FOR several weeks, the media speculated about the preparations being made at the Musudan-ri missile test site. North Korea was said to be ready to test its long range Taepodong-2 liquid fuel missile that could hit targets 6,000km away. Leaders of nations in the theatre and far away from it spoke sternly about the consequences.

American experts with considerable experience of service in defence demanded a crippling preemptive strike against the launch site; others hoped that the anti-ballistic missile systems already in place would intercept it anyway. Closer home, in South Korea, analysts and politicians disagreed openly with the hype in the West and suggested that Pyongyang was, perhaps, gearing up only to launch a communication satellite.

In the end, North Korea matched the fireworks of July 4 in the United States with a spectacular display of its missile power. An assortment of six of them, still not differentiated by class or category, lit up the morning sky and a seventh followed 12 hours later. The world at large discovered the defiant exploit before the North Koreans did and there was a torrent of adverse and alarmed comment.

On the positive side, it seemed that even in this moment of demonstrating its resolve to counter a US preemptive attack with a “relentless annihilating strike”, North Korea had taken care to ensure that the missiles would not intrude into Japanese territory. One of the missiles plunged into the sea within 40 seconds of the launch reviving assessments that the technological problems of long-range delivery systems were still hobbling the North Korean programme.

Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin has hinted in a BBC webcast that North Korea has to go a long way before it can acquire a genuine inter-continental capability. Inevitably, more tests will follow if a broad solution of the tangled problems of the Korean peninsula is not arrived at through negotiations.

Like the Kalashnikov, the Russian Scuds have had an impressive global career. They have been exported and re-exported. North Korea was reported to have received them direct from the USSR and indirectly from Egypt. Reverse-engineered, the Scuds have undergone a veritable metamorphosis. Visiting Pyongyang in 1993 as a member of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s delegation, I mentioned, in the course of a conversation about the philosophy of juche (self-reliance), with a North Korean interlocutor that the 159 missiles that Saddam Hussein hurled against Tehran when I lived and worked in that beautiful city were noticeably inaccurate and, therefore, costly in terms of civilian victims.

Countries like North Korea and Pakistan, he explained patiently, should not have any aggressive designs; they needed only deterrence and for that, pinpoint accuracy could wait. Meanwhile one should hope that missiles were never used.

Like India and Pakistan, North Korea seemed to emphasise only its defensive needs. Already, the real enemy was not the capitalist south but the United States.

Quite apart from how the North Koreans grapple with the re-entry problems, they have a deterrent capability with an arsenal that may include 800 missiles. Once again, it is a matter of opinion if they have nuclear devices and, more particularly, if they have developed a nuclear warhead that their short and medium range missiles can carry. They certainly have conventional warheads of considerable explosive power; hostile speculation about their readiness to mount chemical and biological weapons is probably to be seen in the context of the axis -of -evil propaganda.

North Korean missiles that are largely South Korea-specific include a highly accurate KN-02 (range: 100-120kms), the not-so-accurate Hwasong-5 (range: 300km), Hwasong-6 (range: 500km) and Scud-D (range: 700km). Payloads vary from 250kg to about 1,000kg. In recent years, the South Koreans have learnt not to be too nervous about this clutch of weapons as it makes only a small addition to the danger posed to Seoul and many other densely populated areas of the country by the North Korean long-range artillery.

The missiles will definitely make a difference to the United States troops in South Korea as they would be vulnerable to attack even if they are fully relocated beyond the artillery range.

Japan’s concern, which may finally tip the balance in the internal debate on the future of its Defence Force, arises more from the missiles that have already been tested or may be in the process of parameter validation. Nadong can carry 700kg over about 1000km. Then there is Taepodong-I (now referred to as Paektusan-I) which has a range of 2200km and Taepodong-X which like Nadong can be fired from mobile launchers and may have a range of 2,500-4,000km.. It will be interesting to know if the present series of tests have invested Taepodong-X with reliability and accuracy. If so, North Korea’s interest in ICBMs will have only a political significance as its officials have repeatedly affirmed that they have never under-estimated the perils of war-fighting with the United States.

