile defence might be aimed at undermining China's nuclear deterrent (Friedberg 2005). Chinese officials are particularly concerned that the joint missile defence system might be extended to include Taiwan, neutralising their coercive capabilities and facilitating the island's formal independence (Cody 2006; China's National Defense2006). If Japan (which occupied parts of Chinese territory between 1931 and 1945) acquired any offensive capability, Beijing also would suspect that Japan aggressively intended to expand its influence at China's expense in order to dominate East Asia (Blanchard 2006). Thus, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman recently strongly criticised high-level Japanese politicians' consideration of a pre-emptive strike as 'extremely irresponsible' (Yonhap News 2006a). In response to the increasing military capabilities of its potential adversaries, China will likely expand its own nuclear arsenal to maintain an effective deterrent against the United States (and Japan) and augment its missile and submarine capabilities to restrain Taiwan. (South Korea also feels uneasy about Japanese arms build-ups—either conventional or nuclear—as demonstrated by its recent negative reaction to Tokyo's plan for procuring F-22 fighters. Some South Korean leaders even believe that Japan is exploiting the North Korean armament as a pretext for military expansion.)

The United States and Japan might in turn interpret these Chinese moves as an aggressive attempt at blackmail aimed at subjugating Taiwan—and therefore take countermeasures (such as an increase of their missile defence capabilities). Moreover, Taiwan may also strengthen its own military capabilities (for example, by acquiring ballistic missiles and missile defence systems) to offset China's augmented offensive capability. These reactions then could further reinforce China's suspicions about the Allies' intention and strengthen its effort to expand its military power. In the midst of this arms race, mutual suspicion and tension would further grow, and the region would become unstable.
This potential danger, however, does not warrant alarmism concerning North Korean nuclear development. China presently sets economic development as its top priority, and tries hard to avoid an open conflict with its major trading partners and investors. The United States does not want to confront China militarily at the moment because it faces more pressing security challenges such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. Also, Japan needs a stable relationship with China to resuscitate its economy fully and to disarm North Korea peacefully. These powerful politico-economic incentives for cooperative relations will reduce (at least for the near future) the potential danger that North Korean armament will spur an intense arms race as well as spiralling conflicts.

Crisis instability
In addition to the regional security dilemmas, the possibility of a pre-emptive war (as opposed to a preventive war) looms larger as Pyongyang develops nuclear weapons. Pre-emption is to attack an adversary first in anticipation of an imminent aggression by that adversary (Schelling 1966). Such a war is likely when antagonists perceive strong incentives to strike first—in other words, when absorbing an enemy's first blow carries high costs and risks, while an early action has a reasonable chance to spoil such a disastrous attack.

North Korean nuclear armaments can put the United States in such a precarious situation. Unless forestalled, a North Korean nuclear attack against major population centres in the region could inflict considerable damage directly on civilian populations and regional economies.5 It is estimated that a one-kiloton bomb 'could kill people in an area of about one square mile and partially destroy a much larger area' (Sessler et al. 2000). According to census statistics, in 2005, approximately 42,334 persons per square mile resided in Seoul and 14,864 per square mile in Tokyo (National Statistical Office 2007; Tokyo Metropolitan Government 2007a). Such high population densities mean that even a small-scale attack can produce large civilian casualties. The economic consequences of an attack might also be severe because of the high geographical concentrations of economic activities in South Korea and Japan. For example, the gross regional domestic product (GRDP) of Seoul accounted for 22.8 percent of South Korea's national total in 2004, and that of the adjacent Gyeonggi province amounted to 19.9 percent (National Statistical Office 2005). Tokyo's GRDP accounted for a similarly large fraction of Japan's national production—16.4 percent in 2002 (Tokyo Metropolitan Government 2007b). On the other hand, the United States has sophisticated conventional and nuclear weaponry that could destroy much if not all of Pyongyang's small, rudimentary nuclear force as long as the locations of North Korea's underground storages and launch sites could be confirmed; the US missile defence system can probably cope with the remainder with reasonable confidence. In sum, the United States may have an effective damage-limitation capability against North Korea.

If the United States were certain that its robust retaliatory capability would deter a nuclear attack by Pyongyang, it could conclude that a pre-emptive attack is unnecessary. However, Washington seems to have little such confidence in deterrence. The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States categorically stated that 'containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies' (Bush 2002). Also, Washington cannot completely trust that its rudimentary missile defence system is capable of fending off all incoming nuclear weapons by itself. In the midst of an acute crisis and with no fool-proof alternatives available to them, American policymakers might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korean nuclear and missile facilities if they detect North Korean moves to increase the readiness and alert level of its nuclear forces and anticipate an impending nuclear attack (Kim 2006).

For its part, North Korea also has an incentive to pre-empt in a desperate situation. Pyongyang views its nuclear arsenal as a valuable yet vulnerable strategic asset. In its pursuit of a nuclear capability, the Kim Jong Il regime has diverted scarce resources from North Korea's ailing economy and has not hesitated to risk a confrontation with the United States as well as with major regional powers—including its Chinese patron. This fact reveals the significant strategic (and perhaps political) value Pyongyang attaches on a nuclear deterrent. However, this prized asset is potentially vulnerable to an enemy attack—particularly a nuclear one. The liquid-fuel missiles in the North Korean inventory—the probable delivery vehicles for its nuclear weapons—can be located during their rather lengthy launch preparation and destroyed on the ground. Also, the size of the North Korean arsenal is so small that even a partially successful attack against it could reduce its nuclear capability drastically. Although US intelligence presently seems quite deficient with regard to the DPRK nuclear force, Pyongyang cannot rest assured that this deficiency will remain the case. Therefore, North Korean leaders would be susceptible to a 'use-it-or-lose-it' mentality if they anticipate an impending disarming offensive by their adversaries and perceive it as a prelude to an invasion. Such desperate North Korean attacks would aim to increase casualties upfront and coerce the United States to abandon its plan of attack, or to achieve battlefield advantages (e.g., delays in US reinforcements). Although the effectiveness of these attacks is moot, the Kim Jong Il regime will not give up any potential advantages in an existential conflict. Even if Pyongyang initially decides not to pre-empt, it will probably take precautionary measures—such as placing its nuclear forces on high alert or dispersing them to reduce their vulnerability. Washington may in turn mistake these extraordinary moves for harbingers of an imminent attack and take provocative countermeasures, thereby amplifying incentives for a DPRK pre-emptive attack.

In an acute crisis, such fears and temptations on both sides could possibly interact to trigger an armed conflict that neither side wants. As noted earlier, the DPRK nuclear arsenal poses a considerable potential threat to Washington and its allies. In a crisis situation, the US military would markedly raise its operational preparedness should a pre-emptive attack become necessary—as the US military did, for instance, in 1994 (Kim 2006). The United States might strengthen surveillance efforts to locate and track the North Korean nuclear forces; it also might reinforce its offensive strike capabilities, possibly to the extent that Pyongyang would mistake such precautionary measures for actual first-strike preparations. Such misperception is a real possibility, given North Korea's limited intelligence capability.

Two other factors might also negatively colour Pyongyang's interpretation of US action and further increase the chances of misjudgement and overreaction: first, Washington's doctrine of pre-emption, and second, North Korea's abiding perception that the United States is hostile, a perception ingrained by decades of confrontation. Consequently, North Korean leaders might be tempted to use their valuable nuclear weapons for fear of losing them to a US disarming strike. This temptation will be especially powerful if Pyongyang views such a strike by Washington as a prelude to a full-scale invasion. Kim Jong Il will not spare his best strategic weapons in what he believes is a struggle for survival.

North Korea's nuclear armaments can generate continual crises, posing a persistent threat to peace on the Korean peninsula. Even proliferation optimists—who believe the spread of nuclear weapons tends to promote peace—recognise that political relations can be unstable until all parties deploy reliable nuclear deterrents (Sagan and Waltz 2003). For instance, acute crises occurred between the nuclear-armed superpowers during the early Cold War (most notably over Berlin and Cuba) when mutual assured destruction had yet to be established. Furthermore, India and Pakistan—both nascent nuclear powers—fought a limited war over Kashmir in 1999 (Kapur 2005). These events indicate that, despite their potential for promoting caution, nuclear arsenals do not prevent dangerous crises altogether, especially when such arsenals are insecure. And the DPRK nuclear forces will remain so for the foreseeable future. Pyongyang's opponents are making far larger investments on conventional and/or nuclear armaments. The 2006 defence budget of North Korea amounted to an estimated US$2.3 billion, only a tiny faction of the military budgets of the United States (US$535), Japan (US$41.1), and the ROK (US$23.7) (Military Balance 2007). Therefore, resource-strapped North Korea will be unable to build a secure second-strike force anytime soon against the United States and its regional allies.6 To make things worse, behavioural tendencies shown by Americans and North Koreans do not bode particularly well for crisis prevention. Americans frequently forget that their actions could appear threatening to their adversaries, instead believing that their benign intentions are too obvious to misperceive. North Koreans are not known for their empathy and sensitivity to other states' security needs, either. Therefore, the chances of managing the security dilemma effectively and avoiding crises between the two countries do not look too good (Jervis 1989). And North Korean armament means that a crisis on the Korean peninsula can lead to a far more destructive war.

Although an inadvertent nuclear escalation is a significant potential threat as such, however, it does not justify the conventional alarmist view. The potential danger of an unwanted nuclear conflict will eventually breed caution on both sides and reduce the odds of its realisation (Jervis 1989). The United States will likely avoid applying provocative military and economic pressures for fear of a crisis spiralling out of control into a nuclear exchange. In fact, Clinton administration officials feared this possibility of inadvertent escalation and therefore hesitated to resort to limited use of force or even economic sanctions—even when Kim Jong Il was suspected of having only one or possibly two nuclear devices of unproven potency. Now that North Korea has a greater retaliatory capability, pre-emption carries higher risks. As Pyongyang's retaliatory capability grows, the possibility of US pre-emption will further decrease. For its part, Pyongyang will avoid overly provocative brinkmanship tactics and participate in negotiations—at least until it moves out of a period of vulnerability when it is not yet able to deploy a secure nuclear force capable of hitting major US urban-industrial targets (CNS 2006: 11). A pre-emptive strike will be its last resort in any case, because such a strike would provoke a massive retaliation from the United States. Although one cannot dismiss the possibility of a pre-emptive war altogether, history tells us that states rarely have launched pre-emptive attacks because these actions carry considerable political costs of appearing to be an aggressor (Reiter 1995). Given the nuclear taboo, nuclear pre-emption will surely have a far greater political backlash; so there has been no such attack.

Conclusion
I have attempted to dispel widely held myths about the strategic implications of North Korea's nuclear arming. I have argued that its acquisition of nuclear weapons alone will not bring grave dangers to regional security: namely, war in the Korean peninsula and nuclear proliferation throughout East Asia. Contrary to the pessimistic expectations, nuclear bombs do not make Pyongyang any less deterrable and actually somewhat reduce the likelihood of a US preventive war. South Korea and Japan will not seek an independent nuclear deterrent to cope with the North Korean threat because they have what look like potent yet less politically burdensome alternatives—the US nuclear umbrella, negotiated disarmament, and missile defence. I also have argued that North Korean nuclear development nevertheless poses lesser latent threats to stability of East Asia. The armaments strengthen incentives for pre-emptive strikes on both the US side and North Korea, thereby raising the risk of a crisis inadvertently escalating into a major war. Also, the security dilemmas could worsen between Washington and Beijing, between Tokyo and Beijing, and between Tokyo and Seoul. Countermeasures taken by one country against the DPRK nuclear arsenal could unintentionally prompt negative reactions from another, increasing mutual tensions and igniting arms races. But although these potential dangers are significant, they hardly warrant an alarmist view on—and a drastic response to—the North Korean nuclear armaments. In the final analysis, a nuclear-armed Pyongyang will not cause a political tsunami, but only a ripple.

If the arming of North Korea alone is unlikely to either cause deterrence failure on the Korean peninsula or trigger a nuclear chain reaction in East Asia, then what development could give rise to these dangers? I argue the unravelling of US regional alliances could make such imaginary threats a reality. A US withdrawal from East Asia—whether due to diminished interest or capability—could undermine deterrence on the Korean peninsula and trigger a nuclear domino effect.

If the US-ROK alliance—and, with it, the US nuclear umbrella in the region—disintegrates, Kim Jong Il might be tempted to conduct a limited-aims operation against the South. In this scenario, North Korea would attempt to seize a valuable piece of territory—part of Seoul, for example—through a surprise attack, and then threaten to use nuclear weapons if South Korea counterattacks. In such an event, absent a US nuclear protection, South Korea would have compelling reasons to fear that its counteroffensive would call forth a nuclear retaliation. Partial occupation of Seoul also would cripple South Korea's own ability to mobilise its superior war potential and launch a powerful counterattack. Consequently, South Korea might be forced to succumb to North Korean blackmail and accept a fait accompli, with North Korea achieving a dominant strategic position on the Korean peninsula. (Although a US withdrawal would further decrease the risk of US preventive war against North Korea, its net effect would be negligible on the situation because Washington already has lost any intent to attack Pyongyang. In the final analysis, US retrenchment would undermine deterrence on the Korean peninsula.)

To avoid this danger, South Korea would respond to the lifting of the US nuclear umbrella by acquiring an indigenous nuclear capability; Japan would follow suit. If the US-Japan alliance withers away, Tokyo would be vulnerable to Pyongyang's possible nuclear attack and blackmail. Japanese politicians would feel pressured to develop nuclear weapons to supplement a missile defence. Thus, US retrenchment—in conjunction with North Korean armaments—would nuclearise East Asia.
US withdrawal from East Asia appears to be a distinct long-term possibility. With the collapse of Soviet power, the United States no longer faces a grave threat—the rise of a regional hegemon—to its vital security interests (Mearsheimer 2001). While a nuclear-armed North Korea and its possible link to terrorists are significant, they are neither a security threat of equivalent magnitude to a regional hegemon nor a problem that the US regional presence can readily solve. Although the regional alliances might be useful long-term assets in hedging against China's pursuit of regional hegemony, US retrenchment could better serve this purpose by inducing the regional states to increase their own military strength. South Korea's and Japan's armaments would make possible an overwhelming counter-hegemonic coalition should China threaten to dominate East Asia in the future. For these reasons, the United States will likely reduce its military presence and commitment in the region over the long haul. The Iraq quagmire and its associated expenses will play catalytic roles in such retrenchment, as the recent reduction of USFK demonstrates. China's efforts to push the United States out of East Asia and enhance its regional influence might also facilitate US strategic retreat.
My analysis implies that Pyongyang's neighbours must avoid overreactions to its nuclear development. Although it is certainly preferable to see North Korea free of nuclear weapons, its armaments cannot dramatically undermine regional security by itself in the short run. Also, the DPRK nuclear development will not have unmanageable repercussions on the global system. The North Korean armament is more likely to remain an isolated incident than to trigger a domino effect, because all the concerned states want to avoid the latter event and thereby preserve the non-proliferation regime. While the bad precedent set by Pyongyang might encourage other nuclear aspirants like Iran, the international society would simultaneously develop a heightened sense of crisis and therefore show stronger resolve to prevent further spread of nuclear weapons and reinforce the global regime. The resultant increased efforts for deterrence and interdiction (e.g., the Proliferation Security Initiative) could stop Kim Jong Il from transferring sensitive materials to potential buyers, although the effectiveness of these measures has been questioned (Chestnut 2007). Therefore, if living with a nuclear-armed Pyongyang is inevitable for a while due to lack of an effective solution, it is imperative to avoid overreacting and unnecessarily exacerbating latent dangers that include an inadvertent war in the Korean peninsula and an unnecessary arms race among major powers.

The arming of North Korea calls for prudent foreign policies. More specifically, Washington needs to abstain from sharply expanding military activities such as aggressive aerial surveillance and placing psychological and material stresses on Pyongyang as its Operation Plan 5030 reportedly envisions (Auster and Whitelaw 2003). Tokyo is better off neither acquiring pre-emptive strike capabilities nor loosening constitutional constraints on use of force. And Beijing needs to acknowledge Washington's and Tokyo's legitimate security concerns regarding the DPRK nuclear development and prudently respond to their self-defence measures. As for Seoul, the greatest potential problem seems to be its overly conciliatory approach—what Randall Schweller (2004) calls 'underbalancing'—rather than overreaction. Most importantly, Pyongyang must clearly understand that its membership in the nuclear club has dramatically increased the risks associated with its traditional strategy of resorting to brinkmanship and creating acute crises, at least in the short run. Kim Jong Il must recognise that nuclear weapons do not provide an ability to encroach upon other (nuclear-armed) nations' vital interests with impunity, and that his nuclear arsenal can help protect only his own critical interests—such as deterring a violent attempt for regime change in North Korea.

Notes
1. The deployment of a missile defence in East Asia could also strain US relations with Russia, as it has done in Europe. The term 'security dilemma' describes a situation in which measures each state takes for self-defence arouse alarm and trigger countermeasures on the other side. See Jervis (1978).
2. Estimate made by US Army General Gary Luck, a former USFK commander.
3. The October 2006 nuclear test did not dramatically change US public opinion on military action against North Korea. In its immediate aftermath, 58 percent of Americans opposed air strikes and 80 percent objected to a ground war (Newsweek Poll2006).
4. Tokyo also fears that its nuclear armament would lead to international condemnation and set off regional nuclear competition. For example, see an interview with Japanese Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma (Chosun Ilbo2007).
5. While North Korea requires a nuclear arsenal to hurt Japan severely, massive conventional bombardment from the forward-deployed DPRK artillery and short-range rockets already suffices to ravage major cities of South Korea. In this regard, North Korean nuclear development arguably affects Japan's security more significantly than South Korea's defence.
6. In addition to a lack of resources, organisational behaviour can also further delay deployment of survivable nuclear forces. According to Scott Sagan (2003), military organisations often make inadequate efforts to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear arsenals, and tend to follow inflexible routines and thereby unwittingly expose nuclear forces to a possible first strike. This generic problem is particularly salient when militaries are not under strict civilian control—probably the case with North Korea, which espouses the songun (military-first) policy.
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Neo-liberalism and the politics of Australian aid policy-making

2008-09-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Author: Andrew Rosser
DOI: 10.1080/10357710802286825
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 62, Issue 3 September 2008 , pages 372 - 385
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Introduction
The main driver of Australian aid policy has always been the government's foreign policy and security objectives (Davis 2006). But to the extent that the Australian aid program has had development-related objectives, neo-liberalism has provided the framework for how these are to be achieved. As noted in the Introduction to this special section, the principles of neo-liberalism have permeated key government reports on aid policy, key ministerial statements on the Australian aid program, and a range of other aid policy documents since the late 1970s. This paper examines the politics underlying this situation. It suggests that the dominant influence of neo-liberalism on Australian aid policy reflects two factors: the interests and structural power of Australian business and the institutional context within which aid policy-making in Australia occurs. The interests and structural power of Australian business, it is argued, have made the Australian government, whether under the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the Liberal-National Coalition, predisposed towards neo-liberal aid policies while the institutional context has enabled the government to exclude groups who oppose these policies from meaningful participation in the aid policy-making process.

In presenting this argument, I begin by addressing some theoretical concerns. I then examine the agendas and interests that have shaped aid policy debates in Australia, the way in which the two aforementioned factors have contributed to the ideological dominance of the neo-liberal agenda, and the implications of the recent change of government in terms of the future influence of neo-liberalism on Australian aid policy.

Theoretical Concerns
Few scholars have examined the way in which political factors have shaped the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy. To the extent that they have, they have fallen into two broad groups. The first group has emphasised the influence of broad changes in the global political economy, the effect of these changes on the ideas promoted by powerful international development organisations, and the way these have in turn filtered through to the Australian context. Higgott (1986), for instance, has explained the decision of the Jackson Committee to advocate free trade in terms of the emergence of a new international division of labour, a consequent shift in many countries' industrialisation strategies away from import-substitution to export-orientation, and the emergence of governments in the US and the UK that advocated reduced state intervention in the economy and a greater role for the private sector and liberal markets. These changes, he argued, led to a shift in the nature of development thinking within organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) away from a basic needs approach—which had been the dominant approach to development during the 1970s—towards a neo-liberal one. The subsequent changes in Australian aid policy, he says, were the 'brainchild' of these developments.

The second group of scholars has emphasised the way in which Australian aid policy has been informed by Australia's location in the global economic system, particularly in terms of the North-South divide, reflecting the influence of dependency and world systems theories. Anderson (2006), for instance, has argued that neo-liberal aid policies have been part of a neo-colonial attempt by the Australian government to promote Australian business interests at the expense of poor countries. For instance, he argues that Australian aid to East Timor has been used to pressure the East Timorese government 'to keep open the opportunities for private foreign investment, and to prevent the social regulation of that investment' (Anderson 2003: 116), both of which he says will benefit Australian business groups that have invested in East Timor rather than Timorese interests. Similarly, Cirillo (2006: 5) has argued that 'Australia's approach to governance aid has … ..evolved to emphasise the role that economic liberalisation and market-based development plays in facilitating trade capacity in developing countries—thereby quenching Australia's thirst for regional free trade access' Although not explicitly set within a dependency or world systems framework, her analysis suggests a similar link between Australia's national interests and neo-liberal aid policies.

The problem with these perspectives is that they obscure the domestic dynamics of Australian aid policy-making and the way in which these have shaped the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy. The first perspective suggests that the Australian government passively absorbs its aid policies from outside while the second perspective suggests that Australian aid policies are simply 'read off' the country's location in the global economic system. In both cases, they ignore the contests that have occurred over aid policy within Australia itself. While these contests have not, generally speaking, produced large demonstrations, passionate parliamentary debates, or become major election issues, they have nevertheless produced conflict over aid policy. To ignore this is to miss an important dimension of the politics of Australian aid policy.

To the extent that scholars have examined the way in which domestic political factors have shaped the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy, they have focused on the beliefs of the individuals who have been involved in or excluded from the aid policy-making process. For instance, Stent (1985) explained the Jackson Committee's support for free trade by referring to the fact that the Committee included three orthodox economists and no heterodox economists. But a focus on the beliefs of individuals leaves unaddressed the crucial question of why individuals with neo-liberal beliefs were given a central role in this process in the first place. To understand this, we need to examine the broader political and social context within which aid policy-making in Australia has occurred. Specifically, we need to examine the way in which this context has created an imperative for Australian governments to pursue neo-liberal aid policies while simultaneously enabling them to exclude critics of neo-liberalism from real participation in the policy-making process.

Studies of the domestic politics of aid policy-making in other donor countries suggest a need to focus on interest-related and institutional factors. Several scholars have shown how particularistic business interests have pressured governments in donor countries to use their aid budgets for commercial rather than developmental purposes (Diven 2001; Lancaster 2007). Others have shown how the interests and agendas of political parties and the coalitions that underpin them have shaped governments' policies in relation to the overall size of international aid budgets (Therien and Noel 2000; Carbone 2007). With respect to institutional factors, Lancaster (2007) has pointed to the nature of electoral rules (specifically whether or not countries have proportional voting), whether countries have presidential or parliamentary systems of government, and the location of the aid program within government as having been particularly important in shaping aid policy in the donor countries she examined. Institutions are important, she suggests, because they influence 'who sets the issue agenda, who has access to decision-makers, who decides policies, and who can veto decisions' (2007: 19).

I propose that the ideological orientation of Australian aid is also best understood in terms of interest-related and institutional factors. However, my approach differs from that employed in the aforementioned comparative studies in three important respects. First, I do not seek merely to illustrate congruence between the interests of particular sections of society and the nature of aid policy, as does Diven (2001) for instance, but also to explain why that particular section of society has had influence over aid policy. In other words, I bring issues of power explicitly into the analysis. Second, my focus is on the broader structural context rather than the role of political parties in shaping aid policy. 'Partisan politics,' as Carbone (2007) describes the latter explanatory variable, is not very useful for our purposes because the ideological character of Australian aid policy has, by and large, transcended changes in government. This suggests that it is the structural context that has been most important in shaping the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy rather than changes of government, as the partisan politics approach suggests. Third, with respect to institutional factors, I argue that it is the 'executive-type' nature of this process rather than the institutional factors identified by Lancaster (2007) that has been the most important factor in shaping the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy. My reasons for focusing on this factor are explained in full below.

Agendas and Interests
In broad terms, aid policy debates in Australia over the past three decades—at least as far as they have related to development objectives—have been informed by two main competing ideological agendas: the neo-liberal agenda and the social justice agenda. Neo-liberalism has been defined as 'a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade' (Harvey 2005: 2). According to this definition, neo-liberalism 'holds that the social good will be maximised by maximising the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market' (Harvey 2005: 3). In policy terms, the neo-liberal agenda has translated into a commitment to the so-called 'Washington consensus' (WC) (Williamson 1990), a set of economic policies that included fiscal discipline, tax reform, trade liberalisation, foreign direct investment liberalisation, deregulation, interest rate liberalisation, privatisation, exchange rate liberalisation, and secure property rights. Since the mid-1990s, it has entailed a commitment to an augmented version of this consensus—known as the 'post-Washington consensus' (PWC)—that blends WC policies with a concern to promote 'good governance' and ensure social conditions conducive to market-oriented economic reform and economic growth in developing countries (Jayasuriya and Rosser 2001). The PWC has allowed greater scope for certain forms of state intervention in the economy (e.g. the introduction of social safety nets measures at times of economic crisis to protect the poor) but it has been characterised by a continued commitment to liberal markets. It has also rejected the idea, associated with some supporters of the social justice agenda, that people in developing countries have certain human rights that extend beyond the right to own property and sell their labour power.

Within Australia, the business sector has been the most influential advocate of neo-liberal ideas (Argy 1998; Bell 2006). In the two to three decades prior to the mid-1980s, there were deep divisions between business groups in Australia over issues such as the need for free trade and labour market deregulation, reflecting the fact that many businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector, benefited from state protection. But by the late 1980s, Australian business had increasingly come to share a 'common front on many issues like fiscal restraint, small government, globalisation and business and labour market deregulation' (Argy 1998: 232). In part this reflected significant reductions in manufacturing protection during the 1980s and decisions by Australian manufacturing businesses to either move their activities offshore or find ways to compete in a more globalised economy from an Australian base. In part it also reflected the massive growth of the financial sector in Australia as a result of financial sector globalisation during the 1970s and 1980s. Having grown enormously in size, financial sector business groups became an important voice of business, bolstering those of traditional free market groups in commerce, mining and farming (Argy 1998: 232). Support for neo-liberal policies has generally crossed the big business-small business divide, although, as Argy (1998): 232) notes, these two groups have often differed on issues related to competition policy within the Australian market.

Importantly, Australian business's support for neo-liberal policies has extended to the aid sector. Business has had an interest in the adoption of neo-liberal aid policies to the extent that such policies have helped to open up new opportunities for Australian businesses in developing countries and make their existing investments in these countries more profitable. For instance, in a recent report, the Allen Consulting Group (ACG) (2007: 20) noted that international '[b]usinesses tend to be attracted to and thrive in stable, secure environments.' For this reason, it argued, Australian business groups should 'advocate (and actively encourage) respect for the rule of law, property rights, and other pro-growth institutions' in developing countries (ACG 2007: 21), all elements of the neo-liberal agenda. To the extent that Australian business groups have directly sought to influence aid policy in Australia, they have argued for precisely these sorts of changes (see, for instance, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry 2005; 2007).

Neo-liberal aid policies have also gained support from professional economists from a variety of Australian government, academic and business organisations, most notably the National Centre for Development Studies (and its successor institutions), the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (both at the Australian National University), and the Centre for International Economics (CIE), a Canberra-based consultancy. Finally, as noted above, the three major political parties in Australia—the ALP, the Liberal Party and the National Party—have also been strong proponents of neo-liberal aid policies, at least since the early 1980s. When in government, all three political parties have sought to use aid policy to pursue foreign policy, security, and commercial objectives as well as developmental objectives (Davis 2006). And there have been some differences between them in relation to how aid has been used in this respect1. But the three parties have remained at one in relation to the ideological orientation of Australian aid policy, regardless of whether they have been in government or opposition.

The second agenda that has informed aid policy debates in Australia in recent decades—the social justice agenda—has been characterised by a concern with issues such as the basic needs of the poor, the protection of human rights, and the equality of income and wealth distribution. A key part of this agenda has been a belief that economic globalisation—and the neo-liberal policies that have produced it—have worsened inequality, undermined social cohesion, and harmed the environment. In contrast to neo-liberals' support for competitive markets, then, supporters of the social justice agenda have argued that states in developing countries should intervene in targeted ways to address these problems (Oxfam 2001; APHEDA nd) rather than rely on the so-called 'trickle down' effect, as neo-liberals advise (Kilby 2007). With respect to the role of the state in promoting economic development, they have argued that there are many paths to development and that developing countries need to build strong states before embarking on economic liberalisation (World Vision 2002). Other concerns—particularly over the past decade or so—have included debt forgiveness for developing countries, reducing the risk of international financial instability by reducing international capital mobility, and the creation of a fairer international trading system through reform of the World Trade Organisation and more widespread use of the principles of 'fair trade' (World Vision 2002; Oxfam 2001). For some supporters of the social justice agenda, the idea that the poor have basic rights has been important while others have been motivated more by Christian notions of charity. Either way, they have been critical of the neo-liberal agenda and have accordingly sought to promote reform to the existing policies and institutional structures of Australia's aid program, although some who have been influenced by dependency theory have at times advocated a more radical approach (Blackburn 1993: 69-91).

