THE prospect of a renewed conflict in the Korean peninsula has greatly increased after the announcement by American officials that North Korea has been preparing to carry out an underground nuclear test since March and could set off a blast as early as June.

New satellite photographs show tunnels being dug under a mountain in the north east of the country and building material being taken back in an effort to contain an underground blast. The pictures also show what appears to be an observation stand a few miles away.

The prospect of a North Korean nuclear test has naturally alarmed Pyongyang’s neighbours who have been trying for the last two years to head off a confrontation between North Korea and the United States as that is bound to destabilize the region. They have been trying to keep diplomacy active and alive. South Korea has even bent over backwards to keep the North in good humour. Its foreign minister has, however, now admitted that the nuclear issue has reached a “critical moment” and that patience among neighbours is wearing thin.

Nuclear experts believe that North Korea has already amassed enough fissile material from its nuclear programmes to assemble six to eight nuclear bombs. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates that North Korea has close to six nuclear weapons. According to its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, North Korea has the industrial infrastructure to weaponize its plutonium.

For years North Korea has denied that it had been trying to make a bomb despite being caught by inspectors producing more plutonium than it had owned up to. In 2002 it was also accused by the US of attempting to import materials for enriching uranium. Since then Pyongyang has repeatedly threatened to show off its “deterrent force”. On February 10, North Korea finally came out with the declaration that it had developed nuclear weapons to defend itself from the United States.

Experts believe that North Korean nuclear test is the next logical step in a nuclear weapons programme that has been underway for almost 50 years. North Korea is already a “declared” nuclear state after its announcement this year that it has nuclear weapons. Now it wants to become a “recognized” nuclear state like India and Pakistan.

In order to achieve that status, it must first make itself a “demonstrated” power by conducting a nuclear test. Such a test will force the world, particularly America, to take Pyongyang seriously as a nuclear power. Therefore, the satellite photographs showing preparations for an underground nuclear test in the north eastern part of the country make sense.

If North Korea does go ahead with a successful nuclear test, it is bound to change dynamics in Asia. It will cause a lot of insecurity with its impact, particularly on the whole of East Asia, South Korea and Japan. The scenario soon after the blast will be chilling. Some amount of radioactive fallout may leak from the test site and drift towards Japan. Financial markets in Tokyo and Seoul will tumble after the news. Foreign companies in South Korea will start thinking whether to pull out or reduce their operations. And the US will debate whether to impose a blockade or other tough measures to contain the North Korean nuclear fallout.

The prospect of being “recognized” as a nuclear power is no doubt attractive, but if Pyongyang goes ahead with a nuclear test, it will have to face very serious consequences. A nuclear test will mean a complete fall-out with China and the real possibility of UN sanctions. Since rumours began circulating about a possible North Korean nuclear test, Chinese officials have been visiting US embassy in Beijing to request intelligence updates about the likely site and timing. South Korea’s foreign minister Ban Ki-moon and his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing warned North Korea on May 6 that any further escalation of the 30-month nuclear standoff would backfire diplomatically.

The US is increasingly worried that the North Koreans might be able to mount nuclear warheads on their ballistic missiles. North Korea’s recent short-range ballistic missile test off its eastern coast has led to speculation that it is upgrading missiles it could use to attack American bases or other targets in South Korea.

North Korea has not made any effort to deny a recent statement by Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, that Pyongyang now has the technology to produce an actual warhead that could fit atop missiles which, by US intelligence estimates, could reach parts of the United States.

This becomes all the more a real possibility because the North Korean leader Kim Il Jong II is regarded a reckless man. President Bush has described him as a “tyrant” and a “dangerous person” who “starves” his own people and has “huge concentration camps”. But some analysts argue that however brutal Kim’s policies may be, he seems to be following a rational course because he has only two options: he can either wait for an American attack or he can move quickly show his nuclear card, hoping he can thus bargain for a deal that ensures his regime’s survival. Amongst American officials, there are differences over the seriousness of nuclear threat from North Korea. The CIA has been more cautious over intelligence reports than the Pentagon and the White House. Although US spy satellite images have shown what may be preparations for an underground nuclear test, some officials warn that this may also be an “elaborate ruse” by the North Koreans.

