Al Qaeda has been unusually clear about its interest in nuclear weapons, and in particular those held by Pakistan, recently.
On June 21st, al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan said this about Pakistan’s arsenal: “God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans.”
And within the last month Osama bin Laden “said the jihadists must gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of America, India and Israel,” analyst Bruce Riedel noted. Writes Riedel, “Al Qaeda has told us clearly what the consequences of defeat are – nuclear Armageddon.”
(Image courtesy Nevada Division of Environmental Protection)
Earlier this month Quebec adults were asked two versions of a question about more independence for the Canadian province. How the question was asked heavily influenced the results:
Q — “If a referendum on Quebec sovereignty were held today, would you vote yes or no to the following question? - ‘Do you agree that Quebec should become a country separate from Canada?’”
- Yes — 34%
- No — 54%
- Not sure — 13%
Q — “If a referendum on Quebec sovereignty were held today, would you vote yes or no to the following question? - ‘Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of a bill respecting the future of Quebec?’”
- Yes — 40%
- No — 41%
- Not sure — 19%
Even the confusingly worded second version does not get even a plurality of support, suggesting why the probability of independence for Quebec in the next couple of decades remains low.
Source: “Question Shapes Views on Sovereignty in Quebec,” Angus Reid, June 12, 2009.
Events of the last three week’s have unsettled Iran’s future, and the range of potential outcomes is now broader than it was before.
Regardless of how Iranians actually voted, “Iran is a divided country now,” as one analyst put it to the New York Times, with different forces backing more starkly competing visions of the world. As a result, all of these outcomes have become more likely:
- A shift to straight authoritarianism, unleavened by the partial democracy that had characterized post-revolution Iran, with the security forces and hard-line conservatives at their core
- A rapid transition to a less authoritarian version of Iran’s religiously based governance system, an idea supported by “many prominent first-generation revolutionaries”
- An outright collapse of the theocratic system, though this might plunge Iran into civil conflict
The forces driving these futures are quite complex. These are a few factors that have emerged:
- Some grand ayatollahs have expressed sympathy with the dissenters and have not sided with supreme leader Khamenei, the Washington Post notes.
- Powerful establishment figure Rafsanjani may be abandoning opposition candidate Mousavi, Juan Cole reports.
- The Basij volunteer militia, other security forces, and even the Revolutionary Guard may be less monolithic than thought, and might balk at some kinds of repression, analyst Afshin Molavi suggests.
- An Iranian student has suggested that Ahmadinejad could be in a position to do a “Nixon-to-China,” improving relations with the US on the basis of his conservative credentials.
International system
Pei suggested that there will not be an “Asian century” in the same way that the 20th century was the American century: Asia will lack the capabilities and skills to remake the world in the way the United States did. Moreover, the region is too divided, and intraregional rivalries will cancel the individual powers out, for no net effect.
Martinez agreed that, in the short term, the narrative of American decline due to the financial crisis was overblown. He emphasized that the US and China are now in a position of mutual dependence, a relationship could actually help the US perpetuate the American century. He does not see any innovative ideological worldview motivating China: no great ideological challenge is coming out of Asia.
Japan does not want to be second to China in Asia, Pei noted.
Asian economies
Continued growth in the 7-9% range should not be assumed, Pei asserted, given the challenges countries face in as little as 10-15 years. He suggested that Asia lacks an ecosystem for innovation, and that such a system is obstructed by the entire Asian “way of life.”
China’s domestic evolution
China will become a democracy at some point, Pei said. It will come from the top down, when members of the political elite choose to use popular discontent to further their personal goals. This could actually undercut its economic performance, he added.
He said that the Communist Party has successfully whitewashed history, and Chinese know little of the repressions from the 1950s to Tiananmen. As a result, the Party’s legitimacy could be threatened when it all comes out, as happened to the Party in Russia during glasnost.
Martinez forecast that, if economic growth falters, the Party would need an alternative rationale for its continued dominance, and might turn to nationalism, for instance on the Taiwan issue. He noted that even young, educated, cosmopolitan Chinese are in full agreement with the government on nationalistic issues such as Tibet and Taiwan.
Pei said that the financial crisis has not disillusioned Chinese about Western capitalism, but it has provided an “aha” moment, as they have watched the US make serious mistakes.
The discussion is at the NAF site on video.
Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link.
Though Iran appears to be headed for more years with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, columnist Roger Cohen recently noted a potential long-term path for the nation.
Former president and powerful establishment figure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani “believes in a China option for Iran: a historic rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime.”
This could either mean simply less militancy abroad, which would greatly reduce external pressure on the country, or a the full Chinese option: greatly reducing the trappings of Islamic theocracy while maintaining control of key aspects of power. The analogy is not precise, however, as Iran is much more democratic than China, and indeed more democratic than most states in the Middle East, US allies included.
(Flag courtesy State Dept.)
The New York Times reported this week on another potential driver of instability in Pakistan: the Taliban are harnessing the country’s severe social inequities to advance their Islamist cause.
Given that Pakistan is “largely feudal,” the authors write, this “carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.”
Pakistan has the classic conditions for social revolution. After independence, notes the article, Pakistan maintained a narrow landed upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers remained subservient…. Successive Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and even the most basic forms of education and health care. Avenues to advancement for the vast majority of rural poor do not exist.
Poor government and corruption are key aspects of this; Pakistan is rated highly corrupt in Transparency International’s surveys — in 2008, it was 134th out of 180 countries, scoring only a 2.5 out of 10.
Such a revolution could be a disaster for anti-Taliban forces. Instead of chipping away at the state’s control piece by piece, the whole society could shift at once, and everything, including the armed forces and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, would fall into the hands of the radicals.
This would greatly tempt both India and the US to intervene in some fashion, if only to destroy or seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post provided further evidence that North Korea is so out of step with the South — and the rest of the world — that dealing with a regime collapse might require something like cult deprogramming.
On top of the North Korean claims that they have a satellite orbiting the Earth (when the actual payload fell into the Pacific after launch on April 5th), the Post details how bewildered North Korean defectors are by life in South Korea:
- Life in the Stalinist North has left them paranoid and unable to trust anyone.
- They have learning problems, and are often weak in basic reading and math.
- The Korean of the South is puzzling, as it is infused with hundreds of words borrowed from English.
- They are often unwell, with health problems such as hepatitis and drug-resistant tuberculosis.
- They do not understand basics of consumer life such as credit cards.
These recent arrivals may be unrepresentative of the North in some respects, as they come from a particularly isolated and abject part of North Korea, but they still offer hints of what might come after change comes to the North.
This is also, it might be noted, an example of dyschronicity: in wealth, culture, and technology, the North is now 50 years or more out of sync with the South.
Amnesty International reports that 1,000 women accused of being witches have been rounded up by Gambian security forces, who were accompanied by Guinean witch doctors.
The reason? “The witch-doctors were invited to The Gambia early in the year, soon after the death of President Jammeh’s aunt. The President reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death,” Amnesty reports.
This exemplifies dyschronicity — that two places may be greatly out of sync in time — as the developed world last engaged in mass witch persecutions centuries ago.
It also reveals, again, how flimsy governance in Africa is: many countries lack any authority that can be relied on to act with rationality and restraint.
Image copyright Futureatlas.com — usable with attribution and link
Thomas Ricks, author of the acclaimed Fiasco, argued recently in the Washington Post that US involvement in Iraq may be only half over.
“A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for,” he writes, because Iraq is more fragile than it now seems.
- Iraqi factions will likely try to break out of the current arrangements now enforced by the US. This could mean full-scale civil war.
- A military takeover is possible. An expert suggests to Ricks that “the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people.”
- Power centers in Iraq are diverse and obscure, and include former Sunni insurgents and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Ricks suggests al-Sadr is likely to gain more power — and that he might become an American ally, as the Sadrists are Iran’s Shiite Iraqi foes, historically.
- The Iraqi army may revert to brutal Saddam-era tactics without American supervision.
The consensus in the US military, Ricks suggests, is that Americans will still be fighting in Iraq in 2015.
The website Treehugger suggests eight places — low-lying islands, more specifically — that will “soon” be uninhabitable due to climate change.
They are:
- the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean
- Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Carteret Islands (off PNG), and Majuro Atoll (Marshall Islands) in the Pacific
- Lamu and Pate, Kenyan coastal islands
- Bhola, in southern Bangladesh
- Key West, off southern Florida
“Soon” is a relative term here–many of these places would still be inhabitable for decades, under current sea-level rise forecasts.
The Pacific islands involve relatively small numbers of people; they could actually be moved, though this would involve irreparable cultural destruction.
Bangladesh illustrates another level of impact: millions of people live on these low-lying islands, and tens of millions in vulnerable coastal areas. Significant sea-level rise could dislocate so many people that the stability of countries like Bangladesh, and their neighbors, could be undermined.
(Thanks to Stu Gagnon for the tip.)
Image: Maldives from space, courtesy NASA