January 18, 2010

A Tribal Strategy for Winning in Afghanistan

With a problem as complex as Afghanistan, I have felt some justifiable trepidation to enter an overcrowded field of underqualified experts and opine on what should be done there. The real experts are the Afghans themselves, though many of the Afghans with the best access to foreign audiences have their own agendas. The few Americans who speak with credibility are those with experience living and fighting there — men like Major Jim Gant, who embedded a team of half a...

Categories Afghanistan
January 16, 2010

Ten Years Later, South Korea Questions Suspected North Korean Agent in U.S. Resident’s Kidnapping

The Reverend Kim Dong Shik, a U.S. lawful permanent resident, was kidnapped from China by North Korean agents 10 years ago today. Rev. Kim was there helping North Korean refugees. Somehow, the North Koreans managed to carry Rev. Kim back across the Chinese-North Korean border without any interference from our friends the ChiComs, despite the fact that Rev. Kim was wheelchair-bound (do wheelchairs even exist in North Korea?). Years later, rumors emerged to the effect that Kim was tortured to...

Categories Abductions/Terrorism (NK)
January 15, 2010

We Are All Neocons

Seeing this item at the Real Clear World blog, I could no longer evade the cold truth that Change has come! The American Interest has a good round table on North Korean policy. The upshot seems to be that most analysts think that regime change is not only the optimal outcome but essentially an inevitable one – Kim Jong Il won’t live forever and what comes next could be quite chaotic if it’s not handled correctly by all the parties...

Categories Regime Change/Washington Views
January 15, 2010

Apocalypse Watch: China Cancels Gay Beauty Pageant

From this report on the cancellation of the Mr. Gay China Pageant, I learn: 1. For all of the party’s apparent success at maintaining, er, tight control over society, social change is putting the state in conflict with individuals: “I feel really sad. This was going to be a very good event to show a positive image of gay people,” said Wei Xiaogang, a pageant judge and host of Queer Comrades, a popular Internet talk show on gay issues. 2....

Categories China
January 15, 2010

How Corrupt Is North Korea These Days?

Very, if this report from Good Friends is true: On November 28th, Hamheung City, South Hamgyong Province publicized the latest results of the drug crackdown. The City launched the campaign since last September. Party officials, including four officials belonging to the Provincial Party, three officials from the city party, two police officers from the Sungchun region, two prosecutors from the Province, and one party official from the Sapo region, who have accepted bribes from drug smugglers were the main targets...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK
January 15, 2010

North Korea Battles Rising Cell Phone Use

Cell phone use continues to grow in North Korea, despite the government’s best efforts to block it. Handsets are used to make appointments and payments and to trade goods. Even South Korean pastors are using cell phones to give sermons to people in North Korea. If cell phones connected to the North are linked to the South via the Internet, this provides valuable information unobtainable through traditional media. Competition for breaking news is expected among South Korean civic groups related...

Categories Inside NK/Subversion
January 14, 2010

14 January 2010: The Morally Retarded Lorin Maazel, Part 3

JEFFREY GOLDBERG IS READING “NOTHING TO ENVY” and contrasting the plight of its subjects with Lorin Maazel’s moral equivalence between America in North Korea. Like Karajan and Bernstein before him — try that for equivalence! — Maazel’s political views add more value to our discourse for the criticism they evoke than for their own substantive merits. THE H1N1 OUTBREAK CONTINUES in North Korea, although it’s very difficult, for the most familiar of reasons, for anyone to know how serious it...

Categories Anju Links
January 14, 2010

“Chutzpah” in Korean = “막무가내”

North Korea, which is ironically quite fond of accusing South Korea of the “suppression” of its puppets in South Korea, is demanding that South Korea prosecute the activists who’ve resumed showering its countryside with anti-Kim Jong Il leaflets: The chief delegate to inter-Korean military talks was quoted as saying by the Korean Central News Agency that “South Korean organizations, swept by anti-communism, caused a disturbance by flying tens of thousands of leaflets from Paju, Gyeonggi Province on Jan. 1. “South...

Categories Censorship/Democracy/Propaganda/Subversion
January 13, 2010

State Department Spokesman on Human Rights Policy

Because of time constraints, all I can give you for now is some quotes from yesterday’s press briefing, below the fold. Thanks to a reader for forwarding. Money quote: “We’ve made clear, going back several months, we’re not going to pay North Korea for coming back to the Six-Party process.” On the role of human rights in the six-party talks, however, the answers were vague to the point of being non-responsive.

Categories Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
January 13, 2010

13 January 2010: Sarah Palin Unwittingly Makes Case for Withdrawing Most of USFK (Update: Palin Denies)

SHE COULD HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT NORTH KOREA: One of the hallmarks of a regime in financial trouble is a complicated regime of “special” exchange rates aimed at getting around the problems caused by financial mismanagement. The devaluation that Venezuela announced last week may have been a good idea, given the country’s recession, and the problems of declining oil revenues. But the way Chavez has gone about the thing is typically ham-fisted. By Sunday, he was threatening to deploy the...

Categories Anju Links
January 13, 2010

North Korea Rejects Capitalism, Experiments with Luddism

Even for North Korea, this idea sounds too strange to be true: Therefore, Japanese cars are no where to be seen in North Korea. According to the source, Japanese cars are now supposed to be destroyed. Except, cars over 20 thousand tons, graters, and other weighty mechines will not be destroyed. These machines, however, willl only be operated at nights. [Open Radio] No doubt, this would do wonders for that “great and powerful socialist economy” the North Koreans are on...

Categories NK Economics
January 12, 2010

Peace Through War, as Explained by Christine Ahn

I see Kim Jong Il is broke again: Fifty-seven years after the end of the bloody Korean conflict, always unpredictable North Korea on Monday proposed a peace treaty to formally end the hostilities. The communist state suggested that once a treaty was underway, it would return to the stalled six-party talks to end the regime’s nuclear ambitions. But first, North Korean officials say, they want international sanctions imposed last year to be lifted immediately. The proposal was met with skepticism...

Categories North-South/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
January 11, 2010

We Can’t Trust North Korea, or the People Who Do

What is the objective of negotiating with North Korea at all? How you answer that question may depend on whether you believe North Korea cheated on the first Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton left office, the evidence that North Korea cheated by trying to build a uranium bomb was too compelling for any responsible president to ignore, yet during the last decade, true believers in diplomacy with Kim Jong Il invested themselves in denying that evidence and...

Categories Anju Links
January 11, 2010

11 January 2010: Will Obama Open U.S. Embassies to N. Koreans at Last?

OBAMA TO OPEN EMBASSIES TO N. KOREAN REFUGEES? That would be huge, and I’ll have much more to say about that later. Also, Robert King says human rights will be on the six-party agenda. NORTH KOREA’S H1NI OUTBREAK has reached Camp 16. Meanwhile, the South Korean government continues to provide aid to the North despite its doubts about the data the North is reporting. TODAY’S “WE ARE ONE” MOMENT is brought to you by the Joongang Ilbo, and features North...

Categories Anju Links