June 12, 2003	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 11, 1424

WASHINGTON: With little advance warning, the United States has abandoned its early trip-wire strategy in Korea.

The theory, which held through the Cold War, was that 37,000 US troops stationed near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea would be enough to deter an attack from North Korea since the United States would react with nuclear weapons if those troops and the South Koreans were overwhelmed. Those troops were there as hostages.

This worked for a while. But things have changed, including the ideology of the Bush administration which tarred the North Koreans with the axis of evil brush — along with Iraq and Iran. Also, the American troops, once seen as a guarantor of peace in the Korean peninsula, were targeted by a growing political sense in Seoul, expressed in South Korea’s last presidential elections, that the Americans were occupiers and an obstacle to reunification.

Last week, the US government announced that the American troops would remain in South Korea, but would be pulled back away from harm’s way. The trip-wire was relaxed with little warning, although Washington had sent signals in the past that it was likely to undertake such a move.

Selig Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Centre for International Policy, believes that the United States was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way.

He believes that the American government should have made the move as part of a negotiated reciprocal agreement with the North Koreans. In this case scenario, the United States and North Korea would both move their troops away from the high-tension DMZ at the same time. It could have led to a general easing of the situation in the Korean peninsula.

But the sudden unilateral announcement increased uncertainty on both sides of the DMZ and had the effect of increasing tensions. Harrison and others believe that the American pullback was ordered to give the US armed forces greater flexibility should the White House order an attack on North Korea. It appeared to many to be another case where the Pentagon, with White House approval, is playing the leading and decisive role in American foreign policy decisions.

The American pullback has no impact on what the State Department in Washington considers to be the real danger: that North Korea is busily engaged in producing nuclear weapons that could be sold to rogue nations or even to terrorist groups.—dpa