Author: Sandy Gordon, ANU

While no reasonable person would shed too many tears for the passing of the Tamil Tigers (except for the number of civilian deaths involved), we should, perhaps, shed some tears for Sri Lanka itself.

A generation ago, Sri Lanka had an ambition to become another ‘Asian Tiger’.  And it had every prospect of so doing had not the vicious civil war intervened. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Hammaad Qayyum Khan, ANU

During the last two years of ‘democratic’ rule, Pakistan has experienced a whirlwind of challenges, with signs of more to come. Everything in Pakistani has an air of uncertainty attached to it − be it cricket or domestic and foreign policy. Democracy in Pakistan has experienced many different forms and taken on many different meanings, a product of the vagaries of political failure and shifting international alliance relations.

Eight years into the Pakistan’s alliance with the U.S., the so-called ‘frontline state’ of the war on terror continues to battle for its image. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Siow Yue Chia, Singapore Institute of International Affairs

The story on Singapore in 2009 has been that of a vulnerable small and open economy overcoming the fallout from the global financial crisis with sound economic and financial fundamentals, good governance and a timely stimulus package.

The exposure of Singaporean financial institutions to failed and distressed institutions in the US and Europe was not significant and did not pose any systemic risks to Singapore’s economy, as local financial institutions were well capitalised and remained resilient. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Rajiv Kumar

There is currently an air of expectation about India’s future prospects both within the country and even more so abroad. We are surely on the move. The new century, it is said, will see India emerge as a global player because of its structural advantages.

Some of the major ones are, for example, a young population with its promise of an expanding workforce Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: New Mandala

The Thai armed forces have been major players in Thai politics since the 1932 coup which ended the absolute monarchy.

During the 1990s, some suggested that Thai soldiers were increasingly being by-passed by new societal forces, thus making the armed forces less relevant political players. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: S. M. Naseem

The challenges facing the Pakistani state, both domestic and external, continue to mount and periodically bring it to the brink of disaster. Whether by some miraculous intervention of Providence or through the rather delicate balance of forces that keep propping it back to a tenuous equilibrium, the ‘existentialist threat’ to the state, gets averted. However, each new equilibrium is not only more fragile but takes place at a lower level of existence and of the welfare of the people inhabiting it.

The last two years have been especially traumatic and have taken the nation on a roller-coaster ride of hope and dismay. Democracy by itself may not bring tangible rewards for the population in the short run, but it does rekindle the hope of future advancement of well-being for many. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: James Scambary, Swinburne University

It has been almost two years now since the end of the intense communal conflict that engulfed East Timor between 2006 and 2007. The events of this period proved a salutary experience for a range of nation building enterprises, not least of which were security and peace-building.

There has been considerable soul searching over the events of that two year period. We now know that East Timor is not the unified, homogenous society forged in the firmament of the resistance, as previously thought. We now know that the national police force is highly factionalised and manifestly unprepared to resume active duty. It is also recognised that if attempts are not made to sort out the mess of property law, stimulate the economy, and create some jobs, there will be a similar conflagration in the near future.

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Author: Nicholas Farrelly

In the past fortnight Burma’s State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) decided to stop pulling its punches with some of the ‘ceasefire groups’ that share its territory.

The first of these ceasefires was agreed as the Communist Party of Burma fractured in the late 1980s. Since then, these agreements have become a consistent part of any analysis of Burma’s politics but, ultimately, they remain a wildcard in national affairs.

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Author: Amin Saikal

It is time for President Hamid Karzai to bow out gracefully, even if he is declared as the winner of last month’s election. His regime is tainted by allegations of corruption, maladministration and electoral fraud to the extent that he is no longer capable of leading Afghanistan for another term with an acceptable degree of legitimacy.

Karzai assumed power nearly eight years ago, with more national and international support than any previous Afghan ruler had enjoyed. The Afghan people had suffered from 24 years of warfare, bloodshed and devastation: the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, followed by internecine conflict among various Afghan warring groups and the Pakistan-backed medievalist Islamic rule of the Taliban in the 1990s. A majority of them desperately yearned for a constructive and effective national leader. The US-led intervention in response to the 11 September 2001 al-Qaida attacks on the US, resulting in the toppling of the Taliban regime and the instalment of an internationally backed administration under Karzai, provided a unique opportunity. The US and its allies invested very heavily in the new Afghan leader with an expectation that he would prove instrumental in working with them to generate the necessary conditions for democracy, stability and security – enabling the Afghans to rebuild their lives and their country.

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Author: William Maley

At 6 am on 20 August, I headed out from my hotel in the Kabul Shahr-e Naw district to join a team of observers visiting polling places in different parts of the Afghan capital.

Most election observation by international observer teams is as much an exercise in confidence building as in detailed monitoring, since at best one can witness only a tiny fraction of the vote-casting even at a single polling station. My own day proved quite uneventful. A bomb blast in a nearby suburb, and a gunfight downtown, did nothing to disrupt my monitoring, and in the polling places I visited, the polling staff conducted themselves well, right down to the proper recording of serial numbers on the tamperproof seals that hold the lids of ballot boxes in place. Many journalists in Kabul saw much the same thing, and this lent a distinct tone of relief to reporting of election day.

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Author: Siaan Ansori and Greg Lopez, ANU

Some 20,000 or so Malaysians met the full force of Prime Minister Najib’s security forces when they demonstrated peacefully on August 1 in Kuala Lumpur against the repressive Internal Security Act (ISA), a draconian law used by the Malaysian Government to quell the Communist insurgents after the Malayan Emergency. By Malaysian standards, this was a mammoth demonstration; not only in size but also in the statement it made, considering the extent to which Mr Najib had gone to stop it. The government’s response to the demonstration casts further doubt on Mr Najib’s commitment to democratic reform.

Since coming into power on April 3, 2009, Mr Najib has portrayed himself as a reformer. He released 13 ISA detainees, including key HINDRAF leaders, and promised that he would amend the ISA. In addition, he also implemented some populist reform measures in the economic sphere. Although these changes raises Mr Najib’s popularity within the electorate, analysts have observed that Najib’s strategy mimics UMNO’s tried and tested formula of quick political wins which are long on form and short on substance.

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Author: William Maley, ANU.

With Afghanistan’s presidential election underway, the political temperature is beginning to rise notably. A suicide bomb blast outside NATO-ISAF headquarters in the heart of Kabul on Saturday August 15 pointed to the capacity of Taliban militants to strike at heavily-protected targets, and a ‘night-letter’ (shabnamah) posted near mosques in Kandahar on 16 August signaled a direct threat to polling places in Afghanistan’s south. The Taliban seem to be keen to strike at Afghanistan’s election where they can. But the exact nature of the outcome that they are seeking remains obscure. Their aim may be to wreck the electoral process as a whole, but it might also be to strike a direct blow against President Karzai.

The presidential election will be conducted using a variant of the French system. If no candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round of voting (scheduled for 20 August), then a second round (notionally scheduled for 1 October) will be held between the two candidates who did best in the first round. President Karzai won only 55.4 per cent of the vote in the October 2004 election, when according to Asia Foundation polling, 64 per cent of respondents believed the country was going in the right direction. It would be astounding if in 2009, when the most recent Asia Foundation polling suggests that only 38 per cent of respondents believed the country was going in the right direction, he were still able to win more than 50 per cent. In all the circumstances, a run-off seems highly likely; a first-round Karzai victory would likely trigger a rish of fraud allegations.

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Author: Chung-in Moon, Yonsei University, Seoul.

At the historic North-South summit in Pyongyang on June 15, 2000, there was a sense that lasting peace on the Korean peninsula lay just around the corner. I still cherish that moment when I was witness to a foundation of mutual trust being built through the expansion of cooperation and exchange between the two countries. The dismantling of the Cold War structure that had haunted the peninsula for decades never seemed more achievable.

As we reach the ninth anniversary of that hopeful event, the Korean peninsula is caught by a dramatically different vision, one in which the hard-earned progress of recent history has unraveled and left us worse off than where we began.

Given the success of the Clinton years and the diplomatic posture promised by President Obama, I anticipated that the new administration would adopt a more progressive policy towards North Korea based on the Clinton-Kim Dae-jung model.  Yet, a number of major domestic and international issues including the economic crisis, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Palestine rendered North Korea a low policy priority for the Obama Administration.

That was until the April 5 rocket launch. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: Sagar Prasai

Think about the difficulties of writing a constitution for a country like Nepal. There are 103 ethnic groups, 17 officially recognized languages, and 19,000 former combatants still in cantonments. In the Constituent Assembly (CA), there are 25 political parties with no one in a clear majority, 601 members who disagree on most everything, 11 constitution drafting sub-committees, three committee rooms, and an anticipated 300,000 submissions to be read. Plus, barring public holidays, there are about 330 days left to complete the job.

Due to delays in every preparatory step – from drafting procedural rules to public consultations – the drafting calendar has become so compressed that if the CA seriously focuses on logistics, it is likely to fail politically. If it seriously focuses on politics, it is likely to fail logistically.

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Author: Bina D’Costa, ANU

In the early morning on the 25 February, a mutiny by the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) broke out in Dhaka. Following some horrific ordeals experienced by many army officers, including senior BDR staff and their families, the mutiny ended 33 hours later.

The dispute, thought to be about the pay and command structure of the BDR, Bangladesh’s paramilitary force, now looks increasingly like a sinister plot to destabilise a democratic but institutionally weak nation-state. While it is not clear how the BDR rebels got access to scores of arms and ammunitions, there are now confirmed reports that some non-BDR individuals and institutions were connected to this mutiny.

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