December 23, 2007
Where Boys Were Kings, a Shift Toward Baby Girls

By CHOE SANG-HUN
SEOUL, South Korea — When Park He-ran was a young mother, other women would approach her to ask what her secret was. She had given birth to three boys in a row at a time when South Korean women considered it their paramount duty to bear a son.

Ms. Park, a 61-year-old newspaper executive, gets a different reaction today. “When I tell people I have three sons and no daughter, they say they are sorry for my misfortune,” she said. “Within a generation, I have turned from the luckiest woman possible to a pitiful mother.”

In South Korea, once one of Asia’s most rigidly patriarchal societies, a centuries-old preference for baby boys is fast receding. And that has led to what seems to be a decrease in the number of abortions performed after ultrasounds that reveal the sex of a fetus.

According to a study released by the World Bank in October, South Korea is the first of several Asian countries with large sex imbalances at birth to reverse the trend, moving toward greater parity between the sexes. Last year, the ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, still above what is considered normal, but down from a peak of 116.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990.

The most important factor in changing attitudes toward girls was the radical shift in the country’s economy that opened the doors to women in the work force as never before and dismantled long-held traditions, which so devalued daughters that mothers would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

The government also played a small role starting in the 1970s. After growing alarmed by the rise in sex-preference abortions, leaders mounted campaigns to change people’s attitudes, including one that featured the popular slogan “One daughter raised well is worth 10 sons!”

In 1987, the government banned doctors from revealing the sex of a fetus before birth. But experts say enforcement was lax because officials feared too many doctors would be caught.

Demographers say the rapid change in South Koreans’ feelings about female babies gives them hope that sex imbalances will begin to shrink in other rapidly developing Asian countries — notably China and India — where the same combination of a preference for boys and new technology has led to the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses.

“China and India are closely studying South Korea as a trendsetter in Asia,” said Chung Woo-jin, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. “They are curious whether the same social and economic changes can occur in their countries as fast as they did in South Korea’s relatively small and densely populated society.”

In China in 2005, the ratio was 120 boys born for every 100 girls, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Vietnam reported a ratio of 110 boys to 100 girls last year. And although India recorded about 108 boys for every 100 girls in 2001, when the last census was taken, experts say the gap is sure to have widened by now.

The Population Fund warned in an October report that the rampant tinkering with nature’s probabilities in Asia could eventually lead to increased sexual violence and trafficking of women as a generation of boys finds marriage prospects severely limited.

In South Korea, the gap in the ratio of boys to girls born began to widen in the 1970s, but experts say it became especially pronounced in the mid-1980s as ultrasound technology became more widespread and increasing wages allowed more families to pay for the tests. The imbalance was widest from 1990 through 1995, when it remained above 112 to 100.

The imbalance has been closing steadily only since 2002. Last year’s ratio of 107.4 boys for every 100 girls was closer to the ratio of 105 to 100 that demographers consider normal and, according to The World Factbook, published by the Central Intelligence Agency, just above the global average of 107 boys born for every 100 girls.

The preference for boys here is centuries old and was rooted in part in an agrarian society that relied on sons to do the hard work on family farms. But in Asia’s Confucian societies, men were also accorded special status because they were considered the carriers of the family’s all-important bloodline.

That elevated status came with certain perquisites — men received their families’ inheritance — but also responsibilities. Once the eldest son married, he and his wife went to live with his family; he was expected to support his parents financially while his wife was expected to care for them in their old age.

The wife’s lowly role in her new family was constantly reinforced by customs that included requiring a daughter-in-law to serve her father-in-law food while on her knees.

“In the old days, when there was no adequate social safety net, Korean parents regarded having a son as kind of making an investment for old age security,” Professor Chung said. It was common for married Korean men to feel ashamed if they had no sons. Some went so far as to divorce wives who did not bear boys.

Then in the 1970s and ’80s, the country threw itself into an industrial revolution that would remake society in ways few South Koreans could have imagined.

Sons drifted away to higher-paying jobs in the cities, leaving their parents behind. And older Koreans found their own incomes rising, allowing them to save money for retirement rather than relying on their sons for support.

Married daughters, no longer shackled to their husbands’ families, returned to provide emotional or financial support for their own elderly parents.

“Daughters are much better at emotional contact with their parents, visiting them more often, while Korean sons tend to be distant,” said Kim Seung-kwon, a demographer at the government’s Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.

Ms. Park, the newspaper executive, said such changes forced people to rethink their old biases. “In restaurants and parks, when you see a large family out for a dinner or picnic, 9 out of 10, it’s the wife who brings the family together with her parents, not the husband with his parents,” she said. “To be practical, for an old Korean parent, having a daughter sometimes is much better than having a son.”

The economic changes also unleashed a revolution of a different sort. With the economy heating up, men could no longer afford to keep women out of the workforce, and women began slowly to gain confidence, and grudging respect.

Although change is coming slowly and deep prejudices remain — in some businesses, women are pressured to leave their jobs when pregnant — women are more accepted now in the workplace and at the best universities that send graduates to the top corporations.

Six of 10 South Korean women entered college last year; fewer than one out of 10 did so in 1981. And in the National Assembly, once one of the nation’s most male-dominated institutions, women now hold about 13 percent of the seats, about double the percentage they held just four years ago.

Shin Hye-sun, 39, says she has witnessed many of the changes in women’s status during her 13 years at the TBC television station in Taegu, in central South Korea. “When I first joined the company in 1995, a woman was expected to quit her job once she got married; we called it a ‘resignation on a company suggestion,’” she said. Now, she said, many women stay after marriage and take a three-month break after giving birth before returning to work.

“If someone suggests that a woman should quit after marriage, female workers in my company will take it as an insult and say so,” Ms. Shin said.

According to the World Bank study, one of the surprises in South Korea was that it took as long as it did for the effects of a booming economy to translate into changes in people’s attitudes toward the birth of daughters.

The study suggests that the country’s former authoritarian rulers helped slow the transition by upholding laws and devising policies that supported a continuation of Confucian hierarchy, which encourages fealty not only to family patriarchs, but also to the nation’s leaders.

With the move toward democracy in the late 1980s, the concept of equal rights for men and women began to creep into Koreans’ thinking. In 1990, the law guaranteeing men their family’s inheritance — a cornerstone of the Confucian system — was the first of the so-called family laws to fall; the rest would be dismantled over the next 15 years.

After 2002, the narrowing of the gender gap signaled that attitudes about the value of women — and ultimately of daughters — had begun to catch up to the seismic changes in the economy and the law.

And last year, a study by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs showed that of 5,400 married South Korean women younger than 45 who were surveyed, only 10 percent said they felt that they must have a son. That was down from 40 percent in 1991.

“When my father took me to our ancestral graves for worshiping, my grandfather used to say, ‘Why did you bring a daughter here?’” said Park Su-mi, 29, a newlywed who calls the idea that only men carry on a family’s bloodline “unscientific and absurd.”

“My husband and I have no preference at all for boys,” she said. “We don’t care whether we have a boy or girl because we don’t see any difference between a boy and a girl in helping make our family happy.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-mead30dec30,0,1035099.story
From the Los Angeles Times
The great fall of China
Revised GDP calculations show that Beijing isn't the giant we thought it was.
By Walter Russell Mead

December 30, 2007

The most important story to come out of Washington recently had nothing to do with the endless presidential campaign. And although the media largely ignored it, the story changes the world.

The story's unlikely source was the staid World Bank, which published updated statistics on the economic output of 146 countries. China's economy, said the bank, is smaller than it thought.

About 40% smaller.

China, it turns out, isn't a $10-trillion economy on the brink of catching up with the United States. It is a $6-trillion economy, less than half our size. For the foreseeable future, China will have far less money to spend on its military and will face much deeper social and economic problems at home than experts previously believed.

