AT first the news from North Korea seemed like an almighty setback to those who believe we can deal with grave security problems more by engagement rather than confrontation.

Not only did it appear to knock the shine off Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize, since his greatest achievement, apart from Camp David, was his successful diplomacy that brokered the 1994 freeze on the country’s nuclear bomb making, it appeared it might well open the doors again to those Republicans who eight years ago were arguing for the US to bomb North Korea.

A strange thing appears to have happened in those eight years. For all the bluster with President George Bush’s notion of an “axis of evil”, no longer is the talk this wild. The accent is all on diplomacy and an emphasis on what is still apparently being honoured in the old 1994 agreement, the freezing of plutonium production, the most potent raw material for nuclear bomb manufacture.

Eight years ago, Brent Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor to president George Bush senior (and now the dove on going to war with Iraq) said that President Bill Clinton would be making a terrible mistake if the U.S. did not immediately bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant before the cooling rods containing plutonium, sufficient to make half a dozen nuclear weapons, could be transferred to it.

In the end Carter was able to pull off his remarkable diplomacy because Clinton feared the consequences of war. The Pentagon told him that the U.S. could lose 50,000 troops. Also that it was possible that North Korea already had in its arsenal two or three nuclear weapons and that if the regime thought it might lose the war it would use these.

Nothing has really changed in the interim to alter the dangers of going to war. The U.S. many times broke its side of the bargain. At various times a Republican dominated Congress made it impossible for the Administration to deliver on various parts of the U.S. side of the bargain, in particular the ending of the trade embargo. And now the North has broken in the most blatant manner possible an important element in the nuclear freeze, (although it should be stressed it doesn’t appear to have actually gone into nuclear bomb production).

The war option is no more viable than it was eight years ago. It comes as no surprise that Japan, the country, apart from South Korea, that has the most to fear from North Korea’s nuclear armament and missile programmes, is arguing that the 1994 agreement needs to be revitalised not abandoned. And perhaps indeed the North Korean admission of its clandestine activity is more a cry for openness and creative diplomacy than a new threat to deliver nuclear annihilation.

Here in Taiwan there is a sense of wait and see. Taiwan is used to living under threat. The antagonist it faces across the Taiwan Strait is far larger, better armed and in every way more formidable than North Korea. It is five years since the last blow up in this delicate relationship. Angry at Taiwan’s attempt to break out of its diplomatic isolation with a quasi-official visit of Taiwan’s president to America China “test-fired” missiles in the Taiwan Strait, only to be met by a dramatic show of U.S. naval strength in the same waters.

But since then, and particularly with the electoral victory of the long time opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party, the relationship has quietened. It may not be harmony and it is still subject to sudden flair ups, as when President Chen Shui-bain in August spoke of their being “one country on each side” of the Strait. But each crisis seems to occur at more distant intervals and the wind goes out of them quicker each time.

There are some here who argue that Taiwan is being slowly throttled by the Chinese diplomatic embargo, but it’s hard to believe that when the Taiwanese economic presence in the mainland is growing by leaps and bounds and China is becoming increasingly reliant on Taiwanese high-tech expertise and when Chinese tourists in droves can be seen milling around the Chinese art treasures in the National Palace Museum.

There is the occasional voice in the legislature arguing for Taiwan to develop its own nuclear weapons so that China would no longer dare intimidate the island. And there are those, like Vice President Annette Lu who, in an interview with me, try to fudge the one China issue by saying “we are one Chinese”. All such voices tend to have somewhere at the back of their mind an independent Taiwan as their goal.

But this will never work out. China is too vast and too powerful to be deflected from its goal of a unified China (which the U.S. formally supports) — even if Taiwan started to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, that would provoke China to move pre-emptively.

The issue is more subtle: how to make sure China respects the individuality and personality of Taiwan. This means above all respect for Taiwan’s democracy, rule of law and total autonomy in domestic affairs — not like Hong Kong where since re-union some important principles have been undermined, not least the commitment to proceed to democracy.

The main goal for Taiwan must be the same goal as in America’s dealing with North Korea- the avoidance of war. There is no point in standing up for human rights and benign principles if the method chosen is so antagonistic it leads to war. War is the worst of all human wrongs and as it runs its course every human right in the book is smashed to pieces.

As with North Korea engagement rather than confrontation is the path to take. — Copyright Jonathan Power

THERE is a very real danger today that the international concentration on security matters could sideline development problems — particularly those that are more intractable.

This could stall or even reverse the process of providing what developing countries need most to advance, namely improved market access in terms of trade rules and access to finance, foreign direct investment, and technology.

We have entered a new era. September 11, 2001, put an end to the post-cold war period and the atmosphere that nurtured so many positive changes in international relations. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized many of the developments that were to come, the demolition of physical or legal barriers between countries or people in many parts of the world. The conclusion of the Uruguay Round of General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the establishment of World Trade Organization (WTO) brought the promise of an end to wars in the economic sphere and the removal of barriers to the free flow of finance, investment, and technology.

The attacks of a year ago radically changed this atmosphere. The most accurate symbol of the phase we are entering is not the collapse of the World Trade Centre but the construction of new walls in the attempt to keep out terrorism — legal walls keep out immigrants and economic refugees; economic barriers against specific products, such as steel or certain agricultural products from developing countries; physical walls to keep out the anti-globalization demonstrators that appear at every major international conference and to bunker public buildings.

While in many cases walls and defences may be necessary, they are usually the expression of a failure to address larger, more basic problems. The challenges we face today go well beyond terrorism. The far larger issue is insecurity, which all people fear, the rich and the poor, in a world that is growing increasingly dangerous, unpredictable, and uncertain.

The roots of today’s insecurity are multiform and if we really wish to find lasting solutions we will have to take measures to protect against all kinds of threats.

The great French political analyst, Raymond Aaron, succinctly described the cold war in this way: “Impossible peace, improbable war.” Now, war is no longer improbable. On the contrary, it is becoming more and more likely.

One reason for this is that certain forms of warfare have changed the ratio between the risks and benefits of war. When the probable benefits largely exceed the risks, the attractiveness of war as a solution to international problems necessarily increases as well. This could even lead to a sort of banalization of war, a dramatic departure from the past when war was considered the last possible resort.

Meanwhile, the dominant issues of yesterday are rapidly fading from view. Globalization, for example — not long ago the central issue of contemporary international life, a subject capable of mobilizing multitudes in public places, is fast losing its importance, and for a simple reason: the political is again reasserting its primacy over the economic sphere. The state is reasserting its primacy over the markets, which are able to survive attacks like those of a year ago only because of state intervention.

One of the clearest indications of how economic considerations are now taking a back seat to political or security matters is the lack of discussion in the current debate about war in Iraq on the huge impact it would have on oil prices in particular and the world economy in general.

What is needed most today is solidarity. The world’s problems are inextricably linked and must be faced together. People in parts of the world that may be left underwater by rising sea levels caused by global warming are not likely to see the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as their paramount and most immediate concern; nor are the citizens of countries in Africa decimated by AIDS, which is in effect a sort of bacteriological warfare.

Solidarity is indivisible. It must be invoked and maintained not only with regard to global warming and the fight against AIDS, but also to the struggle against extreme poverty and desperation, wherever they are found.

Today there is at least some comfort to be taken in the fact that in dealing with international trade we have been able to preserve the multilateral structures thus far. There is a group of multilateral negotiations going on right now focused on the need to address the legitimate aspirations of developing countries to have a more balanced system.

— Copyright IPS

The writer is the Secretary-General of the UNCTAD.

PAKISTAN’s seventh general election promises to raise any number of issues on which opinion will be sharply divided. Few would question the validity of the view that the masterful rise of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) is a complete surprise.

For many it is also a shock that has the effect of an earthquake for the political landscape and a cataclysm for the political environment. Being an alliance of staunchly fundamentalist religious parties, normally antagonistic (occasionally hostile) to one another, the MMA was generally viewed as a ‘marriage of inconvenience,’ and an untenable alliance unlikely to last. The six Islamic parties that have formed the MMA represent distinctly irreconcilable schools of thought, practice, rituals — even attire.

As far as the basics of Islam are concerned, the MMA six are far from like-minded, let alone united or ‘muttahid.’ It is only fair to ask what is it that now enables them to think alike and act in unity? As already noted, it is not Islam that has ever united them and brought them together to move in one harness. In fact, their understanding and preaching of Islam has always divided them. At the moment, or during the election campaign, the MMA six came together on one point — declaring the US as the enemy of Islam.

The feeling that the United States is arrayed on the other side of the Muslim-Israel divide is pretty widely shared in Pakistan. Thanks to the recent events in Palestine, Muslims all over the world tend to feel that way, however vaguely. In this predominantly Muslim country, almost everyone is unhappy about the US policies in Palestine. But few would go so far as to join the MMA’s tirade against the US that had begun to sound like bugles of war during the MMA campaign.

The people of Pakistan have strong sympathy and deep compassion for the people of Afghanistan. Many feel that the manner in which the government of President Bill Clinton abandoned the people of Afghanistan to their misery after the Soviet defeat was the “unkindest cut of all,” to use a Shakespearean expression.

Even this undeniable fact cannot fully explain the MMA phenomenon that is essentially a reincarnation of the Taliban. Public memory cannot be so short as to forget that until the other day the Islamic fundamentalists, particularly the major parties in the MMA fold, were the closest allies of the United States in its war against the “godless” Soviets. That war was being fought by the US on Afghan soil, with the guns on the Taliban shoulders and with the unstinted support from all those who are now the standard-bearers of the MMA.

Most people in Pakistan were astonished to hear the MMA bigwigs relentlessly firing away their cannons on the US whose war they were once fighting in the name of Islam. Now the Taliban target has shifted from the “godless Communism” to the “godless United States.” One does not have to go back too far into the past to be reminded of the rise of the Jamaat-i-Islami and similarly fundamentalist Islamic entities in Pakistan and their intimacy with the United States from the beginning of the cold war. It was a long and passionate ‘affair.’ In that phase, the US would embrace and mollycoddle any element willing to join its war on the ‘evil empire’ of good old Ronald Reagan’s description.

The final battle between the Taliban version of Islam and “godless communism” was fought and won by the united forces of the United States and the Taliban, the forebears of the MMA, so to say. How intimate equations of the fundamentalists change overnight defies the comprehension and belief of normal human beings. Who could have believed that the Islamists and the United States would find each other in such fierce confrontation?

There is hardly any doubt that the sudden rise of the MMA in such strength is hard to explain in terms of principled politics. Disenchantment with the United States is pervasive across the Muslim world. But there has to be a lot more than just this negative sentiment behind this wave that has swept so much away from the scene in the Frontier province. An array of political and ethnic giants, that were believed to be invincible or irremovable, has been felled.

In their election campaign speeches, the MMA stalwarts proclaimed that they would usher in the Islamic state. One can only wonder how and from where would this process begin. The world has seen how the Taliban, the precursors of the MMA, ushered in the Islamic order in Afghanistan and in what shape they have left their country. Where are the Taliban and where is their Islamic revolution? Every Pakistani should feel free to answer that question. Those who would try to evade this question would be guilty of looking away from the most outstanding political reality of the moment.

Regardless of where one stands on the political stage, it should be realized that MMA kind of entity emerges from a situation where politics is played out in isolation from the people. Most political parties in Pakistan have become apolitical bodies, out of touch with the people and the prevailing reality. The MMA has exploited, unfairly and in a dubious manner, one public sentiment. It has touched a raw nerve and cashed in on public trauma. As politics, it has been a strategy that is indelicate and insensitive to the point of being jugglery.

Pakistan is no stranger to fundamentalists. This nation has survived more than ten years of ‘Islamization’ by Zia, with the Jamaat-i-Islami very much in tow. The tallest in the MMA caboodle of today were the dedicated soldiers of that wave of ‘Islamization.’ They stood by dictator Zia when he declared democracy was not in his book.

Whatever Zia and his cohorts did to this country, did not in any way promote the cause of Islam. What the Taliban did to Afghanistan in the name of ‘Islamization’ is more than enough to give this nation the creeps, and rob it of its sleep. Already the MMA is talking of some very damaging things that they might do if they were allowed a chance.