Race to the top
Ding Ying

SCIENTISTS have long warned that global warming is a growing threat. Now international observers are concerned that the natural resources in the Arctic region-made more accessible by rising temperatures-could lead to conflict between countries eager to exploit them. This previously tranquil and peaceful polar area has become crowded with treasure-hunting exploration teams from different countries. International studies experts point out the need for established principles governing Arctic exploration to prevent abuse and head off international conflict.
Treasure island
The Arctic refers to the wide region around the North Pole, which includes the Arctic Ocean and parts of eight countries and territories. Abundant resources, including natural gas, oil, aquatic products and mineral resources, are stored underground and have until now remained largely untouched. According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report issued on July 23, the area north of the Arctic Circle has an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.
These resources account for about 22 percent of the undiscovered, technically recoverable resources in the world. The Arctic has about 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas and 20 percent of undiscovered natural gas liquids. According to the report, about 84 percent of these resources are located offshore. The report values the Arctic's oil and natural gas resources at about $30 trillion, which is equal to the combined 2007 gross national products of the United States, Japan, China, Germany and Britain. In addition, the Arctic has millions of tons of zinc, lead, diamond and gold reserves, as well as fishery reserves.
Another Arctic draw is the fabled Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The melting Arctic ice cap opens it up more each year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report saying that, as Arctic temperatures rise, so will the route's economic value. A Xinhua report said that if icebergs in the Arctic Ocean continue melting at their current speed of 3 percent a year, 10 years from now the Northwest Passage will be open for at least one month in the summer. By 2080, or even as early as 2050, the passage will be completely ice-free. Compared to the Panama Canal, the Northwest Passage would shorten the voyage between North America and Asia by 6,500 km and the Europe-Asia route by 3,990 km. In addition to lowering commercial costs, an open passage would also have military and strategic value.
Now, competing sovereignty claims among the eight Arctic-attached countries-Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and the United States-have led governments to become more aggressive. Russian daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article on May 4 saying that Arctic issues are most likely to be the reason behind a third world war. Canada considers the Arctic its own backyard. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared on August 26 that Canada would invest $100 million over five years to map its energy and mineral resources in the Arctic as preparation for later exploration. "Use it or lose it is the first principle of Arctic sovereignty," Harper said.
In late August, the Canadian military also began Arctic training exercises for emergencies arising from increased commercial, research and recreational traffic. "With climate change and the opening of the Northwest Passage, we're seeing increases in all those areas," said Brigadier-General David Millar, Canadian Commander of Joint Task Force North. According to the Canadian Press, the exercise was "designed to boost Canada's Arctic sovereignty and increase the military's ability to respond to emergencies." In August 2007, Russia planted a flag on the seabed under the North Pole. On September 17 this year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered his officials to draft a law marking Russia's southern Arctic zone. "It is our duty to our direct descendants," a Reuters report quoted him as saying. "We have to ensure the long-term national interests of Russia in the Arctic." In the meantime, Russia is conducting military training in the Arctic region as well.
As early as 60 years ago, the United States began sending expedition teams to the Arctic region. The United States, Russia, Britain and France have all had nuclear submarines in Arctic waters. Other countries have been less bold, but they still hope to share in the Arctic spoils. Norway is halfway into a two-year Arctic drilling plan, and this summer Iceland got in on the action as well. Chen Xulong, an international studies expert at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS), predicts that more countries will join in the competition.
Coming challenges
Chen concluded that none of the countries involved would let go. "All of them will try their best to get the biggest profit instead of giving up to their competitors," he told Beijing Review. As a result, he said, these countries must adopt every method they can, like exploiting loopholes in international law, claiming sovereignty, sending scientific expedition teams and launching military exercises. Chen said that the international community will not stand by and allow the situation to worsen, but will make an effort to mediate disputes and protect the environment so as to minimize the damage that might result from international competition. However, he stressed that Arctic and Antarctic issues are politically and legally complex, posing a serious threat to order in the polar areas.
Chen pointed out that since no country's continental shelf has been proven to extend into the Arctic, it remains international territory. On August 22, Hong Kong-based Ta Kung Pao newspaper published an article saying that the Arctic does not belong to any country but is the shared property of people throughout the world. Every country has an equal right to exploit the Arctic, the article said, and countries competing for sovereignty are infringing on that right. "Currently, the competition remains in the scientific research field, targeted at finding scientific evidence to prove their legal sovereignty over the area," Chen said. "However, military action is most effective in establishing sovereignty, so sooner or later these countries will take military action in the Arctic area. The fight is just beginning."
The competition could have major implications for the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a 1982 international agreement laying out rights and responsibilities. The U.S. Senate never ratified the treaty, but may reconsider since it would grant the United States new legal rights. Chen said the competition could lead to UNCLOS revisions or entirely new Arctic laws. The competition will also influence the global chess game among superpowers. Chen took Russia's flag-planting as an example. In recent years, the U.S.-led Western world has kept Russia on the defensive, but now Russia is using its energy resources and military strength as leverage. "The flag-planting was Russia's counter plan," Chen said. "The competition hides invisible dangers. It can reshape the international political and military order in the end."
Chen said the competition might drive the countries involved to launch new policies on the Arctic. The European Union is considering issuing new Arctic policy. Common interests could also forge new coalitions. For example, countries around the Arctic could join forces to exploit its resources while excluding others. International competition benefits the Arctic in at least one respect: The region's strategic and economic value has spurred extensive scientific research about the polar area. Norway, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States all have observation stations.
Chen said the competition could also lead to a new international mechanism for dealing with Arctic disputes through peaceful dialogue and diplomacy. "But the precondition is these countries must have the common will to do so," he said. "They need to compromise with each other." Chen also noted that Antarctic exploration could be different. "Human beings have missed their opportunity to share the Arctic, but there is still a chance for Antarctica, as the non-military and environmental protection principles have been set for the Antarctic area," he said. Yin Chengde, another CIIS expert, suggested four principles that might calm the current situation: globalization, peace, fairness and credibility. History shows that confrontation and conflict do not work, Yin said. Only through international cooperation can problems be resolved peacefully. That will ensure a bright and peaceful future not only for the Arctic, but also for the world below it.

—The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item

Winning the battle, losing the faith
Nathaniel C. Fick

THE lion of the people will turn on you, warned Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, a former Taleban foreign minister, as we sipped green tea at his home in Kabul a few weeks ago. He noted that while Americans had been shocked by a series of spectacular insurgent attacks over the summer, the US-led coalition faced a far greater danger than the resurgent Taleban: growing despair among average Afghans that their government is fundamentally illegitimate. Every aspect of sound counterinsurgency strategy revolves around bolstering the government’s legitimacy. When ordinary people lose their faith in their government, then they also lose faith in the foreigners who prop it up. The day that happens across Afghanistan is the day the coalition loses the war.
With more than 230 military deaths since January, this year is on track to be the deadliest yet for the coalition in Afghanistan. July alone saw a brazen attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the deaths of nine Americans at a combat outpost in Nuristan and the killing of 10 French soldiers on the outskirts of Kabul. The response has been a growing consensus around sending two to four more combat brigades to Afghanistan — 8,000 to 16,000 troops. Although larger and more populous than Iraq, Afghanistan has fewer than half the coalition forces, and critical programmes to advise the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police operate at one-third to one-half of their authorized strength. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Michael Mullen, told Congress last year, “In Afghanistan we do what we can; in Iraq we do what we must.” Reduced violence in Iraq will probably free up troops to do what we must in Afghanistan, but a government viewed by its people as worth fighting for is at least as important as adequate numbers of troops, helicopters and reconnaissance drones.
The timing of two coming events, however, give cause for hope: the American election next month and the Afghan presidential election next year. The new American administration will have greater freedom to pressure the Afghan government, and anyone aspiring to win the Afghan presidency will need to secure the support of the new man in the White House. One sign of the current government’s unpopularity is that nearly all the prominent Afghans we met on our recent trip hinted at being presidential candidates in 2009. Still, when asked who will win that election, they responded unanimously, “Whichever candidate the United States supports.”
Washington should send a message to every candidate that even tacit support depends on a serious commitment on three fronts: combating corruption; decentralising governance; and negotiating political reconciliation with Taleban members who renounce violence. First, the Afghan government must confront corruption in its own ranks. Tribal elders in Ghazni told us that they are “slapped on one cheek by the Taleban, and on the other cheek by the government.” They talked of extortion by the police, dysfunctional courts and rampant bribery in government offices. The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes. It’s no surprise so many actively or passively support the Taliban.
To fight corruption, President Hamid Karzai should immediately do three things: Fire those seen as the most corrupt cabinet ministers, provincial governors and district governors; arrest and prosecute the most notorious warlords from the civil war in the 1990s, who committed unspeakable atrocities but are living openly in Kabul or the provinces; and break the relationship between the government and the country’s largest industry, the poppy trade. The coalition can assist in these reforms by “embedding” Western civilian experts in law, government and business management at every level of the Afghan government. This can improve performance and transparency. For example, one government worker described to us how a corrupt land deal was reversed because “locals were able to confront the governor together with a coalition representative, which made the issue hard to ignore.”
Second, the Afghan government must rethink its approach to extending central government control throughout the country. Afghanistan’s remote valleys have long sheltered tribesmen with an antibody reaction to outside power. Yet the Afghan Constitution, drafted under close American tutelage, posits a highly centralised government, with the leaders of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces appointed by and beholden to Kabul, rather than to their own people. Decentralising power does not necessarily require amending the Constitution, but it does demand that central authorities in Afghanistan focus on providing services of national scope: an army and police force, roads, electricity, a postal service and the like. Actual governance at the district level must stem from traditional tribal, social and religious structures.

