One thing that bothers me about how Pakistan conducts its foreign policy is how narrowly it is focused on a few states. The four horsemen of Pakistan’s foreign policy are: the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia, and India. These states take an overwhelming and disproportionate level of our government’s interest, time, money, effort. Almost everything we do is run through the prism of relations with one or more of these states.

Now, it’s trivially true that some partners and/or rivals will be more important than others, depending on history, geography, the distribution of power, and so on. This much is true for all countries.

What’s unique, or at least noteworthy, about the situation in Pakistan is the near-absence of other areas and regions of the world. Think about it: when’s the last time you heard about an important state visit to/from Brazil? Or Australia? Or South Korea?

I don’t know the first thing about investment and money, but I’ve always heard the phrase “diversifying your portfolio”. Well, Pakistan’s portfolio is not very diverse at all. It puts us at a disadvantage, in that we are more vulnerable to small changes in each of the four aforementioned states.

Furthermore, we leave a lot of potential gains on the table by ignoring different parts of the world. Consider textiles. Pakistan’s textile industry constitutes about sixty percent of its exports. It is a massive, massive part of our economy. So with good reason, we have approached the U.S. (unsuccessfully) and the EU (successfully, it seems) to loosen tariffs and trade barriers on textiles.

Now, with respect to our successful lobbying with the EU, this is great news. The reason this is great news is that there are a number of countries in the EU which, presumably, would very much like our textiles. The following is a list culled from the CIA World Factbook, with countries whose “main” imports include textiles. The EU countries are shaded orange.

Source data: CIA World Factbook

Of course, there happens to be another region of the world that would, presumably, very much like our textiles. Here’s the list from above again, but this time with African countries shaded blue.

Source data: CIA World Factbook

Now, it’s perfectly plausible that we have, in fact, engaged in a lot of lobbying efforts for more trade with Africa, and I just haven’t heard about it. But I’ve never really heard anyone else talk about it either. My guess is our economic, political and diplomatic relationships with African countries, particularly the non Arab ones, are essentially dormant.

I’m only using textiles (and Africa, for that matter) as an illustration of a broader point. Pakistan needs to do a better job of engaging with states out there on the basis of mutual interests. Maybe it’s not trade, but rather cultural exchange programs. Or student scholarships, or sports tours, or whatever. There’s a whole lot of foreign policy beyond drones, war, terrorism, and oil, and there’s a whole lot of countries out there not named the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia, and India. I hope the new power team from LUMS in charge of our foreign ministry grapples with this issue a little bit.

In its latest effort to highlight the danger of loose nukes – in this case, weapons-usable nuclear material – the Nuclear Threat Initiative has launched its Nuclear Materials Security Index. The intent, according to NTI co-Chairman, Chief Executive Office and public face of NTI former Senator Sam Nunn, is to provide a “country-by-country assessment of the status of nuclear materials security conditions around the world.” The Index, which identifies North Korea and Pakistan as having the world’s worst overall atomic material security conditions among the universe of 32 nations holding a threshold level of nuclear material, is intended to help pinpoint where the trouble spots are. The threat of nuclear terrorism still exists and the index points out these all countries possessing such materials have work to do, some more than others.

At the top of the heap, the Index ranked Australia the highest of the 32 nations. Hungary and the Czech Republic came in second and third place.  The United States was given a ranking of 13, while the United Kingdom was ranked 10th.  The other remaining acknowledged nuclear powers, France, Russia and China, were respectively ranked 19th, 24th and 27th.

Developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the NTI index assesses the 32 states that possess a minimum of 1 kilogram of weapon-usable nuclear material on their overall nuclear protective conditions by looking at five broad factors: quantities and sites; security and control measures; global norms; domestic commitments and capacity; and societal factors. The index also analyzed the nuclear security conditions in 144 other nations that have less than 1 kilogram of weapon-usable material using a subset of conditions such as domestic legislation criminalizing atomic materials smuggling and participation in international nonproliferation agreements. Denmark was in the top spot on that list. Throughout the process, the EIU and NTI were advised by an international panel of experts who included former IAEA Nuclear Security head Anita Nilsson, Carlos Augusto Feu Alvim da Silva, the former head of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC), and Harvard Belfer Center nuke expert Matthew Bunn.

Speaking at the Index release on January 10th, Nunn said that they found that, while governments were becoming more engaged on nuclear material security, there was not a consensus about what security measures mattered most. He also stated that the Index was not meant to punish the low scorers while praising the high ones. “I want to be clear that the Index is not about congratulating some and chastising others. Instead, it should be used as a tool for initiating discussion, analysis and debate, as well as beginning to help build a consensus. My bottom line: If the world is to succeed in preventing catastrophic nuclear terrorism, all countries can and must do more to strengthen security around the world’s most dangerous materials. The NTI Index challenges governments worldwide to respond to the threat by taking appropriate steps to strengthen security conditions.”

Nunn hopes that the Index will help inform the Nuclear Security Summit process, including the upcoming March meeting in South Korea.

Just read this article on Dawn (by AFP) and thought I’d share it:

http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/30/offbeat-stories-from-2011.html

Among offbeat and zany stories from the year just ending:

- The bad news for a group of employees in a Canadian technology company was that the firm was closing down and laying them off. The good news, received the same day, was that 10 of them had jointly won the equivalent of 7.1 million dollars in the state lottery.

- Faced with a school ban on boys wearing short rather than long trousers in hot weather, a 12-year-old British pupil registered his protest by showing up in a skirt.

- A woman in Sicily who had put off paying a three-year-old parking fine got a shock when she opened a letter telling her it had shot up to 32,000 euros, including interest. An absent-minded official had typed in the date of the violation as ’208′, rather than ’2008′, and the computer had done the rest.

- Following a trend set by Knut, a cuddly polar bear cub, and Paul, an octopus that was touted for predicting World Football Cup results, a German zoo promoted Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum. Alas, the squint-eyed marsupial died in the course of the year, but not before her photo had drawn millions of laughs on the Internet.

- Also in Germany, an enterprising cow named Yvonne escaped from a herd about to be slaughtered and spent three months evading both the police and the media in the southern region of Bavaria. When caught, she was given refuge in an animal sanctuary.

- Fans of the local football team in the southwestern French town of Dax were bemused when their website was attacked by hackers sending them vengeful messages in German. The protesters had mistaken it for the official site of Germany’s main stock market index, the DAX.

- British power stations recorded one of their biggest surges in energy demand ever just as live TV coverage of the country’s royal wedding was drawing to a close. Engineers attributed the excess to around a million people putting on their electric kettles at the same time to make tea.

- The central Asian nation of Uzbekistan organised a key university entrance exam for all students on a single day. Just as the event began, the country’s five mobile phone operators shut down all text-messaging services, citing “urgent maintenance” but in fact nipping in the bud any possibility for students to use them to cheat.

- Radio listeners in Israel heard their foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, being interviewed from the comfort of his home. As the interview ended, they clearly heard the sound of his toilet flushing.

- A poverty-stricken 75-year-old woman in the Caucasian republic of Georgia cut off all Internet access in both her home country and neighbouring Armenia when she inadvertently sliced through a cable while foraging for scrap metal.

- A huge electronic counter set up in London’s Trafalgar Square to provide a 500-day countdown to the start of the city’s Olympic Games not only stopped functioning, but started going backwards.

- A young girl in Australia who used an Internet site to issue an open invitation to her 16th birthday party had to cancel it after 200,000 people said they were coming.

- A Dutchman who drove his expensive sports car at almost 300 kilometers (180 miles) an hour on a Belgian highway was caught because he couldn’t resist putting a film of the exploit, along with pictures of the speedometer and commentary on the type of car, on the video sharing web site “YouTube”.

- A 36-year-old woman in Italy filed for divorce just a month after getting married. The reason: her new husband had insisted on bringing his mother along on their honeymoon.

- Chinese TV viewers thought there was something familiar about a sequence on the news supposedly showing the country’s warplanes going through their paces. And there was: it turned out that the footage was from the hit US film ‘Top Gun’.

- A group of white doves released from the Vatican during a sermon by Pope Benedict XVI refused to play their roles as symbols of peace. Rather than soaring up into the air, they simply flew straight back in through the window.

- A man arrested for credit card fraud in South Korea was found to have kept a detailed diary of a long career of burglaries, containing the addresses of houses he had broken into and details of what he had taken. His home also contained many of the stolen items.

Family planning efforts in Pakistan
Efforts to promote family planning in Pakistan are struggling against the reality that many women are simply not in a position to make such decisions. Pakistan has the regions highest fertility rate with an average of four children per woman. 

Korean “comfort women” in landmark protest against Japan
Korean women seized by Japanese military during World War II, then forced into sexual slavery, staged their 1,000th successive weekly protest outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea on Wednesday. “I want President Lee [Myung Bak] to urge Japan to apologize for the past sins and make compensation. The Japanese ambassador should make a formal apology as quickly as possible before we all die,” said Kim Bok-dong, 88, one of five former “comfort women” in attendance, and one of only 63 still alive today from among the more than 200,000 girls taken to military brothels.

UN asks donors for $7.7 billion to meet humanitarian emergencies in 2012
The United Nations projects it will need $7.7 billion from international donors in 2012 to cope with humanitarian emergencies affecting some 51 million people in 16 countries, chiefly Somalia, Sudan and Kenya. The appeal, made today by Valerie Amos, the UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, is less than the $8.9 billion the world body sought for 2011.

Bensouda to take on gender violence at ICC
Holding perpetrators of gender-based crimes accountable for their actions will receive increased focus moving forward, newly elected International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda says. Bensouda, who is the first woman to hold the ICC’s top prosecution position, believes the court’s efforts can help end the impunity that surrounds sexual assault and gender-based crime in many parts of the world.

Global malaria death toll falling
The number of people dying from malaria has dropped significantly over the past decade thanks to concentrated prevention and treatment efforts, according to the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report. “It is remarkable progress. When I began working in the malaria field in Africa, we were fighting a losing battle. Now all that has changed, and the risk of dying from malaria has fallen by a third in a decade,” said Dr. Richard Cibulskis, the report’s chief author. Still, WHO warns that insufficient funding may limit progress. Funding hit $2 billion in 2011, the highest level ever but still short of the $5 – $6 billion needed annually to achieve WHO’s target of zero malaria deaths by 2015.

USAID chief makes case for investment in global health
The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development recounted the story of a woman at the world’s largest refugee complex in Dadaab, Kenya, as an example of why investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars is needed in global health. “There was a woman who had traveled for 80 kilometers, carrying her remaining belongings to a place of shelter, and along the way had been attacked and robbed. She reached a point where she had to make an unimaginable decision. She could no longer carry both of her children. She had to choose because she couldn’t physically carry both of her children into that camp. I have three kids. I just couldn’t forget that story,” Rajiv Shah said Thursday at a dinner hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Photojournalist exposes secret world of child brides
In an interview, photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair — who shot the feature “Too Young To Wed” for National Geographic magazine — discusses nearly a decade of work investigating child marriage throughout the world. Despite international agreements that outlaw the practice in many countries, millions of young girls, some as young as five, are forced into marriage annually.

UN Population Fund Executive Director on HIV/AIDS, Maternal Health, and Leadership
In a far-ranging interview, Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the UN Population Fund, discusses approaches to sexual, reproductive and maternal health, as well as hot-button issues such as population growth. “The unmet need for voluntary family planning remains appallingly high, considering that 215 million women in developing countries still lacking access,” he said. “The gap between this unmet need and the amount of money available for family planning must be bridged, starting with those in most need — the rural and urban poor, and also young people, upon whom our future rests.”

Five girls who resisted child marriage hailed as ‘icons’ by President
 Economic progress is not the only indicator of a country’s development, a nation requires its people to show courage against social pressures and overcome social evils, said President Pratibha Devisingh Patil on Wednesday after meeting five teenagers from West Bengal who fought social and family pressure and resisted child marriage.
The girls, with little education and almost no support, turned down marriage proposals and faced the anger of their families and the community. They earned praise from the President, who described them as “icons” and asked them to share their stories and encourage girls to say no to under-age marriages.

Gen Jean-Paul Paloméros, chief of staff of the French air force,
is confident about the Dassault Rafale's prospects in major
international competitions, and partially attributes the aircraft's
previous losses in Singapore and South Korea to politics.

"I've
flown in the Rafale and I know what it can do," said Paloméros, speaking
to Flightglobal at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace
exhibition in Malaysia late last month. "Rafale was designed since
conception as a multi-role aircraft," he added.

According to
Paloméros, the Rafale is well suited to handle emerging air-to-air and
air-to-ground threats in the Asia-Pacific region.

"The Rafale has
very high manoueverability," he said. "It will be getting an AESA
[active electronically scanned array] radar and it has good weapons. It
will also receive the MBDA Meteor air-to-air missile, offering extra
range against any types of threats."

The AESA version of the
Thales RBE2 radar will be introduced into Rafale in 2013, when French
forces begin receiving the fourth block of production aircraft. The
Meteor is still undergoing development, but should be deployed on the
Rafale after the middle of the decade.

Paloméros is confident the
Rafale will emerge triumphant in India's medium multi-role combat
aircraft competition for 126 fighters, where it is on a shortlist with
the Eurofighter Typhoon. Indian media reports suggest the decision is
imminent, possibly before the end of 2011.

READ MORE

As reported last week in the New York Times, South Korea is seeking renegotiation of a 1974 treaty that bars it from acquiring spent nuclear fuel reprocessing or uranium enrichment plants–so-called “fuel cycle facilities” that can be used both to support a nuclear energy sector or an atomic weapons program. At the time the treaty was adopted, the right-wing authoritarian South Korean government was understood to have some interest in developing nuclear weapons, and so the treaty was implicitly intended to block that path.
Today, the democratic South Korean government’s ostensible rationale for wanting to reprocess spent nuclear fuels is to help deal with a seemingly intractable spent fuel disposal problem. But, as Princeton’s Frank von Hippel explained in an analytic article last year, the notion that reprocessing solves the waste disposal problem is dubious to begin with, and in South Korea’s case there is an obvious alternative.
Of course, like other countries that have intently sought fuel cycle facilities in the past–Germany, Japan, Brazil, to name the most significant–it is implicitly understood in South Korea that such facilities could open the road to a nuclear weapons program. At a time when North Korea has gone nuclear in defiance of concerted international efforts to stop it, having that fall-back nuclear weapons capability must be widely considered not such a bad thing in South Korean governmental circles.
In light of what clearly is a genuine North Korean threat, it would be better in principle if the case against South Korean reprocessing could be argued strictly in terms of energy, as that may be the more effective argument. But given that revision of a 1974 treaty is involved, inevitably the United States will have to make its case on the basis of arms control–and that means it ultimately may have to give in.
If it did, how would the South Korean situation be different from Iran’s, where the United States and the other great powers are taking an ultra-hard line. There are two obvious differences, and they are huge. First, South Korea is pursuing fuel cycle facilities openly, whereas Iran has concealed its efforts whenever it could, in flagrant violation of Nonproliferation Treaty obligations. Second, Iran had an active and comprehensive program to actually develop nuclear weapons, and some elements of that program may be ongoing; if South Korea ever had such a program, it was in an altogether different era and under a different regime.

Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yukio Edano is Person of the Year. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

Foreign Policy Association bloggers write their “Year in Review” posts for their respective topics by Dec. 1 of every year. Of course any Year in Review of Japan will be dominated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis.

Summary of the Past Year

The year started out quietly enough in Japan. Bells gonged at midnight as Buddhist temples rang in the new year. Families crowded Shinto shrines before going home to eat zoni and soba noodles, their length symbolizing longevity. Children received otoshidama, envelopes of spending money. In foreign policy, there were the usual territorial disputes with Russia, China and South Korea. These all seem ironic in retrospect, given that 2011 would become the most tumultuous year in Japan’s post-war history.

Japan’s disaster-in-installments began suddenly on March 11 when the country was hit by the largest earthquake in its history. The tsunami triggered by the 9.0-magnitude quake claimed nearly 20,000 lives and kicked off a crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Rolling blackouts in Tokyo halted production of automobiles and consumer electronics, the lifeblood of Japan’s export-driven economy, which was already mired after more than 20 years of stagflation. Stress mounted in shelters as evacuees grew impatient waiting for help from an indecisive government. Consumer confidence plummeted amidst fears of radiation-tainted food from the Fukushima area.

Politicians from the opposition Liberal Democratic Party called for a no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Naoto Kan. Kan survived the motion, but stepped down in early September due to heavy criticism from the public, the LDP and rival factions within his own Democratic Party of Japan. After promising to resign, Kan became an outspoken critic of the nuclear power industry, playing to popular fears of radiation inborn in the people of Japan, the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons.

Kan was succeeded by Yoshihiko Noda, who was a controversial choice for the government’s top seat given his view that the war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni are not in fact criminals. However, the decision from the DPJ to promote the former Minister of Finance indicates that Tokyo is making economic recovery its top priority.

Most Unexpected Event

The idea of a major earthquake hitting Japan has never been a question of if, but when. Whenever I walked through bustling Shinjuku Station in downtown Tokyo, I would think of the oft-quoted statistic saying that there was a 90 percent chance of a major earthquake hitting Tokyo within the next 50 years. As I looked around at the thousands of faces around me, I was struck by how devastating such a tragedy would be.

Just as Americans will always remember where they were on 9/11, I will always remember where I was on 3/11. When the quake struck, I was a few hundred miles away in Okayama, where I was working at an elementary school. I was leaving school at the time, chatting with a student’s mother as we walked through the parking lot. I didn’t even feel a tremor. After I returned to my apartment, I dove onto my bed fully clothed to take a hard-earned end-of-the-week nap. My wife returned from work about 30 minutes later and said, “There was an earthquake.”

I said, “Where?”

“Near Tokyo.”

“Was it the big one?”

“Looks like it.”

I rolled out of bed and turned on the TV. Live footage showed floods washing over familiar towns in Fukushima and Miyagi where I had passed through two summers before. The fires that always accompany an earthquake issued inspissating clouds of dark smoke obscuring the afternoon sky. The images were incongruous with the sunny sky outside my apartment window. I learned that my sister-in-law was stranded at Ikebukuro Station, but was OK. The first rumors of a shut-down at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant were reported, but took backstage to the human crisis the tsunami had left in its wake.

After the initial shock of the disaster, the Japanese people, who are usually non-confrontational by nature, began to voice frustration with the government’s inaction, partisan bickering and non-transparency in the following months. However, the discontent never reached a level that threatened Tokyo’s authority, and a sense of normalcy eventually returned to the country.

Person of the Year

I declare Yukio Edano as Person of the Year. As Chief Cabinet Secretary for Prime Minister Naoto Kan, Edano had the thankless job of being the face of the government. As he gave updates to the people and press on the situation at Fukushima, he often took the brunt of criticism toward the government. The government was criticized for trying to pacify the population, rather than inform them. One common complaint went something like: “We’re not panicked because we’re afraid of what’s going on, but because we don’t know what’s going on. That is your fault!”

However, Edano worked tirelessly to keep the world informed on the disaster at Fukushima. If updates were piecemeal, it had more to do with Tokyo Electric Power Company trying to hide the true extent of the damage, while covering up their own incompetence. Edano himself criticized TEPCO for keeping Kan’s administration in the dark.

Edano’s efforts began to show on his face, and he eventually gained the admiration of the Japanese people, who value hard work. The Japanese admonished Edano to get some rest with the catchphrase, “Edano nero!” Sleep, Edano!

When Noda succeeded Kan as Prime Minister, he appointed Edano to the prestigious post of Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Forecast for 2012

If the March 11 disaster has taught us anything, it’s that acts of God can make forecasts futile. However, barring another major disaster, I predict Tokyo will attempt to return to and maintain the status quo in 2012.

Changes in Japan are few and far between, and almost always have an outside catalyst. However, when the country does decide to change, it does so at an astonishing pace. Japan’s economy has been kept afloat for the past 20 years by massive pork-barrel spending. I hoped that the March 11 disaster would provide an impetus for change in Japan’s notoriously conservative government. However, for the time being, change in Japan does not appear to be forthcoming, signaled by the government’s intent to rebuild a massive wall of concrete in Tohoku meant to hold back a tsunami, which failed its first test on March 11.

Japan may have no choice but to change. The devastatingly low birthrate and large number of seniors crushing an economy that has had only lackluster growth since 1990 signals the country is on the brink of a demographic crisis. The Japanese are a xenophobic people, and have traditionally been uncomfortable with immigration. Unless the country takes an uncharacteristic 180-degree turn in its sentiment toward foreigners, Japan will be forced to move more jobs overseas to make up for its labor shortage and generate enough capital to take care of its seniors. The obvious choice for this labor pool will be where Japan has turned to in the past: China and Korea. Whether Japan will do this peacefully or return to its historic aggression remains to be seen.