UPDATE: Please, please, please do not insinuate that because some conflicts and nations are not mentioned in this diary that I somehow don't care about them. This diary is about the ten countries I view as having the greatest influence over whether or not the world can co-exist in relative peace. I am very aware that other horrible conflicts exist, but I view these nations as holding global influence that can stand in the way of a peaceful global community. If you disagree with my list, fine, but please don't accuse me of not caring; I wouldn't have written this diary if I didn't.
I diaried a long time ago about whether or not the notion of "world peace" was a farce, and responses from Kossacks were split. So for the purpose of this diary, "world peace" is translated to mean more or less "war-free." Hopefully, that's a definition we can temporarily agree on.
I believe that a war-free world is dependent entirely upon these eight ten nations:
Afghanistan
China
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Iran
Israel
Pakistan
Russia
Somalia
Sudan
United States
Also, please keep in mind, this is ONE woman's opinion, not gospel... just my thoughts.
Naturally, in the time it takes to restore relative peace in these nations, conflicts could spring up elsewhere, but these nations should be the focal points of President-elect Obama's foreign policy initiatives.
Afghanistan: Our long, unprovoked and costly occupation of Iraq has left our relatively small military deployment in Afghanistan (not to mention the Afghan people) vulnerable.
While Afghanistan is often referred to as being part of the Middle East, it is actually at the center of Asia, with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north, and China to the northeast. However, it also borders two of the most dangerous nations in the world, Iran and Pakistan, which contributes to the notion that it is a Middle Eastern nation.
I don't need to tell any of you how the Bush administration botched things here, and we weren't the first foreign nation to throw wood on the fire (and this wasn't the first time we'd done so, either). In fact, since early Mongolian conquests, Afghanistan has been in turmoil for most of its history, facing strained relations with Pakistan since the early 20th century and fending off Soviet attacks with U.S. dollars and weapons in the 1970s.
In January 2007, Robert Burns of the Associated Press reported:
"The number of insurgent attacks is up 300 percent since September, 2006, when the Pakistani government put into effect a peace arrangement with tribal leaders in the north Waziristan area, along Afghanistan's eastern border, a U.S. military intelligence officer told reporters... U.S. military officials cited new evidence that the Pakistani military, which has long-standing ties to the Taliban movement, has turned a blind eye to the incursions."
A CNN article today outlined suggestions for Obama on how to handle Al Qeada:
"Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government must continue to improve its understanding of terrorist networks throughout the region to identify the linkages between jihadist groups from the Taliban to al Qaeda to the Kashmiri militant organizations such as Lashkar-e-Tayyiba that threaten not only the South Asian regional order but also global peace.
One of the building blocks of such a database should be the identification of suicide attackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which could be accomplished using DNA samples, accounts on jihadist Web sites, good intelligence work and media reports...
The United States must re-conceptualize its Afghan policy as a regional problem. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are embedded in a sea of ethnic Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
In fact, there are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than there are in Afghanistan -- some 40 million altogether, according to the CIA World Factbook -- making them the largest ethnic grouping in the world without a state."
So as you can see, solving the problems in Afghanistan is intricately intertwined with solving the problems in Pakistan.
Pakistan: As last week's attacks on Mumbai seems to have confirmed, terrorist presence in Pakistan is not being squelched. And as the New York Times reported this morning, Pakistan can't solve a problem Pakistani leaders won't admit exists:
"Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan’s new government, raising questions whether it can — or wants to — rein in militancy here. President Asif Ali Zardari says his government has no concrete evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks, and American officials have not established a direct link to the government. But as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday morning, pressure was building on the government to confront the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian and American officials say carried out the Mumbai attacks.
Though officially banned, the group has hidden in plain sight for years. It has had a long history of ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies."
Obama caught a lot of flack in the primaries for saying that, with or without approval from Pakistan, he would pursue terrorist targets hiding within their borders. While people chastized him then, it is becoming more and more evident that he cannot expect cooperation from Pakistan in fighting terrorism within their borders. And now we know it:
"A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers."
Pakistan may have become the new center for the War on Terror, while we were too busy fighting insurgents in Iraq to notice.
Iran: The threat Iran poses, I feel, will depend on President-elect Obama's course of policy with them. During the campaign, he explained that he wasn't afraid to sit down with our enemies to work towards resolution. As the Associated Foreign Press reported yesterday:
"The [U.S. and Iran] have had no diplomatic relations for nearly three decades since Islamist students took American diplomats hostage for 444 days following the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the US-backed shah."