However, there are indications that the US has softened its stance on North Korea. The first indication was given by President Bush himself who, in his State of the Union address in February, did not repeat his 2002 characterization of North Korea as part of an “axis of evil”. Nor did he recycle his Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s January assertion that Pyongyang was an “outpost of tyranny”. The president also seemed to indicate that, unlike Iran where he urged the Iranian people to overthrow their government, the US would not seek to precipitate or opt for a regime change in North Korea.

Then in March, the US said that North Korea “need not completely dismantle its nuclear weapons arsenal” before receiving benefits under an aid-for-disarmament proposal. However, the North Korean response to American gestures has so far been discouraging. Pyongyang said it would no longer deal with “half-baked” George Bush, despite previous demands for bilateral talks with the United States. Does North Korea mean it or is it a diplomatic bluff? No one knows for sure except Kim Il Jong II.

By June it will be full one year since North Korea last took part in six-nation talks with United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia — in an effort to strike a deal to dismantle its nuclear programme. Efforts to coax Pyongyang back to the table and keep diplomacy alive have not so far met with any success. Recently, the North Korean foreign ministry raised hopes for a resumption of the moribund talks by dropping a precondition for separate one-on-one contacts with the Americans. Washington has responded positively by saying that the US remains ready for direct talks with North Korea within the framework of multi-party talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear arms programme.

Most Pyongyang watchers are agreed that North Korea is considering a nuclear test. When a country announces its membership in the nuclear club, as the North Koreans did in February, the next logical step is to go for a nuclear test. Some analysts believe the reclusive state has already tested the triggering mechanism for a bomb and the only thing left to do is to set off a plutonium bomb to see if its technology works. Under the circumstances, the prospect of Pyongyang joining the nuclear club has suddenly become real. Since a nuclear North Korea poses a serious and destabilizing threat for Asia, particularly for its neighbours, the Americans may face a far more difficult dilemma than the one relating to Iran.

The writer is a former ambassador.

RELATIONS between the two Asian countries with the largest economies, China and Japan, have deteriorated owing to differences rooted in history, as well as divergence in their strategic perspectives on the emerging world order. Indeed, the conflicts in their perceptions and interests reflect both the legacy of history, and their current competition for resources and influence. How they reconcile their differences will be determined not only by their leaderships, but also by regional and global trends during a period of transition in world history.

Japan, despite the fact that it was defeated by the US in the Second World War, and is the only country subjected to an attack by nuclear weapons, has become a close strategic and political ally of Washington, as well as a component of the dominant West. China, that suffered exploitation and humiliation at the hand of the imperialist world, underwent a communist revolution following the Second World War.

For the past 25 years, it has been a success story of development and modernization that is seen as a potential threat to western political hegemony and economic domination. Historically, China is home to an ancient civilization, going back 5,000 years, which considered itself to be the centre of the world, calling itself the “Middle Kingdom.” Japan, smaller in size, and insulated by the sea, developed a dependence on its giant neighbour, deriving its language, culture, cuisine and religion from China. However, the past two centuries saw a transformation, and a brief role reversal.

Japan adopted modern science and education in the 19th century. As a result of the Meiji reforms, it became the only Asian country to join in the imperial game, colonizing Korea and parts of China.

On the other hand, the Celestial Empire in China failed to modernize, and was exploited and occupied by all the colonial powers of the time. Japan led the pack, first setting up a puppet kingdom in Manchuria, and then, in the 1930s, launching a full-scale invasion to conquer and colonize China. The Japanese resorted to extensive and inhuman atrocities to break the will of the more numerous Chinese.

This period coincided with the civil war in China, and the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) under Chiang Kai-Shek considered the communist, led by Mao Zedong, as a greater threat than the Japanese.

The communists, while resisting the nationalist onslaught by such tactics as the Long March of 1935-36, bore the brunt of the resistance to the Japanese, and thus won the grass-roots support that led to their victory in 1949.