Beyond the technical data lies an extensive but barren field of diplomacy, made more unproductive by the unfortunate axis-of-evil speech. The region faces unpredictable security threats today largely because opportunities for an across-the board solution for the Korean peninsula are not taken up or are deliberately stymied. In a world of flux, the policy dynamics of Russia, China, South Korea and even North Korea have changed. Each one of these countries has moved away from the Cold War stereotypes; even more so from the legacy of the deadly three-year Korean war.

China, in particular, has translated its desire for a peaceful and stable Korean peninsula on its sensitive northeastern border into a policy of encouraging processes that bring North Korea into the mainstream of the nations of the world. South Korea uses the limited space available to it to manoeuvre itself into a position of being a fraternal neighbour which has not shut the door to an eventual reunification with the North.

Even as crises emerge and fade away, it seeks to protect the joint industrial venture in North Korea and the valuable agreement on tourism. There are recurrent reports that its president has incurred the displeasure of President Bush who demonstrates it by delaying and denying the favour that “allied” rulers seek most — a phone call from the White House.

It is a cliche of the regional situation that North Koreans resort to provocative actions to seek global attention and persuade the United States to engage in a productive dialogue aimed at ameliorating the country’s economic distress.

One of the major allegations against Pyongyang is that it has been raising almost $600 million per annum from the sale of missiles and related technologies. Would it be so dependent on such alleged deals if the West would overcome its ideology-driven policies and allow North Korea a place in the sun? With a largely skilled population of 22 million, the country can achieve prosperity in a short time.

The argument that it is secretive and reclusive because of some mystical linkage with Marxism — and not because of the pervasive threat to its independence and established order — is self-serving. The West seeks a transformation of North Korea but then spurns every opening that would encourage it.

Japan’s reluctance to promote this transformation is particularly difficult to understand. Admittedly, it is hamstrung by its treaty with the United States. Ironically, greater North Korean belligerence compounds Japan’s security dilemma more than for any other country.

In a sceptical view of its regional policies, Japan wants to sharpen the apprehensions of its people about a putative threat from China and North Korea so that it can break out of the constraints of its peace constitution.

In this version, the United States which has a security treaty with South Korea as well, simply does not want a rapprochement in the Korean peninsula as a regional detente would raise questions about the current drive to strengthen the US Pacific command. Japan may eventually review its nuclear policy; at the very minimum it would become the mainstay of ballistic missile defence projects.

Much is being said about North Korea being in breach of its 1999 commitment relating to missile tests. The fact of the matter is that the moratorium it agreed to was essentially for the duration of the talks and was also linked to a package of incentives.

President Bush hardened the US policy towards North Korea in the first flush of the neo-conservative drive to reshape the world. When the North Koreans received Japan’s prime minister, Koizumi, in September 2002, they signalled their willingness to extend the suspension of tests but by February 2006, there were clear signs that they were beginning to despair of a positive turn in their relations with Tokyo and that, as a consequence, they would resume testing.

There is still enough ambiguity in North Korean statements on proliferation issues to justify a change of western and Japanese policy. President Putin has talked of plain commonsense which seems to determine the response of China and Russia to the sanctions bid in the UN Security Council. Commonsense may be the name of the road that has not been taken. It is still not too late to try it. As far as Pakistan is concerned, for a variety of reasons, this is the option to support.

Expressions of Islamabad’s concern about perils of nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia must never be delinked from an emphasis on reconciliation in the Korean peninsula. Pakistan will do well to ponder over the reasons why the United States has desisted from sabre-rattling in the wake of the North Korean tests. It should stay with the peace party.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

The Europeans have rediscovered their backbones. “The EU condemns the loss of lives caused by disproportionate use of force by the Israeli defence forces and the humanitarian crisis it has aggravated,” said Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency, on Friday.

The Swiss were even blunter, condemning what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip as “collective punishment,” which is contrary to the Geneva conventions.

It won’t change anything on the ground, and both the EU and Switzerland can expect the usual torrent of abuse from American sources for daring to criticise Israel. But Israel’s actions in the past two weeks, since an attack on a military outpost left two Israeli soldiers dead and one a prisoner in the hands of Palestinian militants, have clearly “violated the principle of proportionality,” as the Swiss put it. On Thursday, for example, the death toll was one Israeli soldier and 23 Palestinians, close to half of whom appear to have been unarmed civilians.

