NightWatch
For the Night of 8 July 2009
North Korea: The BBC reported on film footage broadcast by APTN about Kim Chong-il?s appearance on the 15th anniversary of his father?s death. Kim appeared gaunt, with sparse hair, walked with a limp. The Kim at today?s memorial ceremony resembled the Kim who presided over the convening session of the Supreme Peoples Assembly (SPA) in April, except he was even more frail looking.
The BBC posted a short video of Kim?s public appearance. That is a credible baseline for gauging his deterioration or restoration to health in future appearances with photos. One thing is certain: the man who appeared in the SPA assembly hall today did not appear capable of making daily inspection visits around the country, which the North Korean media insist on broadcasting.
China: Update. Multiple international media reported thousands of Chinese troops entered Urumqi on 8 July to separate the feuding Han and Uighur ethnic groups, after three days of communal violence left 156 people dead. Long convoys of armored cars and green troop trucks with riot police rumbled through the city of 2.3 million people. Other security forces carrying automatic rifles with bayonets formed cordons to defend Muslim neighborhoods from marauding groups of vigilantes with sticks.
Military helicopters buzzed over Xinjiang Province?s regional capital, dropping pamphlets urging people to stay in their homes and stop fighting. Special police from other provinces were called in to patrol the city. A senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting.
The crisis was so severe that President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy, where he was to participate in a Group of Eight summit. It was an embarrassing action by a leader who wants to show that China has a ?harmonious? society as it prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, according to the BBC commentary.
During this Watch, Urumqi is quiet, according to all news outlets.
Comment. All is obviously not ?harmonious? in the central kingdom. Harmony remains a surprisingly still powerful Confucian political and Daoist philosophical concept of government by the communists. The word harmony in English translation does not come close to capturing its meaning through several thousand years of Chinese political culture. Analysts should interpret official use of this word and its adjectives as a sign of cultural retrenchment. In Chinese history, society is harmonious when the wishes of the Emperor are understood and obeyed.
For new analysts: The Urumqi riots are a text book case study of the early phase of internal breakdown and crisis management. The first principle is that the established forces of law and order always must fail before the national government recognizes the gravity of the problem and responds. This is a nearly universal rule of crisis management.
Every living system exists in a state of dynamic tension with its neighbors and its components. This includes Uighur and Han Chinese populations in Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, for example. The primary problem solving task in living systems is to satisfy the needs and wants of its components in order to sustain life.
This task always involves stress because the needs and wants of all components can never be satisfied. Resources are always limited and their allocation must be balanced. Balancing in biological systems creates stress. Every living system evolves and possesses mechanisms for coping with the normal range of stresses in the system.
Thus, some demands of the Uighurs for greater political participation can be satisfied because they fall within the normal range for stress. But not their basic demand for an end to the 60-year long Han Chinese invasion of Xinjiang, for example. The Han Chinese demand for security from the Uighurs and propensity to take revenge is another matter. That falls far outside the normal range of stress responses for which the Han Chinese police are prepared to cope. Bashing Uighur heads is predictable. A counter uprising by Han Chinese is overwhelming and something to be encouraged and joined.
The stress between the two dominant ethnic groups in Urumqi is always close to erupting in limited violence or other forms of lawlessness, but the central authorities maintain sufficient local police and paramilitary police to keep the peace most of the time for the historically predictable range of flashpoints.
All governments attempt to solve stress problems at the lowest, most efficient cost, thus all will be prone to let the local forces do what they are paid to do, keep stress under control. There is no reliable way to tell whether a specific outbreak of lawlessness will exceed the capabilities of the normal stress control mechanisms, or is just letting off steam, pent up tension.
Most governments will decline to respond to the first signs of local disorder with an expensive overwhelming response because it might be overkill and unnecessary and make them appear foolish and scared. Thus the basic rule of prediction is that governments that are not despotic must allow the local forces try. If they succeed, huge costs are unnecessary. If they fail, the government knows what it must do next ? escalate.
Now this phenomenology is not the same as being caught by surprise. It is just the way crisis management works in living systems. It is, for example, the same phenomenological and systemic response by any biological system to an internal disorder. If the normal stress control mechanisms fail, peripheral and non-essential systems will start to shut down as the system shunts resources to the afflicted component to first limit damage, then stabilize the afflicted sub-system and finally restore it in a new normal state or condition.
