June 7, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 6, 1424

SINGAPORE: If the United States is serious about rapid redeployment of its forces in Asia, it will have to do better than in South Korea: a decade after promising to hand over its huge Seoul headquarters, South Korea has regained only the golf course.

Now, the United States has said it will pull back its forces from the world’s last Cold War frontier in a historic move that a top US commander in the capitalist South said would not weaken the allies’ defence against the communist North.

More far-reaching forces may be at play.

“The issue is not why are we doing this — because it is clearly long overdue — but why is it so urgent to announce it now,” said Ralph Cossa, head of the Hawaii-based Pacific Forum CSIS think tank. The deal was agreed last October, he said.

“This is Rumsfeld with his eye on the bigger picture and his lack of regard for little minor details like the fact that the Cold War is not over yet on the Korean peninsula,” he said of the US Defence Secretary whose vision of a smaller, mobile, technologically advanced force triumphed in Iraq.

AGILE AND FLEXIBLE: Pentagon officials have not hidden that new technology means US military positions in the Asia-Pacific region can now be shifted to create a more agile, flexible and effective force. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said just that only days ago.

The problems of the Korean peninsula are more complicated and more deadly than threats in the Middle East.

North and South Korea remain technically at war because the armed truce that ended the 1950-53 Korean conflict never led to a peace treaty.

South Korean officials have voiced concern that shifting US troops away from the frontier for the first time — even if only by a few miles at first — could be perceived by the North as a weakening of US support for Seoul or as a move to clear the way for a pre-emptive attack on the North.

Moving house could be slow. An agreement in principle about 10 years ago to move the huge US army headquarters from prime Seoul real estate has so far freed only a golf course.

Exacerbating the situation is the nuclear crisis over Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions.

“This is a consequence not of a major US policy change to Korea, but as much an issue of a changed and more modern approach to military operations,” said Ross Babbage, professor of strategic and defence studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.

The changes are intended to enable US troops, and their South Korean allies, to develop as more mobile units that are afforded greater manoeuvrability as they move further from the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) dividing North from South, he said.

While the move may offer military advantages and new flexibility to troops pinned down for five decades along the most heavily fortified border on earth, the timing may not have been ideal given the nuclear crisis.—Reuters