Game Called on Account of Fog

Game 1 of the Japan Series was called in the seventh inning on account of fog, but the Chiba Lotte Marines were given the win because they were ahead 10-1 at the time. The Japan Times reports:

The game was interrupted by fog in the seventh inning as umpires pulled players off the field after Benny Agbayani's two-run homer.

Almost 40 minutes later, home plate umpire Minoru Nakamura called the game.

Lotte's Tomoya Satozaki, Agbayani and Lee Seung Yeop all homered, and Saburo Omura doubled in a pair of runs for the victors....

"It was too bad we didn't get to play nine innings," Lotte manager Bobby Valentine said. "[Starting pitcher] Shimizu was fantastic."

Lotte's powerful offense had little trouble putting runs on the board, as the Marines reached base in every inning.

Starting with the bottom of the fifth, Lotte scored in three straight innings, taking control of the game.

Good for the Marines. And good for the White Sox in the World Series. I hope Game 2 in Chicago is not called on account of snow.

UPDATE: The Japan Times also explains the frustrations of trying to keep up with either Japanese or American baseball on Japanese broadcast channels. (Frustrations other than the broadcast-channel tendency to end coverage exactly on the half-hour, even if it's a tie game in the 9th inning with the top of the order due up to bat.)

This is 2005, the 21st century, the age of cable and satellite and, if you are a baseball fan looking to see the games live, but you don't have extra-terrestrial reception capability, it is going to get worse.

Probably, within a few years, fewer and fewer games will be telecast on the conventional channels, and more and more will be on cable or satellite.

But, to look at it from the opposite angle, it is going to get better. It has gotten better. A lot better.

Go back about 25 years, and all we got on TV throughout Japan were the Tokyo Giants games, home and road, picked up an hour into the game and usually cut off long before the final out was recorded.

Today, if you have the right systems, you can get all six Japan pro baseball games any day of the season, from the first pitch all the way through the hero interview, even if the game goes 12 innings or five hours.

We can also get two or three MLB games per day during the season, all the playoff games and the World Series, live and in English.

What more do you want?

Japanese Pilot's Diary, 3 January 1945

January 3, 1945, cloudy then clear, rain in the evening

We've had stews for the past three days. Today's was the most delicious, perhaps because it was made with a miso broth. I couldn't stomach the strange smell of the herring roe, though. The roe would have been fine if it had been soaked in water for two or three days. Serving things that even the Payroll Department couldn't eat was just for show and was irresponsible.

Take-yan read my fortune with cards. According to what he said--in the tone of a real diviner--I would be poor and struggle, and my social standing and advancement were uncertain. My future was exceedingly uninteresting. Will Dad die before me and Mom live on? Even if I had a romantic relationship, he told me, I'd be completely rejected and defeated. He says that I absolutely will not be bound to anyone and that a man I would approve of will appear, steal her heart, and steadily captivate her. And apparently I will die young. Well, that can't be helped, and besides that's my basic wish. What's strange is that she's going to die young, too.

If he's this sort of diviner, he doesn't need to borrow any cards. When I laughed and said, "If you offer fortunes like this, your business will fail," he said, "Because I do it only when asked, I don't give discounts or do it for free." He nonchalantly and noisily began to eat a pomelo. He gazed longingly at a second pomelo that was big and looked like a head, and he finished that off, too.

I remember that it was two years ago today that I got a thirty-six-hour pass and went home, together with a student pilot at Yatabe, my chest festooned with seven medals. A send-off party was held, and lots of sake was poured. My older brother Kitaro made a speech. I recall that he pointed out that it was the anniversary of the fall of Manila.

I'd like to reflect on that. It's been a full three years since the fall of Manila. Hasn't Manila been transformed into the site of frontline fighting? In that time there was the change of course at Guadalcanal. There was the gyokusai ['jewel shattering' = honorable fight to the death = total annihilation] at Attu Island. The gyokusai at Kwajalein and Rota. The many infuriating results continue: the gyokusai at Tarawa and Makin and more recently the gyokusai at Saipan and Tinian at this time last summer. But we are not defeated. We're winning. We are definitely winning this war. While everywhere we rout two or three times as many enemy and achieve splendid victories, resistance is hard, quantitatively, and we go off to commit gyokusai, pledging resolutely to save the country for seven lifetimes. Decisive battles are now taking place in the Philippines. At the moment, Japan will make a comeback with this last stand, break the enemy's nose, and push with irresistible force, push to the end.

Both the army and the navy have formed special-attack units and are continuing the intense and endless battles. I believe that 1945 is the autumn of emergencies when the Yamato race, one million strong, will choose death and make a last stand. I am overcome with emotion as I remember my send-off two years ago.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 65-66

Japanese Pilot's Diary, 8 April 1945

April 8, 1945, clear

In the morning we practiced dropping thousand-kilogram practice bombs. One bomb was twenty meters off the target, and a second misfired.

The engines of our planes were in great shape, and we were in good spirits. Preparations for the attack.

This time--I'm definitely not expecting to return alive.

No, it's not that I don't expect to return alive. I simply intend to body-crash, and thus my dying can't be avoided, can it?

I'll get myself ready, write my last letters, and make arrangements for the things I'll leave behind.

In the end, my life will have been twenty-two years long.

I'll smear the decks of enemy warships with this teenager's blood. It'll be wonderful!

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), p. 79

The pilot, Itabashi Yasuo, died in a special-attack flight on 9 August 1945.

Pop Culture vs. Corruption in Romania, Take 2

Matt Welch has another update on Romania in the October 2005 edition of Reason that reprises the theme of his 17 July 2004 essay in Canada's National Post headlined "Rapping the Commies Away: A New MTV Generation in Romania Tries to Drive out Corruption."

Welch's current title is perhaps a tad overoptimistic: "The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised: The TV show Dallas helped overthrow Ceausescu. Now gangsta rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet thugs." But he gives a vivid account of developments in Romanian pop culture during and after the Ceausescu era. Here's how it ends.

Pop culture, once beaten down to virtual nonexistence, has now become a valuable export. In the summer of 2004, the Moldavian-Romanian boy band O-Zone scored Europe’s No. 1 pop and dance hit, the unbearably catchy single “Dragostea Din Tei,” which topped the charts in at least 27 countries and sold more than 8 million copies. (You’ve probably heard it—think relentless Euro disco, and the phonetic phrase “Numa numa yay.”) And popular gangsta rap bands like Parazitii ['The Parasites'], despite suffering greatly from domestic piracy and the censorious ways of the National Audio Visual Council (which banned one video simply for the reasonable couplet “alcohol is life/life is alcohol”), have still managed to sell nearly 1 million CDs since Ceausescu was shot.

Unlike the 1989 generation of anti-communist students, these twentysomethings didn’t taste the clubs of miners, didn’t help overthrow an odious tyrant, and didn’t worship at the altar of a 1980s TV show that glorified a morally corrupt business tycoon. “We were more into Seinfeld,” Parazitii manager Munteanu says. Not to mention foul-mouthed 1990s Compton rap sensation N.W.A. “You really need freedom to do this kind of music, you know?”

But their revulsion at corruption, coupled with a government that shares it, offers serious hope that post-communist Europe’s red-headed stepchild will finally emerge from its long, dark shadow and create a country far more free, successful, and interesting.

“On a recent and fairly rare venture into Bucharest’s club scene, I looked at the trendy crowd and felt for a moment that I could have been in Manhattan or South Beach,” said former U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest, who led a daily crusade against Romanian corruption during his three-year tenure, in an exit interview with the monthly magazine Vivid, one of nearly a dozen English-language publications in Bucharest. “Then a series of young people brought me back to reality, stopping one by one at the table to thank me for speaking [out].... Those who think they’re getting away with corruption are just fooling themselves. A new generation is coming, and it will demand, and indeed create, change.”

And maybe some new wealth. But are the music and film industries really going to help eliminate corruption? Only by motivating voters without fostering cynicism. Otherwise, I would guess that straight-laced bankers are going to be a lot more critical in the fight against corruption than pop musicians.

Dangers of One-Party Control in a U.S. Democracy

The explosive outbreak in 1997 of a long-simmering scandal in Hawai‘i illustrates the dangers of one political party exercising full control of all three branches of a U.S.-style government for over four decades. In Hawai‘i's case, Democrats maintained constant control of the legislature, the governor's office, and the judiciary--while the state Supreme Court justices appointed the trustees of the largest charitable trust in the country. But Republicans are in no way immune to the same pernicious disease, whether at the state or national level.

University of Hawai‘i law professor Randall Roth was instrumental in bringing the extent of the scandal to public attention and forcing state and federal officials to begin attempts to redress the sorry state of affairs. Here's an excerpt from his article in the journal of the International Center for Not-for-profit Law in 1999. Much has changed since that time.

Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate (KS/BE) was established 114 years ago by the will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the great-granddaughter and last descendant of King Kamehameha the Great. Initial funding of this charitable trust consisted of roughly 10% of the Kingdom of Hawaii's land mass, including all of Waikiki. The KS/BE corpus today is estimated to be worth approximately $10 billion, including a 10% interest in Goldman Sachs....

The will directs that trustees be chosen by justices of the "Supreme Court," which at the time of the princess' death meant the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaii. But Supreme Court justices continued to make the selections when Hawaii was a republic, territory and state ... until late last year. It was then that four of the five justices, bowing to public pressure, agreed not to participate in future trustee selections. The one dissenter has suggested privately that he has authority to make future selections "as a majority of one." In past years, the justices did not hesitate to decide cases involving the trustees they selected. But earlier this year, the justices agreed to recuse themselves in such matters.

HIGHLY COMPENSATED TRUSTEES. KS/BE trustees have paid themselves annual fees averaging about $900,000 each. They argue that this has been within the compensation cap set by mechanical application of Hawaii's statutory fee provision. But the nation's preeminent authority on trust law has called this formula "practically incomprehensible ... an awful statute." Among other problems, it does not define "revenue," "income" and "general profits." As a result, it is not clear in what circumstances net income as opposed to gross income is to be used, or to what extent capital losses are to be offset against capital gains.

These ambiguities take on greater meaning when you consider a few numbers. During the three-year period currently under review by a court-appointed master, the trustees experienced losses and loss reserves totaling $241 million. This exceeded investment income from all sources, including Goldman Sachs. Plus, annual management and general expenses rose from $42 million to $52 million to $61 million. According to the master, the total return for this three-year period was minus 1.0%.

Due to a dramatic, last-minute floor vote on the floor of the state House of Representatives, the 1998 Legislature replaced the statutory fee formula with a simple requirement that trustee compensation always be "reasonable under the circumstances." The bill had been bottled up in the House Judiciary Committee (whose chair has for years received a $4,000 monthly retainer from KS/BE), and was actively fought by the Speaker of the House (who recently received a $132,000 consulting fee on a KS/BE land transaction).

POLITICAL CONNECTIONS. One of the current trustees was Speaker of the state House of Representatives at the time of his appointment in 1984 and for several years thereafter. Another had been President of the state Senate just prior to being appointed a trustee. A third had just been chairman of the state Judicial Selection Commission, and a fourth was a physical education teacher turned state Department of Education administrator who recently had served as chairperson of the sitting Governor's re-election committee on the island of Maui. The fifth trustee, Oswald Stender, is sometimes called the accidental trustee. Unlike the other four, he is not politically active and was not the first choice of any justice. Stender emerged as a compromise candidate only when the justices reached a stalemate over other candidates, one of whom was generally regarded at that time as a political "king maker." Stender is the only trustee with CEO-like credentials. [All trustees have now been replaced.--J]

Cynics sometimes point out that members of the Judicial Selection Commission are selected by the Speaker of the House, President of the Senate and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court ... and that KS/BE trustees in recent years have included a Speaker of the House, President of the Senate and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Governor also selects Commission members, and the most recent trustee is the best friend and political confidant of the Governor. [emphasis added]

The law firm of another recent Judicial Selection Commission chairman has received $15 million in fees from KS/BE since his tenure on the Commission, and the law firm of a former Governor received millions in fees soon after he left office in 1995.

Unsuccessful candidates for justice of the state Supreme Court have described being quizzed by members of the Judicial Selection Commission about who they might be inclined to name as a KS/BE trustee. These candidates concluded that no one gets appointed to the high court in Hawaii unless they answer this question "correctly."

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has a special website devoted to its extensive coverage of this evolving story between 1997 and 2003.

U.S. Embassy Beijing, 5-8 June 1989

President [George H.W.] Bush called me Monday morning, June 5th [1989]. Earlier that day in Washington, in his first official comment on the crackdown, the president had announced a ban on new weapons sales and suspension of military contacts. In our phone conversation, I told President Bush that things were pretty calm on the ground but that my main concern was the safety of American citizens in Peking, particularly American students living at Peking universities that were the locus of the student movements.

At the U.S. Embassy, we were already getting heat from the American press, which had gathered en masse in front of the embassy at 7 that morning, clamoring to know how the embassy was going to safeguard the lives of Americans in Peking. Fortunately for the U.S. government, McKinney Russell, a career officer at the old United States Information Agency, was an experienced hand. Russell knew that any story, once the fighting subsides, becomes a local story. He had called me at about 6:30 a.m. that morning, and we got our cue cards together. Yes, we assured the journalists, we had scouted out evacuation routes and organized buses to get students out of harm's way and take them to hotels or to the embassy. We fended off the hungry journalists, but we knew they would be coming back for more.

At this point, I should have put into place a general evacuation order as some other embassies had done, in particular the Japanese and French Embassies. I would have saved myself a lot of headache, but we went about it piecemeal. We started evacuating students on Monday, and on Tuesday embassy personnel started calling all Americans to urge them to leave Peking. But we waited until Wednesday, June 7, to inform American residents of a voluntary evacuation procedure for all Americans. Initially, I relied on the Consular Section, which has the responsibility for the welfare of American citizens, to do the calling and planning. Later, at [military attaché Jack] Leide's suggestion, I switched the evacuation planning to the military attaché's office because, as military men, they were better organized to handle this sort of crisis operation.

[Assistant military attaché] Larry Wortzel's frustration over delays was the catalyst for the change. On June 8, after scouting evacuation routes and informing American citizens of collection points, Wortzel returned to the embassy prepared to lead a convoy of embassy vehicles at 11 a.m. But he discovered that little progress had been made in assembling the convoy. Diplomats and others were haggling over insignificant details, like who would drive which car. Wortzel stormed out of the room, cursing a blue streak. He bumped right into me. Ten minutes later, I found Wortzel in his office. I dumped the batch of motor pool keys on his desk. "You are in charge," I said. "Get this convoy out of here in 30 minutes."

The delays brought all sorts of opprobrium down our--largely, my--head. Disgruntled Americans gave the media the story they wanted: The American government wasn't performing well in a crisis. Stories appeared in the stateside press about the embassy's "failure" to assist U.S. citizens trying to get out of China. Magnifying the "failure" was news footage from Peking that showed a city under lockdown with the possibility of more clashes. There was talk of civil war between branches of the Chinese military, which had different views of the crackdown. The reports were wrong. At the embassy, we knew from accurate reporting by Wortzel that rumors of a split in the PLA were overstated. It turns out that a Canadian military attaché, who had never been trained in ground combat, asserted to the press that civil war between ground troops was imminent. The attaché had looked at tanks facing outward on a highway overpass with guns pointed in three directions and come to his erroneous conclusion. This fueled the rumor mill racing around Peking and over the airways.

Nevertheless, despite our best efforts, I was behind the curve. Hysteria set in on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Our Citizen Services Center started getting about 2,000 calls a day from Americans concerned about family members in China, and politicians in Washington excoriated the Bush administration for failing to act to protect Americans. I had people badmouthing me in Peking and all over the U.S.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 324-326

Niall Ferguson on Europe and China

Economic historian Niall Ferguson contrasts Europe and China in today's LA Times.

EUROPEAN UNION finance ministers went to China last week. Their trip may shatter the complacency that seems to pervade European capitals these days. "Wake up and smell the coffee" is what we like to say here in the U.S. when we encounter complacency. But it's the Chinese green tea that the Europeans need to wake up and smell....

Today, as a result of reforms dating to the late 1970s, China has the most dynamic economy in the world and quite possibly in all history. Europe, by contrast, is fast becoming the "sick man" of the developed world — a title held until recently by Japan.

Over the last decade, according to the International Monetary Fund's latest World Economic Outlook report, growth in the core economies of the EU that make up the Eurozone has been a sluggish 2% per year. Growth in China has been more than four times faster. In dollar terms, China's gross domestic product is already about one-fifth the size of the Eurozone. Project those growth rates forward and China could overtake the Eurozone within 30 years.

Europe's sluggish growth is only one of several reasons why China's leaders rank the EU significantly behind the United States in the global pecking order. Leave aside the two other big reasons, lack of military clout and lack of significant energy reserves, both of which make Russia seem more important to Beijing than Europe. And purely as a potential market for China's exports, Europe seems less promising than China's own Asian neighbors.

via RealClearPolitics

Lotte Marines Clinch Pennant!

I'm happy to see the long-suffering White Sox in the U.S. World Series. Last year about this time, I was wondering whether this year would see an all-Chicago series between the Cubs and the Sox. The major drawback of the White Sox victory over the Angels is that it brings to an end Matt Welch's season of sharply informed comment on the national pastime.

Meanwhile, Japan's Pacific League playoffs have ended, too, with gratifying results.

FUKUOKA (AP) Bobby Valentine's Chiba Lotte Marines are going to the Japan Series for the first time in 31 years.

Tomoya Satozaki doubled in a pair of runs in the top of the eighth inning at Yahoo Dome on Monday as the Marines defeated the Softbank Hawks 3-2 in Game 5 of the Pacific League's second stage playoffs to advance to the Japan Series, where they will face the Central League champion Hanshin Tigers.

"I don't think either team should have lost," said Valentine. "The Hawks are a great team and the Marines are a great team and I congratulate everyone in the organization."

The Marines, who last played in the Japan Series in 1974 when they were known as the Lotte Orions, will open the best-of-seven championship on Saturday at Chiba Marine Stadium.

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to root for the Nankai Hawks, while my Dad would root for their archrivals, the Daimai Orions. Now I'm happy to see the successors of the Orions beat the Hawks, mostly because the Hawks have been rather unfair toward foreign players, while the Marines have gone so far as to hire a foreign manager, not to mention one of Hawai‘i baseball's favorite sons, Benny Agbayani.

In a sloppy piece (see comments) from 2001, Scott Gorman at JapanBall.com described the Hawks' attitude toward foreign players who threaten their manager's home run record.

On September 24th, [Tuffy] Rhodes, a journeyman when he played in America, did the unthinkable: He tied Sadaharu Oh’s decades-old record for most home runs in a season when he belted number 55. That he was even granted a chance to tie and perhaps surpass Oh, the unchallenged king of Japanese baseball as a player and now the manager of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, may be a testament to how much attitudes towards American players have changed in Japan, just as the immense popularity of Ichiro Suzuki in the United States signals a sea change in the American acceptance of Japanese players.

In contrast, consider the case of Randy Bass, an American slugger of an earlier era, who in 1985 was denied even the opportunity to challenge Oh. When he got close, Japanese players and managers appalled at the thought of an American (and it must be said in race-conscious Japan, an African-American player to boot) taking home the precious record intentionally walked or hit him every time he came to the plate in the last games of the season. Oh said nothing.

But this year, Oh let it be known that Rhodes should have a chance without prejudice, much to his credit. Perhaps he suddenly remembered that as a young player, before he was anointed, he took lots of guff because his mother was born in Taiwan, and he therefore was not a “pure” Japanese. [Oh's family name is Wang in Chinese, and more likely came from his father's side.] Rhodes’ lot was made easier by the fact that he showed proper respect for the record and the personage of Oh all year, much to the dismay of the Japanese sporting press, who love to create screaming headlines.

(But perhaps Oh still had mixed feelings, at least about seeing his 37-year-old record broken in front of him. In a game against Oh’s Fukuoka Daiei Hawks on September 30th, Rhodes was walked or given impossible-to-hit pitches, despite Oh’s statement that he wanted everything on the level. Were Oh’s coaches acting against his wishes? Hard to say, but unlikely. But the general principle remained; Rhodes, it was maintained, was still be given his chances, apparently just not against the Hawks).

UPDATE: Tom of That's News to Me notes that Gorman seems to have mixed up Randy Bass, who's white, with Tuffy Rhodes, who's black.

The Interrogation of Kim Hyun Hee

On November 29, 1987 ... a powerful bomb exploded on a Korean Air Lines (KAL) jetliner over the Andaman Sea on its way from Abu Dhabi to Seoul. All 115 passengers and crewmembers were killed....

Moving swiftly after news of the plane's disappearance, the Bahrain Intelligence Service had determined that the passport of Mayumi Hachiya, a 25-Year-old Japanese woman traveling with her father and registered on the first leg of KAL 858 from Baghdad to Abu Dhabi, was a fake. On November 31 at the airport in Bahrain, where the two had flown in an attempt to get home from Abu Dhabi, the suspicious pair was apprehended by Bahraini police as they were about to board a flight for Rome. The elderly man, who turned out to be a veteran North Korean secret agent, bit into a cyanide-laced cigarette and died instantly. Bahrain Police Chief Ian Henderson, however, grabbed for a similarly poisoned cigarette on the lips of the young woman. She hesitated for a moment, and Henderson flicked the cigarette out of her mouth. The young woman survived. To this day, Henderson, an Englishman by birth, shows curious visitors the scar on his finger where the young woman bit him when he reached for the "cigarette."

At first, with her interrogators the young woman stuck steadfastly to her cover story that she was a Chinese orphan who had grown up in Japan and who had had nothing to do with the bombing. But her actions belied her story. In one violent outburst in Bahrain, enraged by a line of questioning about her sexual past, she felled a female interpreter with a palm-heel strike to the nose, delivered a hammer-fist punch to the groin of Henderson, and then grabbed for his pistol. She was about to shoot herself with the pistol when she was jolted by an electric stun gun. Her rage prompted Henderson to send her to Seoul. "Get her out of here. She belongs to the South Koreans now," Henderson said.

The man who took Kim Hyun Hee--her real name--back to Seoul was Vice Foreign Minister Park Soo Kil. Park flew to Bahrain shortly after the KAL 858 explosion with three agents from the Agency for National Security Planning, also known as the KCIA, to demonstrate to the Bahrain authorities that Kim was indeed a North Korean agent. Chief among the evidence was an analysis of the cyanide-laced cigarettes, which showed them to be the same type used by North Korean agents apprehended in South Korea. Bahrain was getting pressure from unfriendly countries such as Syria to send her to China. Park told Bahrain government officials that the longer the suspected terrorist stayed in their country, the more at risk Bahrain would be to a rescue attempt by North Korea that could leave more people dead, likely Bahrainis. Finally, after Kim's attack, the Bahrain government let her return with him.

In Seoul, under twenty-four-hour observation and subject to in-depth questioning to which she replied in either Japanese or Chinese, Kim broke and confessed. On the eighth day of her interrogation, she collapsed upon the breast of a woman interrogator and said in Korean, "Forgive me. I am sorry. I will tell you everything." The interrogation had been conducted masterfully by the South Koreans. They had observed the way she expertly made her bed every morning as if she had had prolonged military training, uncovered discrepancies in her story, like her incorrect use of southern Chinese words to describe life in northern China, and cajoled her by taking her on a tour of Seoul.

She admitted to helping place a radio time bomb with liquid explosive in the overhead luggage rack of KAL 858 while on the Baghdad to Abu Dhabi leg and then deplaning with her fellow agent. Kim revealed that the two North Koreans had been traveling overseas, disguised as father and daughter, for more than three years in preparation for the operation. Interestingly, the South Koreans used the fact that Kim had said she was originally from China to get back at the North Koreans. They communicated to Peking through the New China News Agency in Hong Kong that "your North Korean friends have put this monkey on your back." The Chinese were upset--and probably embarrassed....

For the bombing of KAL 858, the U.S. put North Korea on its list of countries engaged in terrorism and started to assist South Korea in security arrangements for the upcoming [1988] Olympics. In a meeting with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in March 1988, President Reagan received assurances that there would be no North Korean terrorist attacks at the Olympics.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 283-284, 286-287

Mullah Omar and Bin Laden: New Friends, Not Old

Since September 2001, Mullah Omar has been widely portrayed as an old friend of Osama bin Laden's. Richard C. Clarke, the CIA counterintelligence chief, said that Mullah Omar and bin Laden were old friends and that Mullah Omar was anxious for bin Laden to return to Afghanistan from Sudan. [Former Taliban intelligence chief] Khaksar denies this, saying the two had never met until after the Taliban took control of Kabul in September 1996.

Clarke said Bin Laden was encouraged by Mullah Omar to come to Afghanistan from Sudan to build training camps and bring his money. That's plain wrong. The terrorist training camps flourished under the mujahedeen government [1992-1996], the opponents of the Taliban. Osama bin Laden came to Afghanistan from Sudan with the help of the mujahedeen government.

The Taliban had become, by 2001, a loathsome repressive regime. But that does not justify or explain why the CIA revised history in order to connect bin Laden and Mullah Omar in those early days of the Taliban movement. The CIA should have known that Osama bin Laden's friends were the men of the Northern Alliance, men like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the very men it would later choose to help hunt bin Laden.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 31-32

Kandahar, 1986: City of Music and Rubble

It's a bizarre twist that the Taliban movement, with its horrific repressiveness and abhorrence of music and mysticism, should have come out of Kandahar, where ritual worship at shrines is widespread. That region is home to the [Sufi] Pirs, clerics who trace their lineage to Islam's prophet and have mystical qualities that are revered, their feet and hands kissed.