However China suffered 11 million casualties in the war against Japan, whose record of barbarities and massacres is a terrible one. There is hardly a family in China that did not lose some member in that struggle.

Memories of Japanese atrocities are deeply embedded in the psyche of the Chinese people. Though the compulsions of modernization, they started since 1978, have inevitably led to close economic relations with Japan, the Chinese leadership and masses remain sensitive to any signs of resurgence of militarism in Japan.

This writer recalls that during his tenure as ambassador to China, there was widespread condemnation of efforts to whitewash the atrocities in the new textbooks of history being prepared in 1985 in Japan. In response to official protests, and popular demonstrations, the textbooks were not introduced.

Twenty years later, we again have a prime minister in Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, who is a nationalist, and believes in a more assertive international role for Japan. He has perhaps been influenced by the approach of President Bush since 2001, which is based on power and realpolitik. Apart from sending Japanese troops to Iraq, that implies support to the Bush policy of pre-emption, Japan has also backed the US Ballistic Missile Defence Initiative of May 1, 2001, and has been supportive of Taiwan over its standoff with China.

Two recent moves attributed to Mr Koizumi have highlighted his insensitivity to Chinese feelings over Japanese war crimes. One has been the revival of the initiative to publish revised history books that gloss over Japanese atrocities in China such as the Nanjing massacre of 1937, in which 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed.

The other was his formal visit to the Yasukuni shrine that honours Japanese war dead, including the soldiers who participated in barbarous acts before and during the Second World War.

In the recent past also, such visits have been advocated by the nationalist elements in Japan, who stand for the revival of Japanese militarism. Having been the worst sufferer of Japanese militarism over the past two centuries, China remains deeply fearful of the consequences of such a revival.

Matters came to a head when Japan stepped up its canvassing for support to its candidature for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Simultaneously, Mr Koizumi opposed the relaxation of the arms embargo imposed on China by the EU countries, after the latter showed readiness to do so in response to a request by the Chinese prime minister. Last but not the least, the Japanese began prospecting for oil in a part of the East China Sea that is disputed between China and Japan.

The issuing of statements by China critical of Japan, and opposing its entry as a permanent member of the Security Council could not fail to attract international attention at a time when Chinese trade with Japan actually overtook Japan’s trade with the US.

An interesting factor in the timing of this response was that it took place following the session of the Chinese parliament, the National People’s Congress, and on the eve of a party conference that tightened up the internal administration against corruption and mismanagement. President Hu Jintao was perceived as a party loyalist, committed to safeguarding its role and image of integrity.

For Mr Koizumi, this Chinese response posed a real problem, at a time he was spearheading an effort for a more active Japanese role in the world, to which he feels Japan is entitled, as the largest donor of overseas development assistance in the world. In fact, Japan had provided $34 billion to China, as war reparations, to make up for the enormous damage done to China’s economy and people during its occupation.

He utilized the 50th anniversary of the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung in April to issue a statement, apologizing profusely for all the suffering Japan had caused by its military aggression during the Second World War.

The presence of President Hu Jintao in Bandung afforded an opportunity for reconciliation, and the two leaders announced their intention to resolve their differences through a friendly dialogue.

Despite this move, there can be little doubt that the long-term relationship between China and Japan would be competitive, though the complementary nature of their economies makes them natural partners. As nations, both carry bitter memories, the Japanese of ancient domination, and the Chinese of recent colonization, accompanied by harrowing brutality.

In looking to the future, Japan’s close alliance with the US, and the virtual integration of their economies are facts that will not change. But since Japan is relatively a small country, with a few resources other than a skilled manpower, it is not a credible candidate for the role of a great power.

China has risen through peaceful development, by opening up to the world, and has the size, the population and resources to emerge as a future superpower.

However, it appears to have its priorities right, and is not a candidate for hegemony. Japan is backing the US policies for the containment of China, and is courting other powers, such as India, Australia, Southeast Asia as well as Europe to help achieve the same goal. It plays on fears of an eventual Chinese threat, whereas China’s strategy is to remove such fears and to offer partnership in fighting poverty and backwardness. An effective UN system could allay Japan’s fears.