Within Australia, the main proponents of the social justice agenda have been development NGOs that engage in advocacy work as well as service provision, those carrying out just the latter tending to avoid debates over the respective roles of state and market in development, the extent to which the poor have 'rights,' and the broader trade and foreign policy issues that affect aid policy2. Oxfam Australia (formerly Community Aid Abroad), a secular development NGO that currently espouses a rights-based approach to development; World Vision, a Christian development NGO concerned with social justice issues; AIDWATCH, an NGO that monitors and campaigns on Australia's aid program; APHEDA, the development arm of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU); and the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), the national umbrella organisation for development NGO, have been perhaps the strongest supporters of this agenda within the development NGO community. The social justice agenda has also drawn support from some academics in Australian universities, particularly ones operating within the 'critical tradition' in development studies3, progressive minor political parties such as the Australian Democrats and the Greens, and minority elements within the major political parties. The progressive minor political parties and minority elements in the major political parties have been particularly important allies for the advocacy-oriented development NGOs in as much as they have been a key conduit through which the latter have been able to have issues of concern to them discussed within parliamentary fora such as Question Time and Senate Budget Estimates Committee hearings4.

The Politics of Aid Policy-Making in Australia
Australian business has been 'relatively disengaged' in relation to aid policy issues (ACG 2007: 39) in the sense that its lobbying activities and participation in public policy debates has been more focused on issues like industrial relations, tax reform, financial sector reform, fiscal policy, and trade liberalisation—where it has had significant interests at stake—than aid policy—where its interests have arguably been more subtle. Development NGOs, by contrast, have been highly engaged in relation to aid policy issues, actively lobbying and seeking to influence government policy at more or less every opportunity. Yet the neo-liberal agenda has exerted much greater influence over Australian aid policy than the social justice agenda.

There have been two reasons for this. The first has to do with the structural power of business. As scholars such as Poulantzas (1969) and Lindblom (1977) have pointed out, business exercises significant influence over states in capitalist societies simply by virtue of its control over scarce investment resources, giving it greater power than other political and social actors. Capitalist societies, it is argued, have an 'investment imperative' (Winters 1996)—that is, they need continued capitalist investment in order to reproduce themselves. Capitalist states therefore have to provide an economic climate that makes it profitable for business to invest. To fail to do so is to invite political instability and possibly social revolution. As Winters (1996) among others has observed, the structural power of business has been enhanced in recent decades by increasing capital mobility. As economic globalisation has proceeded apace, it has become easier for businesses to shift their investment resources to alternate jurisdictions. This has increased pressure on capitalist states to provide an economic climate conducive to capitalist investment, particularly from those elements within business—such as financial capital controllers—that are highly mobile. As a capitalist state, the Australian state has been deeply affected by such structural pressures. As noted above, Australian business has been most concerned about promoting neo-liberal reform in policy areas such as industrial relations, trade and finance. Nevertheless, the broader structural imperative for the Australian state to pursue neo-liberal policies has dictated that it adopt such policies in the aid sector as well. The result has been to predispose the Australian government, regardless of whether it has been led by the ALP or the Liberal-National Coalition, towards neo-liberal aid policies. The broader structural conditions have made it virtually impossible for any of the major political parties to stray from the neo-liberal line, even in a policy area as low profile as aid policy.

The second reason why the neo-liberal agenda has exerted much greater influence than the social justice agenda over Australian aid policy has to do with the institutional dimensions of the aid policy-making process in Australia, particularly its executive-dominated character. In some political systems, legislatures play a key role in aid policy-making, for instance the US (Lancaster 2007: 99-100). However, it is the executive arm of government that has dominated aid policy-making in Australia, reflecting the nature of the foreign policy-making process in general. As Gyngell and Wesley (2007): 145) have observed, the Australian parliament has had little role to play in foreign policy-making because foreign policy decisions have rarely required enabling legislation or parliamentary approval. At the same time, parliamentary foreign policy debates have been rare, have often been scheduled around debates on domestic matters, and have generally involved the simple reading of prepared statements by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and figures from the Opposition (Gyngell and Wesley 2007: 145). This has given the government of the day almost complete discretion over who participates directly in the foreign policy-making process.

Accordingly, aid policy-making—like foreign policy-making in general—has tended to involve only a small group of people: members of the Cabinet (most notably the Minister for Foreign Affairs), Parliamentary Secretaries that deal with international development issues, senior officials in AusAID, officials in the offices of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and relevant Parliamentary Secretaries, and a few trusted outsiders. The latter have been particularly important in as much as the government has delegated much of the process of writing aid policy to them. Typically, they have been neo-liberal economists and representatives of the business community, reflecting the government's predisposition towards neo-liberal policies. For instance, the Jackson Committee consisted of three representatives of big business and three neo-liberal economists; the Simons Committee consisted of one representative of big business, one neo-liberal economist and a third member (Gaye Hart) with a background in education and training, including a period as the head of the Australian arm of UNICEF; and the White Paper Core Team consisted of two neo-liberal economists and a third member with a background in international agricultural research.

Development NGOs, academics working within the critical tradition in development studies, and progressive minor parties, by contrast, have been more or less excluded from participating in the aid policy-making process, except in ways that deny them any real influence over policy. For instance, with the exception of Gaye Hart, no representatives of these groups were included in either the Jackson or Simons Committees or the Core Team that prepared the 2006 White Paper. Development NGOs and some academics working within the critical tradition in development studies have been given positions in official bodies that deal with aid policy issues, most notably the Aid Advisory Council (AAC)5. But this is a relatively powerless body, its role being limited to the provision of advice to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and constrained by infrequent meetings. Development NGOs and critical academics have often been consulted as part of planning and review exercises within AusAID. But the general perception is that their views have rarely had much impact, at least in comparison with those of neo-liberal economists and the representatives of the business community. The Howard government also apparently tried to 'silence dissent' (Hamilton and Maddison 2007) within the development NGO community by threatening the funding of one development NGOs that was publicly critical of Australian aid policy6.

The executive-dominated nature of the aid policy-making process has also restricted the role of progressive minor political parties such as the Democrats and the Greens in this process. The fact that Australia has proportional voting in the Senate has made it possible for minor political parties to gain seats in this house of parliament. And when these parties have held the 'balance of power' in the Senate, they have been able to negotiate deals with the government of the day that have given them some say in the content of legislation. But the fact that foreign policy decisions have generally not required enabling legislation or parliamentary approval has dramatically limited their scope for influencing aid policy. The only real avenues through which they have been able to participate in aid policy-making have been Senate Question Time and Senate Budget Estimates Committee hearings—where they have been able to ask questions of government ministers and their representatives and senior government officials—and by trying to influence public opinion through statements to the media7. However, none of these avenues have offered the minor political parties much leverage or influence.

The case of the 2006 White Paper illustrates nicely the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the aid policy-making process. As noted above, the Core Team chosen by the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, to lead the process of developing the White Paper and prepare the key report on which the White Paper would be based was dominated by neo-liberal economists. The other background papers prepared as part of the White Paper process and which fed into the Core Team's report were all co-written by external consultants and AusAID officials (AusAID 2005a; Gordon et al 2005), the former including a number of neo-liberal economists8 but only one figure with strong connections to the development NGOs community9. Following preparation of the various background papers, the White Paper itself was prepared by senior AusAID officials working in conjunction with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs (AusAID 2005b). Development NGOs, development experts operating within the critical tradition of development studies, and figures from progressive minor political parties had few opportunities to influence the White Paper. The development NGOs were 'consulted' by the Core Team and figures from the government at various points and they and a wide variety of other groups were permitted to make written submissions to the Core Team and participate in several public consultation fora. But the fact that no representatives of the development NGO community were included in the Core Team itself meant that they had no direct role in influencing the content of the White Paper. Natasha Stott Despoja from the Australian Democrats and Kerry Nettle from the Greens raised questions concerning the ideological orientation of the White Paper in Senate Budget Estimates Committee hearings10, but these Committees offered them no real leverage. Otherwise the minor political parties played little role in the process of preparing the White Paper, reflecting the lack of an institutional entry point into the process.

Future Directions
In early 2006, just before the Howard government published its White Paper on the Australian aid program, the ALP's Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs, Bob Sercombe, released a discussion paper promising 'a new vision' for the Australian aid program (Sercombe 2006). In this discussion paper, Sercombe took issue with the Howard government's approach to the role of economic growth in development as outlined, among other places, in the White Paper. He argued that the Howard government had seen economic growth as the sole route to poverty and ignored the link between poverty reduction and increased productivity of the poor. A Labor government, he suggested, would do more to raise the productivity of the poor by supporting investments in basic public services such as education and health. He also argued that such a strategy would serve to reduce inequality and in this way promote development in a broader sense than that implied by a focus on economic growth. Finally, he castigated the Howard government for failing to make the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) more central to its approach to development issues.

Sercombe failed to win ALP pre-selection for his seat in early 2006, so he did not get a chance to pursue these ideas following the election of the Rudd Labor government in November 2007. Since then, Bob McMullan, the Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance, has taken the lead in formulating the new government's approach to aid policy with Duncan Kerr, the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, also playing a role. Various speeches the two have made suggest that the Rudd government will give greater prominence to the MDGs and prioritise new investments in health, education and the environment (e.g. Kerr 1998; McMullan 2008). At the same time, however, they have continued to emphasise the need for market-oriented economic reform in developing countries. For instance, the ministerial statement on the Australian aid program issued as part of the government's budget in May 2008, the most detailed statement of the new government's approach to aid policy at the time that this paper was written (mid-May 2008), lists “promoting better health”, “promoting better education”, “broad-based growth” and “addressing environmental and climate change challenges” among the main priorities of the aid program. But it also emphasises the need for “sound macroeconomic and public investment policies, openness to trade and investment, [and] microeconomic reforms that increase competition and reduce costs” to promote economic growth (Smith and McMullan 2008: 22-23). It also retains from the Howard years a key concern with improving governance, particularly economic governance, in developing countries, although it does at the same time outline a concern to improve state responsiveness and accountability to disempowered and poor communities (31-32).