It would be unwise to engage or outrage poweful Iran while terrorists hide in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is best to express a willingness to secure peace in the Middle East, and keep a cautiously neutral tone in any dealings with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Russia: Russia talks tough in dealings with Georgia and when its position or policies are questioned, but rampant poverty and insufficient health care (the average life span for Russians is 61.5 years for males and 73.9 years for females). In January 2008,
Moscow News reported that:
"Russia's health ministry predicted on Wednesday that the birth rate in Russia would equal the mortality rate by 2011.
"By 2011 the mortality rate should be equal to the birth rate," Social Development and Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said.
In the first eleven months of 2007 the mortality rate in Russia was 14.7 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 15.3 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2006, the minister said."
Russia conducts foreign policy like a child throwing a temper tantrum, but they are so desperate to raise the birth rate and attract foreign investors to their impoverish nation that they would do well to focus on domestic issues before eyeing conflicts to involve themselves in.
Somalia: Since the government of Somalia has proved ineffective in stopping piracy off its shores, the nations with commerce and security interests in those waters need to lend further Navy strength to defeating piracy. As the Independent reported:
"Piracy is widespread and, in some regions, very much on the rise. According to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which collates the figures for both attempted and successful hijacks, there were 264 piracy attacks around the world in 2007. By September this year there had been 199. Many take place in what has up until now been considered the most dangerous area: the South China Sea, and the Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia. But the fastest-growing area is the Gulf of Aden, off war-torn and lawless Somalia and its breakaway region of Puntland, where the number of attacks doubled to 60 in 2007 and has soared to 92 so far this year."
Somali pirates are not as well-trained, skilled, or dangerous as terrorists we face elsewhere, but they threaten global interests and should be stopped before they become a bigger threat.
Democratic Republic of the Congo: A rebellion in the Congo threathens to escalate, and Rwanda appears to be stirring the pot, as the
New York Times reported yesterday:
"As before, Rwanda’s stake in Congo is a complex mix of strategic interest, business opportunity and the real fears of a nation that has heroically rebuilt itself after near obliteration by ethnic hatred... There seems to be a reinvigorated sense of the longstanding brotherhood between the Congolese rebels, who are mostly ethnic Tutsi, and the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which has supported these same rebels in the past... The fates of the two countries are inextricably linked. In 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda killed 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, and then fled into eastern Congo. Rwanda responded by invading Congo in 1997 and 1998, denying it each time initially but later taking responsibility. Those invasions catalyzed years of war that drew in the armies of half a dozen African countries."
I readily admit, I don't know nearly as much about this region as I would like to. But we should be certain not to ignore this situation, if we can help it.
Sudan: What is happening in Darfur is genocide, pure and simple. Even aid workers have become frequent targets, Reuters reported today:
"Masked men armed with an AK-47 and hand grenade abducted and beat up six aid workers on the road to a volatile camp in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region on Thursday, peacekeepers said.
The aid workers had been in a convoy heading to Kalma camp in south Darfur, the scene of numerous clashes between bandits, militias, government troops and residents.
It was the latest in a string of attacks on aid staff. Eleven humanitarian workers have been killed in Darfur this year, and U.N. figures show aid compounds were targeted 144 times between January and September.
The six aid workers - all Sudanese - are employed by an international aid organisation, which asked not to be named. Three of them were taken to hospital after the attack.
"The worst thing about it was the impact on our staff. They will be traumatised," said an aid agency representative. "But this is what happens. Darfur is not safe and vehicles are a target."
It has been estimated that 200,000 to 450,000 are dead and more than 2.5 million are missing in the systematic ethnic cleansing. This is not an effort the United States can take on alone. Human rights organizations and the U.N. need the might of a coalition of nations to hope to resolve this crisis.
China: Our relationship with the world's fourth-biggest economy is complex. As Bloomberg reported today:
"The U.S. is China’s second-largest export market after Europe. China, with the world’s largest currency reserves -- poised to top $2 trillion -- surpassed Japan in September to become the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries."
Yet there are numerous issues where the U.S. and China fail to see eye to eye, from Tibet to human rights. However, joint efforts to resolve the global economic crisis imply that for now, our ties are solid, and while we will never agree with China on some social and political issues, they pose no threat to world security; only Tibet's, which I hope and pray Obama will take a stronger stand on than his predecessors.
United States: Finally, it appears that none of the issues in the afore mentioned nations can be resolved without deft and cautious diplomatic and, where necessary, military action from the United States. Never before have we needed a leader with the collected, calm, and socially-conscious character of Barack Obama. I have hope that we will see progress in some of these regions under his leadership, but we will need a lot of help from our fellow global citizens.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
And if you made it to the end, GirlZero owes you a drink. ;)