—Khaleej Times

NATO’s Afghan war of barbarity
Seumas Milne

WHILE the eyes of the Western world have been fixed on the global financial crisis, the military campaign that launched the war on terror has been spinning out of control. Seven years after the US and Britain began their onslaught on Afghanistan to oust the Taleban and capture Osama Bin Laden, the Taleban surround the capital, Al-Qaeda is flourishing in Pakistan and the war’s sponsors have publicly fallen out about whether it has already been lost.
As the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen concedes that the country is locked into a “downward spiral” of corruption, lawlessness and insurgency, Britain’s ambassador in Kabul, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, is quoted in a leaked briefing as declaring that “American strategy is destined to fail”. The same diplomat who told us last year that British forces would be in Afghanistan for decades now believes foreign troops are “part of the problem, not the solution”. The British commander Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith was last week even blunter. “We’re not going to win this war,” he said, adding that if the Taleban were prepared to “talk about a political settlement”, that was “precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this”. The double-barreled duo were duly slapped down by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates for defeatism. But even Gates now publicly backs talks with the Taleban, which are in fact already taking place.
This is the conflict Western politicians and media continue to urge their reluctant populations to support as a war for civilization. In reality, it is a war of barbarity, whose contempt for the value of Afghan life has fueled the very resistance that Western military and political leaders are now unable to contain. In this year alone, for every occupation soldier killed, at least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of occupation forces. They include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by a US air assault in Azizabad in August; the 47 wedding guests dismembered by US bombardment in Nangarhar in July — US forces have a particular habit of attacking weddings; and the four women and children killed in a British rocket barrage six weeks ago in Sangin.
By far the most comprehensive research into Afghan casualties over the past seven years has been carried out by Marc Herold, a US professor at the University of New Hampshire. In his latest findings, Herold estimates that the number of civilians directly killed by the US and other NATO forces since 2006, up to 3,273, is already higher than the toll exacted by the devastating three-month bombardment that ousted the Taleban regime in 2001. And over the past year civilian deaths at the hands of NATO forces have tripled, despite changes in rules of engagement.
But most telling is the political and military calculation that underlies the Afghan civilian bloodletting. “Close air support” bomb attacks called in by ground forces — which rose from 176 in 2005 to 2,926 in 2007 and are now the US tactic of choice — are between four and 10 times as deadly for Afghan civilians as ground attacks, the figures show, and airstrikes now account for 80 percent of those killed by the occupation forces.
But while 242 US and NATO ground troops have died in the war with the Taleban this year, not a single pilot has been killed in action. The trade-off could not be clearer. With troops thin on the ground and the US military up to their necks in Iraq and elsewhere, US and NATO reliance on air attacks minimizes their own casualties while guaranteeing that Afghan civilians will die in far larger numbers.

—Arab News