What happened to $4 trillion in Chinese gross domestic product?

Statistics. When economists calculate a country's gross domestic product, they add up the prices of the goods and services its economy produces and get a total -- in dollars for the United States, euros for such countries as Germany and France and yuan for China. To compare countries' GDP, they typically convert each country's product into dollars.

The simplest way to do this is to use exchange rates. In 2006, the World Bank calculated that China produced 21 trillion yuan worth of goods and services. Using the market exchange rate of 7.8 yuan to the dollar, the bank pegged China's GDP at $2.7 trillion.

That number is too low. For one thing, like many countries, China artificially manipulates the value of its currency. For another, many goods in less developed economies such as China and Mexico are much cheaper than they are in countries such as the United States.

To take these factors into account, economists compare prices from one economy to another and compute an adjusted GDP figure based on "purchasing-power parity." The idea is that a country's GDP adjusted for purchasing-power parity provides a more realistic measure of relative economic strength and of living standards than the unadjusted GDP numbers.

Unfortunately, comparing hundreds and even thousands of prices in almost 150 economies all over the world is a difficult thing to do. Concerned that its purchasing-power-parity numbers were out of whack, the World Bank went back to the drawing board and, with help from such countries as India and China, reviewed the data behind its GDP adjustments.

It learned that there is less difference between China's domestic prices and those in such countries as the United States than previously thought. So the new purchasing-power-parity adjustment is smaller than the old one -- and $4 trillion in Chinese GDP melts into air.

The political consequences will be felt far and wide. To begin with, the U.S. will remain the world's largest economy well into the future. Given that fact, fears that China will challenge the U.S. for global political leadership seem overblown. Under the old figures, China was predicted to pass the United States as the world's largest economy in 2012. That isn't going to happen.

Also, the difference in U.S. and Chinese living standards is much larger than previously thought. Average income per Chinese is less than one-tenth the U.S. level. With its people this poor, China will have a hard time raising enough revenue for the vast military buildup needed to challenge the United States.

The balance of power in Asia looks more secure. Japan's economy was not affected by the World Bank revisions. China's economy has shrunk by 40% compared with Japan too. And although India's economy was downgraded by 40%, the United States, Japan and India will be more than capable of balancing China's military power in Asia for a very long time to come.

But don't pop the champagne corks. It is bad news that billions of people are significantly poorer than we thought. China and India are not the only countries whose GDP has been revised downward. The World Bank figures show sub-Saharan Africa's economy to be 25% smaller. One consequence is that the ambitious campaign to reduce world poverty by 2015 through the United Nations Millennium Development Goals will surely fail. We have underestimated the size of the world's poverty problem, and we have overestimated our progress in attacking it. This is not good.

There is more bad news. U.S. businesses and entrepreneurs hoping to crack the Chinese and Indian markets must come to terms with a middle class that is significantly smaller than thought. Investors in overseas stocks should take note. Companies with growth plans tied to the Indian and Chinese markets could face disappointing results, and the high prices of many emerging-market stocks depend on buzz and psychology. Investor sentiment on China and India may now be significantly more vulnerable to future bad news.

China's political stability may be more fragile than thought. The country faces huge domestic challenges -- an aging population lacking any form of social security, wholesale problems in the financial system that dwarf those revealed in the U.S. sub-prime loan mess and the breakdown of its health system. These problems are as big as ever, but China has fewer resources to meet them than we thought.

And there is the environment. With poor air quality, acute water shortages, massive pollution in major watersheds and many other environmental problems, China needs to make enormous investments in the environment to avoid major disasters. Globally, it will be much harder to get China -- and India -- to make any sacrifices to address problems such as global warming.

For Americans, the new numbers from the World Bank bring good news and bad. On the plus side, U.S. leadership in the global system seems more secure and more likely to endure through the next generation. On the other hand, the world we are called on to lead is poorer and more troubled than we anticipated.