Collectively, these documents imply a change of direction in aid policy under the Rudd government consistent with, on the one hand, the ALP's traditional adherence to multilateralism and the principle of good international citizenship in foreign affairs and, on the other hand, Third Way-style social democracy. However, they do not signal the abandonment of neo-liberalism in favour of support for a markedly greater role for the state in economic development or, say, a rights-based approach. Broadly, given their emphasis on the need for market reform and improved economic governance, their approach is consistent with the PWC. It is clear that, notwithstanding the apparent changes, promoting neo-liberal economic reform in developing countries will remain a key plank of the Rudd government's approach to aid policy, even if it receives less prominence in government rhetoric than under the Howard government.
Such an outcome is consistent with the broader political environment surrounding aid policy-making, as it has been analysed here. The structural and institutional context remains unchanged: business continues to exert enormous structural leverage over the Australian state notwithstanding the change of government and the aid policy-making process remains concentrated in the executive, making it possible for the new government to continue excluding groups that oppose neo-liberal aid policies from real participation in the aid policy-making process. All this suggests that the 'new vision' for the Australian aid program is unlikely to involve a shift away from neo-liberalism.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Patrick Kilby, Jane Hutchison, Shahar Hameiri, and Richard Robison for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and Caddi Johnson for her research assistance. The usual caveat applies.
Notes
1. For instance, the ALP was highly critical of the Howard government's use of aid money to fund the establishment of an immigration detention centre in Nauru (see, for instance, Sercombe 2006) while the Liberal and National parties were critical of the Hawke-Keating government's use of aid money to promote Asian engagement, especially through the Development Import Finance Facility (see, for instance, Kelton 1998: 5).
2. Interview with Graham Tupper, former Executive Director of ACFID, Canberra, September 2007.
3. For an overview of the views associated with the critical tradition in development studies, see Kothari and Minogue (2002).
4. Interview with Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs for the Australian Democrats, Adelaide, 3 October 2007. See also Blackburn 1993: 238.
5. The current AAC includes a number of representatives from the development NGO community: Tim Costello (World Vision); Paul O'Callaghan (ACFID); Tony Eggleton (CARE Australia); Gaye Hart (ACFID); and Jack de Groot (CARITAS).
6. See, for instance, AIDWATCH's claims in relation to the Australian Tax Office's treatment of its charitable status (AIDWATCH 2007). It should be noted that such threats have not necessarily been effective. On the one hand, some of the more critical development NGOs are not heavily reliant on government funding and concessions—indeed, some, such as Oxfam, have a policy of limiting their reliance on such funds. On the other hand, AIDWATCH has found a way of remaining in business despite the withdrawal of its charitable status.

7. To be sure, the progressive minor political parties have been able to trade their Senate vote for government legislation in one area of policy for changes in aid policy, as Brian Harradine did in 1996 when he shared the balance of power in the Senate. Harradine, a socially conservative Tasmanian senator, traded his vote on the privatisation of Telstra and other government legislation in exchange for changes in AusAID's family planning policies. But such episodes have been relatively rare, presumably reflecting a calculation on the part of the minor political parties that there are not enough votes in aid policy to justify such deals. This is where a requirement for parliament to approve aid policy would have made a significant difference: there would have been no opportunity cost for the minor political parties in doing deals in relation to aid policy, making it more likely for social justice principles to be incorporated into aid policy.
8. I am referring specifically here to Mark Baird, a former World Bank Vice-President, who co-wrote the background paper on Asia; Ron Duncan, the former head of the NCDS and the head of the White Paper Core Team, who co-wrote the background paper on the Pacific; and the consultants from the CIE who co-wrote the background paper on the environment.
9. I am referring here to Gaye Hart, the President of ACFID.
10. See, for instance, Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee (2006).
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Fighting the Taliban: Pakistan at war with itself

2008-09-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Author: Ashok K. Behuria
DOI: 10.1080/10357710701684963
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: Australian Journal of International Affairs, Volume 61, Issue 4 December 2007 , pages 529 - 543
Previously published as: Australian Outlook (0004-9913) until 1990

Abstract
Some new groups calling themselves Pakistani Taliban with links to the Afghan Taliban have asserted themselves in the tribal areas of Pakistan. This has complicated the internal security scenario for Pakistan. This article traces the roots of the problem and argues that the State with its confessional character emits strong Islamist impulses making it easy for Taliban-like forces to take roots in Pashtun dominated areas in Pakistan. While the process of Talibanisation may not succeed in engulfing the entire state of Pakistan, it will certainly pose a critical internal challenge, contributing to its fragility and compelling Pakistan to stay perennially engaged with its internal security. Roll back is difficult but not impossible. This will involve the strong commitment of the State to take steps to bring about social, economic and political transformation in the Taliban-infested areas, and an effort on the part of the international community to help Pakistan in this critical endeavour.

General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan, admitted on 15 September 2006 that the “centre of gravity of terrorism” had shifted from Al Qaeda to the Taliban and that the Taliban was a “more dangerous element because it has roots in the people” unlike Al Qaeda and was “more organised”.1 He regarded the Taliban as an “obscurantist social concept” and argued that the real danger lay in the emerging strength of the Taliban and in the possibility of converting their resistance “into a national war by the [Pashtuns] against … all foreign forces”. The resurgence of the Taliban was the pet theme of analysts and observers who tracked developments in Afghanistan since 2004-2005. In Kabul in August 2007, Musharraf expressed his concern about “a particularly dark form” of terrorism confronting the region and said that people of Pakistan and Afghanistan faced “a great danger in the shape of fringe groups, a small minority that preaches hate, violence and backwardness”.2

The Malaise
Despite the fact that it has carried out several successful and bloody attacks on the security forces of Pakistan (and also against the international forces stationed in Afghanistan) and killed many civilians, the Taliban has not been banned by Pakistan or the US as a terrorist organisation. This could partly be because the authorities in Pakistan and the US still consider the Taliban as a force that can be moulded to serve their ends in Afghanistan. Perhaps mindful of the historical context in which the Taliban rose as a militant Islamist movement in Afghanistan after the successful “Jihad” against Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1988, the Taliban is viewed as a natural heir of Islamist radicalism unleashed during this period. Were it not for its truck with Al Qaeda, it would still be regarded as a localised phenomenon which the world could ignore and get used to.

However, now that the Taliban has made its presence felt in Pakistan, authorities there have taken serious note of its intentions and ability to pose a critical challenge to internal security of Pakistan. In fact, the emergence of a shadowy group called the “Pakistani Taliban' and their continuing links with the Afghan Taliban has embarrassed the leadership in Pakistan. That the Taliban had a Pakistani coordinate was well known. But it was largely regarded as a force operating outside Pakistan. The prospect of having to contend with such a radical force at the internal level has disturbed the security calculus in Pakistan.

The case of pro-Taliban militants laying siege on the Red Mosque at the heart of the Pakistani capital, in February 2007, until they were flushed out through military action, along with the rising incidence of suicide attacks against security forces in the tribal areas of Pakistan and the spread of the influence of the Taliban beyond the tribal areas in recent years, suggest that the Taliban phenomenon will affect Pakistan for a prolonged period and warrants a deeper analysis of the malaise that is affecting the Pakistani state at the moment.

The Afghan Taliban
Most of the analysts of the Taliban phenomenon explain it away as an after-effect of the Afghan Jihad. It was indeed a movement of the students (Taliban means student in Arabic/Urdu) from the religious seminaries in Pakistan who sought a way out of the civil war that raged in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan between 1988 and 1994.3 They made their presence felt around Maiwand and marched to Kandahar in 1994, making it the nucleus of the Taliban movement. Active patronage from Pakistani intelligence boosted the morale of the movement as it spread into other areas of Afghanistan and swept into the capital city of Kabul in 1996. The Taliban was viewed by many as a better alternative to the tribal warlords and a host of warring militant groups seeking to establish their writ in Afghanistan. While the US watched it all from a distance, it silently assented in the hope of bringing peace to Afghanistan through a promising student militia who also enjoyed immense popular backing in the initial years of their triumph.

However, as soon as the Taliban settled in Kabul, they revealed their conservative orientation and their rigid, inflexible and illiberal interpretation of Quran which formed the core of their rule in Afghanistan. Their leader Mullah Omar, who was soon seen to be allying himself with Osama Bin Laden of Al Qaeda, became the Amir-ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) and his writ became law in Afghanistan. The Taliban sought to impose a strict version of Islam4 and turn Afghanistan into a laboratory of Jihad. It reversed the trend of progressive social reconstruction attempted by the communists during the Soviet occupation. Men were forced to grow beards and pray five times a day. Barbers were asked to close down their shops. Women were barred from working in public offices and forced to wear the veil, stay home, and not to appear in public places unescorted by men. Dance and music were banned. Islamic systems of punishment were introduced and public executions became common place. A specific department, called the Amr bil Ma'ruf wa Nahy an al Munkar (Department of Promotion of Virtue and Eradication of Vice) was established in Kabul in December 1996 to ensure the observation of Islamic practices.

The Taliban spread from the Pashtun majority areas in the South to areas dominated by other ethnic minorities such as the Hazaras (mostly Shias), Uzbeks and Tajiks. The Taliban storm raged through these areas, through force and fraud, with active participation from both the Pakistani State5 and non-state actors 6 between 1996 and 2000. Excepting in the Panjsir valley, the Taliban controlled most other areas by early 2001.

The threat of sanctions and prolonged economic isolation by the wider international community did not help as Afghanistan became increasingly isolated and a haven for Islamist extremists, closer in orientation to the Deobandi-Wahabi version of Islam and a training ground for jihad for radicals from all corners of the world. The attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001 made the world realise the extent of the forces Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden had raised in their Islamist laboratory in Afghanistan.

The subsequent US led attack on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, for harbouring Al Qaeda terrorists, began in October 2001, and the Taliban fled from Kabul. Steady streams of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants trickled into the tribal areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. These militants, multi-national in character— Afghan, Arab, Pakistani, Chechen, Uzbek, and Uyighur — had fought in support of the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, Afghans and Pakistanis constituted a majority of these forces. While many of the Taliban forces stayed within the tribal areas, Al Qaeda elements spread across the length and breadth of Pakistan. The arrest of many top Al Qaeda cadres from various towns of the Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan later proved this point. The forces loyal to the Taliban confined themselves to the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, and virtual hibernation until their resurgence in 2003. While the Pakistani State moved its troops to the tribal Northwest Frontier Provinces under US pressure, its ability to contain the resurgence of the Taliban has been limited since early 2003.

