Malaysia's Allah Controversy

“We are…a moderate, Muslim state”, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak declared last November. “There may be some incidents along the way that take place, but that should not be seen as evidence of a radical shift”.

Those words are ringing increasingly hollow. Following a December court ruling that reversed a government ban on the use of the term “Allah” for God in Malay-language Christian publications, almost a dozen churches were attacked in Malaysia with Molotov cocktails and rocks. The instability threatened to upset Malaysia’s fragile multi-ethnic fabric and derail Mr. Najib's own vision of inter-racial harmony.

The brouhaha is more political than religious. The word “Allah” predates Islam and is still commonly used by Christians in other predominantly Muslim countries like Syria and Egypt. Even the traditionally Islamic Parti Islam-se Malaysia (PAS) makes no bones about it.

But Malaysia’s ruling party UMNO is anxious to court Malay-Muslim voters by posing as the guardian of Islam, particularly after its unprecedented drubbing in 2008 elections. It insists – curiously – that using ‘Allah’ is part of a pro-Christian plot to convert Muslims.

This is only the latest episode of the government’s Islamic posturing. During the past year, it dithered before prosecuting Muslims who offended Hindus by using a severed cow’s head in public demonstrations, and threatened to cane a Muslim woman for drinking.

The ‘Allah’ controversy could cost the government dearly. Non-Malays and even moderate Muslims might fault Mr. Najib’s half-hearted initial attempts to stop Muslim demonstrations in mosques for emboldening the radicalism that followed. And UMNO’s lurch toward extremism could alienate its constituencies in the Christian-strong eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak.

If these sentiments persist, voters could desert the ruling party in the next election (expected before 2013) in favor of the more moderate Pakatan Rakyat (PR) opposition coalition. Though the gulf in parliamentary control is still quite jarring to expect an outright UMNO defeat – UMNO holds 137 of 220 seats while PR holds 82 seats – it is not unreasonable to expect an even greater shift of voter sentiment away from UMNO if this politicking continues.

More broadly, UMNO’s exclusivist Islamist agenda could tarnish Malaysia’s reputation as a moderate and prosperous Muslim country. Incidents such as this will only exacerbate the flight of capital and non-Malay talent from it, thereby crippling Malaysia’s long-term economic competitiveness.

Malaysia also risks facing international opprobrium for its radical drift. Already, Kuala Lumpur’s decision to back Iran in a key vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month along with Cuba and Venezuela, when even China and Russia did not, raised eyebrows in Western countries in general and Washington in particular. What may seem like a deft political strategy for Malaysia's ruling elite is fast looking like a damaging political game for the country.

Beyond Vietnam's Defense White Paper

Earlier last month, the Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense (MoND) released its third white paper since 1998. The document is markedly more transparent than its predecessors. It provides multi-year defense budget numbers and extensively maps out the country’s security situation and defense structure and outlook.

However, it reveals little about the country’s future strategic plans and priorities. It was silent on Vietnam’s recent two-billion dollar deal to buy six Kilo-class diesel-powered submarines from Russia, and was also relatively muted on the country’s simmering territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. These recent key developments beyond the white paper clearly point to a future strategy that is maritime-centric and focused on defending the country’s territorial claims.

This should come as no surprise. Vietnam is a coastal state that has a long coastline and close proximity to the South China Sea. Its strategy of “advancing seawards” is enshrined in several government declarations, most notably the informal ‘Maritime Strategy towards the Year 2020', formulated in 2007, which clearly states Vietnam’s intention to harness its maritime resources for economic development so that they can contribute more than fifty percent of the country’s GDP by 2020. “The priority is now being accorded to maritime issues”, concludes Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Vietnam at Australian National University.

In order to exploit its maritime resources, Vietnam will have to protect its sovereignty, particularly from Beijing with which it has locked horns over the potentially oil and gas-rich Spratly and Paracel Islands. China has been increasingly assertive over the last few years, pressuring foreign firms not to develop Vietnam’s maritime sector in disputed areas, constructing new structures on key reefs, and beefing up its naval presence.

Vietnam’s future defense strategy will thus be heavily focused on acquiring the capabilities to address this threat. Experts agree that the Kilo submarines were at least partly geared at countering China’s burgeoning military capabilities. But they are only a small part of Hanoi’s broader naval ambitions in the near future, which will include assembling missile frigates, expanding naval cooperation with Southeast Asian states (including possible joint exercises), procuring more arms and technology, and enhancing the professionalism of its forces. Hanoi has also attempted to bolster its relationship with the United States, with Defense Minister Gen. Phung Quang Thanh meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon last month and some officials suggesting that nascent security ties could mature in the future to include eventual arms sales.

The extent to which Vietnam is able to achieve its goals will largely be determined by its financial capacity and ability to turn equipment into effective capabilities. The global financial crisis reduced the country’s defense budget as a percentage of GDP from 2.5% to 1.8% last year, and its continuing economic troubles may put some dents on its defense hopes.

Acquiring new technology is also hardly the quick fix it appears to be. Vietnam needs to develop a naval doctrine that incorporates these technological capabilities, and thus far it lacks even a coordinated marine policy. Furthermore, new equipment (like submarines) requires funding to make the force combat ready, and the transition period between acquiring equipment and fully integrating its force capabilities into a country’s existing force structure varies depending on the infrastructure and finances available.

Despite these constraints, one can expect Vietnam’s eyes to be set firmly on the sea in the years to come.

Copyright -- AsiaEye: http://blog.project2049.net/2010/01/beyond-vietnams-defense-white-paper.html

Why We Haven't Had A Nuclear Terrorist Attack

The threat from nuclear terrorism, we have been told, is astonishingly high. From loose Soviet warheads to the Taliban in nuclear-armed Pakistan, from Saddam Hussein’s WMDs to Al-Qaeda’s nuclear bid, one detects a deep-seated fear bordering on paranoia that has existed since the end of the Cold War.

That phobia persists today, even among the ‘experts’ and ‘watchers’. Of eighty-five experts polled in 2005, a whopping 50 percent said there was a risk of a WMD attack occurring before 2010, and 70 percent before 2015. And the scholar Graham Allison famously and boldly predicted in his 2004 doomsday book “Nuclear Terrorism” that the detonation of a nuclear device in an American city is “inevitable” if the status quo remains.

Yet, despite this paranoia, no mushroom cloud has materialized in almost two decades. Why has this not occurred, and what does this tell us about the actual risk that the threat poses?

In a piece in Foreign Affairs last year, Michael Krepon of the Henry Stimson Center attributed this to two things. The first was notable U.S. efforts to reduce nuclear dangers, which include programs designed to lock down dangerous weapons and dismantle Cold-War era missiles and bombers, cooperative threat reduction programs to assist Moscow with security and transportation of nuclear material, and greater intelligence coordination since September 11. The second was the tendency for doomsayers to exaggerate the threat itself.

GlobalEye believes, however, that the absence of a mushroom cloud can be mostly attributed to the sheer difficulty for terrorist groups to acquire the necessary nuclear material in the first place.

According to Evan Braden Montgomery of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, there are four main ways for a terrorist group to acquire a nuclear weapon – build it from scratch, get it from a state, steal it, or construct an improvised version. Contrary to the simplistic hyperbole we hear in official and scholastic circles, however, these scenarios all seem either quite unlikely or fictitious.

The first scenario – building it from scratch – can be dismissed entirely because such an endeavor has eluded even aspiring nuclear weapon states. There is simply no chance that even a well-funded terrorist group will acquire the knowledge, infrastructure and finance to do this.

The second is almost as fictitious. The idea that a state would part with such a valuable commodity as a nuclear warhead is ludicrous given the immense resources and time required to make it, the prestige and security it confers on the state, the lack of trust and gulf of interests that often characterizes relationships between terror groups and their state sponsors, and the fear of retaliation on a state if such an association were detected. A more plausible scenario could be that rogue elements from a government provide some nuclear material to nefarious regimes (eg. the AQ Khan network), though even here, distribution is still restricted to states and authorization requires state complicity (it did even in the AQ Khan case).

Stealing a weapon too can almost be ruled out entirely. Nuclear weapons are heavily guarded, so a group would require enough personnel and ‘connections’ to infiltrate a weapons storage site, locate the weapon, disarm alarm systems, and then avoid military personnel and action teams. Even in the off-chance a group does acquire the weapon, most modern nuclear weapons (particularly those from U.S., U.K, France and Russia) are equipped with permissive action links (PALs) which make it difficult to activate and detonate the device, including long numeric codes and limited-try features, or environmental sensing devices (ESDs) which will not arm a device unless the specific environmental conditions for delivery – like changes in altitude and acceleration – are detected.

Even the scenario most sweat about today – the likelihood of a terrorist group stealing a nuclear warhead from the Pakistani government – is highly unlikely, if not entirely impossible. Pakistan has been working with the United States covertly on installing security devices (like PALs) on its nuclear devices for years, and has its own security measures, like keeping the fissile cores of its weapons separate from their non-nuclear detonators (making it very difficult to steal an entire weapon).

The forth scenario is probably the one we have to fret about the most. A terrorist group could build a van-sized improvised nuclear device with just a grapefruit-sized lump of highly enriched uranium or an orange-sized lump of plutonium, combined with material available in the commercial market. But, interestingly, terrorist groups have not been trying very hard to do so. According to the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database, only eighteen cases out of a total of 1,340 incidents involving illicit nuclear and radioactive materials involved either HEU or plutonium, and in most cases the total quantity was just a few grams, far from the 20 kilograms required to construct an implosion device. But, since groups could potentially acquire material from places like civilian nuclear reactors, and because the amount required is so small, it is impossible to rule this out entirely.

Ultimately though, it seems that terrorist groups have concluded that, at least for now, there are other easier and less costly ways of acquiring the means to conduct devastating attacks. While this should not be a cause for complacency, it should shed a little perspective regarding the alarmist warnings of nuclear terrorist attacks we hear about today and will continue to hear about in the future.

Evaluating Indonesia's Military Reforms

The Indonesian Defense Ministry recently decided to procure three new CN-235-220 maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) and purchase 96 additional patrol vessels to boost its naval arsenal. Further aircraft orders could be filed at the end of 2010, and Indonesia is also eying new submarines and platform docks over the next few years.

The acquisitions are part of the Indonesian navy’s 2010-2014 Strategic Plan, which aims to achieve the minimum operational requirements of Jakarta’s poorly-funded armed forces – or what Indonesian President President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono calls a ‘Minimum Essential Force’.

This commitment has been enacted beyond rhetoric. According to Jane’s Information Group, the $4.06 billion-dollar defense budget allocated for 2010 is a 21% increase from 2009, and it will grow in line with the country’s GDP for the first time in four years. Coinciding with an increase in funding, The Indonesian Defense Ministry recently issued a series of military-related reforms to be implemented over the next few months. These included increasing troop salaries, streamlining defense policies and practices, revitalizing its local defense industry, and purchasing new equipment.

The measures are a welcome development for the Indonesian armed forces. Jakarta has one of the lowest defense budgets as a percentage of GDP in its neighborhood, a mere 0.62% compared to more than 2% in most of Southeast Asia. Experts have long lamented Indonesia’s aging defense equipment systems, poorly paid troops, and bottle-necked and red-tape-ridden policy process. The Indonesian government also came under fire earlier this year when budgetary shortfalls for equipment maintenance was suspected as the main cause of a military transport plane that crashed in East Java killing 101 people.

Experts, however, remain only cautiously optimistic about this fresh defense outlook. Since the budget increase is barely enough to maintain Indonesia’s current aging equipment, planned purchases of new, updated technology have been pushed back to at least 2013. Indonesia’s uncoordinated legislative process, poor implementation record, and intense inter-agency competition also cast doubts over whether these “ideas” can be “translated into action”.

Such a tight defense budget also restricts Indonesia to dealing with current problems instead of also adapting to future security threats. One 2008 think-tank workshop predicted that overpopulation, energy shortages, and climate change will severely compound Indonesia’s already dizzying array of security challenges over the next few decades, further straining defense budgets, increasing equipment maintenance requirements and sparking domestic unrest. Yet the Indonesian Defense Ministry recently said that it had “no specific national security agenda for climate change”.

Despite these cautions, President Yudhoyono remains undeterred, pledging to gradually increase the budget annually until his term expires in 2015. As one of the fastest countries to emerge out of the world financial meltdown, Indonesia’s economy is probably robust enough to financially support this goal. But whether a flood of cash and a deluge of reforms can modernize and professionalize Indonesia’s embattled defense forces remains uncertain. This essential makeover could well achieve only minimal results.

Copyright: AsiaEye (http://blog.project2049.net/2009/12/indonesias-defense-makeover.html)

Japan Expands Naval Power

When, upon being elected, Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama spoke of building fraternal seas and constructing a European Union-styled East Asian Community, critics denounced him as a naive peacenik. But Hatoyama's low-profile Nov. 23 decision to commission a new DDH-22 helicopter destroyer -- Japan's largest military vessel since World War II -- suggests he is actually striking a shrewd balance between promoting regionalism and protecting Japan's regional and global interests through robust naval capabilities.

The DDH-22 is officially designated as a "helicopter-carrying destroyer" by Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces (MSDF). But with its flush flight deck and large, starboard-side island structure, it looks a lot like a "light" aircraft carrier. While Japanese law states that carriers "exceed the war potential needed for a minimal level of self-defense" permitted by Japan's pacifistic post-war constitution, the MSDF has craved such capabilities since the 1960s, and Tokyo has long been inching closer and closer to this goal. Hatoyama's decision to commission the DDH-22 culminates a request first made when the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was in power, suggesting that a bipartisan consensus exists for the expansion of Japan's naval power.

While defense officials are loathe to say so publicly, the move is at least partly directed at China. Though Japan is still the Pacific's second-largest naval power (after the United States), Beijing's blistering military buildup is threatening to blunt Tokyo's superiority at sea. Earlier this year, China's People's Liberation Army Navy flexed its military muscle by deploying cruise-missile-laden destroyers around energy-rich gas fields in the East China Sea, and by conducting training exercises in the disputed Senkaku Islands.

The provocations so rattled Japan's Defense Ministry that it soberly concluded in its annual defense white paper that Tokyo's military posture was "inadequate" to fend off these Chinese encroachments. Hatoyama has already demonstrated his ability to offer a conciliatory posture toward Beijing -- including an apology for Japan's wartime transgressions, a pledge not to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, and the inking of a joint military exercise agreement with Beijing. By approving these defense acquisitions, he has signaled that he is also willing to confront hard military realities.

The implications extend beyond Japan's immediate periphery. Since the end of the Cold War, Japanese governments have been incrementally loosening the MSDF's constitutional shackles and approving a string of increasingly ambitious international maritime missions, ranging from transporting equipment in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Cambodia (1992) to humanitarian operations after Indonesia's tsunami (2005) to anti-piracy missions off the Somali coast (2007).

By approving the DDH-22, Hatoyama has ensured that the MSDF's international role will continue to grow. Such destroyers will further equip the MSDF with a wide spectrum of capabilities for missions such as refueling other vessels, transporting personnel and equipment, and conducting surveillance of surrounding waters. More generally, the ships' ability to deploy rotary-wing aircraft at great distance from Japanese waters suggest they can help safeguard Japan's global lines of supply and promote its overseas interests, particularly given Tokyo's overwhelming dependence on Middle Eastern oil and its deepening involvement in Africa.

Regionally, Hatoyama has also made Tokyo's naval capabilities the centerpiece of his lofty East Asia Community initiative. Most of the preliminary cooperative measures he outlined at a keynote address in Singapore last month involved the MSDF, from inking agreements on disaster management and maritime accidents to crafting multilateral efforts among littoral states to counter piracy in the Asia-Pacific. And far from merely hoping that such arrangements would materialize, he firmly indicated and specifically outlined how Japan would make a "proactive contribution" in each of these fields -- such as dispatching MSDF vessels as yu-ai boats (literally translating to "fraternal boats") in disaster-relief operations. "Japan," Hatoyama added confidently, "is a maritime country that has the know-how and assets to maintain the peace at sea."

With Japan scheduled to add even more of these destroyers to its arsenal over the next few years, naval experts James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara project that "the convergence of intent and capability could very well produce a traditional maritime power on the East Asian littoral." The specter of a militarily ambitious Tokyo might trigger alarm bells in an Asia still haunted by the nightmares of Japanese conquest and brutality during World War II. But the possibility of a full-scale Japanese aircraft carrier capacity is still far off. The DDH-22 lacks a special "ski-jump" deck needed for offensive fixed-wing jets to take off. And even if Japan does acquire the necessary technology, STRATFOR, a leading global intelligence agency, says that there is a "substantial learning curve" for both aviators and ship crews in becoming proficient in taking off and landing these aircraft.

Politically, too, Hatoyama's fledgling and inexperienced government is currently hamstrung by a fragile coalition. Further down the road, Japan's graying population will continue to exert pressure on the country's tight budget, while even incremental increases in Tokyo's capabilities will raise the eyebrows of Japan's war-wary citizenry.

Even so, it is worth considering the prospects for a confident and assertive Japanese navy in the coming years. Such a sea change would surely have significant consequences for the regional balance of power in Northeast Asia, and for global security at large.

Copyright: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Article.aspx?id=4814
Photo: What the DDH-22 is projected to look like (By: usi.kir.jp/Data/Temp/22DDH_2.jpg)

'Selling Out' Human Rights

Kelley Currie, nonresident fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, an Asian security think tank, has a provocative piece in the neo-conservative bastion "The Weekly Standard". In it, she argues that Denmark worryingly followed in the footsteps of Western nations by giving in to China and selling out human rights by issuing a conciliatory diplomatic note on Tibet and Taiwan in exchange for Chinese concessions on a climate change agreement in Copenhagen.

The article seems simplistic. Most nations try to balance ideals and interests in their foreign policy, and this tough balancing act often ends up upsetting both ardent human rights activists and cold calculating realists. Politicians either end up looking like immoral statesmen "selling out" their country's values or ideological zealots distracted from their nation's narrow self interests.

But Ms. Currie makes a more general point that is worth restating at length: "The Chinese have long claimed that the West cynically uses human rights as a political tool to contain China's rise. We prove them right every time a Western country abandons its principles by treating human rights issues as bargaining chips to be given away for marginal improvements to a global climate agreement, a heavily qualified promise of support on Iranian nuclear issues, the illusion of access to the Chinese market, or even just an improvement in the "atmospherics" of the relationship".

That is, while nations worry about following their interests rather than their ideological blinkers, they should be equally concerned about treating their ideals as mere bargaining chips to be traded away, regardless of the potential "returns" they may end up receiving. To use the Chinese example, if Washington uses its ideals merely as 'cards' (as opposed to values critical to the fabric of its national character), it in fact validates the Chinese assertion that these issues are really not that important to America, and that the United States will back down if Beijing pushes on them with increasing fervor.

This is a point often lost on avowed 'pragmatists' who treat international relations like a mere trading exercise, and, at times, by the Obama administration, which snubbed the Dalai Lama earlier this year for fear of angering China and spoiling the prospects for cooperation on big-ticket issues like climate change. Rather than kowtowing to Chinese demands on human rights issues, the United States and other Western democracies ought to push back against China's efforts to undermine human rights norms and institutions. Even as China's power and influence continue to grow, the focus should be on ensuring that China's greater power is commensurate with greater responsibility in the international arena on human rights issues, rather than merely finding the right price for selling these values out.

The United States and other democracies ought to be beacons of freedom, not bargainers or bidders. For, as Ms. Currie rightly notes, "it is only when we stop treating human rights issues as leverage that we can harness their inherent transformative power”.

China's Young Nationalists

Earlier this month, the Lowy Institute for International Policy released "China Poll 2009", its first public opinion poll conducted in China. The report contains many interesting findings, but one in particular piqued GlobalEye's interest.

The poll found that younger and more educated Chinese were more nationalistic and fearful than their elders. Younger Chinese (18-24 years old) were twice as likely as their elders (55 years and older) to say that the U.S. posed the greatest or the second-greatest threat to China's security in the next ten years: 60% compared to 30%. The report also adds that "younger Chinese adults tended to be more likely than their elders to say China was receiving less respect than it deserved and that...the United States posed a threat".

Furthermore, in some cases, more education even engendered a greater sense of threat perception. For instance, respondents with a university or college education were more likely to say India and Japan posed a threat than those whose highest level of education was junior secondary school: 43% compared with 25% for India and 49% compared with 36% for Japan.

The data flies in the face of some analyses which claim that the rise of a younger, more educated, worldly, and capitalistic generation of Chinese will necessarily push the logic of economic interdependence to its deterministic peaceful end. On the contrary, as Sinologist Minxin Pei has suggested, it is precisely the young, urban and educated Chinese who appear to be more nationalistic.

Experts have long claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fans the flames of nationalism in order to legitimize its rule. But we have also seen sporadic instances when the Chinese government has been unable to control the outbursts of fiery Chinese pride among the country's youth, from the Olympic torch relay protests last year to the anti-Japan riots that erupted across China in 2005 over textbooks. These views will also probably become much more pervasive in the near future -- by 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 will increase by 61% to 500 million. Given this, it is worth at least pondering a future where a more nationalistic younger generation of Chinese asserts pressure on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)to defend their nation's interests more vigorously, and what the potential consequences of that might be. The tail may end up wagging the dog.

True, polling is an imperfect science. In this case, the Lowy Institute admits that poll was conducted during a rather anomalous year that saw the Olympic torch relay and the Tibetan crackdown (2008) and a month that had Beijing come under heavy media scrutiny over various issues from human rights to pollution (July).

But that still does not explain why the opinions of Chinese youth diverged so much from their older counterparts in the same poll. Or why this should not raise serious questions about the orientation and attitude of China's next generation, and the tectonic impact it could have on Chinese foreign policy.