Maybe the old Chinese curse says it best: We seem to be headed for interesting times.

Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World."

www.smallwarsjournal.com

Can the Anbar Strategy Work in Pakistan?

By SWJ Editors


Can the Anbar Strategy Work in Pakistan?

By Clint Watts

Afghan and Arab fighters defeated the Soviet Union by pursuing a strategy that mobilized tribes to entangle a foreign occupier in a hostile land. In rugged terrain, Soviet conventional forces lost their initiative to a ruthless insurgency campaign. Through a decade of fighting, the Soviets ultimately died from a thousand cuts. They entered Afghanistan a world power and returned home demoralized by Muslim guerrillas, hastening the collapse of their regime.

In the 1990s, Osama Bin Laden decided to use a similar strategy against the United States. Spurned by his homeland of Saudi Arabia and vexed by the presence of infidels on holy soil, Bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into a protracted entanglement in the Middle East. This entanglement, he thought, would increase al-Qa’ida’s prestige and recruitment, unify all Muslims, and ultimately exhaust the United States and lead to its withdrawal from the region.

In Somalia, Bin Laden’s first attempt to mobilize tribes on his own against the United States failed. While headquartered in Khartoum, Bin Laden deployed advisory teams to Somalia from 1992-1994. Through training, finance and religious indoctrination, al-Qa’ida’s insurgency cadres attempted to align the Muslim tribes of Somalia in a common effort to repel Western aid and military intervention. Instead of waging jihad on Westerners, however, al-Qa’ida found itself engulfed in an entanglement of its own, squandering precious resources and trapped in a chaotic morass of state failure.

Al-Qa’ida’s venture in Somalia failed for three reasons. First, al-Qa’ida did not understand the local tribal power structure. Bin Laden’s cadres found themselves trapped in a web of overlapping alliances in which Somali clans and militias routinely switched sides and were far more interested in focusing on the ‘near enemy’ of a rival clan over the ‘far enemy’ of the west. For African Somalis, simply surviving in a failed state took primacy over an ideological battle between outside Arabs and unknown Westerners. Second, al-Qa’ida’s brand of Salafi Islam clashed with the local variant of Sufi Islam. Somalis were uninterested in the oppressive Salafi preaching of Arab outsiders over the mystic Sufi strain of Islam worshipped in their society for centuries. Third, al-Qa’ida underestimated the costs of supporting an insurgency in interior Africa. Time and again, al-Qa’ida operatives failed to marshal sufficient resources—water, equipment, weapons—to maintain the loyalty of Somali tribes.

Al-Qa’ida has lost Iraq for the same reasons. First, Iraqi Sunni tribes have turned against the foreign fighters since their presence sustains the U.S. occupation. Second, Iraqi Sunnis were turned off by the restrictive practices of Salafi Islam which al-Qa’ida members implemented in areas they controlled. Third, with the shift in U.S. strategy, the increased intelligence and military action from Sunni tribal alliances, and the more stabilizing efforts of surrounding countries in the region, it has become logistically difficult for al-Qa’ida to maintain a fighting force in Iraq.

Recent U.S. success in defeating al-Qa’ida in Iraq has prompted policy makers and military planners to export this strategy to other theaters, specifically the tribal areas of Pakistan. However, the U.S. should ask itself three questions before continuing: Will the tribes of Pakistan’s frontier provinces turn on al-Qa’ida? Probably not. Unlike Somalia and Iraq, al-Qa’ida has operated in the tribal regions of Pakistan for more than two decades and today it is part of the region’s fabric, not an outsider. Will the ideology of al-Qa’ida clash with Pakistani tribes? In the past it may have, but today there is a greater overlap between the Deobandi strain of Islam that the Taliban follows and the Salafism of al-Qa’ida. Third, will financial and military inducements to Pakistani tribes translate into pressure on al-Qa'ida's logistics? Unlikely. The tribes in Waziristan have already withstood six years of pressure from Musharraf and al-Qa’ida has more than twenty years worth of supply networks in the region.

The U.S. is correct to seize upon any opportunity to dislodge al-Qa’ida from Pakistan’s tribal regions, especially if it involves the use of surrogates. However, it should not use a blanket strategy of alliances with al-Qa’ida’s hosts if the social, cultural and geographic conditions make its chances of success unlikely. If it does, U.S. forces might be the ones entangled, stretched logistically, and in conflict with the local ideology. As al-Qa’ida in Somalia and Iraq has learned, this is a bad place to be.

Clint Watts is a former US Army Infantry Officer, FBI Special Agent and Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He is Co-editor and Co-Author of Al-Qa'ida's (Mis) Adventures in the Horn of Africa and Program Manager for the FBI-Combating Terrorism Center Education Initiative and Combating Terrorism Center Harmony Program which declassifies and publishes studies based on al-Qa'ida's internal documents captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Iran Cited In Iraq's Decline in Violence
Order From Tehran Reined In Militias, U.S. Official Says
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 23, 2007; A01

The Iranian government has decided "at the most senior levels" to rein in the violent Shiite militias it supports in Iraq, a move reflected in a sharp decrease in sophisticated roadside bomb attacks over the past several months, according to the State Department's top official on Iraq.

Tehran's decision does not necessarily mean the flow of those weapons from Iran has stopped, but the decline in their use and in overall attacks "has to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision," David M. Satterfield, Iraq coordinator and senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said in an interview.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker said that the decision, "should [Tehran] choose to corroborate it in a direct fashion," would be "a good beginning" for a fourth round of talks between Crocker and his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad. Although the mid-December date scheduled for the talks was postponed, Crocker said he expects that the parties will convene "in the next couple of weeks."

The Pentagon has been more cautious in describing Iran's role in changes on the ground in Iraq. A Defense Department report released Wednesday emphasized that support for militia groups by Tehran's Shiite government remains "a significant impediment to progress." And Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Friday that "the jury is out" on whether Iran is playing a less-destructive role.

"There has been a reduction in . . . attacks," Gates said. But, he said, it is uncertain whether the decrease is a result of U.S. and Iraqi actions "or whether the Iranians have begun to reduce the level of support. . . . We don't have a good feeling or any confidence in terms of how to weigh those different things."

One U.S. official, familiar with intelligence reports on Iraq but unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said the conclusion that a high-level policy decision was made in Tehran is "in the strike zone" of intelligence assessments. Iran "would definitely like to maintain some degree of influence over the militias" and other players in Iraq, the official said. Iran remains deeply involved in Iraqi political and economic affairs.

The Bush administration has said that Iran maintains a widespread intelligence network in Iraq, with blurred lines between political operatives and those with direct involvement in militia violence. Rather than lessening its influence in Iraq, the official said, Iran has opted for "a creative shift in tactics" as violent militia action -- some of it directed against Shiites -- has turned many Iraqis against them.

Satterfield agreed that Iran was not acting out of "altruism" but rather from "alarm at what was being done by the groups they were backing in terms of their own long-term interests."

At a news conference Friday, Rice sidestepped an opportunity to criticize Iran. The United States, she said, remains "open to better relations" with Iran, adding, "We don't have permanent enemies."

The administration has long been reluctant to ascribe anything but malevolent motives to Tehran. Although a National Intelligence Estimate released early this month concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago, the White House has emphasized its conclusion that the program, which Iran has consistently denied, actually existed.

The administration is far from declaring a fundamental change in Iran's attitude toward and objectives in Iraq, or judging that the new direction is permanent.

But "we have seen such a consistent and sustained diminution in certain kinds of violence by certain kinds of folks that we can't explain it solely" by internal factors in Iraq, Satterfield said. "If you add those all together, your calculus doesn't come out unless you also add in that the Iranians at a command level must have said or done something, as well."