After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Pakistani militants siding with them came back home to experiment with the Taliban precepts in the tribal hinterland and successfully made their writ run in local pockets in Waziristan, Bajaur, Malakand, Swat and even in Khyber. The extent of Taliban infiltration was evident by 2004-2005 with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and militant assertions of local Pakistani Taliban in Miramshah in 2005.7

The Pakistani Taliban: The Pre-9/11 Years
The Taliban were the products of the Deobandi religious seminaries (Madrassas) which dotted the Pashtun-dominated areas of Pakistan along the borders. Madrassas also mushroomed in the Punjab and Sindh too. In fact, the Banuri mosque of Karachi played a leading role in the Afghan jihad. The intelligence agencies of Pakistan, the USA and Saudi Arabia had promoted the establishment of these seminaries and designed special curricula for ideological indoctrination of Afghan refugee children, mindful of the Jihad raging in Afghanistan.

While Jamiat-i-Islami (JI) enjoyed prime patronage under the Zia-ul-Haq regime to mobilise support for the Jihad, and was a major voice in deciding which groups Islamabad would support, Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) was busy setting up Madrassas for educating the young Afghans and preparing them for the Jihad.8 Once the Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and the mujahideen came to power, the the Pakistani intelligence agencies failed in their attempt to bring all groups together and Afghanistan was plagued by internecine feuds until the rise of the Taliban in 1994. As the Taliban gained popularity, it attracted material and moral help from the Pakistani establishment, enabling it to bring the entire state under its control. It was then that the JUI of Pakistan overtook JI as the main mediating political group in Pakistan between the Pakistani State and the Taliban. Most of the top leadership of the Taliban were educated in Pakistani madrassas controlled by the JUI. JI was not as madrassa-centred as JUI and the latter was in charge of almost 80 per cent of the madrassas in Pakistan by the 1990s.

The JUI-Taliban relationship continued to grow even if the JUI suffered a split in 1990 over the issue of its leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman supporting the Benazir Bhutto-led government. Maulana Shami-ul-Haq broke away from JUI and founded his own branch after his name, i.e, JUI(S). After being overthrown in 1991, Benazir made a come-back in 1993. It was then that her government decided to back the Taliban. Maulana Fazlur Rehman's faction of the JUI played an important role in developing this strategic relationship between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban. Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, whose madrassa at Akora Khattak, called the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania, claimed to have produced the most Taliban cadres, also joined this partnership. As the Taliban became more entrenched there was a fringe Islamist element in Pakistan, produced by these madrassas and fired with the Jihad ideal, which started demanding Taliban type rule in Pakistan.

One was Maulana Sufi Muhammad, who founded his Tehreek Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) in 1992, and launched a formal movement for the imposition of Taliban style rule in Pakistan. By November-December 1994, TNSM had started asserting itself with thousands of its armed supporters seeking to impose Sharia in the Malakand division in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan. In 1995, its followers occupied government offices in the Swat district and demanded the imposition of Sharia in the area. On September 6, 1998, in reaction to the August 1998 American missile attacks on Afghanistan, the TNSM threatened to attack American citizens and property in Pakistan unless the USA apologised to the Muslim world for its missile strikes. Later on October 27, 2001, about 10,000 TNSM cadres from Bajaur, led by Maulana Sufi Mohammed and heavily armed with Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, missiles, anti-aircraft guns, hand-grenades and swords, crossed the Pakistan-Afghan border to join the ranks of the Taliban in their fight against the US-led forces.

The pressure from the religious elements was so great on the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that in 1998 he introduced the fifteenth amendment to the Pakistani constitution … Clause 2 of this proposed Article states:
The Federal Government shall be under an obligation to take steps to enforce the Shariah, to establish salat, to administer zakat, to promote amr bil ma'roof and nahi anil munkar (to prescribe what is right and to forbid what is wrong), to eradicate corruption at all levels and to provide substantial socio-economic justice, in accordance with the principles of Islam, as laid down in the Holy Quran and Sunnah.9

The bill was passed in the lower house on October 8, 1998. But it was not presented to the upper house because Nawaz Sharif's party did not have the required majority there. It is rumoured that the Prime Minister was waiting for the day when he would have a majority in the upper house to get it passed as an affirmation of his devotion to Islam. In reality it was an attempt to steal the thunder of the religious political parties. However, in practical terms Pakistan had moved closer to the Taliban version of Islam by then.

There was also the case of Mulana Akram Awan of Chakwal, Shiekh of the Naqshbandiah Owaisiah order, threatening to lay siege on Rawalpindi in April 2001 demanding imposition of Sharia in Pakistan. He was supported by Zaheerul Islam Abbasi, the retired General who had planned a coup in 1995 and subsequently been sentenced to imprisonment later that year, and the late Azam Tariq, the Deobandi-Sunni leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba. General Musharraf had to negotiate with the Maulana and assure him that he would try to accommodate his demands in lieu of the former pulling out his men from Rawalpindi. Musharraf also tried to co-opt and win Azam Tariq's allegiance by helping him get elected to the National Assembly. Despite Azam Tariq's assassination in 2003,, Pakistani supporters of the Taliban began asserting themselves in different locales inside Pakistan trying to impose a radical version of Islam on the people even before September 11, 2001.

The Roots of Talibanisation
The roots that sustain Islamist demands for the establishment of the rule of Sharia in Pakistan ironically lie in official Islam, championed by the Pakistani state. The following analysis indicates the Pakistani state has been under pressure from the right wing ulema (religious scholars) since its inception to convert the western-derived elements of the Pakistani state to a Sharia-based Islamic system. The modernist elite in Pakistan has, over time, conceded to Islamist demands, in order to avoid any confrontation and to reduce the chances of the Islamists making political gains. However, such a bargain has proved counter productive, pushing the State further down the Islamization path.
Pakistan was carved out of British India for the minority Muslims concerned about the prospect of being marginalised by the majority Hindu population. The leadership of the movement for Pakistan, mostly from northern India and elitist and feudal in orientation, used Islam in their mobilisation strategy to attract the Muslim masses. During the course of the movement, the bogey of Islamic-culture-in-danger was also raised to elicit stronger mass support and by the time of the creation of Pakistan, Islam had become a unifying element for the Muslims. However, once the state of Pakistan came into being, its main architect, and its sole spokesman, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who claimed to have carved it with the help of a type-writer, underplayed the Islamic dimension and defined the basic institutions of the state in liberal and secular terms. However, he passed away exactly 1 year and 29 days after Pakistan's creation, before the constitution was drawn up enshrining the principles he outlined in his address to the nation on August 11, 1947.10 The leaders succeeding him were unable to contend with the Islamist forces that were encouraged during the movement for Pakistan. “What was the need of founding Pakistan if it were to be a secular one?”11, asked some of the conservative right wing leaders. As the debate on the nature of the Pakistani state gathered momentum in the Pakistani Constitutional Assembly, it soon became apparent in the “Objective Resolution”12 of the Pakistani Constitution in 1949 that Islam had entered the constitution as an unalterable frame of reference.13 Even secular leaders like Ayub Khan and Z.A. Bhutto had to insert 'Islamic provisions'14 in the constitutions enacted during their rule.

Islamisation leads to Talibanisation
Article 2 of the 1973 constitution declares Islam as the official state religion and the preamble emphasises the point that sovereignty belongs to Allah. Article 227 states that all “existing laws shall be brought in conformity with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the holy Qur'aan and Sunnah … and no law shall be enacted which is repugnant to such injunctions” (Article 227). The ulema (Islamic scholars) have played an officially recognised role in shaping the Pakistani polity, including the writing of legislation.

The clergy has been accorded a constitutional place through the establishment of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). The CII was first introduced by Field Marshall Ayub in his 1962 constitution and Ayub used his influence and discretion to select only conformist clerics who would adopt a modernist line and attest his policies. The constitution of 1973 also made constitutional provision for the CII with a constitutional mandate to examine existing laws and recommend ways of bringing them into conformity with Islam's injunctions. The constitution promised to make all laws conform to the principles of Islam within ten years from the promulgation of the constitution. While Z.A. Bhutto did not make any effort in this regard, the damage had been done and the CII continues as a body prescribing conservative steps to be taken by governments from time to time. This has exerted unnecessary pressure on the government that at times has made use of the recommendations of the CII to demonstrate their Islamic credentials.

During Zia-ul-Haq's rule, the CII worked most enthusiastically and served as Chief Advisory Council to the President, entrusted with the responsibility of examining whether federal and provincial laws were in line with Islamic principles. So far the CII has recommended repeal of 829 federal laws passed till 1977.15 Many more laws are currently under review. As a result of their influence, Islamisation is, at least formally, the ultimate objective of the constitution and the basis of the state's legitimacy.

The attempt at Islamisation did not stop there. Zia-ul-Haq added Sharia benches to Provincial courts and a Sharia appellate bench to the Federal Supreme Court to decide matters concerning Islamic laws. These came to be known as the Federal Shariat Court. Sharia education was added to university education and an International Islamic University was established to offer judges crash courses on Islamic jurisprudence, to train official mullahs, and to emphasise research on Islamic history, politics and economics. During Zia's time, Islamisation efforts even spread to the criminal justice system. The penal laws, criminal procedure and Evidence Act were also amended through Presidential decrees/ordinances eroding the legal status of women.

Zia's infamous Hudood ordinances sought to introduce medieval forms of punishment like flogging, amputation, public stoning etc. With such symbolic but pervasive Islamisation efforts the non-Muslim minorities were reduced to 'dhimmis'16 of the medieval age. Even if the constitution gave them rights to profess and practice their religion, in practice there was an overwhelming majoritarian bias against minority sects like Ahmadiyas.17 In some cases, the Christians were targeted through blasphemy laws brought in by Zia.

It has been very difficult to repeal these Islamising provisions in Pakistan, as can be seen in the efforts by Musharraf to moderate some provisions of the Hudood ordinance to protect the rights of the women. It took Musharraf almost eight years to venture into the terrain of the Mullahs over the issue of restoring some women's rights, encroached upon by the Islamist incursions during the Zia era, signifying a gradual Islamisation of the Pakistani state and society.
Interpretations

The state with its modern trappings and liberal leadership has found it difficult to fight the menace of Islamic radicalism and progressively the conservative lobby has advanced. One interpretation could be that politics in Pakistan is dominated by a minority group consisting of the political, military and bureaucratic elite which is drawn from the feudal class or, as Hamza Alavi has suggested, from the elite salariat18 Due to the slow pace of socio-economic development of the Pakistani society and the apathy of the ruling elite towards the issue of creating equal conditions for people to make social, economic and political mobility possible, the political system in Pakistan is under strain from many sources.

Elite Competition?
One plausible explanation for the Islamic clergy's desire for political power could be their social composition. Ever since Pakistan was established a large majority of the clergy came from the less prestigious social classes, unlike the anglicised elite which invariably came largely from the feudal class. It was calculated by the famous Pakistani economist, the late Mahbub ul Haq in the mid-1980s that the ruling class in Pakistan was an exclusive group consolidated through inter-linkages and confined to around 500 families. Apart from few leaders like Qazi Hussain Ahmed, most of the mullahs have humble origins and come from poorer areas of Pakistan.19

At a certain level it can be interpreted as elite competition. Due to the unavailability of a consensual system of elite circulation (whereby different sets of elite could change their positions at the top in a peaceful manner), they have found it strategic to assert themselves through mobilisation of popular constituencies around the theme of Islam-which has high emotive value given the socio-economic backwardness of the people. However, this is not to deny that competitive elite networking has made complex alliances possible and at times the weakest group, with nuisance value and illegitimate coercive power, has been seen to ally itself with the military elite in its quest for state power. It has also been observed that this orthodox elite (the mullahs for instance) has been very entrepreneurial and made good use of their small but vocal and assertive power-base to keep themselves in circulation. The fact that the most prominent among these conservative elites have been vulnerable to opportunistic offers, suggest that their success has been in direct proportion to the willingness of the ruling elite of the time to accommodate them.20

The stakes of the Mullah
The mullah-military nexus21 which has been the theme of extensive research both in and outside Pakistan, has made it tempting on the part of the military elite, which has been one of the important constituents of state power, to make use of the militant religious constituency in designing its foreign and domestic policy. During the post-Afghan-Jihad days the use-value of this constituency increased substantially and the military-dominated Pakistani state incorporated its preferences into its Kashmir policy vis--vis India and in the bargain tolerated the intense Sunni-Deobandi sectarian implications at the domestic level. There was little realisation that these elements would come home to roost. By the 1990s it was seen that they had indeed made their presence felt in the tribal belt in Pakistan.
There is another element to militant Islam that has adopted the Taliban model in Pakistan over the last decade. It has nested itself in the Pashtun majority tribal areas in and around the federally administered tribal areas and northern Baluchistan. Projecting themselves as the Pakistani Taliban they have posed a tough challenge to Musharraf and the American forces in this virtually unadministered terrain. They have also managed to spread into the adjoining areas but with limited success and failed to penetrate into the Punjab and even Sindh provinces, despite having a working base in Karachi facilitated by their sectarian cousins. They have made inroads into Islamabad, as was witnessed in the wake of the Red Mosque siege. It became possible to penetrate into the capital, Islamabad, due to the gradual spread of jihadi mosques during General Zia's reign. Moreover, the leaders of these orthodox outfits, both militant and moderate, have come from the Pashtun ethnic group. Fears are growing that if Pakistan does not resolve its internal Taliban problem it may even encounter Pashtun-religious opposition in NWFP and northern Baluchistan. The recent resolution in the provincial assembly in NWFP to rename the province as “Afghania”, must have instilled some fear into the administration.

Strains in the Mullah-Military Alliance

The current military-led government has tried to underplay the role of Islam in the institutions of the Pakistani state. However, it is well-known that it had struck a deal with religious forces before the elections in October 2002 and played a big role in bringing disparate conservative political groups together to form the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, better known as the MMA, (literally translated as the United Council of Action), a grand coalition of religious-political parties including Deobandi, Barelvi and Ahle Hadith Sunni groups as well as Shias.

The government of the day, committed to “enlightened moderation”, has tried to engage the religious forces through dialogue, discussions and negotiations over issues spanning from the women's protection bill to deals with tribal Islamist militants. Even if this has not ensured smooth relations between the establishment and the MMA, the uneasy cohabitation has at least helped the government in maintaining a democratic faade. It has also helped the MMA in influencing the behaviour of the government in many ways.

If one analyses the several rounds of negotiations that Chaudhury Sujaat Hussain (President of the ruling political party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam) had with the JUI-F leader Fazlur Rehman, one finds that the original draft of the bill was substantially diluted to accommodate the wishes of the MMA leadership. Even then the MMA was opposed to the deal. The situation, as it remains to date, favours the military led government, yet the Mullahs have the power to influence the decisions of the government especially in matters concerning issues around social reform, gender rights, madrassa education and religious issues.

In certain ways, tacit governmental patronage has also boosted the morale of the MMA to the extent of passing a Shariat bill in the NWFP provincial Assembly, similar to the 15th amendment initiated by Nawaz Sharif, discussed earlier.22 At another level, the MMA, by acting as a buffer between the government and the Islamist militants, has provoked the ire of the extremists. Despite their willingness to work with the military during different periods of Pakistan's history, the religious-political forces had managed to retain their support base in these areas. But this time, with the appearance of ultra-radical conservative forces, the hold of the MMA over the Pashtun-dominated areas may weaken. Alternately, sensing the popular pulse in these areas, the MMA may seek to disassociate from the ruling establishment and raise its Islamisation bogey all over again. The resignation of the JI chief Qazi Hussain in July 2007 is an indication of a widening fault line within the MMA over whether or not to support Musharraf's policies in Pakistan.

Is roll-back possible?
There is a liberal argument that the Islamist tenor of the current constitution is more apparent than real. In essence, the government chosen by the people of the State, is the sovereign entity in Pakistan, for Allah had delegated all his authority to Pakistan. Such an argument is often advanced by the liberal constituency in Pakistan who claim that the silent majority of Pakistan are against a militant version of Islam and that the plurality within Islam in Pakistan would act as a defence against any move by any one version to dominate the polity in Pakistan. It is also argued by many Pakistani liberals that the largest province of Pakistan, the Punjab, will never come under the spell of any such regressive force and will serve as a uniting force in Pakistan.

However, such sanguine analysis is undermined by the state conceding space to such regressive forces, even symbolically. The dominant elite of Pakistan needs to redefine state institutions in liberal terms in order to keep Islam out of the affairs of the State. The State, rather than working on how to make good Muslims, ought to devote more time to liberal education, genuine reform of existing madrassas and open up the political domain to allow the militant forces to battle it out in the game of electoral politics, which will effectively deter their enthusiasm and appeal. A closed political system with doctored elections and unrepresentative rulers is a recipe for disaster. If the state makes an effort to contain Islamic extremists through force alone, it may create a situation quite similar to the those in Algeria, Turkey and even Indonesia.

Aware of the political value of Islam, General Musharraf has emphasised a liberal interpretation of Islam. In the negotiations with the Maulanas of the Red Mosque, it was reported that the government had tried to soften the stand of the Maulanas by expressing its commitment to work towards a Sharia-based political system in Pakistan. Shujaat Hussain and Ejaj-ul Haq (the late Ziaul-Haq's son), the mediators, emphasised that there was unanimity of opinion between the Government and the Maulanas regarding the evolution of a Sharia-based system in Pakistan, but that the methods could be different. In fact, as far as the orientation of the government is concerned there seems to be a tremendous reservoir of sympathy for the Islamist position among many politicians belonging to the ruling faction, even if President General Musharraf might be singing a different tune.

It has to be re-emphasised here that even if the rise of the Pakistani Taliban has made the JUI and even the JI — the principal Sunni political parties within MMA, look like moderates, there is basic agreement between the two regarding the need to have Islamic Sharia-based rule in Pakistan. The moderating effects of participation in the democratic political process wears off once they lose government patronage. The temptation to bring in Islamic rule through coercion is always present among enthusiastic supporters at the grassroots level and this constituency will continue to provide the necessary oxygen for the pro-Taliban Islamist militancy in the tribal belt. The Pakistani state faces a long struggle, as far as fighting these elements are concerned. It may be true that such militancy may not exert disintegrative pressure on the Pakistani state. However, given the close nexus between the Taliban and other types of extremists like the Deobandi Sunni sectarian elements and Kashmiri militants within Pakistan, the very possibility of such autonomous but inter-connected armed militant groups operating within Pakistan—even if they were to stay largely localised in the Pashtun belt—is quite disturbing. Such forces may engage the state in a perpetual confrontation with a regressive force, and contribute to the fragility of the state machinery. This would make the army play a more central role and further strengthen its hold on power in Pakistan.

The world at large ought to help Pakistan avert the danger of a Pakistan chronically “at war with itself”.23 This can be achieved by helping Pakistan revert to a participative political process where these assertive constituencies would be compelled to try out their strength in the theatre of electoral politics vis--vis other mainstream political parties which have traditionally performed better in electoral contests. Simultaneously, the Pakistani state should initiate a silent revolution to mainstream the far-flung tribal areas economically. By connecting these areas to the heartland through all weather road networks, greater penetration of political parties24 to these areas (the political parties are not allowed to operate in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas,25 and by providing the people with access to liberal education (because the literacy rate in these areas is as low as 29.51% for males and 3% for women)26 and by reforming the madrassa education system, the tide of Talibanisation that Musharraf underlined in Kabul can be reversed.