The severe interpretation of Islam that the Taliban eventually embraced with such vigor came from the outsiders who would take it over, the Afghans trained at Pakistani madrassas, and later by the austere philosophy of Wahabi Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia and the Arab militants who would later wield such control.

Kandahar was not a city of severe Islam in 1986. Kandaharis were not anti-Western ideologues, but in fact just the opposite. The mujahedeen, who arranged my clandestine visit to Kandahar city, were Pashtun tribesmen, kinsmen of Mullah Omar. They drove throughout the region on motorcycles.

In their homes in bomb-shattered villages were old dust-clogged tape recorders that blared Pashtu songs. The most popular singer was a Pashtu chanteuse named Nagma, who sang of love lost, new love.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), p. 33

Rashid on the Pakistani Military vs. Mother Nature

In today's Daily Telegraph, Ahmed Rashid questions how well Pakistan's military rulers will survive the latest huge natural disaster to hit the region.

The last time the Pakistan army rode to the rescue of its citizens after a massive natural disaster, the result was a civil war and the loss of half the country.

That was in 1970, when half a million people in what was then East Pakistan drowned as a result of typhoons and floods, and the delay of the army in launching a relief effort led to enormous public anger and the eventual creation of Bangladesh....

So far the army has been woefully slow in reacting to the disaster. Its much vaunted Crisis Management Cell - set up after 9/11, run by army officers and modelled on America's National Security Council - has itself been an abysmal disaster. Management on the ground has been superficial at best. Stories abound, such as the one about a 72-man team of Spanish rescuers and their sniffer dogs being kept waiting for 48 hours at Islamabad airport before someone told them where to go. But as the army operation kicks in, bolstered by foreign aid, money and helicopters, public anger will recede.

One may well ask why the seventh largest army in the world is holding its hand out for helicopters and tents when America has supplied dozens of helicopters since 9/11 and the country is one of the largest tent manufacturers in the world.

The army itself holds thousands of tents in stock, along with tens of thousands of tins of foodstuffs and blankets - which do not seem to have been released. Perhaps this is because the army continues to fight an insurgency in Balochistan and al-Qa'eda remnants in Waziristan along the border with Afghanistan. These operations are on-going even as the army runs the relief effort.

It has not gone unnoticed among Western intelligence agencies that the epicentre of the quake is also the epicentre of the camps run by Pakistani extremist groups affiliated to al-Qa'eda, where hundreds of Kashmiri militants and Afghans are being trained.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has pointed the area out to visiting Western leaders on a map as being the centre of Taliban resurgence. The Kashmiris trained in this area still cross the Line of Control to ambush Indian patrols. The army, wishing to continue to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan, has turned a blind eye to these activities. While the army is likely to be wary of allowing Western aid agencies running pell-mell all over Azad Kashmir, it will now be impossible to keep these camps hidden and to continue training.

One positive result of the earthquake may be greater international and Pakistani civilian pressure to close these camps, thereby speeding up the peace process with India.

via RealClearPolitics

Kaplan on the Modern Military vs. Mother Nature

In today's New York Times, Robert D. Kaplan develops a point he made after last year's Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.

With the global population now at six billion, humans are living in urban concentrations in an unprecedented number of seismically, climatically and environmentally fragile areas. The earthquake-stricken region of Pakistan saw a doubling of its population in recent decades, certainly a factor in the death toll of more than 20,000. The tsunami in Asia last December showed the risks to the rapidly growing cities along the Indian Ocean. China's booming population occupies flood zones. Closer to home, cities like Memphis and St. Louis lie along the New Madrid fault line, responsible for a major earthquake nearly 200 years ago when those cities barely existed; and the hurricane zone along the southern Atlantic Coast and earthquake-prone areas of California continue to be developed. More human beings are going to be killed or made homeless by Mother Nature than ever in history.

When such disasters occur, security systems break down and lawlessness erupts. The first effect of the earthquake in the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad was widespread looting - just as in New Orleans. Relief aid is undermined unless those who would help the victims can monopolize the use of force. That requires troops.

But even using our troops in our own country is controversial: the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 strictly limits the use of troops inside the United States. The Gulf Coast devastation has helped remind us that this law was enacted in a rural America at a time when natural disasters took a relatively small human toll, and such calamities were viewed more fatalistically.

In a nation and a world where mass media and the Internet spread the word of disaster so effectively, impassioned calls to do something can quickly erode constitutional concerns, political differences and worries over sovereignty. Just as Pakistan has now agreed to accept aid from its rival India, Iran accepted help from the United States Air Force after the earthquake in Bam in 2003. The very people who typically denounce the American military will surely be complaining about its absence should our troops not show up after a major natural calamity.

Indeed, because of our military's ability to move quickly into new territory and establish security perimeters, it is emerging as the world's most effective emergency relief organization. There is a saying among soldiers: amateurs discuss strategy, while professionals discuss logistics. And if disaster assistance is about anything, it's about logistics - moving people, water, food, medical supplies and heavy equipment to save lives and communities. We also have our National Guard, which is made up primarily of men in their 30's (many of whom are police officers and firefighters in civilian life) trained to deal effectively with the crowds of rowdy young men that tend to impede relief work.

via RealClearPolitics

The Seduction of Mullah Omar

The Taliban had a lot to offer Pakistan. They could provide strong Pashtun allies in Afghanistan, something Pakistan desperately needed because its only other significant Pashtun ally was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen prime minister who hadn't yet set foot in Kabul, choosing to stay outside the city and pound it with rockets in an attempt to dislodge his rival and the current defense minister, Ahmed Shah Masood....

The Taliban could also provide training and inspiration for the jihadis that Pakistan was using with such ferocity in Indian-ruled Kashmir, a small former princedom that both India and Pakistan claimed as their own....

It wasn't difficult to co-opt the Taliban. Pakistan insinuated its control slowly and insidiously. It used Pakistani mullahs like those attending the meeting in Kandahar to mold and manipulate Mullah Omar. Additionally, the ISI recruited Afghans trained at Pakistani madrassas to infiltrate Mullah Omar's inner circle. One of Pakistan's handpicked men was Tayyab Aga, barely thirty-five years old and a perfect English speaker. He would eventually become Mullah Omar's spokesman, rarely leaving his side. He won Mullah Omar's confidence through sheer persistence.

Every day, he and his friends would sit outside Mullah Omar's office in Kandahar and send in messages, pleading to see the one-eyed leader. Mullah Omar didn't always answer their messages. Sometimes they waited weeks before being called in to see him. But they were patient men.

Each time, they would fill his head with flattery, praising him for his commitment to Islam, to the purity of the Sharia law that he had imposed. The seduction went on for months.

A measure of their progress was that eventually some of the founding members of the Taliban, men like [intelligence chief Mullah Mohammad] Khaksar, had trouble seeing Omar. Khaksar said: "It changed slowly. I used to walk into his office unannounced, drink tea and talk. But then it changed. I couldn't easily see him. He was always too busy and when we did get in they were always there, these mullahs from Pakistan or these new Afghan mullahs talking nonsense."

The real triumph for Pakistan and for its Afghan surrogates came in the first months of 1996 on the day that Mullah Omar removed the Cloak of Islam's Prophet from its sacred resting place, unseen since 1935, and in front of more than 1,500 mullahs who had traveled to Kandahar, declared himself Amir-ul Momineen, or King of the Faithful.

This act of hubris turned even the Muslim countries against the Taliban, reducing their circle of international friends and making them more dependent on Pakistan. It also inspired the Islamic zealots, those jihadis Pakistan had been nurturing so carefully.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 41-42

Anti-DDT Trumps Antimalaria in the West

An op-ed by Sebastian Mallaby in today's Washington Post hits on a topic that was once close to my liver and is now closer to my heart, enforced disarmament in the battle against malaria.

Some 500 million people still get the disease annually, and at least 1 million die, but the World Health Organization refuses to recommend DDT spraying. The U.S. government's development programs don't purchase any of the chemical. In June President Bush made a great show of announcing a new five-year push against malaria; DDT appears to play no part in his plans.

But the worst culprit is the European Union. It not only refuses to fund DDT spraying: In the case of at least one country, it has also threatened to punish DDT use with import restrictions.

That country is Uganda, which suffered a crippling 12 million cases of malaria in a population of 27 million in 2003. The Ugandans know perfectly well that DDT can help them: As Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute recently testified to Congress, DDT spraying in one part of the country in 1959 and 1960 reduced the prevalence of malaria from 22 percent to less than 1 percent. Ugandans also know the record in South Africa, where the cessation of DDT spraying in 1996 allowed the number of malaria cases to multiply tenfold and where the resumption of spraying in 2000 helped to bring the caseload down by almost 80 percent.