This process is identical that followed by police in the US, such as the Los Angeles police response to rioting in Watts for six days in August 1965. No Governor will call in the national guard unless and until the police are overwhelmed. To do so unnecessarily would brand him as alarmist and be reflected in the next election. Thus, governments have no choice but to wait and see whether the police are capable of solving the problem at the lowest cost, before calling in the guard or the Peoples Armed Police, which is a high cost measure in dollars, yuan, and political capital.
The Chinese leadership was not caught by surprise, necessarily. They are hardly fools in managing a nation of over a billion people and understand well the explosive activism of the Uighurs. They are bound by the iron rules of instability and crisis management problem solving in a living system. The Uighur problem is now literally under control. Not solved, but under control.
Autocratic states and despotisms, as in North Korea, make a practice of always overreacting to unrest as a fail-safe, prophylactic crisis management response that ensures regime survival. They disregard the costs in favor of surety. The Chinese leaders are showing they are more tolerant of protests than Kim Chong il, in North Korea, but not much more.
The Uighur unrest poses no threat to the central government, but the Han Chinese counter-riots pose a serious threat to the survival of the Urumqi Uighurs and a serious source of incitement for other Han to take law into their own hands in the 14 or 15 other regions of China where non-Han minorities mix with the Han. To its credit, the central government has acted to protect the Uighurs from the Han, but three days late.
A lesson to young China watchers is the Han Chinese appear much more docile than history shows they are. Chong guo is translated as central kingdom, but its historic sense is that the Han Chinese are the ethnically, culturally and morally superior center of the world. Minorities on the fringe, including Westerners, are culturally defined as inferiors.
Pakistan: What happened to the political crisis in Islamabad between General Kayani, Zardari, Gilani and Nawaz Sharif?
Today President Zardari admitted for the first time that militant groups were "created and nurtured" in Pakistan to achieve some short-term objectives, Press Trust of India reported. During a meeting with former senior civil servants at the presidency the night of 7 July, Zardari made "a candid admission of the realities" and said those groups returned to haunt Pakistan after 11 September 2001.
Sometimes Zardari appears to indulge a death wish, with statements of this kind. A clarification will no doubt be issued shortly. The Indians love to pick up on such unguarded comments.
Afghanistan: Pakistan?s The News carried the remarks of a US Marine Brigadier today.
The commander of US Marines in southern Afghanistan said Wednesday there was an urgent need for more Afghan security forces as well as civilian experts to back up a major offensive against Taliban insurgents. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The fact of the matter is we don't have enough Afghan forces, and I'd like more," Brigadier General Larry Nicholson told reporters in a teleconference.
"Imagine if I had 4,000 Marines with 4,000 Afghan forces. I mean, it would not even be comparable to even the relative success that we've had over these first seven days," the general said from Camp Leatherneck, a Marine base in Helmand Province.
The News version is vastly more accurate and important than the insipid coverage of the General?s statement by US media. This General is correct that 8,000 mixed forces might make a lasting difference, provided the Afghans remained after the Marines retrieved the situation and left.
No Readers should have the slightest doubt that a US Marine combat brigade can beat in a firefight any combination of Afghans armed with AK-47s and wearing turbans, flowing robes and sandals, every time. That, however, is irrelevant, as General Vo Nguyen Giap said after the Vietnam War.
Only the Afghans can effect permanent change in the security situation. The General?s lament is that they are too few to make a lasting difference.
Note: The unclassified fighting data for June 2009 establish it as the most bloody month in the 8 year history of the US and Coalition presence. According to icasualties.org, 38 ISAF and NATO soldiers died (27 US, 2 UK, 2 Canada, 1 Estonia, 3 Denmark, 3 German); 23 -- 60% -- from roadside bombs. The only months in which NATO deaths were higher were June and August 2008 during the summer offensive last year, but adding in the number of wounded, June 2009 is the worst month of the 8 year fight.
Unclassified data show that 85 men were wounded, including 28 US, 5 UK, 7 Netherlands, 3 Poland, 1 Australia, 3 Estonia, 4 Italy, 1 Denmark, 1 France, 4 Canada. In addition, 27 other International Security Assistance Force personnel were reported wounded by reliable sources but not identified by nationality.
In a recent interview with a former CIA officer responsible for Afghanistan, the interviewer asked what would be the effect of a surge in US and allied forces to protect the 20 August Presidential elections in Afghanistan. His comment was more troops will provide more targets. The facts are bearing out the wisdom of his response: expect casualties to rise steeply. Eight years on and the Coalition and Afghan commands do not seem to know how to deal with roadside bombs now any better than in 2001.
