Global Eyes

Part II: Asia, Africa, and the Americas

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

ASIA

South Korea: The next nuclear weapons state? A South Korean nuclear bomb is no panacea and should not dissuade from trying the diplomatic track toward North Korea. Still, letting South Korea get its own deterrent could increase Korean and US security at no cost to the American taxpayer:

A nuclear frenzy has taken over East Asia. China is growing its nuclear arsenal at a breakneck pace to catch up with Russia’s and the United States’ larger weapon stockpiles. Despite international outcry, North Korea now musters a working nuclear deterrent. It is restlessly working to increase its size and survivability. Russia is helping Pyongyang by weakening the sanction regime and providing technological support. And yet, the norm of non-proliferation may have found a new challenger: South Korea.

Last year, President Yoon Suk-yeol warned that a military nuclear program was an option on the table. He is not the only South Korean political heavyweight toying with the nuclear option, and almost three-fourths of the citizenry favor an independent deterrent. Caught off-guard, Washington reemphasized its commitment to defending Seoul and the two capitals formed a ‘Nuclear Consultative Group’ to discuss issues of nuclear deterrence further. American nuclear submarines now make frequent stops in South Korean ports to give substance to extended deterrence. Still, unsurprisingly, these small gestures did little to reassure South Koreans. Sixty percent do not believe that the United States would risk nuclear war on their country’s behalf.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned Japan's ambassador to Minsk to protest “spying activities.” State media in Belarus said that Belarusian security forces had detained a suspected Japanese intelligence agent alleged to have surveilled border areas and military installations.

★ Al Qaeda expands its footprint in Afghanistan. The Taliban aren’t cracking down:

Al Qaeda has set up nine new terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2024, a sign of the Taliban’s increasing tolerance of terror groups in their backyard in spite of pledges to crack down, according to an Afghan resistance leader visiting Washington this week. “These are training centers; these are recruitment centers,” said Ali Maisam Nazary, the top diplomat for Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front based in the country’s Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. “The Taliban have even allowed al Qaeda to build bases and munitions depots in the heart of the Panjshir Valley. [That’s] something unheard of, something impossible even in the 1990s for al Qaeda to have achieved.” 

Nazary said that since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021, just before the complete withdrawal of US troops from the country, terror groups including al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have exploded in size and scope, as the country’s unguarded borders have allowed foreign fighters from Arab countries, Central Asian neighbors, and Europe to pour into Afghanistan. Nazary said that 21 known terror groups are currently operating inside the country. “We’re seeing all the lights are blinking red,” said Doug Livermore, a former US Navy official and a member of the Special Operations Association of America. The United Nations believes that al Qaeda has training camps in at least 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, even as the Taliban publicly deny that the terror group has a presence in the country. 

Al Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel has explicitly called for foreign fighters to migrate to Afghanistan and prepare to attack the West. … The country has become an “open black market” of leftover weapons, many of them American, he added. 

What’s at stake in Sri Lanka’s first presidential vote since its economic meltdown?