So the Ugandans, not unreasonably, would like to use DDT. But in February the European Union waved an anti-scientific flag at them. The Europeans said Uganda might need to institute a new food monitoring program to assuage the health concerns of their consumers, even though hundreds of millions have been exposed to DDT without generating any solid evidence that the chemical harms people. The E.U. proposal might constitute an impossible administrative burden on a poor country. Anti-malaria campaigners say that other African governments are wary of even considering DDT, having seen what Uganda has gone through.

Please read the rest.

I've only experienced the mildest form of malaria, Plasmodium vivax. It was unpleasant enough, but P. falciparum is the true killer. And it's spreading.

UPDATE: Two discussion threads in diametrically opposed blogs question Mallaby's take and tease out some of the finer points of the DDT vs. malaria issue. Enviro-hawk Tim Lambert argues that the E.U. is only concerned to prohibit the use of DDT on agricultural products that it imports. Everyone seems to agree that's a dangerous and counterproductive use of DDT, in that it fosters DDT-resistant strains of malaria more quickly than localized use does and can endanger other species. So agricultural use should be banned. There seems to be much less agreement about how much and how widespread DDT resistance already is. The most effective use of DDT seems to be spraying it on the inside walls of houses or on mosquito nets. Libertarian Ron Bailey's piece sparks a debate about how effective DDT is relative to other chemicals, what the relative costs are, and how important human life is relative to that of other living creatures.

Belated Happy Hangul Day!

Hangul Day (한글날) was 9 October. The ever-observant Language Hat has more, and Language Log has much, much more.

A Nondiplomat at a Nonembassy in Taiwan

In Taiwan I had to get used to the unusual situation of conducting diplomacy in a country with which America wasn't supposed to have diplomatic relations. To wit, at AIT [American Institute in Taiwan] we were officially consultants under contract to the State Department working in an unofficial capacity at a nonembassy to advance America's interests in Taiwan. It was a mouthful, and the semantics and diplomatic gyrations that American representatives in Taiwan had to go through were at times humorous, at times frustrating.

Starting with the mundane, we had to develop a new vocabulary to conduct diplomacy. The embassy became an institute in 1979, and I was its second director, following veteran diplomat and fellow China hand Chuck Cross. At the institute, there were no American flags flying, no national days celebrated, nor Marines in red, white, and blue. Instead of a political section, we had a general affairs section or GAS, perhaps an appropriate acronym for political reporting. Rather than a consular section, there was a travel service section. In our daily lives, we had to be careful to adhere to certain rules. If I were addressed by a Taiwanese journalist as ambassador, I had to ignore him. If at some function or performance we were seated in the special section reserved for diplomats, we had to suggest that this was not quite right. Most of the time we ended up sitting there anyway. Should the agressive Taiwanese press have caught wind of any protocol slipup on our part and used it to trumpet recognition of an upgrading of the relationship, we would have caught hell from both Washington and Peking.

The most frustrating part was that we were prohibited from meeting with Taiwanese Foreign Ministry and Defense officials as well as with the president himself in their offices, nor could they visit us in ours. We could meet with a designated group of Taiwanese foreign service officers who staffed AIT's counterpart organization on the Taiwan side. But we had to transact the majority of our discussions in other venues, like restaurants, country clubs, golf courses, and private homes. Perhaps the most serious casualty of such restrictions was our waistlines. Dinners and cocktail parties--the staple of most diplomatic posts--took on added importance in Taiwan. A rich Chinese diet can wreak havoc with an American-fed body, as it did with mine.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 238-239

Asashoryu Loses in Las Vegas

After narrowly winning last month's Aki Basho in Tokyo, Asashoryu has lost again, this time in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS — Ozeki Tochiazuma beat yokozuna Asashoryu in the final to win the first-day tournament of sumo's exhibition tour of Las Vegas on Friday.

Thirty-eight wrestlers in the top-tier makuuchi division took part in the competition, which will be followed by similar one-day mini tournaments for two more days during the tour. The spectators Friday were entertained by humorous introductions of each wrestler and explanations of techniques by Hawaiian-born former ozeki Konishiki in the opening ceremony and between bouts.

Warms my heart to hear it. I hope Asa loses a bit at the casinos, too. He can well afford it.

The Las Vegas Sun reports:

Tourists gawked as the athletes drank, smoked, played slots and held court at the Baccarat tables.

The buffet at Mandalay Bay, the hotel-casino hosting the event, added 2,500 pieces of sushi, pickled daikon and miso soup to its spread, just feet away from a steaming heap of mashed potatoes.

Japundit has a reporter on the scene!

BTW, here's a thorough analysis of September's Aki Basho that trashes Bulgarian upstart Kotooshu's actual performance during his bouts.

The Bulgarian's 12-0 start was highly inflated. There's no denying that Kotooshu is extremely athletic, agile, skilled, and well-rounded in his technique. There's no denying Kotooshu's future in this sport. And, there's no denying that Kotooshu's sumo this basho sucked. I'm not talking about his magical escapes at the tawara because he did snatch victory from the jaws of defeat numerous times. I'm talking about his approach to the bouts and his execution. We were onto this early on in the basho. Not a single word of praise over the first three days, and then on day four this statement: "if he keeps this up and manages a 12-3 record, the Association will hesitate to consider Kotooshu's promotion to Ozeki because his sumo content this basho is so poor." Sex symbol Makiko Uchidate of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council also wasn't fooled. She had nothing positive to say about the Sekiwake after the basho, and she also publicly stated that she doesn't think he will secure promotion to Ozeki in Kyushu. It wasn't all bad. After being called out by Asashoryu mid-week, Kotooshu did finally win a bout moving forward against Kyokushuzan on day 8. He followed that up with an excellent win against Iwakiyama on day 9, and he thoroughly dominated both Ozeki (Tochiazuma on day 11 and Chiyotaikai on senshuraku). But that's it; only four solid bouts. Other than that it was bad sumo.

Gannon on Afghanistan's Abandonment in 1992

After the Soviet Union withdrew, the world's interest in Afghanistan flagged. When the Najibullah government didn't collapse, the international community did not have the wherewithal to deal with Afghanistan, plot its future, find sustainable leaders. World events quickly overshadowed Afghanistan. By the end of 1989, just months after the Soviet withdrawal, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, Reagan declared communism defeated, and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. Afghanistan was yesterday's war. The wider world had done the most dangerous of things. It had stuffed this tiny country with massive amounts of weapons, including the precious Stingers, had turned over the countryside to the volatile discordant mix of mujahedeen factions, and then had walked away. For the United States, the war it was really interested in had been won; the proxy war was of little interest. The mujahedeen were the victors, the Communists were the losers. It didn't matter that the mujahedeen leaders had proved themselves to be murderous men who had signed and broken several accords. They vowed to put aside their territorial, ethnic, and religious divides, even traveling to Saudi Arabia to visit Mecca, Islam's holiest site, to seal their promise. But they never kept their promises. And no one cared.

Najibullah was forced to negotiate his own removal, and the mujahedeen were eventually given Kabul, despite their bitter rivalries and bloodletting. The task of negotiating this was handed over to the United Nations. In April 1992, the United Nations fulfilled its mission and Najibullah agreed to step down, despite the fact that there was no coherent alternative government ready to replace him. No sustainable form of a mature government had been cobbled together. No one had even tried. The world had moved on without making even one attempt to find an alternative to the warfaring mujahedeen leaders. The United States wanted to give the spoils of its last Cold War battle to its mujahedeen allies and get out. The world had no interest in carefully assembling a unified government to rule Afghanistan, to rebuild and bring stability. That would have taken sustained involvement, and the forceful removal from the scene of some of the more vicious mujahedeen. Instead, the international community opted for a quick exit.

It was a ludicrous mistake to hand over Kabul to the mujahedeen. It set in motion the chaos that would eventually bring the Taliban to power. But the international community wasn't looking to Afghanistan's future. It wanted out.

And so Afghanistan was handed over to the fractious, feuding mix of tribal warlords, who had been elevated to the status of mujahedeen factional leaders to fight the Soviet Union. Their stature had been enhanced by the billions of dollars and weapons they had received from the United States and the rest of the world.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 8-9

The Nearly Invisible Japanese Military

The Times (of London) on 6 October carried a report by Richard Lloyd Parry and Robert Thomson on the ambiguous status of the Japanese military.

IF YOU encountered Tsutomu Mori as he travels to work in central Tokyo, you would never guess what he does for a living. Every day, hundreds of people like him in well-pressed suits and shiny shoes converge upon a well-guarded compound in the Ichigaya district.

