New book details Chinese spy effort ahead of Olympics

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As athletes train for the summer Olympics in China, a new book claims that the country's vast spy network is gearing up for a different challenge - keeping an eye on journalists and potential troublemakers.
French writer Roger Faligot, author of some 40 intelligence-related books, has penned 'The Chinese Secret Services from Mao to the Olympic Games', due out February 29.

His findings claim that special teams are being formed at the country's embassies abroad "to identify sports journalists ... and to define if they have an 'antagonistic' or 'friendly' attitude in regards to China."

Potential foreign spies who may seek to enter China by posing as journalists or visitors will be subject to special surveillance.

The same goes for human rights activists who could use the event to demonstrate in favour of causes such as Tibet, where China has violently crushed protests against its rule, it says.

That's not to mention the long list of other issues preoccupying Chinese authorities, including the possibility of an Al-Qaeda attack and protests from the Falun Gong spiritual movement. China has outlawed Falun Gong, which combines meditation with Buddhist-inspired teachings.

"The watchword for the Chinese is 'no problems at the Olympics,'" Faligot says.

Faligot, who is fluent in Mandarin, says he spoke with numerous Chinese officials.

According to him, two million Chinese work directly or indirectly for the intelligence services through the state security agency.

In a chapter titled 'China: Gold Medal for Espionage', the author says the director of the group coordinating Olympic security, Qiang Wei, has a 1.3-billion-dollar (885-million-euro) budget.

An Olympic security command centre has been created "in order to assure a response to all risks in real time".

Olympic organisers admitted last year to budget overruns caused by extra expenditure on security at the Games, the biggest international event ever staged in communist China.

Last September, China's then-police chief Zhou Yongkang said that "terrorist" and "extremist" groups posed the biggest threat to the success of the Olympics.

He did not elaborate, but China has previously accused some members of the ethnic Muslim Uighur community in the nation's far western region of Xinjiang of terror-related activities.

In the year leading up to the August 8-24 Games, the Chinese army will have organised 25 exercises on how to respond to crises, including a chemical attack on the subway.

The teams being formed in foreign embassies will work in conjunction with "different Chinese intelligence services under diplomatic cover".

Those intelligence services will include the secretive 610 office, set up in 1999 to target the Falun Gong movement and which operates worldwide.

But the intelligence services won't only be deployed during the Olympics to keep an eye out, Faligot says. They'll also be recruiting among the two million visitors expected for the event.

Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium

America and the world

Big think that gets you a headline
Jan 17th 2008

The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation
By Strobe Talbott

Simon & Schuster; 478 pages; $30

Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
AS A successful American journalist, diplomat and now president of the Brookings Institution in Washington, Strobe Talbott has been all over the place. Some people may think this book is all over the place too.

AP

Now, look here

Its first half is a brisk history of civilisation: a mad gallop through the birth of Judaism, the coming of Christianity and Islam, the ups and downs of Greece and Rome, the imperial dynasties of China, the triumphs and depredations of Genghis Khan, the founding of America, the French revolution, Napoleon, the Ottomans and so forth. This part of the book also provides a speed-dating history of political ideas: for a fleeting couple of pages each, the reader meets thinkers from Dante to Darwin and Machiavelli to Marx, with no previous acquaintanceship assumed.

Mercifully, the gallop slows to a canter as modern times approach. Mr Talbott proceeds at a statelier pace through the two world wars, the cold war and the establishment of the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Eventually (at the point at which the author strides onto history's stage as Bill Clinton's deputy secretary of state), the canter becomes a walk. The story from the Clinton administration to the present fills almost half the pages.

A book that ranges so wide can be hard to digest, but there is method in Mr Talbott's meandering. He is fascinated by what he believes to be a continuous tension between the world's need and appetite for collective governance on the one hand and, on the other, the desire of tribes and nations to think of themselves as independent and sovereign. His dash through history ancient and modern is an attempt to show that the “great experiment” in global governance of his title has its origins in religion, philosophy and the strivings of leaders over thousands of years. Empires, he argues, have not all been about rape and pillage. Alexander and Napoleon had bigger ideas about the fellowship of man—or at least of those men who bowed to the imperial will.

Mr Talbott has also had the good luck to be able to track the same tension in the present day, as America after the cold war has oscillated between a multilateral and unilateral foreign policy under Presidents Clinton and Bush. This part of his story is the better read. He is frankly partisan, a multilateralist who sees the unilateralism of Mr Bush's presidency as a sorry interruption in history's inexorable progress towards a more consensual world in which going it alone can no longer answer pressing problems such as nuclear proliferation and climate change.

Fortunately, you do not have to buy the author's wider musings or share his admiration of Mr Clinton, Al Gore and Kofi Annan to enjoy this ambitious journey through history and politics. And it is not, in the end, so peculiar to dart back and forth between great ideas, the broad sweep of history and the day-to-day practicalities of politics. Wittingly or unwittingly, that is what political leaders do all the time.

In one amusing passage, for example, Mr Talbott describes a chat between President Clinton, Mr Gore and some of their speechwriters. Mr Gore is waxing eloquent about the differences between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson on whether the principles of democracy were limited to America. Jefferson, says Mr Gore, was right: “Rousseau said the body politic is a moral being possessed of a will. He was thinking on the national level. We need to take it to the international one.” There are a lot of contradictions in all this great stuff, grumble the speechwriters as the group breaks up. “You guys can do it,” says the president with a grin: “We need some big think that gets us a headline.”

The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation.
By Strobe Talbott.
Simon & Schuster; 478 pages; $30

Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and the Good War

February 25, 2008

By George Friedman
There has been tremendous controversy over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which consistently has been contrasted with Afghanistan. Many of those who opposed the Iraq war have supported the war in Afghanistan; indeed, they have argued that among the problems with Iraq is that it diverts resources from Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been seen as an obvious haven for terrorism. This has meant the war in Afghanistan often has been perceived as having a direct effect on al Qaeda and on the ability of radical Islamists to threaten the United States, while Iraq has been seen as unrelated to the main war. Supporters of the war in Iraq support the war in Afghanistan. Opponents of the war in Iraq also support Afghanistan. If there is a good war in our time, Afghanistan is it.
It is also a war that is in trouble. In the eyes of many, one of the Afghan war’s virtues has been that NATO has participated as an entity. But NATO has come under heavy criticism from U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates for its performance. Some, like the Canadians, are threatening to withdraw their troops if other alliance members do not contribute more heavily to the mission. More important, the Taliban have been fighting an effective and intensive insurgency. Further complicating the situation, the roots of many of the military and political issues in Afghanistan are found across the border in Pakistan.
If the endgame in Iraq is murky, the endgame if Afghanistan is invisible. The United States, its allies and the Kabul government are fighting a holding action strategically. They do not have the force to destroy the Taliban — and in counterinsurgency, the longer the insurgents maintain their operational capability, the more likely they are to win. Further stiffening the Taliban resolve is the fact that, while insurgents have nowhere to go, foreigners can always decide to go home.
To understand the status of the war in Afghanistan, we must begin with what happened between 9/11 and early 2002. Al Qaeda had its primary command and training facilities in Afghanistan. The Taliban had come to power in a civil war among Afghans that broke out after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban had close links to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). While there was an ideological affinity between the two, there was also a geopolitical attraction. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan concerned Pakistan gravely. India and the Soviets were aligned, and the Pakistanis feared being caught in a vise. The Pakistanis thus were eager to cooperate with the Americans and Saudis in supporting Islamist fighters against the Soviets. After the Soviets left and the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis wanted to fill the vacuum. Their support of the Taliban served Pakistani national security interests and the religious proclivities of a large segment of the ISI.
After 9/11, the United States saw Afghanistan as its main problem. Al Qaeda, which was not Afghan but an international Islamist group, had received sanctuary from the Taliban. If the United States was to have any chance of defeating al Qaeda, it would be in Afghanistan. A means toward that end was destroying the Taliban government. This was not because the Taliban itself represented a direct threat to the United States but because al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan did.
The United States wanted to act quickly and decisively in order to disrupt al Qaeda. A direct invasion of Afghanistan was therefore not an option. First, it would take many months to deploy U.S. forces. Second, there was no practical place to deploy them. The Iranians wouldn’t accept U.S. forces on their soil and the Pakistanis were far from eager to see the Taliban toppled. Basing troops in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan along the northern border of Afghanistan was an option but also a logistical nightmare. It would be well into the spring of 2002 before any invasion was possible, and the fear of al Qaeda’s actions in the meantime was intense.
The United States therefore decided not to invade Afghanistan. Instead, it made deals with groups that opposed the Taliban. In the North, Washington allied with the Northern Alliance, a group with close ties to the Russians. In the West, the United States allied with Persian groups under the influence of Iran. The United States made political arrangements with Moscow and Tehran to allow access to their Afghan allies. The Russians and Iranians both disliked the Taliban and were quite content to help. The mobilized Afghan groups also opposed the Taliban and loved the large sums of money U.S. intelligence operatives provided them.
These groups provided the force for the mission. The primary U.S. presence consisted of several hundred troops from U.S. Special Operations Command, along with CIA personnel. The United States also brought a great deal of air power, both Navy and Air Force, into the battle. The small U.S. ground force was to serve as a political liaison with the Afghan groups attacking the Taliban, to provide access to what weapons were available for the Afghan forces and, above all, to coordinate air support for the Afghans against concentrations of Taliban fighters. Airstrikes began a month after 9/11.
While Washington turned out an extraordinary political and covert performance, the United States did not invade. Rather, it acquired armies in Afghanistan prepared to carry out the mission and provided them with support and air power. The operation did not defeat the Taliban. Instead, it forced them to make a political and military decision.
Political power in Afghanistan does not come from the cities. It comes from the countryside, while the cities are the prize. The Taliban could defend the cities only by massing forces to block attacks by other Afghan factions. But when they massed their forces, the Taliban were vulnerable to air attacks. After experiencing the consequences of U.S. air power, the Taliban made a strategic decision. In the absence of U.S. airstrikes, they could defeat their adversaries and had done so before. While they might have made a fight of it, given U.S. air power, the Taliban selected a different long-term strategy.
Rather than attempt to defend the cities, the Taliban withdrew, dispersed and made plans to regroup. Their goal was to hold enough of the countryside to maintain their political influence. As in their campaign against the Soviets, the Taliban understood that their Afghan enemies would not pursue them, and that over time, their ability to conduct small-scale operations would negate the value of U.S. airpower and draw the Americans into a difficult fight on unfavorable terms.
The United States was not particularly disturbed by the outcome. It was not after the Taliban but al Qaeda. It appears — and much of this remains murky — that the command cell of al Qaeda escaped from Afghan forces and U.S. Special Operations personnel at Tora Bora and slipped across the border into Pakistan. Exactly what happened is unclear, but it is clear that al Qaeda’s command cell was not destroyed. The fight against al Qaeda produced a partial victory. Al Qaeda clearly was disrupted and relocated — and was denied its sanctuary. A number of its operatives were captured, further degrading its operational capability.
The Afghan campaign therefore had these outcomes:

Al Qaeda was degraded but not eliminated.
The Taliban remained an intact fighting force, but the United States never really expected them to commit suicide by massing for U.S. B-52 strikes.
The United States had never invaded Afghanistan and had made no plans to occupy it.
Afghanistan was never the issue, and the Taliban were a subordinate matter.
After much of al Qaeda’s base lost its sanctuary in Afghanistan and had to relocate to Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan became a sideshow for the U.S. military.

