September 19, 2007

Have Fun Spending That $20 Million in Hell

Mullah Abdullah Jan, the Taliban commander who led the kidnappings of 23 Korean hostages in Afghanistan, was killed in an air strike by U.S. forces.  U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a house in Ghazni province where a council of Taliban commanders was meeting on Monday night, the Associated Press reported.  Twelve Taliban leaders were killed including Abdullah, the commander of Qarabagh district in Ghazni, AP said on Tuesday, citing Ghazni provincial police chief Ali Shah Ahmadzai. Abdullah was believed...

Categories Islam/Terrorism/Iraq
September 18, 2007

Q&A With Professor Andrei Lankov: On Changing North Korea

[OFK: This post is a follow-up Q&A to my review of Professor Andrei Lankov’s new book, “.” Prof. Lankov is a lecturer at the Australian National University, now on leave and teaching at Kookmin University. You can see more of Prof. Lankov’s books here, and you can find plenty more of his work linked on this blog. Two of his more notable recent articles include “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism” and “How to Topple Kim Jong Il.”] Q....

Categories Books & Films/Deprogramming
September 18, 2007

Chaos Conquers North Korea

I had really wanted to publish  a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses.  So spread the word:  Yahoo! mail stinks.  Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos  or the erosion of...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Economics
September 17, 2007

The Orchard File: What are North Korea and Syria up to?

In the wake of the first reports about a reported Israeli air strike in  Syria, a  new crop  of reports  has considerably muddied facts that initially had seemed much clearer.  Journalistic politics is certainly a part of the problem.  Some of the reports are alarming, while others seek to downplay, and anyone who claims to be objective about war, diplomacy, and WMD today  is lying.  You probably know where I stand on Agreed Framework 2.0 by now.  If the more...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/WMD
September 16, 2007

Review: ‘North of the DMZ,’ by Andrei Lankov

[Update: I’ve since received some responses to specific questions I asked Prof. Lankov, so the discussion should begin either later tonight or tomorrow AM, depending on other stuff I need to do first.] I first read Andrei Lankov’s work when both of us were blogging on NKZone, through his columns in the Korea Times, and through his more recent scholarly works. I imagine that most readers have also read something of those works. The first time I met Prof. Lankov...

Categories Books & Films/Inside NK
September 14, 2007

My Kind of Spy Scandal

Tired of hearing about South Korean officials leaking our secrets and technology, or about North Korean agents gradually pulling  a smothering blanket of juche over the South?  Had enough Robert Kim already?  Take heart.  The bad guys have troubles of their own: For years, Ambassador Li Bin was China’s  go-to diplomat for the tense Korean Peninsula. After studies in North Korea, Li had served several tours in the Chinese embassies in Pyongyang and Seoul. Fluent in Korean and gregarious in...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy
September 13, 2007

Is North Korea Selling Nukes to Syria?

Update:   North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons. The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a...

Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
September 13, 2007

What the Bush Administration Really Thinks About ‘The Spat’

Commenter Michael Sheehan dropped a link to a must-read by former senior NSC advisor Michael Green, on Roh’s bumbling open-air negotiation with President Bush last week. Green also thinks that Roh knew what he was doing, that he did it for domestic political reasons, and that he set his own goals back in the process. In other words, typical Roh: Watching the exchange later on YouTube.com, I felt great sympathy for my former national security colleagues in both countries, since...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
September 12, 2007

Anju Links for 9/12/07

*   Canadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million  from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China.  You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy  to North Korea, and  that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal  advisor on North Korea.  All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood  around performing a colonoscopy...

Categories Anju Links
September 11, 2007

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards:  to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas.  That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system.  That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say  that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed  a dozen  years ago.  What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics
September 11, 2007

Newsweek Reports on Son Jong Nam, North Korea’s Only (Possibly) Living Dissident

A new Newsweek piece about North Korea’s underground movement reports on the plight of Son Jong Nam.  If Son still lives, he sits on death row in Pyongyang for spreading his faith.  You will recall that I previously wrote about him here, and told you how you can join in a campaign to save his life.  Newsweek estimates that there are between 20,000 and 100,000 underground Christians in North Korea. You can’t bring Christianity to such a place on a...

Categories Inside NK/Religion/Resistance
September 9, 2007

North Korea Is Losing Control of Its Border

[Update: Someone “Dugg” this post –thanks — and it’s climbing fast. The digg permlink is here. Page one of “Digg” gets far more attention than just about anything out there, so your diggs are greatly appreciated and are a great way to spread the word. Thank you.] Last week, North Korea announced that several “spies,” possibly including a foreign national, had been caught.  The Daily NK informs us that North Korea’s National Security has claimed credit for the arrests.  The...

Categories Deprogramming/Inside NK/NK Military
September 9, 2007

Burma’s Fighting Monks Battle the Generals’ Thugs

Far away and out of notice of the international press, one of the bravest and unlikeliest acts of defiance of recent times has been playing itself out in Central Burma.  And as is so often the case, the spark for political dissent is economic hardship — in this case, a rise in fuel prices: BANGKOK–A standoff between Burmese authorities and hundreds of Buddhist monks in the central city of Pakokku has ended with the release of 13 officials taken hostage...

Categories Southeast Asia
September 7, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 67

[Update: As I had figured, only video really does it justice. Just watch the body language and Bush’s expression. And for that matter, Roh’s. Roh certainly has used his presidency to perfect a sublime aura of idiocy. It’s hard for me to imagine that South Korean voters will be impressed if their media ever decide to cover this story. There definitely isn’t much love in that room. Click the image. Update 1 continued below, with an AP report that does...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
September 5, 2007

The Shooting Starts Before the Whimpering Ends

I hope this will be the last post I do on the Korean-Afghan hostage story, at least until we start to see the proceeds of its  resolution in bombs, mangled bodies,  and the next round of kidnappings  it will  inspire.  Koreans are still furious,  but mostly at  the victims rather than the terrorists.  I admit to having thought, “better them than us.”  The Korean street is a capricious thing. Consider all that the South Korean government was willing to do...

Categories Appeasement/Terrorism/Iraq
September 3, 2007

In Lafayette Park Now: Reading the Names of 83,000 Abductees

[Update 3: This demonstration came up in a State Department news briefing today. From the comments of both the spokesman and Chris Hill, State is clearly backing away from calling these abductions acts of terrorism. After unambiguously calling the abductions terrorists acts in 2006, State is now airbrushing this issue out of the record. To a degree, you can understand this in the case of South Korea — tragic as that may be — because in the end, it is...

Categories Abductions/Activism
September 2, 2007

What’s the Value of a North Korean Disclosure Anyway?

Update:   Woohoo!   They agreed to full disclosure again, for the second time in six months!   Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy  of our State Department, we can actually  bask in the afterglow of the same breakthrough twice a year!   It’s twice the  feelgood for the price!   At least, until someone leaks that we had to pay another price …. [Hill]  said he and Kim had discussed a range of issues in their two days of talks...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks