Unstable Trio Endangers the World
It is the perfect strategic storm. The deadly combination of irrational fervour, aggressive nationalism, the unimaginable destructive power of nuclear technology, growing Islamist extremism, continuing terrorist determination, an economically and militarily stretched US and a wide international milieu of festering anti-Americanism, which has not been solved by the election of Barack Obama, means the world is entering the most strategically dangerous period at least since the end of the Cold War, and perhaps for some decades before that.
Pakistan, Iran and North Korea are the three critical states, all likely to come to some sort of crisis in the next year or two.
During the past couple of weeks I have spoken to a great range of strategic analysts, policy-makers and opinion leaders, government and non-government, in Asia, the Middle East, North America and Australia.
There is considerable debate about how acute each looming crisis is.
But there is no serious debate that the trend lines on the key issues are generally negative and that seriously destructive dynamics are gaining momentum.
Taken altogether, the strategic environment is acutely dangerous and getting worse. The toxic mixture of irrational fervour, religious or ideological, and the destructive power of nuclear weapons and material makes the prospect of cataclysmic crisis much more immediate than it has been for a long, long time.
These trends are each disclosed, in relatively straightforward language, in the Rudd Government's just published defence white paper, but no one has yet put them all together. Nonetheless, when aggregated, they form a remarkable official description of a gravely disturbing global situation.
On Pakistan, the most acute crisis of all just now, the white paper says: "Pakistan will remain a pivotally important state. Its prospects will continue to be of concern, given its possession of nuclear weapons, its centrality to success in Afghanistan and the havens for Islamist terrorist networks located in Pakistan and, however remote at present, the risk of a radical Islamist capture of the state."
The risks of a radical Islamist capture of the state have risen greatly in recent weeks as the Pakistani Taliban poured into the Swat Valley, not very far from Islamabad.
The sight of the Pakistan Government virtually ceding the Swat Valley to the Taliban, and the Taliban marching ever closer to Islamabad and Pakistan's arsenal of 75 to 100 nuclear weapons, galvanised the Obama administration into extraordinary urgency, evident in statements from Obama and Hillary Clinton that the situation in Pakistan constituted a mortal threat to US security.
Quite simply, the prospect of the Taliban in possession of nuclear weapons terrifies Washington and ought to terrify everybody else.
In response to Washington's urging, the Pakistani military has hit back at the Taliban and driven them out of many newly occupied territories. But the Pakistani military has acted with much less sophistication and discrimination than the Americans have ever done. They have shelled and bombed whole villages. Perhaps a million people are displaced within Pakistan. The Pakistani military is designed for only one thing: fighting India. It is one of the most incompetent counter-insurgency forces in the world.
Most Western analysts do not believe Pakistan is in danger of imminent state collapse. But they all recognise that the extremists are getting stronger and the state is getting weaker. Obama, who this week met Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai in Washington, has given the impression that Washington has a plan to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons in the event of an emergency. This is almost certainly a bluff. Such an operation would be insanely complex.
Some Indian analysts believe Pakistan is already effectively a failed state. There are really several Pakistans: a civilian government that has lost public confidence and does not control its nation's institutions or its territory; a military that is autonomous, unaccountable, divided and ineffective, and that continues to co-operate with the Afghan Taliban and terrorist groups attacking India; a civilian merchant class that is frustrated and hemmed in; and an active civil society that is denied any power.
The central crisis in Pakistan is the attitude of the military. It will not reorient itself away from confronting India, which plays to its vanity, to confronting internal terror, much of which it has fostered for different reasons through the years. It will confront terrorists only spasmodically as a response to US pressure. The terrorists have great power in this situation. One more Mumbai-style terror attack on India and New Delhi will have to launch a military reprisal, which would again see the Pakistani military focus on India.
In Afghanistan, the Pakistani military believes the Americans will eventually leave and its Taliban friends will still be a conduit of Pakistani influence.
Until the Pakistani military makes a fundamental change in orientation, identity and purpose, Pakistan will remain mired in crisis. Afghanistan represents at best a burning stalemate, as the white paper acknowledges by suggesting it will require Western intervention during at least "the next decade".
The Obama surge, supported by Canberra, will not change the situation on the ground. The best hope is to break the link between al-Qa'ida and the Taliban. The Taliban are intensely tribal and diverse. A political strategy of dividing the Taliban and reconciling some of them to the Karzai Government in Kabul is the most promising.
On Iran, there is not a strategic analyst in the world who does not believe the mullahs of Tehran are determined to acquire at least sufficient nuclear material and technical capacity to stand on the brink of immediate nuclear weapons breakout.
Opinion is divided about whether Iran at this stage wants to possess a full suite of nuclear weapons.
The white paper is soberly (and in my view soundly) pessimistic, saying: "The number of states with weapons of mass destruction over the next 20 to 30 years is likely to increase, with the possible addition of Iran to the group of states with nuclear weapons."
Some analysts believe the US will have to learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. But such an Iran will be greatly enhanced in its support of terrorists, some of whom certainly seek at least a radiological weapon.
Further, Iran believes the US is in retreat in the Middle East and is stepping up efforts to dominate the region.
Iran is fired by three factors: a sense of historic destiny and opportunity; rampant nationalism; and authentic religious fervour.
Iran will be an acute crisis for the Obama administration. Israel believes a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat. It may very well decide to strike Iran's nuclear program. The problems with that are three: it's technically difficult; it may be indecisive; and it would unleash new and perhaps uncontrollable forces. Israel wants the US to do the job.
This will be no easy decision for Obama. If he has made a full diplomatic effort with Iran and been rebuffed, it would be a very big decision to allow Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually every non-Israeli strategic analyst who urges caution in responding to Iran ends by saying: "Of course, I might feel differently about this if I were an Israeli."
North Korea is in some ways the least threatening of the first-tier crises. It already possesses a half-dozen nuclear weapons and has not been able to change the strategic orientation of its neighbours. But its leadership is saying it will soon conduct another nuclear test. In the past, it has tended to deliver on such threats.
It is not a sponsor of terrorism but, although a rational actor, at times it has been reckless. It will sell nuclear technology to whoever will buy it, as was evident in the nuclear reactor under construction in Syria, which the Israelis bombed to bits in 2007.
The prospect of the North Koreans selling a nuclear device or material for a dirty bomb to cashed-up terrorists is significant.
As the white paper comments: "Terrorists will keep aspiring to develop or acquire chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. A WMD attack by a non-state actor in the coming decades cannot be ruled out."
These crises are unfolding against a background of several other disturbing trends. China is engaged in a extensive military build-up designed to challenge US supremacy in the Pacific, and new technical developments in cyber warfare make Western computer-based systems ever more vulnerable to hostile states and, in due course, even to terrorists.
The worst-case scenarios in each of the contingencies listed in this article are possibilities rather than probabilities. Indeed, any one may be relatively unlikely. But they are all serious possibilities. Each has a substantial chance of occurring.
The perfect strategic storm? Certainly, it is frighteningly close.