Over time, the United States and NATO brought about 50,000 troops to Afghanistan. Their hope was that Hamid Karzai’s government would build a force that could defeat the Taliban. But the problem was that, absent U.S. and NATO forces, the Taliban had managed to defeat the forces now arrayed against them once before, in the Afghan civil war. The U.S. commitment of troops was enough to hold the major cities and conduct offensive operations that kept the Taliban off balance, but the United States could not possibly defeat them. The Soviets had deployed 300,000 troops in Afghanistan and could not defeat the mujahideen. NATO, with 50,000 troops and facing the same shifting alliance of factions and tribes that the Soviets couldn’t pull together, could not pacify Afghanistan.
But vanquishing the Taliban simply was not the goal. The goal was to maintain a presence that could conduct covert operations in Pakistan looking for al Qaeda and keep al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan. Part of this goal could be achieved by keeping a pro-American government in Kabul under Karzai. The strategy was to keep al Qaeda off balance, preserve Karzai and launch operations against the Taliban designed to prevent them from becoming too effective and aggressive. The entire U.S. military would have been insufficient to defeat the Taliban; the war in Afghanistan thus was simply a holding action.
The holding action was made all the more difficult in that the Taliban could not be isolated from their sources of supply or sanctuary; Pakistan provided both. It really didn’t matter whether this was because President Pervez Musharraf’s government intended to play both sides, whether factions inside the Pakistani military maintained close affinities with the Taliban or whether the Pakistani government and army simply couldn’t control tribal elements loyal to al Qaeda. What did matter was that all along the Afghan border — particularly in southern Afghanistan — supplies flowed in from Pakistan, and the Taliban moved into sanctuaries in Pakistan for rest and regrouping.
The Taliban was and is operating on their own terrain. They have excellent intelligence about the movements of NATO forces and a flexible and sufficient supply line allowing them to maintain and increase operations and control of the countryside. Having retreated in 2001, the Taliban systematically regrouped, rearmed and began operating as a traditional guerrilla force with an increased penchant for suicide attacks.
As in Vietnam, the challenge in fighting a guerrilla force is to cut it off from its supplies. The United States failed to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that allowed men and materiel to move into South Vietnam until the United States lost the appetite for war. In Afghanistan, it is the same problem compounded. First, the lines of supply into Pakistan are even more complex than the Ho Chi Minh trail was. Second, the country that provides the supplies is formally allied with the United States. Pakistan is committed both to cutting those lines of supply and aiding the United States in capturing al Qaeda in its Northwest. That is the primary mission, but the subsidiary mission remains keeping the Taliban within tolerable levels of activity and preventing them from posing a threat to more and more of the Afghan countryside and cities. There has been a great deal of focus on Pakistan’s assistance in northwestern Afghanistan against al Qaeda, but much less on the line of supply maintaining the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. And as Pakistan has attempted to pursue a policy of balancing its relations with the Taliban and with the United States, the Pakistani government now faces a major jihadist insurgency on its own turf.
Afghanistan therefore is not — and in some ways never has been — the center of gravity of the challenge facing the United States. Occupying Afghanistan is inconceivable without a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s policies or capabilities. But forcing Pakistan to change its policies in southern Afghanistan really is pointless, since the United States doesn’t have enough forces there to take advantage of a Pakistani shift, and Washington doesn’t care about the Taliban in the long run.
The real issue is the hardest to determine. Is al Qaeda prime — not al Qaeda enthusiasts or sympathizers who are able to carry out local suicide bombings, but the capable covert operatives we saw on 9/11 — still operational? And even if it is degraded, given enough time, will al Qaeda be able to regroup and ramp up its operational capability? If so, then the United States must maintain its posture in Afghanistan, as limited and unbalanced as it is. The United States might even need to consider extending the war to Pakistan in an attempt to seal the border if the Taliban continue to strengthen. But if al Qaeda is not operational, then the rationale for guarding Kabul and Karzai becomes questionable.
We have no way of determining whether al Qaeda remains operational; we are not sure anyone can assess that with certainty. Certainly, we have not seen significant operations for a long time, and U.S. covert capabilities should have been able to weaken al Qaeda over the past seven years. But if al Qaeda remains active, capable and in northwestern Pakistan, then the U.S. presence in Afghanistan will continue.
As the situation in Iraq settles down — and it appears to be doing so — more focus will be drawn to Afghanistan, the war that even opponents of Iraq have acknowledged as appropriate and important. But it is important to understand what this war consists of: It is a holding action against an enemy that cannot be defeated (absent greater force than is available) with open lines of supply into a country allied with the United States. It is a holding action waiting for certain knowledge of the status of al Qaeda, knowledge that likely will not come. Afghanistan is a war without exit and a war without victory. The politics are impenetrable, and it is even difficult to figure out whether allies like Pakistan are intending to help or are capable of helping.
Thus, while it may be a better war than Iraq in some sense, it is not a war that can be won or even ended. It just goes o

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