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And Now, the News
So how can I distract my mind from the horrific problems of my comfortable, pampered, upper-middle-class existence? By reading about the misfortunes of others, or course! And seeing how everything else seems to be blowing up around us this week, it's pretty easy to find something else to get all depressed over.
Syria
If anything is disturbing the public's perception of the world as a peaceful place in the runup to the Olympics, it's Syria, where rebels and loyalists still fight for control of the country. At the moment, following a rather spectacular bombing and a follow-up campaign that took advantage of military weakness, the rebels seem to have the upper hand. That may change, the rebels are still rebels, and their control over the major city of Aleppo is leaving them struggling to find the means to defend it. If the rebels maintain their momentum, Assad may be forced to fall back on his hardline Alawite supporters, inaugurating an Alawite semi-state that takes up all of coastal Syria (and isolating inland Syria between a number of countries that don't like them all that much). That is, if the rebels hold on in the see-saw conflict. The CSM article reports that eighty tanks are gathering in government positions around Aleppo. The Free Syrian Army quite possibly has no tanks to meet them, and it's unclear if they have the ability to resist a full-scale assault or to survive a long drawn-out siege.
One result of this has been the request of Syrian opposition leaders for western arms. This seemingly innocuous request, along with the confidence that they can topple al-Assad's government in a month, is not playing well in the west - it seems a bit too close to the many pleas by the Libyan rebels of last year - who claimed that all they needed was a break from the government's occasional air attacks. It took more than that - a full-scale NATO interdiction campaign was required, and even with that assistance, the eastern rebels let the westerners do most of the fighting. Experts remain a bit doubtful that things will go as easy as the Free Syrian Army wants with just the infusion of western weapons. Of course, there's also the risk of escalation. Weapons require training, which means western trainers, some present on the ground in Syria. And we all know how quickly that increases the amount of trouble you can get into. Training outside the country is possible, but using Turkey as a Stinger SAM instruction range the same way the US used Pakistan back in the 1980s Afghanistan conflict raises the risk of Turkey getting involved, and since Turkey is a NATO country, that makes people nervous. The shooting down of a Turkish plane by the Syrians was already possible cause for Turkey to invoke the NATO treaty, although diplomacy managed to untangle that apocalypse.
And there's also the problem of the Syrian opposition's lack of concrete identity. There's nobody in charge, nobody making an impression as the real leader of the Syrian rebels, or even an organization. If dozens of those weapons go missing from Syria the US and NATO won't have anyone to hold directly responsible. That more than anything will probably limit their contributions for the time being to things they can afford to have sold on the black market.
Mali
To summarize Mali's problem, things are all f***ed up. The north of the country, conveniently located way the hell away from the country's capital, was threatened by the MNLA, a group representing the Tuareg, the local dominant ethnicity, seeking independence, or at least autonomy. In response the military overthrew the government in the south for being too soft on the MNLA. In the confusing diplomatic fracas as everyone and their mother condemned the coup, the MNLA rolled right over the north of the country. Well, almost. About then Ansar Dine stepped in. Like the MNLA, Ansar Dine was a group dedicated to an independent northern Mali, but while the MNLA came across largely as an ethnic separatist movement, Ansar Dine was clearly an Islamist movement, dedicated to restoration of a caliphate, and with strong ties to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. They stepped in to protect communities and provide an alternative to the depredations of the retreating government army and the advancing MNLA. Then they started taking over. The falling out between the two northern independence movements culminated in the battles of Gao and Timbuktu, in which Ansar Dine chased the MNLA back out of the key towns of the northern region.
The biggest aftershock of this, of course, has been the destruction of Timbuktu's shrines. Ansar Dine being iconoclast of a sort, they enforce the prohibition on tombs. And Timbuktu was home to a collection of UNESCO heritage sites, the mausoleums of several figures important to early Islamic history in West Africa. Was, because many of them have been destroyed in the course of the rampage. This has not endeared Ansar Dine to the international community, or to many of their fellow Muslims, but it is unlikely that a group affiliated with al-Qaeda will care.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't standing idle. They're, well, okay, they're standing idle. The idea of splitting a nation in two is anathema to ECOWAS, or the African Union, neither of which wants to start the waterfall of border realignment that would sweep across Africa if that kind of thing became common. Because of this, ECOWAS is not willing to support an independent Azawad (or whatever you would call northern Mali). At the same time, they don't like coups, so until a government they support can sit in Mali, they are unlikely to do anything. This is assuming, of course, that their claims on the matter actually mean that they're considering doing something. West Africa is not home to a lot of military superpowers, or even many upstarts. And all of those governments have problems at home. A long, open-ended foreign war is likely the last thing they want to do. Expect a lot of posturing, not much action, and for a time, a very peculiar and unstable status quo.