Only there does he put on his olive uniform with its rows of medal ribbons and four stars. Safely concealed from public gaze, he emerges as General Mori, chief of staff of the Ground Self-Defence Force.

For 40 years he has risen up the ranks of one of the best-equipped military forces in the world. He meets his military counterparts from all over the globe (General Sir Mike Jackson was a recent visitor). But 60 years after the end of the Second World War, during which his father fought the British in Burma, he is constrained from wearing his uniform in public or from referring to his organisation as an army.

“It’s a delicate and complex question,” he told The Times. “For people like me it’s difficult to wear a uniform in a crowded train.” This is the continuing paradox of the Japanese military: despite being more active in the world than at any time since 1945, it remains close to an embarrassment for many of its countrymen.

That reminds me how embarrassed I was during the one day a week that we had to wear our uniforms to class during my only year of ROTC at the University of Richmond in 1967-68. (It would have been worse than embarrassing at a lot of other colleges, both then and now.) I ended up dropping ROTC for journalism class going into my sophomore year, but then dropped out of school altogether at midyear.

My only personal experience relevant to any "resurgent Japanese militarism" during my recent 2 months in Japan involved the combined recruiting office for all branches of the SDF on the outside ground floor of the busy Ashikaga Tobu line train station (60+ trains daily to and from Tokyo). The glass-fronted office was as big as the travel agency offices that can be found at any such train station. It had several large posters, like any travel office, but no racks of flyers and no visible customers. In fact, I never saw any activity whatsoever in that office, despite passing it several dozen times during normal business hours.

The way Japanese demographics are headed, the SDF is going to have to either recruit foreign legions or rely more heavily on robots in order to sustain itself, just as many Japanese factories are already doing.

via Foreign Dispatches

Bush and Deng Strike an Oil Bargain, 1977

On the business front, the trip with [George H.W.] Bush [in 1977] was more of a success. Hugh Liedtke, the chairman of Pennzoil, met with Minister of Foreign Trade Li Qiang, and during a meeting with Deng Xiaoping at which Bush and I were present, Bush made significant headway in persuading Vice Premier Deng to allow American oil companies to work in China. At that point in 1977, Deng, who had been restored to his posts earlier in the year with the help of powerful backing in the military, was about a year away from introducing his initial plans for economic reform in China. An old oil man himself; Bush "sold" Deng on the concept of a "risk contract" in which U.S. companies would assume the significant costs of exploration for oil in places like the South China Sea and then share the proceeds from production if oil were discovered. Deng liked the idea because it would allow China to bring into the country free of charge the technology and capital needed to exploit oil resources and then still share in the profits. Deng also knew that his own oil people had oversold him on their capabilities, leaving China with semi-submersible rigs that no one knew how to use and jack-up rigs that had turned over in the Gulf of Bo Hai in northeast China. The concept of "risk contracts" became the basis for joint ventures in oil exploration between the United States and China.

Bush's meeting with Deng built on the acquaintance they had formed during his posting in China and laid the foundation for future meetings, including two more in the next three years that I would also be privileged to attend. In spite of their diminished political statures in 1977--Bush being out of power and Deng having just returned to his government posts from being temporarily purged--I believe that Bush and Deng sized each other up as future leaders. Just as former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had forged personal ties with Deng's predecessors, Mao and Chou En-lai, Bush was developing a relationship with Deng that eventually became critical in sustaining U.S.-China ties in troubled times and advancing them in better times. When the two men ascended to the tops of their respective governments, their personal connection facilitated a blending of American and Chinese interests into a workable formula. This congeniality of leaders at the highest levels is, I believe, one of the keys to managing the Sino-American relationship.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 203-204

Maybe not just the Sino-American relationship.

A Council of War in Afghanistan, 1996

[A] high-level secret meeting brought together some of the most radical of groups and nations, who accused the West then in 1996, a full five years before the September 11 attacks, of waging a war against Islam. The participants urged a counteroffensive and spoke of attacking the United States and the West. They spoke of their hatred for the West and their revulsion for governments in the Middle East that sympathized with the West.

Fundamentalist organizations in Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and other Gulf states were represented, as were militant groups from Pakistan, Algeria and Sudan. They sat beside dissidents who lived in London, Tehran, and Beirut. They had come together to plot a war against American and Western interests.

Convinced that the West had already begun a war against Muslims, they wanted to retaliate, go on the offensive, and take the battle to the enemy on their own terms. This was not their first gathering. There had been at least one earlier meeting in Iran to lay the ground for this gathering, to settle religious and ideological differences that would allow these men to come together to wage a single war against a single enemy--the West....

The men talked for another two hours until Osama bin Laden joined the gathering. At his side was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. It was Sayyaf who spoke first. Bin Laden listened. Sayyaf shared bin Laden's revulsion for U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He praised the violent bombing one month earlier in al-Khubar in Saudi Arabia that had killed more than twenty U.S. servicemen, for which al Qaeda had been held responsible. Sayyaf's small brown eyes seemed to glow as he recounted the bombing. He reveled in the description of it, saying it should be a lesson to America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. He likened it to the 1981 and 1983 bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Embassy and its military compound that had killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and led to the American withdrawal from Lebanon.

Sayyaf's speech inspired an Iranian to call for an all-out offensive against America. He was frenzied. He warned that the Muslim world was facing its gravest conspiracy. It wasn't clear whether he had been sent by the government or whether he represented a jihadi group. Another speaker joined in, this time from Bahrain. His words were angry, his voice rising as he spoke: "We are enduring coercion and humiliation in our own country." Then an Egyptian spoke. He castigated his own government for spurning an offer from Syria to mediate its differences with Iran....

In this way, in mid-1996, high in the lawless tribal lands of northern Pakistan, the terrorist networking began.... Sayyaf's men had been among those who had welcomed bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996, along with others from that mujahedeen government who had also been returned to power by the United States in 2001. The same men had encouraged and allowed terrorist training camps when they were in power from 1992 until 1996. They had lied to the CIA in September 1996 when the agency had requested their help in finding bin Laden. The CIA's intelligence was so flawed that it wrongly said that the Taliban brought bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and that the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, knew bin Laden before he came to Afghanistan in 1996. He didn't. It was Abdul Sayyaf, America's "ally," who had welcomed bin Laden.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. xvi-xviii

The Inspirational Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

In 1992-96, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was a "factional leader who controlled interior ministry, whose soldiers committed atrocities, operated training camps and welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan" under the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen warlord government that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Nowadays, the same Abdul Rasul Sayyaf serves as a key advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

One August day in 2004, when I was having breakfast with Hamid Karzai on the lush green lawns of the presidential palace in Kabul, he described Sayyaf as an ideologue in a way that sounded complimentary. But Sayyaf is a vicious man, whose followers have carried out unspeakable atrocities and horrific massacres of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf inspires violence in others: Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine terrorist organization, was named for him by its founder, Abdurajak Janjalani. Janjalani was a disciple and a student of Sayyaf's who received military training from him. The Indonesian Mohammed Nasir Bin Abbas, alias Solaiman, who was arrested in Indonesia in April 2003, was trained under Sayyaf between 1987 and 1991. Bin Abbas used the terrorist training he received from Sayyaf to set up Camp Hodeibia in the Philippines, according to Maria Ressa's account in Seeds of Terror (New York: 2003). This camp was later taken over by Umar Patek, an Indonesian who has been implicated in the 2002 bombing on the resort island of Bali in which more than 200 people were killed.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. ix-x, xv

Impearls on Entrepreneurism and Its Enemies

Impearls is back to blogging more regularly in his trademark long and thoughtful essays with footnotes. His latest post bemoans the derision of all corporate entrepreneurism by too many on the political left.

It's been obvious and has disturbed me for some time the way in which supposed “liberals” demonize private enterprise and those institutional vehicles which comprise it — companies and corporations — as the veritable Princes of Darkness.

The whole essay is worth reading, but I'll cite just a couple of his supporting quotes.

Andrew Sullivan:

Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I'm merely grateful the attacks haven't stopped the research progress. They've merely slowed it.

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on the Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank: the white man's intelligent activity is used for work of every sort. […]

The white man on the right bank, forced to live by his own endeavors, has made material well-being the main object of his existence; as he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his industry and continual inducements to activity, his eagerness to possess things goes beyond the ordinary limits of human cupidity; tormented by a longing for wealth, he boldly follows every path to fortune that is open to him; he is equally prepared to turn into a sailor, pioneer, artisan, or cultivator, facing the labors or dangers of these various ways of life with even constancy; there is something wonderful in his resourcefulness and a sort of heroism in his greed for gain. [emphasis added –Imp.]

Virginia Postrel notes related ironies in a recent article in Forbes on Criminalizing Science.

