Korea: Redesigning a historic
alliance By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The specter of a machine-gun atop
a robot opening fire on onrushing tanks and
soldiers would seem absurd were it not for the
straight-faced word of a bureaucrat in Seoul that
such an apparition exists and may be deployed on
the South Korean side of the border with North
Korea.
The robot's visual and infra-red
detection devices supposedly empower it to spot a
likely target up to 4 kilometers away, which
happens to be the width of the Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ) between
the
two Koreas, but the possibilities for glitches
that might touch off a war are too numerous to
contemplate.
The fact that this
"intelligent surveillance and guard robot", as Lee
Jae-hoon, deputy commerce, industry and energy
minister, calls it, "has surveillance, tracking,
firing and voice-recognition systems" does not
exactly explain how it would respond to all those
wild animals living without fear within the
sanctuary of the DMZ. Does the robot also come
with a sniffing device capable of telling a deer,
say, from a saboteur or from a defector?
It did seem more than coincidental,
however, that the robot should have officially
surfaced in an announcement on the very day that
South Korea and the United States, against odds
and over innumerable protests, agreed on a plan
for redesigning the historic alliance by which the
US has pledged to defend South Korea ever since
the Korean War.
At the heart of the deal
is a controversial agreement that a South Korean
commander would be in charge of South Korean
troops in the event of a second Korean War - or
any other kind of war.
South Korean
conservatives, including leaders of the opposition
Grand National Party and a string of former
defense ministers and retired generals, have lined
up in opposition, charging that the whole idea is
just another sign of the weakness of the
left-leaning President Roh Moo-hyun in the face of
North Korean demands and radical pressure at home.
Such criticism, however, conflicts with
the speed with which the Pentagon and US
commanders in Korea have not only gone along with
the proposal but gone one better. They say, fine,
let's put all the mechanisms in effect to separate
the commands within three years, while South Korea
now says it will take six years.
The whole
discussion in a sense is esoteric and abstract.
South Korea 12 years ago took command of South
Korean forces in peacetime. No US military officer
commands South Korean troops except for those
seconded under the KATUSA program. (The acronym,
part of the basic vocabulary of military life
here, stands for Korean Augmentation to the US
Army.)
If war were to break out, however,
the question of who would be in charge would be
critical. The nationalist Syngman Rhee, who
survived for 12 years as president until his
ouster in 1960, had no trouble transferring his
forces to US command as they were reeling before
the North Koreans and Chinese at the outset of the
Korean War.
That was then, when the South
was pathetically short of basic infantry weapons,
had no air force and virtually no tanks and heavy
armored and artillery.
Commanders now are
convinced the balance is just about reversed.
North Korean forces, with more than a million
troops, vastly outnumber the 650,000 South Korean
troops, but the South's weaponry is assumed to be
far superior considering the North can no longer
count on China and Russia for new weapons, much
less spare parts for its aging equipment. South
Korea, moreover, has an enormous
military-industrial complex that's capable of
producing its own weaponry, including planes,
ships and tanks.
As if South Korea's own
production facilities were not enough, moreover,
the United States has committed US$10 billion to
modernizing South Korean forces. That's the payoff
in the scheme under which Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has masterminded the pullback of
US troops to well south of Seoul while slashing
the number from 37,000 to 29,500 today on the way
down to 25,000 two or three years from now.
While the US appears to cooperate with
South Korean wishes on the transfer of wartime
control, however, Roh infuriates conservatives
here by pursuing his policy of reconciliation with
North Korea in apparent conflict with the United
States.
He did it again in a television
interview that lasted an hour and 40 minutes in
which he sought to portray his own government as
somehow an intermediary between the United States
and North Korea. Just as China has tried "to
persuade North Korea" to return to talks on its
nuclear weapons, he argued, "we have tried to
persuade Washington".
South Korea, he
said, was "trying to go between North Korea and
the United States" - an exercise that he said
"requires mutual trust".
The image of
South Korea looking for trust in Washington and
Pyongyang in the quest for peace and
reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula only adds
to conservative distrust of moves to revise the
US-Korean military alliance. They see the transfer
of command over South Korean troops to South
Korean command as a critical sign of policies
dominated by leftist advisers who would be happy
to do away with the entire alliance.
Relations, however, are far from that
stage. Against intense leftist pressure, the
government remains committed to providing the land
for a huge new US base at Pyongtaek, near the west
coast about 50km south of Seoul. Police have
cleared out most of the aging villagers who were
protesting the loss of their houses.
The
US also compelled South Korea to agree to
establish a new firing range for its fighter
planes around some islets 70km from a major US Air
Force base at Kunsan on the southwest coast. That
range replaces the one southwest of Seoul that
closed last year after a prolonged campaign by
activists.
The US negotiating tactic for
the new range was revealing. Weary of South Korean
dithering, US negotiators said they would have to
pull all of their planes out of Korea if they had
nowhere for training. The fear of provoking still
more conservative outcries at home probably has
had more to do with Seoul's going along with the
US demand than worries about a North Korean
attack.
Ultimately Roh would like to
dissolve the military reliance. As he remarked in
his television conversation, he is "opposed to
depending on foreign troops to defend our most
sensitive line of defense near the North Korean
border".
But what if the North Koreans
turn to their ultimate weapons - the nuclear
warheads they have been fabricating along with the
missiles capable of delivering them?
Much
to the disgust of conservatives, Roh can't get
over the view that the US and Japan are to blame
for exacerbating tensions. "There has been talk
that the US and even Japan may launch a preemptive
attack on North Korea," he said, "but any use of
force against North Korea prior to its use of
force is not desirable."
In fact, the only
such talk has come from Pyongyang, which regularly
accuses Washington of planning a preemptive strike
- the rationale, of course, for the North's
nuclear program.
Nor is Roh sympathetic
with the US Treasury Department's move to shut
North Korea out of international banking and
finance, direly needed to sustain its dilapidated
economy. He hopes, he said, "for a speedy
conclusion" of the US probe into Banco Delta Asia
in Macau, which the US has said is the conduit for
counterfeit North Korean US$100 "supernotes".
Roh now hopes to jump-start the six-party
talks by a "common and broad approach" that he
believes will be acceptable to both the North
Koreans and the Americans. US President George W
Bush had no trouble signing on to the verbiage
when he hosted Roh at the White House a couple of
weeks ago. Roh sees North Korea's silence on the
topic as a hopeful sign - even though the North
would appear to have rejected the whole thing by
frequent refusals to return to the table unless
the US removes its economic "sanctions".
Just on "any slim chance" the North did
test a nuke, said Roh, South Korea is "making
various diplomatic efforts". In any case, he said,
South Korea would want to take over wartime
control of its own troops even if the North did
conduct a test.
North Korea, moreover,
isn't going to relent in its demands for the
withdrawal of all US troops regardless of the deal
to place them under South Korean command in time
of war. Roh, like the North Koreans, may want all
the Americans out - but not at the risk of
conservative rage that might jeopardize his own
already unpopular regime even before conservatives
muster the strength to take over the government in
the presidential election next year.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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