Tajikistan
So there's a war on in Tajikistan. Don't feel sorry if you have to look Tajikistan up on a map - everyone else does too. The long and short of it is that some of the losers of the Tajikistan Civil War (I bet you don't even remember the Tajik Civil War - I sure don't) have been sitting in the south of the country, hanging out with the members of the ethnic majority they came from, and generally avoiding the government. The problem is that their countryside, which they've been governing in sort of uneasy alliance with the actual national government, has an international border, and is the site of a large amount of international trade and potential profit with their neighbors. Unfortunately, the territory the opposition sits on borders Afghanistan, and Afghanistan doesn't produce much and hasn't since the American invasion. Well, except for heroin. Coincidentally, the remnants of the old opposition have been getting fabulously wealthy recently, although nobody can really pin down exactly what it is that they're selling.
Well, it didn't take the government too long to decide that a) they were tired of having these old enemies running the show in the south, and b) someone was making a mint and it wasn't them and they wanted in on it. The assassination of a Russian official in the region appears to have kicked things off. Ever since the military started moving in, the region has largely been isolated from the rest of the world (as if it weren't isolated enough), leaving the rest of us to only guess what's going on. The best explanation for the background (from which I cribbed a lot of this) can be found here.
ASEAN
Foreign Policy wonks have been going nuts over the ASEAN collapse. It's long. It's complicated. But the short version is that ASEAN was finally forced to confront the biggest issue in Southeast Asian diplomacy, the intrusion of the Chinese into the South China Sea, and
the Chinese insistence that Chinese territorial rights have precedence over the territorial rights of all other nations. Unfortunately, ASEAN couldn't agree on anything, thanks partially to China's friend Cambodia, and a few other monkey wrench jerks along the perimeter. The result was a mess, a crack in the facade of ASEAN's precious consensus, a hasty diplomatic patch job, and the wrecking of ASEAN's prestige. The short version, though, is that for now any countries
with territorial problems in the South China Sea are on their own.
It's unclear who the winner was here. The biggest contender is China, who managed to prevent ASEAN uniting against its ambitions in the South China Sea. But there are other winners out there too. One of them may be Indonesia which might have the chance to build an ASEAN (or some other organization) around Indonesia's position as the region's nascent power broker. Another might easily be the United States, as countries without help from their neighbors turn farther afield for allies. Already the events of this year have pushed America's Southeast Asian allies, like the Philippines and Vietnam (yes, that Vietnam - it's been a weird few years) further into the American camp. What this means in the long term is still up in the air, but it looks like ASEAN is not going to be preserving the balance of power in Southeast
Asia anytime soon.
The Congo
The M23 rebellion is continuing to chug along. Even trying to explain the situation in northwestern Congo is an incredible task, but Jason Stearns does his best at his blog Congo Siasa. Suffice it to say that the Congo is an extension of the old phrase "all politics is local, except when it isn't". Competing local political, security,and economic concerns have driven the conflict in a nation that is far from united, as international actors attempt to stick their nose in and get a piece of the pie. The big concern now is whether or not Rwanda is backing this latest outbreak of rebellion (or more likely, how much they're backing it), and whether or not the continued degradation of security will lead to the growth of even more armed groups in a nation already drowning in three- and four- letter acronyms. Maybe they'll catch a break. They certainly deserve it. In the meantime, the news will likely just be...confusing.
South Sudan
Deserves a post of its own. No, a book. And an ice pack, because my assumption is that the handbasket they're currently traveling in is going to get pretty warm.
Belarus
Well, if that was too depressing, here's some slightly less calamitous news. Belarus has finally confirmed that a Swedish plane violated their airspace way back at the beginning of July. The plane reportedly carried a full payload of teddy bears which were dropped by parachute into the dictatorial eastern European country as part of a free speech
campaign. Since then Belarus has made vague threats that next time their air defense network will be ready.
London
And nobody is doing international conflict right now like London. In his brief, whirlwind visit, Mitt Romney managed to stick his foot farther in his mouth than you could normally do without the help of a piledriver. So much for one possible future candidate's relation with the Sceptered Isle. Now he plans to go on and visit two other American allies...Poland and Israel. Although given that American policy in the European theater depends largely on Germany and France, and in the mideast on Turkey and Egypt, he seems to have weird priorities. But, hey, none of my concern.
In other news, Britain already managed to screw things up by switching the flags of North and South Korea during qualifying matches, causing one incident to kick the games off. North and South Korea will meet in men's table tennis. The US and North Korea will play in women's soccer. Also the London organizers screwed up the birthplaces of several athletes, marking all cities within the USSR as part of Russia, even if they are now inside another country. Meanwhile Iran's judo competitor is staying home due to illness, preventing an Israeli-Iranian showdown.
Anyway, records are already being set in the runup to the Olympics. Specifically Im Dong-hyun of South Korea has broken his own record in archery. He is also legally blind.
Syria
If anything is disturbing the public's perception of the world as a peaceful place in the runup to the Olympics, it's Syria, where rebels and loyalists still fight for control of the country. At the moment, following a rather spectacular bombing and a follow-up campaign that took advantage of military weakness, the rebels seem to have the upper hand. That may change, the rebels are still rebels, and their control over the major city of Aleppo is leaving them struggling to find the means to defend it. If the rebels maintain their momentum, Assad may be forced to fall back on his hardline Alawite supporters, inaugurating an Alawite semi-state that takes up all of coastal Syria (and isolating inland Syria between a number of countries that don't like them all that much). That is, if the rebels hold on in the see-saw conflict. The CSM article reports that eighty tanks are gathering in government positions around Aleppo. The Free Syrian Army quite possibly has no tanks to meet them, and it's unclear if they have the ability to resist a full-scale assault or to survive a long drawn-out siege.
One result of this has been the request of Syrian opposition leaders for western arms. This seemingly innocuous request, along with the confidence that they can topple al-Assad's government in a month, is not playing well in the west - it seems a bit too close to the many pleas by the Libyan rebels of last year - who claimed that all they needed was a break from the government's occasional air attacks. It took more than that - a full-scale NATO interdiction campaign was required, and even with that assistance, the eastern rebels let the westerners do most of the fighting. Experts remain a bit doubtful that things will go as easy as the Free Syrian Army wants with just the infusion of western weapons. Of course, there's also the risk of escalation. Weapons require training, which means western trainers, some present on the ground in Syria. And we all know how quickly that increases the amount of trouble you can get into. Training outside the country is possible, but using Turkey as a Stinger SAM instruction range the same way the US used Pakistan back in the 1980s Afghanistan conflict raises the risk of Turkey getting involved, and since Turkey is a NATO country, that makes people nervous. The shooting down of a Turkish plane by the Syrians was already possible cause for Turkey to invoke the NATO treaty, although diplomacy managed to untangle that apocalypse.
And there's also the problem of the Syrian opposition's lack of concrete identity. There's nobody in charge, nobody making an impression as the real leader of the Syrian rebels, or even an organization. If dozens of those weapons go missing from Syria the US and NATO won't have anyone to hold directly responsible. That more than anything will probably limit their contributions for the time being to things they can afford to have sold on the black market.
Mali
To summarize Mali's problem, things are all f***ed up. The north of the country, conveniently located way the hell away from the country's capital, was threatened by the MNLA, a group representing the Tuareg, the local dominant ethnicity, seeking independence, or at least autonomy. In response the military overthrew the government in the south for being too soft on the MNLA. In the confusing diplomatic fracas as everyone and their mother condemned the coup, the MNLA rolled right over the north of the country. Well, almost. About then Ansar Dine stepped in. Like the MNLA, Ansar Dine was a group dedicated to an independent northern Mali, but while the MNLA came across largely as an ethnic separatist movement, Ansar Dine was clearly an Islamist movement, dedicated to restoration of a caliphate, and with strong ties to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. They stepped in to protect communities and provide an alternative to the depredations of the retreating government army and the advancing MNLA. Then they started taking over. The falling out between the two northern independence movements culminated in the battles of Gao and Timbuktu, in which Ansar Dine chased the MNLA back out of the key towns of the northern region.
The biggest aftershock of this, of course, has been the destruction of Timbuktu's shrines. Ansar Dine being iconoclast of a sort, they enforce the prohibition on tombs. And Timbuktu was home to a collection of UNESCO heritage sites, the mausoleums of several figures important to early Islamic history in West Africa. Was, because many of them have been destroyed in the course of the rampage. This has not endeared Ansar Dine to the international community, or to many of their fellow Muslims, but it is unlikely that a group affiliated with al-Qaeda will care.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't standing idle. They're, well, okay, they're standing idle. The idea of splitting a nation in two is anathema to ECOWAS, or the African Union, neither of which wants to start the waterfall of border realignment that would sweep across Africa if that kind of thing became common. Because of this, ECOWAS is not willing to support an independent Azawad (or whatever you would call northern Mali). At the same time, they don't like coups, so until a government they support can sit in Mali, they are unlikely to do anything. This is assuming, of course, that their claims on the matter actually mean that they're considering doing something. West Africa is not home to a lot of military superpowers, or even many upstarts. And all of those governments have problems at home. A long, open-ended foreign war is likely the last thing they want to do. Expect a lot of posturing, not much action, and for a time, a very peculiar and unstable status quo.