He declined to discuss specific evidence. "We are confident that decisions involving the strategy pursued by the IRGC are made at the most senior levels of the Iranian government," Satterfield said, referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The administration has used that formulation in the past to insist that IRGC training and supplies for militias in Iraq were ordered by Tehran's highest clerical leaders.

Several officials said the change began with the attack in late August on two of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. More than 50 people were killed and hundreds were wounded when members of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia, also called the Mahdi Army, of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fired rocket-propelled grenades and rifles into a crowd of thousands of religious pilgrims. The violence apparently was the result of clashes between Sadr's militia and the Badr Organization, the armed wing of Iraq's largest Shiite political party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

The killing sparked widespread public outrage and deeply embarrassed the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Sadr subsequently suspended JAM violence, although breakaway militia factions -- called "special groups" by the U.S. military -- have continued to attack U.S. and Iraqi government forces.

Their weapon of choice, roadside bombs, particularly the explosively formed projectiles the United States has said are provided by Iran, has been responsible for more U.S. casualties in Iraq than any other form of attack.

"Iran is an enormously complex government, society and country, and we're not there," Crocker said in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "I am real modest about what I think I understand on Iranian actions, decisions and motivations. That said, given Iranian influence, particularly within the Sadr movement and JAM," the freeze on JAM operations that began four months ago would not exist without Iranian approval, he said.

Crocker said he is "prepared to make that inference" in the upcoming talks with Iran.

NYT . Aug 16, 2006


The forensic files will come into play for the first time on Aug. 21, when Mr. Hussein is to stand trial on genocide charges, accused of trying to annihilate the Kurdish people in 1988. He is alleged to have ordered military operations that wiped out entire villages, sometimes with chemical weapons, killing at least 50,000 people.

It is also preparing files on Mr. Hussein’s brutal suppression of the Shiite uprising across southern Iraq at the end of the Persian Gulf war in early 1991. At least 100,000 Shiites, and possibly twice that number, died, according to court officials.

===========================================\

In a meticulous process of documentation, the investigators used sophisticated imaging technology to map the contents of the graves, including the location of each body, spent cartridge and bullet. The remains were then flown by helicopter to the team’s laboratories in a fortified compound in western Baghdad.
On a gray wooden work table in the Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, two yellowing skeletons lay side by side. One was that of a woman between the ages of 35 and 50 with a bullet hole in the back of her skull. Next to her were the tiny bones of an infant no older than a year. A separate bullet had shattered the baby’s skull, which investigators reassembled using surgical tape.
These were Case No. 19 (the baby) and No. 20 (the woman), two of the 123 victims whose bodies Mr. Trimble’s team pulled from a mass grave in a remote area about 60 miles from the northern town of Hatra.
The grave, known as Nineveh 2, is one of three sites the investigators are using to help build the Kurdish genocide case against Mr. Hussein. The skeletal remains, still clothed, were found lying face up, the woman’s left arm around the child, who was wrapped in a blanket decorated with a bunny appliqué.
The woman may have been the child’s mother, or perhaps a relative or a neighbor — the investigators cannot say for sure. But what is certain is that they died in an embrace.
Raad Juhi, the chief investigative judge, said the victims had been told that they were being relocated from their villages near Sulaimaniya to a residential complex elsewhere.
Case No. 20 was dressed in five layers of clothing, suggesting that she had not been allowed to pack a suitcase and had left home in a hurry. She was carrying a handbag with some baby clothes and personal items: a spool of thread, a tube of antibiotic ointment, matches, a metal container, some coins, a barrette and five pairs of gold earrings.
The child was dressed in soft white pants, a red pullover and a white long-sleeved shirt decorated with red trim, a drawing of a red sun hat and the word “summer.”
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Like thousands of other victims, Mr. Juhi said, the victims were herded aboard buses and driven to a holding camp near Kirkuk called Topzawa. From there they were driven into the remote desert, separated into groups — men in one, women and children in another — and then corralled into trenches.