Corporal Gilad Shalit, the soldier who was taken hostage, is no more to blame for the mess he inherited than any other 19-year-old Israeli or Palestinian, and he certainly does not deserve to die. But it is hard to see how blowing up the Gaza Strip’s main power generating station, or arresting eight cabinet ministers and 34 legislators of the democratically elected government of the occupied Palestinian territories in simultaneous night raids on their homes, furthers the cause of Cpl. Shalit’s freedom. There is no sense of proportion here.

Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, writing in the newspaper “Ha’aretz”, put it best. “It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament. A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organisation.”

I am quoting Gideon Levy because, in large parts of the western press, only Israelis are allowed to say such things (and even Israelis holding such views are quoted only rarely). For a non-Israeli non-Jew to say them brings instant accusations of anti-Semitism and, in the case of newspaper columns, corporate banning orders. But what the hell. Let’s take Levy’s argument a step further. The Israeli government has not accidentally stumbled into the plot of a stupidly sentimental Hollywood movie called “Saving Corporal Shalit.” It is run by men and women with decades of experience at navigating the shoal waters of Middle Eastern politics — people who think strategically, and who fully understand the complex relationship between an elected Palestinian government that doesn’t carry out terrorist attacks, and related but semi-autonomous militant organisations that do. They understand it because it was part of Israeli history, too.

Sixty years ago, when the Jews of British-ruled Palestine were an unrecognised proto-state under foreign military occupation, they had respectable political and military organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Haganah (the militia self-defence force that ultimately became the Israeli Defence Forces). They also had brutal terrorist organisations like Irgun and the Stern Gang, who killed both British soldiers and the Palestinians who had a rival claim to the land without compunction. The legitimate organisations did not control the illegitimate ones, but there were constant contacts between them.

The Palestinian Authority’s relations with the current crop of terrorist outfits is very similar. Hamas, the militant Islamic party that won the Palestinian elections last January and subsequently formed a government, has observed a self-imposed cease-fire with Israel for more than a year. Its “military wing,” a largely separate organisation, has not, nor have various other radical groups whose main goal is to discredit mainstream Palestinian organisations that want a negotiated settlement with Israel.

Israel’s past offers enough parallels that its government should and probably does understand that it has a choice: to ignore the extremists and talk about some kind of peace deal with the mainstream — or to use the extremists as an excuse not to talk to the mainstream either. It has chosen the latter option, and the current, vastly disproportionate Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are the evidence for it.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has big plans for imposing a “peace settlement” and new frontiers on the Palestinians — frontiers that will keep all the bigger Jewish settlement blocks (plus all of Jerusalem, of course) within Israel. International political correctness requires that he negotiate this with the Palestinians, but he knows perfectly well that they could never agree to such a terrible deal. Why should they? So he must find a way of demonstrating that negotiations are impossible.

That is what this is really about. Corporal Shalit is a convenient casus belli, but if it hadn’t been him it would have been something else. The first objective of the Israeli attacks is to destroy the elected Palestinian government led by Hamas. As President Bush said, “We support democracy, but that doesn’t mean we have to support governments elected as a result of democracy.”

Olmert knows (even if Washington doesn’t) that destroying the Hamas government will not bring the “moderates” back to power. It will just create a power vacuum in the occupied territories that will be filled by all kinds of crazies with guns. Ideal circumstances for carrying out Olmert’s plans, wouldn’t you say?—Copyright

ONE of the consequences of living in the autumn of one’s existence is the realisation that one is being gradually phased out, like the Aston Martin Lagonda that once roared along the Riviera di Fiori and whose portrait now appears only in National Geographic documentaries.

At times veterans find it difficult to keep up with technological change and become the butt of patronising humour and ridicule from children. And so, being generally exasperated and fruitlessly angry while at the same time being able to deliver occasional pithy mots justes at the receding back of life, they tend to live in the past.

The concept of looking forward to one’s retirement is essentially a western one. Employees who are about to join the ranks of the unemployed often plan what they want to do a year before they are awarded the traditional gold watch. The Brits, evocative of the holiday spirit, often head for Spain or Greece where the sun shines all the year round, and where the beaches are littered with bright, pink anatomies. The Germans, who are more adventurous, often arrive in dense and indigestible territory which encompasses a bewildering variety of names and places and end up in destinations like Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan — the city of the gods.

In Pakistan nobody really looks forward to retirement. In fact, the cost of living being what it is, people feel they would like to carry on working until they peg down from natural causes or are carried out on a stretcher. If you ask a reasonably well to do Karachi male who has been a pen pusher for 45 years, and has obtained the maximum benefit out of the national savings scheme, why he doesn’t just chuck it all up and head for the South Pacific, he might probably say: if he didn’t have something to do there is a strong likelihood that he would go crazy. That’s not entirely true. The fact is he needs the money. Living well has a price.

Retirement nevertheless has its benefits, one of which is that it gives people time to read, to reflect and to reminisce. One day last week, when the clouds headed towards Karachi after having ploughed some northern mountain and there was a gentle hint of rain, this writer sat on his lawn, deep in seeding grass, listening to the quiet friction of foliage, reflecting on the books he had read over the years some of which had given him so much pleasure.

The tally must have been around 800 books, give or take a few hard covers and paperbacks which came in all shapes and sizes and genres — philosophical treatises, whodunits, Victorian underground classics, books on music, trains, chess, politics, Mexico, Yeats, the Indian National Congress, Bengal, Trotsky, the First World War and Siegfried Sassoon. ‘Have you forgotten yet? For the world’s events have numbed on since those gagged days.’

In between Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Henry Kissinger’s Years of Upheaval there were the Russian, Spanish and French classics, meticulously translated into English. The Russian historical novels were inordinately long and one had to plough through acres of material spread over hundreds of pages. The Spanish classic The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset was a remarkable book. His observation about history drawing its nourishment from the valleys and not from the heights, from the average social level and not from men of eminence, appears to be true. As did his observation about the commonplace mind knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

However, out of the vast plethora of manuscripts that this writer has been privileged to read there were two books that stood out and made an indelible impression on him. One is A Modern Symposium by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, first published in 1905. It is simply dripping with jewels and uses as an introduction that trenchant observation by one of England’s greatest poets...’Life like a dome of many coloured glass stains the wide radiance of eternity.’

In this remarkable volume 13 personalities consisting of a Tory peer, a Liberal prime minister, a conservative, a socialist, an anarchist, a professor, a man of science, a man of business, a poet, a gentleman of leisure, a member of the Society of Friends and a man of letters discuss their philosophy of life.

The book contains a unique representation of the points of view held by very diverse men who, though they stand out clearly as individuals, are yet, in their attitude, symbolic of various types of mentality. This book constitutes a complete political education in one volume. What makes the book so remarkable is that every speaker is so incredibly profound that one became utterly convinced that he was right...until one moved to the next speaker. Written in exceptionally fine prose, this book cannot fail to stimulate real thinking.

The other is Ulysses which has, at various times been labelled as dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. D.H. Lawrence, miffed by the treatment British censors accorded to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, complained that ‘Molly Bloom... can rake her unpunctuative consciousness for the longest, most notably fescinine sentence in English’ And Virginia Woolf, echoing the sentiments of the time, was moved to decry James Joyce’s ‘cloacal obsession.’ The Americans were a little more broadminded. In a 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book. But these adjectives do not do justice to the novel which remains a modernist masterpiece.

In a spirit of secularism, tolerance and openness, this writer must express as a tailpiece, his sheer delight after reading that an ordinance has been promulgated, albeit several years too late, that immediately frees on bail a number of women languishing in the country’s jails. Most of the women who have been incarcerated are victims of the iniquitous Hudood Ordinances which have now come under severe scrutiny.

One only hopes that this time the president will be firm and will not back down as he has done in the past, against the forces of repression and obscurantism. When the dust has settled he could perhaps go a step further and punish those who have falsely implicated the victims — all in the spirit of enlightened moderation.