Tajikistan
So there's a war on in Tajikistan. Don't feel sorry if you have to look Tajikistan up on a map - everyone else does too. The long and short of it is that some of the losers of the Tajikistan Civil War (I bet you don't even remember the Tajik Civil War - I sure don't) have been sitting in the south of the country, hanging out with the members of the ethnic majority they came from, and generally avoiding the government. The problem is that their countryside, which they've been governing in sort of uneasy alliance with the actual national government, has an international border, and is the site of a large amount of international trade and potential profit with their neighbors. Unfortunately, the territory the opposition sits on borders Afghanistan, and Afghanistan doesn't produce much and hasn't since the American invasion. Well, except for heroin. Coincidentally, the remnants of the old opposition have been getting fabulously wealthy recently, although nobody can really pin down exactly what it is that they're selling.
Well, it didn't take the government too long to decide that a) they were tired of having these old enemies running the show in the south, and b) someone was making a mint and it wasn't them and they wanted in on it. The assassination of a Russian official in the region appears to have kicked things off. Ever since the military started moving in, the region has largely been isolated from the rest of the world (as if it weren't isolated enough), leaving the rest of us to only guess what's going on. The best explanation for the background (from which I cribbed a lot of this) can be found here.
ASEAN
Foreign Policy wonks have been going nuts over the ASEAN collapse. It's long. It's complicated. But the short version is that ASEAN was finally forced to confront the biggest issue in Southeast Asian diplomacy, the intrusion of the Chinese into the South China Sea, and
the Chinese insistence that Chinese territorial rights have precedence over the territorial rights of all other nations. Unfortunately, ASEAN couldn't agree on anything, thanks partially to China's friend Cambodia, and a few other monkey wrench jerks along the perimeter. The result was a mess, a crack in the facade of ASEAN's precious consensus, a hasty diplomatic patch job, and the wrecking of ASEAN's prestige. The short version, though, is that for now any countries
with territorial problems in the South China Sea are on their own.
It's unclear who the winner was here. The biggest contender is China, who managed to prevent ASEAN uniting against its ambitions in the South China Sea. But there are other winners out there too. One of them may be Indonesia which might have the chance to build an ASEAN (or some other organization) around Indonesia's position as the region's nascent power broker. Another might easily be the United States, as countries without help from their neighbors turn farther afield for allies. Already the events of this year have pushed America's Southeast Asian allies, like the Philippines and Vietnam (yes, that Vietnam - it's been a weird few years) further into the American camp. What this means in the long term is still up in the air, but it looks like ASEAN is not going to be preserving the balance of power in Southeast
Asia anytime soon.
The Congo
The M23 rebellion is continuing to chug along. Even trying to explain the situation in northwestern Congo is an incredible task, but Jason Stearns does his best at his blog Congo Siasa. Suffice it to say that the Congo is an extension of the old phrase "all politics is local, except when it isn't". Competing local political, security,and economic concerns have driven the conflict in a nation that is far from united, as international actors attempt to stick their nose in and get a piece of the pie. The big concern now is whether or not Rwanda is backing this latest outbreak of rebellion (or more likely, how much they're backing it), and whether or not the continued degradation of security will lead to the growth of even more armed groups in a nation already drowning in three- and four- letter acronyms. Maybe they'll catch a break. They certainly deserve it. In the meantime, the news will likely just be...confusing.
South Sudan
Deserves a post of its own. No, a book. And an ice pack, because my assumption is that the handbasket they're currently traveling in is going to get pretty warm.
Belarus
Well, if that was too depressing, here's some slightly less calamitous news. Belarus has finally confirmed that a Swedish plane violated their airspace way back at the beginning of July. The plane reportedly carried a full payload of teddy bears which were dropped by parachute into the dictatorial eastern European country as part of a free speech
campaign. Since then Belarus has made vague threats that next time their air defense network will be ready.
London
And nobody is doing international conflict right now like London. In his brief, whirlwind visit, Mitt Romney managed to stick his foot farther in his mouth than you could normally do without the help of a piledriver. So much for one possible future candidate's relation with the Sceptered Isle. Now he plans to go on and visit two other American allies...Poland and Israel. Although given that American policy in the European theater depends largely on Germany and France, and in the mideast on Turkey and Egypt, he seems to have weird priorities. But, hey, none of my concern.
In other news, Britain already managed to screw things up by switching the flags of North and South Korea during qualifying matches, causing one incident to kick the games off. North and South Korea will meet in men's table tennis. The US and North Korea will play in women's soccer. Also the London organizers screwed up the birthplaces of several athletes, marking all cities within the USSR as part of Russia, even if they are now inside another country. Meanwhile Iran's judo competitor is staying home due to illness, preventing an Israeli-Iranian showdown.
Anyway, records are already being set in the runup to the Olympics. Specifically Im Dong-hyun of South Korea has broken his own record in archery. He is also legally blind.