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada's law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It's a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

Where do these truly evangelical beliefs of the secular left come from? Medieval agrarian repulsion at urban corruption (like the Moravian Brethren)? High-born disdain for the commoners who produced the surplus wealth that funded noble endeavors? A combination of both?

Cambodian Gen. Lon Nol's Worst Enemy: Vietnam

During a meeting with one of our agents in a safe house [in Hong Kong], we obtained information that told of huge Chinese arms shipments going through Cambodia and into South Vietnam to help the Viet Cong. We also learned that the head of Cambodia's armed forces, Lieutenant General Lon Nol, was overseeing the shipments and taking a cut of the arms for the benefit of himself and his own army. In the late 1960s at the time when the arms shipments were at their highest levels, Lon Nol was a favorite of Peking. He was said to have a big picture of Chairman Mao over his desk in Phnom Penh. But we knew that Lon Nol was also a Cambodian patriot. Like their Laotian neighbors to the north, the Cambodians were strongly against Vietnam, whom they saw as the regional bully. Lon Nol was particularly upset that, in their effort to prosecute the war in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army had occupied areas of eastern Cambodia. Our source told us that when the Cambodian Defense Minister traveled to Peking in the fall of 1969, he made a strong appeal to the Chinese to help him get the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. Lon Nol said he was willing to help supply the Viet Cong, but he insisted that Vietnamese troops belonged in Vietnam, not in Cambodia. The Chinese demurred. In Peking's eyes the North Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation against the American imperialists, and it was China's socialist duty and in the country's own interest to support its communist brethren.

The tiff between Lon Nol and Peking turned out to pay off, at least temporarily, for the U.S. Just six months after visiting Peking, in March 1970 General Lon Nol, in part bitter and disappointed at being rebuffed by the Chinese, staged a coup along with First Deputy Premier Sisowath Sirik Matak against Prime Minister Sihanouk and seized power. From Hong Kong we reported to Washington the first signs of a coup when we picked up information that commercial flights from Hong Kong to Phnom Penh were being canceled because the Phnom Penh Airport was closed. Once in power, Lon Nol turned from a supplier to the communist cause in Southeast Asia into an adversary. In an attempt to hinder the Vietnamese communists in their fight to take over South Vietnam, he tried to cut weapons supply lines through Cambodia to Vietnam. Then he cooperated with the U.S. military in its incursion into Cambodia in the spring of 1970, which hurt the North Vietnamese but did not drive them out. In this backdrop to the war next door in Vietnam, thanks in part to the reporting from our source, the U.S. briefly gained the upper hand at China's expense.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 149-150

Half a Life as a Haafu

AP Writer Natalie Obiko Pearson describes her life as a "haafu" in Japan's Mainichi Shimbun.

I'll always remember the feeling of liberation upon arriving in America. My appearance drew no attention, I spoke English with the neutral American inflections picked up at the international school -- I could pass.

Then came the pitfalls of my complete unfamiliarity with America: I knew none of the references to popular culture; I wasn't used to interrupting people so I never got a word in edgewise. I thought a Subway sandwich was something sold in the subway.

In Australia and the United States, countries of immigration built on diversity, I can pass as a native. In Japan I can only do it over the phone. The game is up the moment they see my face or hear my name -- Pea-ya-son, as it's pronounced in Japanese.

Trapped in a culturally ambiguous haafu land, I find kindred spirits in people who have grown up as immigrants or so-called "kikoku shijo" -- Japanese partially raised abroad who don't carry an ounce of foreign blood, yet are marginalized once they return.

Still, the fact that such people exist in Japan means there's an end in sight -- the makeup of the country is changing.

Many here believe that Japan, with its rapidly graying population, has no choice but to open its doors to a massive influx of foreign labor within the next couple of decades. Japanese society will doubtless endure some painful teething. But, frankly, I can't wait.

via Japundit

The CIA Role in the Laotian Elections, 1967

One of my biggest operations involved ensuring a "favorable" outcome in the elections to the National Assembly in 1967. With more attention being focused on the war in Southeast Asia and with the National Assembly in Laos starting to play a larger political role in the country, we thought it was important for Vang Pao to have more of a say in the political governing of the country. We figured out whom to support without letting our fingerprints show. As part of our "nation building" effort in Laos, we pumped a relatively large amount of money to politicians who would listen to our advice. In the election, "friendly" politicians won fifty-four of fifty-seven seats. Ambassador Sullivan referred to me as Mr. Tammany Hall, an allusion to New York City's prodigious Democratic vote-getting machine of the late nineteenth century.

With the CIA's mission expanding so rapidly, our intelligence gathering and reporting efforts boomed. As CIA personnel, we had better access to parts of Laos than our State Department colleagues. In fact, few Foreign Service officers were even allowed to visit places like Long Tieng. The major exception was Ambassador Sullivan, who oversaw the whole military effort in Laos. But other than him, during my time in Laos, only a handful of State Department personnel made it up to Long Tieng. Sometimes, we were in the awkward position of "outreporting" our State Department colleagues in the embassy, who were supposed to be the experts in designated fields such as the Lao economy, politics, and culture. In some cases, their best sources for information turned out to be our paid agents. We had to be discreet in handling such touchy situations. Since I had worked with many of the Foreign Service officers at other posts in Asia, I was given the job of smoothing ruffled feathers. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I failed.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), p. 120

Ethnic Museums: Educating Others or Preserving Selves?

I used my ten days on Hokkaido to examine my idea that Ainu museums present Ainu ethnicity to a larger public, and are run with the goal of asserting Ainu ethnic identity in a way that challenges the majority Japanese conception of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation. This is when the emphasis of the Ainu on preserving their culture and participating in Japanese life as Ainu became clear to me. Ainu-run museums did in fact try to combat popular ideas about the Ainu (such as that there are no Ainu left, that the Ainu language is dead, that the Ainu are particularly hairy, etc.) through signs and information in brochures. At the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan (Ainu Village), guides also tried to make visitors aware that the Ainu are both Ainu and Japanese. For instance, a younger guide (dressed in Ainu clothing) tried to explain that the Ainu aren't entirely different from the Japanese today, but that they still have a special culture, by saying "I'm the same as everyone else. I only wear these clothes from 8 to 5. Do you know any Ainu? These foods came from the Ainu...these place names are Ainu names...."

However, a researcher at the Shiraoi Poroto Kotan museum explained to me that of necessity, Ainu museums can only go so far in trying to explain Ainu ethnicity as well as traditional (and no longer existing) Ainu culture. She agreed with my feeling that it's impossible to attempt to show Ainu culture and history in the same way that Japanese history is portrayed, because there are no records of Ainu history from the Ainu point of view. She also pointed out the impossibility of exhibiting a culture or identity that is currently in the process of being re-defined, and explained that "Ainu culture today is changing. People have a Japanese lifestyle, and they can no longer do things like take bears from the mountains, and it is unclear to them how to include their own feelings and lives in the ceremonies." As a result, she informed me, the main goal of the museum was not to teach others about Ainu culture; instead, it was to focus on cultural preservation for the Ainu themselves.

The emphasis on cultural growth was the most common theme I encountered in Ainu-run museums. I had not realized the extent to which Ainu and Okinawans are currently engaged in re-defining their cultural identities for themselves, or that this concern would dominate other concerns about fitting into a larger Japanese society. Museums did not present this concern to tourists in displays; rather, it was only obvious when I looked at the way space was allocated in museums and talked to people working there. At the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for instance, I was lucky enough to see the most famous contemporary Ainu musician (Oki) practicing for a music competition in the museum's rehearsal hall, and the success of his rehearsal was the main concern of the museum staff. Ms. Fujita explained that she worked at a tourist village (the Gyokusendo Kingdom Village) in Okinawa because she wanted to learn about making Okinawan pottery: it was an apprenticeship, a place where crafts could be taught not only to casual visitors but to those interested in making the practice of those crafts a part of their life. There was also space at the Kingdom Village, as at the Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Memorial Museum, for local dance or music groups to rehearse.

SOURCE: The Myth of Japanese Ethnic Homogeneity, by Catherine Williams, September 1999

The Hong Kong Listening Post in the 1950s

Hong Kong was the best listening post into "Red China." It was, as the long-distance telephone ad used to say, "The next best thing to being there." The island-colony was roiling with action in 1953. Unlike on Taiwan, there were many trade and transportation links to the mainland, and because of its location, Hong Kong was a crossroads for Chinese of all stripes. It was a base for agents from China and Taiwan and, therefore, served as one of the few places where the two sides could rub elbows, and, if the situation called for it, pass on communications to each other's governments. Wealthy capitalists from Shanghai sought refuge in Hong Kong after the Communist revolution and spent much of their time trying to find a way off the island. Furthermore, refugees were streaming in from the mainland. Since 1949, more than one million Chinese had arrived in the city and its surrounding territories. There were an estimated 300,000 squatters in Hong Kong and its territories. Most of the refugees, the majority of whom were farmers and laborers from southern China, came in search of work and a better livelihood. Amazingly, with its improving economy and free enterprise methods, Hong Kong was able to accommodate most of them....

I started out working with the Pao Mi Chu, Taiwan's intelligence apparatus. I worked under "deep cover," meaning that I kept my true identity a secret from the Chinese people with whom I worked. I used aliases when I contacted agents or met with counterparts in Taiwan intelligence. The one I used most often was "John Wright." I would meet with agents in hotel rooms or in safe houses, apartments that had been scouted beforehand to make sure they were not under surveillance by the Communists' huge underground apparatus in Hong Kong. We debriefed refugees and travelers to China, placed agents on ships going to Chinese ports, and helped establish a base in Macao to take advantage of the flow of Chinese between Macao and the mainland....

In the course of my work, I was learning that we could accomplish far more by debriefing travelers or people returning from China than we could by planting frightened resident agents in the country. The resident agents naturally tended to be fearful of getting caught. Travelers, on the other hand, moved more freely and without that fear. Using debriefings, I started to gather useful information for the CIA about what was going on in China. Unfortunately, in those days CIA was obsessed with the idea of a resident agent with a radio no matter what the level of his access or his ability to survive. They focused on process over substance.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 84-86

What Constitutes "Ethnicity" in Japan?

This summer I traveled to Japan as a World Fellow in order to study issues of Japanese ethnic identity first-hand. I was interested in the concept of Japanese ethnic homogeneity and wanted to gain a better understanding of the challenges to this concept that the Ainu and Okinawan peoples in Japan represent. In order to do this, I spent a total of two and a half weeks based in Tokyo, staying with a Japanese family and visiting important "majority" Japanese tourist destinations as well as museums that dealt with both majority Japanese culture and Japan's ethnic minorities. In the middle of this homestay, I spent two weeks traveling through Hokkaido (where most Ainu live) and Okinawa in order to examine the way that the Ainu and Okinawans present themselves to the outside world and assert their separate identities.

The question of ethnicity in Japan turned out to be much harder to address than I had imagined. I planned to look at tourism as a means of cultural exchange between different groups in Japan, and I wanted to understand the way majority Japanese sites are experienced by tourists (who are mainly majority Japanese) in order to understand what a Japanese tourist might expect or be surprised by at a minority Japanese site. I visited popular tourist destinations that are important historically or culturally to the Japanese, such as Nikko, a famous temple complex that is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan; Hiraizumi, home to another famous temple complex; the Tokyo National Museum; the Asakusa Kannon temple which is the oldest temple in Tokyo; and the Imperial Palace where the emperor and his family still reside....

My host family also constantly reminded me that "ethnicity" is not just the symbols or places that express "Japanese-ness"; to be Japanese is also to live the daily life of a Japanese person. This trip was my first attempt at studying an intellectual construct (ethnicity) by looking for it in the everyday lives of real people and by asking them to help me find it there. During the homestay portion of my trip, I realized that scholarship on Japanese ethnicity paints an incomplete picture. Scholarship focuses on revivals of nationalist fervor or on contrasting pairs of stereotypes (geishas vs. salarymen, calligraphy v. technology, etc.). However, there is more to Japanese ethnicity than revering the emperor or being an expert at flower arranging.

For instance, when I asked for suggestions of where to visit, my host mother urged me to visit my host sister's middle school, and the afternoon I spent there including ceremonial tea with the principal, dropping in on six, seventh, and eighth grade classes in all subjects for several hours, participating in English lessons, and finally having coffee in the principal's office again was one of the most memorable of my time in Japan, and not only because of the myths it shattered about the Japanese educational system. My host mother's suggestion reminded me that although "ethnicity" might not be formally recorded or presented as daily life for majority Japanese, it is still thought of as being important in defining "being Japanese". This was reinforced by an afternoon I spent with a Japanese woman and her two children, who are half Australian. To the oldest child, being Japanese included celebrating birthdays and Christmas in a Western style (as these holidays are not really "every day" events), but also required using his mother¹s Japanese maiden name in school. His younger brother, less conscious of fitting in and being Japanese, was perfectly happy to use his English first and last names in school. Thus the homestay portion of my trip revealed that while tourist destinations on Honshu might focus mainly on a "high culture," the "daily life" portrayed in Ainu museums is also a recognized part of Japanese ethnicity.

SOURCE: The Myth of Japanese Ethnic Homogeneity, by Catherine Williams, September 1999

Yale and the CIA in 1950

By the 1950s, Yale had a long association with U.S. government intelligence collection. After all, Nathan Hale ("I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.") was Yale's first unsuccessful spy. Because of their high intelligence caliber and language abilities, Yale graduates were considered attractive candidates for intelligence work. Yale had played a part in the formation in 1942 of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was created to carry out intelligence gathering and paramilitary operations against Germany and Japan. From Yale's class of 1943 alone, ... at least forty-two young men had entered intelligence work, with most going to the OSS. Many of these men stayed on after the war and helped form the core of the new Central Intelligence Agency, which took over the duties of the OSS in 1947.

The connection between Yale and the new CIA started at the top. Yale's president for most of the time I was there, Charles Seymour, was on close terms with Allen Dulles, a top OSS official in World War II and after 1953 the head of the CIA. Seymour's daughter actually worked for the OSS in Europe during the war. During my time at Yale, recruiters on campus for the CIA included the varsity crew coach as well as eminent professors.

One of those professors invited me to see him on a fall day in 1950. He ushered me to sit down in his dark, wood-paneled study. It was late afternoon, and the room was in shadows. The walls of the study were lined with leather-backed volumes on Renaissance history, the Chinese classics, and English literature. The professor smoked a pipe. Between puffs, he made his pitch. Even though I barely knew who he was, he clearly knew of me and what I had been doing at Yale. "You were born in China. Your family saw the collapse of China," he started out. "And here at Yale you are a Russian major?" he asked quizzically. He tried to dissuade me from a career in the diplomatic service or corporate world by mentioning that I hadn't taken any business or accounting courses at Yale. The State Department, he told me, was stuck in cement. "Look at what you are interested in and consider intelligence. It's a growth industry." He then talked about the crucial role intelligence had played in past wars and the exciting nature of the work. He explained that people were needed who had been exposed to foreign environments. I was sold even before he got to my personal qualities. "Besides," he added, "You are a leader. As captain, you turned the soccer team around."

Like so many of my fellow students at Yale, including an English major and wrestler from Wallingford, Connecticut, named Jack Downey and a sophomore from South Bend, Indiana, named George Witwer, I was excited by the prospect of an adventurous career and by the idea that I could contribute to efforts to stem the tide of communism. It was a good cause, and I believed that the United States and its values were worth fighting for. In the foreword of that same 1951 classbook in which Peter Braestrup gave voice to ambivalence on campus was a chilling sentence: "We face the realization that the very civilization we have trained ourselves to foster has been placed on the verge of destruction. The challenge to each of us as individuals cannot be over- emphasized." I quickly signed up for the CIA. So did about a hundred of my classmates.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 69-71

California Trading, 1830s

Our cargo was an assorted one; that is, it consisted of everything under the sun. We had spirits of all kinds, (sold by the cask,) teas, coffee, sugars, spices, raisins, molasses, hardware, crockery-ware, tinware, cutlery, clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes from Lynn, calicoes and cottons from Lowell, crepes, silks; also shawls, scarfs, necklaces, jewelry, and combs for the ladies; furniture; and in fact, everything that can be imagined, from Chinese fire-works to English cart-wheels — of which we had a dozen pairs with their iron rims on.

The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy bad wines made in Boston and brought round by us, at an immense price, and retail it among themselves at a real (12½ cents) by the small wine-glass. Their hides, too, which they value at two dollars in money, they give for something which costs seventy-five cents in Boston; and buy shoes (like as not, made of their own hides, and which have been carried twice around Cape Horn) at three or four dollars, and "chicken-skin" boots at fifteen dollars apiece. Things sell, on an average, at an advance of nearly three hundred per cent upon the Boston prices. This is partly owing to the heavy duties which the government, in their wisdom, with the intent, no doubt, of keeping the silver in the country, has laid upon imports. These duties, and the enormous expenses of so long a voyage, keep all merchants, but those of heavy capital, from engaging in the trade. Nearly two-thirds of all the articles imported into the country from round Cape Horn, for the last six years, have been by the single house of Bryant, Sturgis & Co., to whom our vessel belong.

SOURCE: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Chapter XIII