The Pakistani state will also have to “rollback its paradigm”27 of using militancy for short-term gains in Kashmir, vis--vis India. In fact, this policy of raising an unofficial armed group has boomeranged from when the Pakistani state made use of Al Qaeda training centres to train its cadres. The ideology of the Jihad guiding the militants in Kashmir morphed into an intensely sectarian, Deobandi-Wahabi creed when it was made to interact with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the training camps in southern Afghanistan. The Jihad industry raised by Osama Bin Laden and encouraged by the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence has led to the production of many committed cadres for Jihad against everything they consider un-Islamic, according to their narrow sectarian view-point. This has also completely Talibanised the socio-political context in Pakistan.

The study by Kristian Berg Harpviken reveals that “traditional modes of social organization”28 play a central role in the making of non-state actors with extensive war-making capacity in modern times. Even if the power structure in the tribal areas has changed29 with substantial dilution of the authority of the tribal elders/leaders and triumph of the tribal mullahs in the wake of the prolonged propagation of jihadi culture since the initiation of Afghan Jihad in the early 1980s, the traditional communitarian principles continue to determine the nature of collective action in these societies. It would require tremendous effort on the part of the state to transform these societies from war-making-machines to forward-looking rule-bound political entities. The process of transformation through increasing literacy, promoting participative local bodies integrated with the larger political system and accommodating the competing elite in the political process would require innovative socio-political and economic strategies. The process is difficult but not impossible.

Notes
1. President Pervez Musharraf's address to European Union's Foreign Relation Committee at Brussels on 15 September 2006 available at (accessed 3 August 2007).

2. Musharraf quoted by Jason Straziuso, “Musharraf Warns of 'Talibanisation' in Pakistan”, Associate Press Report, August 13, 2007, available at: (accessed 20 August 2007).

3. For a detailed discussion on Taliban's rise see Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, IB Tauris, London, 2000, Larry P. Goodson. Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban, University of Washington Press, Seattle & London, 2001, William Maley, Fundamentalism Reborn: Afghan and the Taliban, Vanguard Books, 1998, Kamal Matinuddin, The Taliban Phenomenon, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1999, Peter Marsden, Taliban, War, Religion and New Order in Afghanistan, Zed Books Ltd, London, New York, 1998.

4. The Islamic edicts issued by the Taliban immediately after they overran the Afghan capital Kabul emphasised the following: a) compulsory wearing of Hijab (traditional Islamic dress by Muslim women which covers their body from head to foot). Iranian burqa was unacceptable. Male tailors cannot take measures of female bodies and sew clothes for them. Women to be accompanied by men while going out of their homes. b) Banning of all kinds of music and dance, playing of drums, c) No to gambling, idolatry, drugs addiction, British and American hairstyles, riba (interest on loans), washing of clothes by women upstream, keeping pigeons and playing with birds, sorcery and kite-flying. d) Men not to shave beards, and pray five times a day. Ahmed Rashid provides the details of the Edicts in the Appendix of his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Tauris, London, 2000, pp. 218-219.

5. It has been observed by Gilles Dorrosoro, who spent considerable periods in Afghanistan doing his research in the Summer of 2000 that, “several thousand soldiers of the Pakistani regular army were sent to the front; their presence proved decisive in the taking of Taloqan, a small town that Massoud had controlled since 1986 and whose loss is a direct threat to his supply lines between Panjshir and Tajikistan”. See Gilles Dorronsoro, “The World Isolates Taliban”, available on (accessed 23 March 2007).

6. It has been attested by many researchers that pro-Taliban clerics like Sufi Mahammad (leader of TNSM) and Shami-ul-Haq (leader of his own branch of JUI) even closed down their madrassas in response to calls by Taliban in July 1999, for fresh recruits for their offensives against the Northern Alliance and sent the students to join the Taliban war efforts. Larry Gordon, bears it out when he states that, “in a fresh Taliban offensive in July (1999) about five to eight thousand Pakistani volunteers joined Taliban. See Larry P. Gordon, note 3, pp. 82-83, also see Barnet R. Rubin, 'Afghanistan under the Taliban', Current History, Vol. 625, p. 85.

7. December 2005, in Miramshah, North Waziristan, a video footage of a public execution of (as the anchor in the video called them) some “criminals, drug pushers, bootleggers and extortionists”, with their bodies hung from poles, eyes gouged out, and cash stuffed into their mouth brought back the memories of Taliban in Afghanistan in 1994. For detailed reports see Zahid Hussain, “Terror in Miramshah”, Newsline, April 2006, Declan Walsh, “Pakistani Taliban take control of unruly tribal belt”, The Guardian, March 21, 2006, Zahid Hussain, “Terror in Miramshah”, Newsline, April 2006, Graham Usher, “The Pakistan Taliban”, Middle East Report, February 13, 2007, available online on .

8. As per Jessica Stern, “If madrasahs supply the labor for “jihad,” then wealthy Pakistanis and Arabs around the world supply the capital”. In “Pakistan's Jihad Culture, Foreign Affairs, November-December 2000.

9. Text of the 15th Amendment Bill cited in Dawn (Karachi), October 10, 1998.

10. In his inaugural address on August 11, 1947, Jinnah promised equal rights for all citizens regardless of religion, caste or creed. He famously said: “If we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor … you are free- you are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state … in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state”. (accessed 18 August 2007).

11. Maulana Maududi, founder of Jamiat-i-Islami had argued this way.

12. On March 12, 1949, the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan adopted a resolution moved by Liaquat Ali Khan, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan. It was called the Objectives Resolution. It proclaimed that the future constitution of Pakistan would not be modeled on a European pattern, but on the ideology and democratic faith of Islam. Liaqat called it “the most important occasion in the life of this country, next in importance only to the achievement of independence”.

13. An interesting analytical piece titled “Talibanisation of Pakistan”, by Rafi Aamer, came up recently in Dawn (Karachi), August 12, 2008, which also argues the same.

14. Ayub had to include Islamic clauses in the 1962 Constitution. These could not be challenged in any court of law. The state was originally named the Republic of Pakistan, but the first amendment added the word “Islamic” to the name. The word “Islam” and not “Quran and Sunnah” was used in the Islamic clauses to give a liberal touch to the Constitution. The Advisory Council of Islamic Ideology was introduced whose job was to recommend to the government ways and means to enable Muslims to live their lives according to the teachings of Islam.

15. ICG Asia Report N°49, “Pakistan: The Mullahs and the Military”, Islamabad/Brussels, 20 March 2003.

16. Non-Muslim minorities in an Islamic state were called Dhimmis and they were treated differently and were discriminated against by the rulers.

17. Ahmadiyas regard Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian (in present day India) as a later day Messiah who brought the message of Prophet Muhammad forward. Mainstream Islamic sects like Sunni and Shia consider it heretical to accept anybody as a Messiah after Muhammad because the Holy book accords the status of final Prophet to Muhammad alone. Hardline Sunnis and Shias came together in the 1950s and then in the 1970s and launched a movement in honour of the 'finality of prophethood' (Khatm-e-Nabuwat) and demanded expulsion of Ahmadiyas from the fold of Islam. Bhutto brought about a constitutional provision to deny Ahmadiyas the right to call themselves Muslims.

18. The salary earning class that emerged during the colonial period has been called a 'salariat' by the eminent political scientist from Pakistan, Hamza Alavi.

19. Jessica Stern argues correctly in her piece, Pakistan's Jihad Culture: “Whereas wealthy Pakistanis would rather donate their money than their sons to the cause, families in poor, rural areas are likely to send their sons to “jihad” under the belief that doing so is the only way to fulfill this spiritual duty. One mother whose son recently died fighting in Kashmir told me she would be happy if her six remaining sons were martyred. “They will help me in the next life, which is the real life,” she said.”, Foreign Affairs, November-December 2000.

20. The tentative theorisation here has drawn upon the elite theory advanced by Vilfredo Paerto, in his seminal work, The Mind and Society (4 vols.), 1935, and Gaetano Mosca, in his famous work, The Ruling Class, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1958. The salient issue is that there is no consensus on the process of power transition (which has been alternatively called elite circulation) in Pakistan in spite of the fact that the constitution has been in place for almost 35 years. There has been a temptation to override the constitution on the part of the military elite in active collusion with a small but assertive constituency of orthodox mullahs from time to time. This is a marked feature of a highly inegalitarian and feudal society struggling to adapt democracy as a framework for governance.

21. See Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005, Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, I.B. Tauris, distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, Hassan Abbas, Pakistan: Drift into Extremism.

22. MMA leaders would maintain that their insistence on Sharia-based rule does not presage a Taliban style rule in Pakistan. One of them would say “The Taliban had gained power after a bloody conflict whereas the MMA is part of the political process and will employ a gradual approach to total Islamisation of society as recommended by the Shariat Council”. However the conservative slant in their demand makes it unacceptable to the liberals in Pakistan.”. See the discussion on 'Implementing Sharia', in ICG Report, note 15, See the quote from the ICG interview with Hafiz Akhter Ali, NWFP minister for Religious Affairs and Auqaf, Peshawar, 3 January 2003, p. 29.

23. Zahid Hussain argues along these lines, in his book, Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, I.B. Tauris, distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

24. .

25. Benazir Bhutto-led Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP), pleaded recently in a petition to the Supreme Court, that the Political Parties' Act, 1962, be extended to FATA to end its “political isolation”. Editorial, “Ending Fata's isolation”, Dawn (Karachi), 01 August 2007.

26. Pakistani Government Statistics. Available at (accessed 12 April 2007).

27. For example a perceptive observer of the Pakistani situation writes: “Today's Wana is the creation of yesterday's Afghanistan … For the Pakistani State Nek Mohammad represents its own creation. The State has to retake charge of its affairs and rollback that paradigm. But it has to go easy; there are no quick-fixes here”. Nasim Zehra, “State Reworks itself in Wana”, Daily Times (Lahore) April 29, 2004.

28. Kristian Berg Harpviken, devotes a lot of research to understand Taliban's organisational capability through collective action theory in the following paper: “Transcending Traditionalism: The Emergence of Non-State Military Formations in Afghanistan”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1997, pp. 271-287.

29. Gilles Dorronsoro argues that the 1990s saw the triumph of religious authorities (the ulema) and the marginalisation of the traditional elites in his book, Revolution Unending Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present, translated by John King, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.