Indonesia: In today?s presidential election, incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appears on course for re-election with a large majority, exit polls suggest, according to the BBC. Pollsters report he won about 60% of the popular vote -- enough of a margin to avoid a run-off in September.
Former President Megawati Sukarnoputri secured about a quarter of the vote, with Vice-President Jusuf Kalla in third place, according to the exit polls.
The vote passed off peacefully across the country's thousands of islands. The continuing political maturity of the country with the largest number of Muslims of any country and a secular government is tonight?s good news.
Turkey-China: Prime Minister Erdogan said Turkey is closely watching the violence in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, APA reported 8 July. Erdogan was quoted as saying, "Our Uighur brothers living in Turkey and Turkish people feeling this pain in their hearts hold protest actions condemning these events. We have always seen our Uighur brothers as a bridge between Turkey and China, the country we have always had normal relations with throughout the history. Necessary measures must be taken to prevent this brutality. We are a temporary member of the U.N. Security Council for 2009-2010. We will also take these events into consideration there.
Uighurs are Turkic peoples and have a large presence in Turkey. Turkey is China?s bridge to NATO and a customer for Chinese weapons. These act as incentives for the Chinese to get control as fast as possible, which they have done. Erdogan is playing to the gallery.
Somalia-Ethiopia: Update. Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed said 8 July that Ethiopia will commit fully to eliminating the Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab, Press TV reported. Ahmed made his remarks after meeting with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin in Addis Ababa.
It is unclear what transpired between these two men, but Ethiopia will not send troops back to Somalia without ironclad US guarantees of financial and logistic support. If Readers see large numbers of Ethiopian soldiers returning to Mogadishu, which Al Shabaab nearly controls, that is the critical indicator that Prime Minister Meles has obtained a secret US pledge of massive support.
Absent that, the secular Somali government is moribund and its President ought to scout out a nice retirement property in Addis.
Somalia anti-piracy patrol: Update. Russia's third task group from its Pacific Fleet will join the anti-piracy flotilla off the Somali coast in the Gulf of Aden in late July, RIA Novosti reported, citing a Russian navy official. The new task force will include the Admiral Tributs destroyer with two helicopters, a salvage tug, a tanker and a naval infantry unit.
For the Night of 8 July 2009
North Korea: The BBC reported on film footage broadcast by APTN about Kim Chong-il?s appearance on the 15th anniversary of his father?s death. Kim appeared gaunt, with sparse hair, walked with a limp. The Kim at today?s memorial ceremony resembled the Kim who presided over the convening session of the Supreme Peoples Assembly (SPA) in April, except he was even more frail looking.
The BBC posted a short video of Kim?s public appearance. That is a credible baseline for gauging his deterioration or restoration to health in future appearances with photos. One thing is certain: the man who appeared in the SPA assembly hall today did not appear capable of making daily inspection visits around the country, which the North Korean media insist on broadcasting.
China: Update. Multiple international media reported thousands of Chinese troops entered Urumqi on 8 July to separate the feuding Han and Uighur ethnic groups, after three days of communal violence left 156 people dead. Long convoys of armored cars and green troop trucks with riot police rumbled through the city of 2.3 million people. Other security forces carrying automatic rifles with bayonets formed cordons to defend Muslim neighborhoods from marauding groups of vigilantes with sticks.
Military helicopters buzzed over Xinjiang Province?s regional capital, dropping pamphlets urging people to stay in their homes and stop fighting. Special police from other provinces were called in to patrol the city. A senior Communist Party official vowed to execute those guilty of murder in the rioting.
The crisis was so severe that President Hu Jintao cut short a trip to Italy, where he was to participate in a Group of Eight summit. It was an embarrassing action by a leader who wants to show that China has a ?harmonious? society as it prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, according to the BBC commentary.
During this Watch, Urumqi is quiet, according to all news outlets.
Comment. All is obviously not ?harmonious? in the central kingdom. Harmony remains a surprisingly still powerful Confucian political and Daoist philosophical concept of government by the communists. The word harmony in English translation does not come close to capturing its meaning through several thousand years of Chinese political culture. Analysts should interpret official use of this word and its adjectives as a sign of cultural retrenchment. In Chinese history, society is harmonious when the wishes of the Emperor are understood and obeyed.
For new analysts: The Urumqi riots are a text book case study of the early phase of internal breakdown and crisis management. The first principle is that the established forces of law and order always must fail before the national government recognizes the gravity of the problem and responds. This is a nearly universal rule of crisis management.
Every living system exists in a state of dynamic tension with its neighbors and its components. This includes Uighur and Han Chinese populations in Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, for example. The primary problem solving task in living systems is to satisfy the needs and wants of its components in order to sustain life.
This task always involves stress because the needs and wants of all components can never be satisfied. Resources are always limited and their allocation must be balanced. Balancing in biological systems creates stress. Every living system evolves and possesses mechanisms for coping with the normal range of stresses in the system.
Thus, some demands of the Uighurs for greater political participation can be satisfied because they fall within the normal range for stress. But not their basic demand for an end to the 60-year long Han Chinese invasion of Xinjiang, for example. The Han Chinese demand for security from the Uighurs and propensity to take revenge is another matter. That falls far outside the normal range of stress responses for which the Han Chinese police are prepared to cope. Bashing Uighur heads is predictable. A counter uprising by Han Chinese is overwhelming and something to be encouraged and joined.
The stress between the two dominant ethnic groups in Urumqi is always close to erupting in limited violence or other forms of lawlessness, but the central authorities maintain sufficient local police and paramilitary police to keep the peace most of the time for the historically predictable range of flashpoints.
All governments attempt to solve stress problems at the lowest, most efficient cost, thus all will be prone to let the local forces do what they are paid to do, keep stress under control. There is no reliable way to tell whether a specific outbreak of lawlessness will exceed the capabilities of the normal stress control mechanisms, or is just letting off steam, pent up tension.
Most governments will decline to respond to the first signs of local disorder with an expensive overwhelming response because it might be overkill and unnecessary and make them appear foolish and scared. Thus the basic rule of prediction is that governments that are not despotic must allow the local forces try. If they succeed, huge costs are unnecessary. If they fail, the government knows what it must do next ? escalate.
Now this phenomenology is not the same as being caught by surprise. It is just the way crisis management works in living systems. It is, for example, the same phenomenological and systemic response by any biological system to an internal disorder. If the normal stress control mechanisms fail, peripheral and non-essential systems will start to shut down as the system shunts resources to the afflicted component to first limit damage, then stabilize the afflicted sub-system and finally restore it in a new normal state or condition.
This process is identical that followed by police in the US, such as the Los Angeles police response to rioting in Watts for six days in August 1965. No Governor will call in the national guard unless and until the police are overwhelmed. To do so unnecessarily would brand him as alarmist and be reflected in the next election. Thus, governments have no choice but to wait and see whether the police are capable of solving the problem at the lowest cost, before calling in the guard or the Peoples Armed Police, which is a high cost measure in dollars, yuan, and political capital.
The Chinese leadership was not caught by surprise, necessarily. They are hardly fools in managing a nation of over a billion people and understand well the explosive activism of the Uighurs. They are bound by the iron rules of instability and crisis management problem solving in a living system. The Uighur problem is now literally under control. Not solved, but under control.
Autocratic states and despotisms, as in North Korea, make a practice of always overreacting to unrest as a fail-safe, prophylactic crisis management response that ensures regime survival. They disregard the costs in favor of surety. The Chinese leaders are showing they are more tolerant of protests than Kim Chong il, in North Korea, but not much more.
The Uighur unrest poses no threat to the central government, but the Han Chinese counter-riots pose a serious threat to the survival of the Urumqi Uighurs and a serious source of incitement for other Han to take law into their own hands in the 14 or 15 other regions of China where non-Han minorities mix with the Han. To its credit, the central government has acted to protect the Uighurs from the Han, but three days late.
A lesson to young China watchers is the Han Chinese appear much more docile than history shows they are. Chong guo is translated as central kingdom, but its historic sense is that the Han Chinese are the ethnically, culturally and morally superior center of the world. Minorities on the fringe, including Westerners, are culturally defined as inferiors.
Pakistan: What happened to the political crisis in Islamabad between General Kayani, Zardari, Gilani and Nawaz Sharif?
Today President Zardari admitted for the first time that militant groups were "created and nurtured" in Pakistan to achieve some short-term objectives, Press Trust of India reported. During a meeting with former senior civil servants at the presidency the night of 7 July, Zardari made "a candid admission of the realities" and said those groups returned to haunt Pakistan after 11 September 2001.
Sometimes Zardari appears to indulge a death wish, with statements of this kind. A clarification will no doubt be issued shortly. The Indians love to pick up on such unguarded comments.
Afghanistan: Pakistan?s The News carried the remarks of a US Marine Brigadier today.
The commander of US Marines in southern Afghanistan said Wednesday there was an urgent need for more Afghan security forces as well as civilian experts to back up a major offensive against Taliban insurgents. "I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The fact of the matter is we don't have enough Afghan forces, and I'd like more," Brigadier General Larry Nicholson told reporters in a teleconference.
"Imagine if I had 4,000 Marines with 4,000 Afghan forces. I mean, it would not even be comparable to even the relative success that we've had over these first seven days," the general said from Camp Leatherneck, a Marine base in Helmand Province.
The News version is vastly more accurate and important than the insipid coverage of the General?s statement by US media. This General is correct that 8,000 mixed forces might make a lasting difference, provided the Afghans remained after the Marines retrieved the situation and left.
No Readers should have the slightest doubt that a US Marine combat brigade can beat in a firefight any combination of Afghans armed with AK-47s and wearing turbans, flowing robes and sandals, every time. That, however, is irrelevant, as General Vo Nguyen Giap said after the Vietnam War.
Only the Afghans can effect permanent change in the security situation. The General?s lament is that they are too few to make a lasting difference.
Note: The unclassified fighting data for June 2009 establish it as the most bloody month in the 8 year history of the US and Coalition presence. According to icasualties.org, 38 ISAF and NATO soldiers died (27 US, 2 UK, 2 Canada, 1 Estonia, 3 Denmark, 3 German); 23 -- 60% -- from roadside bombs. The only months in which NATO deaths were higher were June and August 2008 during the summer offensive last year, but adding in the number of wounded, June 2009 is the worst month of the 8 year fight.
Unclassified data show that 85 men were wounded, including 28 US, 5 UK, 7 Netherlands, 3 Poland, 1 Australia, 3 Estonia, 4 Italy, 1 Denmark, 1 France, 4 Canada. In addition, 27 other International Security Assistance Force personnel were reported wounded by reliable sources but not identified by nationality.
In a recent interview with a former CIA officer responsible for Afghanistan, the interviewer asked what would be the effect of a surge in US and allied forces to protect the 20 August Presidential elections in Afghanistan. His comment was more troops will provide more targets. The facts are bearing out the wisdom of his response: expect casualties to rise steeply. Eight years on and the Coalition and Afghan commands do not seem to know how to deal with roadside bombs now any better than in 2001.
Indonesia: In today?s presidential election, incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appears on course for re-election with a large majority, exit polls suggest, according to the BBC. Pollsters report he won about 60% of the popular vote -- enough of a margin to avoid a run-off in September.
Former President Megawati Sukarnoputri secured about a quarter of the vote, with Vice-President Jusuf Kalla in third place, according to the exit polls.
The vote passed off peacefully across the country's thousands of islands. The continuing political maturity of the country with the largest number of Muslims of any country and a secular government is tonight?s good news.
Turkey-China: Prime Minister Erdogan said Turkey is closely watching the violence in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, APA reported 8 July. Erdogan was quoted as saying, "Our Uighur brothers living in Turkey and Turkish people feeling this pain in their hearts hold protest actions condemning these events. We have always seen our Uighur brothers as a bridge between Turkey and China, the country we have always had normal relations with throughout the history. Necessary measures must be taken to prevent this brutality. We are a temporary member of the U.N. Security Council for 2009-2010. We will also take these events into consideration there.
Uighurs are Turkic peoples and have a large presence in Turkey. Turkey is China?s bridge to NATO and a customer for Chinese weapons. These act as incentives for the Chinese to get control as fast as possible, which they have done. Erdogan is playing to the gallery.
Somalia-Ethiopia: Update. Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed said 8 July that Ethiopia will commit fully to eliminating the Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab, Press TV reported. Ahmed made his remarks after meeting with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin in Addis Ababa.
It is unclear what transpired between these two men, but Ethiopia will not send troops back to Somalia without ironclad US guarantees of financial and logistic support. If Readers see large numbers of Ethiopian soldiers returning to Mogadishu, which Al Shabaab nearly controls, that is the critical indicator that Prime Minister Meles has obtained a secret US pledge of massive support.
Absent that, the secular Somali government is moribund and its President ought to scout out a nice retirement property in Addis.
Somalia anti-piracy patrol: Update. Russia's third task group from its Pacific Fleet will join the anti-piracy flotilla off the Somali coast in the Gulf of Aden in late July, RIA Novosti reported, citing a Russian navy official. The new task force will include the Admiral Tributs destroyer with two helicopters, a salvage tug, a tanker and a naval infantry unit.