Pakistan enjoys good relations with both the economic powers of Asia. The friendship with China is reinforced by shared borders and principles, and has become a cornerstone of our foreign policy.

Our experience of relations with Japan is also a happy one, and both its rise after defeat, and its assistance as a developed country have benefited us. We would like to see friendly and cooperative relations between these powers that would also be helpful for Asia, which still needs development and stands to benefit from the experience and assistance of economic giants.

As Asians, we hope one would not turn against the other, but work together for the greater good of both, as well as of Asia and the world.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Sensational headlines like the one that appeared last Friday in this newspaper about Pakistan soon signing an anti-terror pact with Australia, certainly nicked the nerve.

The statement was made in all seriousness, as if Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmud Kasuri had suddenly flushed out some fascinating new evidence which suggested that Osama bin Laden might be hiding in an abandoned warehouse in Port Darwin in tropical North Australia.

If Pakistan is so keen to sign another anti-terror agreement to please President Bush, all it really has to do is to ask the Pakistan ambassador in Canberra to present two leather bound folders of the protocol to the Australian foreign secretary, and return a signed copy back to Islamabad through the diplomatic pouch.

This is the normal practice in most countries where the literacy rate is less than 40 per cent, where the ministry of finance is always cribbing about how foreign exchange reserves are being depleted and where a wide swathe of people lives below the poverty belt.

Things, however, work differently in Pakistan, a poor country with rich people. The nation has been told that the agreement will be signed when the president visits Australia in the middle of June. This would mark the first ever visit to this country by a Pakistani head of state.

One wishes no disrespect to the Australians who have always come across as a wonderful and warm people, even though nobody really cares for their cricket team. Nevertheless the question that people both in the assemblies and elsewhere are asking is: are so many state visits really necessary when the ship of state at home has got caught in a bog and shows no signs of pulling anchor?

President Musharraf might be breaking new ground. But one does wonder why the carousel of Pakistani prime ministers and presidents ignored Australia for 58 long years. Since the president appears to have, however, made up his mind to taste the winter chill of Sydney and Canberra, one hopes he will depart from his earlier practice of taking along cartloads of his countrymen on every furlough.

Most of the freeloaders that accompanied Shaukat Aziz on his last trip were well-to-do people and could have easily paid their own passage and hotel bill. There were also two industrialists in the entourage, one of whom unfortunately collapsed, forcing the aircraft to be diverted. Both these businessmen have enough resources to charter their own plane.

While television viewers listened to the prime minister repeat the three pillars of economic reform which were going to ensure a growth of over eight per cent, the nation came to know that the generous Pakistani taxpayer had once again played host to a group of freeloaders. This time it was 23 officials who visited Geneva to attend a three-day WTO symposium in April. A few names had to be dropped for what the government spokesman euphemistically referred to as “logistic” reasons.

There is safety in numbers, and Pakistani delegations are, therefore, invariably three times the size of delegations from other countries. On this occasion even the Swiss hotels were apparently running out of beds. However, Dr Doniya Aziz, Sher Akbar Khan and Liaquat Baloch, who were dropped from the joy ride, and who one assumes would have made major, erudite and Keynes like contributions to the debates in parliament, had they been given the opportunity to attend the session, were given the assurance that they would be accommodated next time an opportunity presented itself. Interestingly, there was not a single delegate who held a doctorate in economics.

The galaxy of distinguished freeloaders that finally got a glimpse of the famous lake, included Lt.Gen. Khalid Maqbool, governor of Punjab, MNAs Kashmala Tariq, Al-Syed Abdul Qadir Jamaluddin, Zaheer Abbas Khokar, Sardar Jaffer Khan Leghari, Chaudhry Imranullah, Saleem Jan Mazari, Dr Farouk Sattar, Aslam Bodla and Haroon Qaiser, the town nazim from Lahore, Naseer Mengal, the state minister for petroleum, Hamid Yar Hiraj, the state minister for commerce, Mazhar Ahmed Qureshi, the parliamentary secretary for commerce, and senators Ilyas Bilour and Dr Nighat Agha.

Two conscientious parliamentarians declined the invitation to waste the peoples’ money — Senator Dilawar Abbas and MNA Asfandyar Wali Khan, grandson of the legendary Khidmatgar chief Badshah Khan, and son of the great Pakhtun leader Wali Khan who, in the opinion of scholars, would have made a great prime minister had he ever been given the chance.

Now for the flavour of the week — the mint with the gaping hole. The National Assembly was informed that the government is spending Rs 93.6 million a year only on salaries and allowances of the 773 employees of the prime minister’s secretariat. This amount does not include what is spent on the staff in the prime minister’s house.

What do all these people do when the country as a whole does not seem to be heading anywhere? One would assume that the prime minister is aware of the law of diminishing marginal utility, and that one of his first actions on taking over would have been to cleanse the Augean Stables. But how can he accomplish very much when he is travelling all the time?

Government servants are believably flawed and complex people, and the average output of the staff in the prime minister’s secretariat must be abysmally low. Most of the time is probably devoted to the usual activity that takes place in government departments: initiating promotions, starting intrigues, hatching plots, moving or suppressing files and, of course, devising creative and novel methods by which the taxpayers’ money can be wasted.

What Shaukat Aziz, who is an educated man, really needs is four bright, alert young men or women with laptops, a degree from a redbrick British university, a reliable heavy duty shredder and a collective staff of not more than 30 people.

Somebody should tell him that when Mumtaz Bhutto was appointed as three-month caretaker chief minister of Sindh, he cast a coldly analytical eye on the place, decided the people could do with a little austerity and governed the province with five ministers.

All government ministries are grossly overpopulated and desperately need streamlining. The staff that is laid off could be relocated where they could do some useful work, like trying to identify and hunt down those unscrupulous agents who after bleeding them of their life savings, smuggle gullible peasants from Sindh and Punjab into Oman, and abandon them to the mercy of the authorities.

Is nobody moved by the sight of those unfortunate wretches in shackles, barefooted, bedraggled and hungry, their faces the shade of a newly dug-up pharaoh, clutching emergency passports and wondering what it was that they had done wrong. What is Saleh Faisal Hayat and the inspectors-general of police of Sindh and Punjab doing about it? Why have arrests not been made ?

What makes Tasneem Siddiqui’s thought provoking article on the rise of mediocrity in Pakistan so pertinent is that every festering sore and example of ineptitude that the author has pointed to is palpably true.

Barring very few exceptions politicians, civil servants and even the traditional corporate multinational bureaucracies, relics from the smokestack era of manufacturing, are a shoddy lot. Poorly educated and ill equipped to handle the disorientation brought about by rapid societal change, political corruption and gross inefficiency at all levels of society.

A foreign writer interested in embarking on a journey through the high sierra of the intellect in Pakistan will be hugely disappointed. No philosophical thinker of the calibre of Dr Radhakrishnan has arisen out of the debris of partition on this side of the great divide.

Few in the last 40 years have been able to come up to the standard of Mr Justice Constantine or Mr Justice Cornelius who set the style in the crucial field of writing judgments. And no retired civil servant has been able to emulate the example set by Akhtar Hameed Khan.

And yet there is the odd flash of brilliance one comes across in the most unexpected quarters, often on the wrong side of the law: the young hacker in Lahore, a supreme architect of creative nihilism, who broke into the computer of the United States Air Force; the motor mechanic who took apart a Datsun and reassembled it as an Alfa Romeo; and the master forger in Nazimabad whose hundred dollar bill was so perfect that he was paid a visit by a team from the US treasury. The talent is there. All one has to do is harness it into the proper channels.

IF you awake before dawn you probably hear a daily sound that may become as anachronistic as the clatter of horses’ hooves on urban cobblestones. The sound is the slap of the morning paper on the sidewalk.

The circulation of daily US newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous: