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Uh oh: Obama gets unilateral with the pirates

Tuesday, April 14, 2009   E-Mail this story   Free Headline Alerts

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

The Obama Administration’s vaunted “multilateralism” took a hit when with apparently direct orders from the President U.S. naval power was used to rescue a kidnapped American ship’s captain. The successful rescue and surgically precise liquidation of his captors and tormentors was greeted at home – and mostly abroad – with relief and satisfaction. It gave rise, at least for the moment, to a surge of pride in the capabilities of the American military, even by some of the President’s most ardent supporters who have been critics of the Bush Administration’s use of it, and certainly by his political opponents.

How the whole incident will play out, of course, remains in the offing.

The Somali pirates – a cancer that has been allowed to grow for years — are holding large numbers of hostages and a dozen or more seagoing vessels at the moment. They have grown exponentially recently with what one maritime industry spokesman called their successful “business model”. The American military commanders are quick to admit they do not have the resources to protect one of the world’s most traveled commercial arteries against growing numbers and sophistication of the pirates with their “revenues” of tens of millions of dollars. Nor is an operation of the sort that rescued this American hero possible under the conditions that are likely to exist in the other hostage takings. Furthermore, with the threat of growing Islamicist international radicalism in Somalia – including apparently young recruits from the American Somali community – a new sanctuary for Islamofascism could be growing on the Horn of Africa with ties to the pirates.

In this instance, the use of force to solve an immediate issue – the safety of the American captain, made all the more poignant by his having offered the ultimate sacrifice to protect his men and ship – became the guiding principal for the President as for his countrymen. Importantly, the American resort to force flew in the face of the UN resolutions, in spirit if not in legal substance, which authorized member states to use military escorts to protect international shipping off the Horn of Africa but without a resort to violence to the seagoing criminals. True, some 12 other countries participate – the Chinese at some command distance – with the U.S.-led effort to patrol a huge region. In the sort of lamentation we have heard so often at the UN, these sea-going criminals are presented as poor little fishermen whose livelihood has been usurped by the armed foreign fish factory ships off Somalia’s coast. It is not the first time that UN resolutions through the wretched process of compromise by the Security Council to get any statements of “international policy” are contradictory and unenforceable, often blaming the victims.

Does that mean that “unilateralism” and force replace efforts to achieve common fronts with U.S. allies, or even so-called neutrals in pursuit of common goals? Of course, not.

But it does mean that whatever subsequent events, there will be no permanent resolution between the dilemma which constantly presents itself to an American president, that is, using the world’s most powerful military against threats to world peace and stability and the calls for maximum restraint in an effort to get unanimity of resolve with other nations.

In the fabricated false history of Bush’s opposition, the long record of attempting UN action when all the intelligence agencies of the Western world believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, has been forgotten. [With all the references to Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates, it is forgotten that the third U.S. president’s successful action in sending an infant navy and the U.S. Marines to North Africa followed Jefferson’s earlier long years and fruitless attempt as an ambassador to enlist cooperative effort among the Europeans to destroy the pirates’ lair.]

Those calls to follow a greater effort for a comity of nations through a perceived lack of earlier discourse and communication were extraordinarily strong for Obama the campaigner. Even as an elected president on his most recently unsuccessful tour of European capitals, he repeated them again and again. But whether he sought additional aid for the NATO effort in Afghanistan, a more coordinated effort to reflate the world’s economy, more effort to restrain Iran’s progress toward weapons of mass destruction, an attempt to “reset” relations by the U.S. [and inevitably by the Europeans as well] with Russia, a new effort to arrive at a new international trade compact, and – most of all — an appeal to the Muslim world for new understanding, there was virtually no agreement nor any but the most nominal proffered assistance.

And certainly the longer term possibilities are poor at best that all that much more multilateral action would be forthcoming, however much he has taken on the responsibility of past misunderstandings [if they were that] through his elaborate professions of the U.S. having sinned. No one in present day Washington wants to face up to the fact that European defense budgets and bloated military bureaucracies simply do not afford the kind of boots on the ground needed for a long campaign in Afghanistan, or for that matter, for other cooperative “police actions” whether Darfur or Somalia.

Wherever you look in Asia at the series of multiple crises, Washington’s efforts at “multilateralism” are stymied as well:

The Obama Administration’s search for a more “multilateral” approach to the political aspects of a worsening Afghanistan problem are in serious trouble. From the outset of its effort to put more public emphasis on regional cooperation, the Obama initiative has come a cropper. Special Envoy Richard H.A. Holbroooke’s title had to be chopped before it was announced because sources close to the Administration had suggested the possibility he – or perhaps an even more exalted figure, former President Bill Clinton – would take on a role as Kashmir mediator.

“Internationalization” of the Kashmir dispute has been the principal “red line” of all Indian policy toward Pakistan since the early 1950s when New Delhi turned back calls for a UN plebiscite in the region. The very mention of it sends the Indians into panic. And they used the offices of the growing Indo-American lobby funded by some of its Silicon Valley millionaires to be sure it was scotched along with the formal assignment of Holbrooke to India as a major player in any regional effort. His recent more modestly presented visit to New Delhi with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen has been trumpeted in the pro-Obama American media as a prt of some rapturous town meeting across the region. In fact, it has loosed a torrent of vitriol from former officials of RAW, the Indian intelligence agency which gets less attention than its Pakistan twin Inter Services Institute as a source of intrigue against the other power.

Holbrooke’s bulldozer techniques of negotiation will have little effect in solving the greatest problem for American strategists in the area: that is, how to focus the maximum efforts of Islamabad’s army and government on rooting out the terrorists in the tribal regions who increasingly are reaching into Pakistan proper. Their sanctuary there presents an almost insolvable problem for U.S/.NATO forces trying to subdue the Islamic radicals in Afghanistan and the border areas and increasingly threatens the regime in Islamabad itself.

But that maximum effort will not be forthcoming so long as the Pakistan military and its more serious politicians must cope with the problem of a continuing Indian strategic threat. Nor is it likely that bonds between elements in the Pakistan military and government with some Islamic terrorists groups can be broken so long as their origins are rooted in the Kashmir dispute. Talk of India contributing to the reconstruction projects in Afghanistan, for example, are only “proof” for the Pakistanis that New Delhi would try again as in the past to use that country and whatever assets it can command in the tribal areas to weaken Pakistan. Holbrooke and Mullen apparently refused as have other American negotiators to accept any of Islamabad’s complaints against Indian activities in Afghanistan in their discussions, further embittering the fractured Pakistani government. The participation of Iran and Russia in the supposed joint effort in Afghanistan is almost a bitter joke: Moscow intrigues to eliminate the U.S./NATO principal base for Afghanistan logistics in her former Soviet Central Asian dependences; Iran continues to supply arms and support to terrorists with ties to Al Qaeda against American interests and stability across the whole Mideast.

Nor is the “multilateral” mantra going to help much with the oncoming threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles and their proliferation. The Obama’s new envoy to the so-called Six Power talks, Stephen Bosworth, has a notorious record as a diplomat’s diplomat – that is, compromise to the point of appeasement. He once courted Central American leftists and the left in South Korea believing thereby to reduce the threat to peace and stability.

The U.S. now returns to the talks, presumably, still banking on the hope that China would use its leverage to rein in Pyongyang. There has been no proof of that. Nor is there likely to be any given Beijing’s fear of instability in the North with an ailing Kim Jong Il and a unpredictable succession, the long history of North Korea as a Chinese ally, and China’s fear of a reunited Korea under Seoul’s leadership in the wake of a Pyongyang implosion.

Given Beijing’s economic woes at the moment – falling growth rates that have been seen as the regime’s only prop [beyond suppression] in a post-Maoist scene – it isn’t likely that Washington will get much help there. It puts the U.S. in an awkward position. Japan – with its dramatic kidnapping issue with the North Koreans still unresolved and sitting under Pyongyang’s missiles – and a new conservative government in Seoul — trying to roll back a decade of failed compromises with Pyongyang and a troubled economy — both want a stronger line with North Korea.

“Multilateralism” is a mantra that rings well in the Inside the Beltway and in the classroom — where even the proposed nominee as Obama Administration’s ambassador to Japan, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye, admits are further and further from the real world. But in that real world where the jungle has floated out to sea off the Horn of Africa, the mailed fist is the ultimate arbiter of power. President Obama has just found that out.

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