地政学を英国で学んだ

日本の政治が変わるチャンス！？

エコノミスト誌の元編集長で日本通のビル・エモットが「日本は経済よりも政治で変化できるチャンスだ！」と言っております。

もちろん民主党に政権交代ということを見越しての発言なんですが。

しかしイギリスよりも良い立場にあるかどうかは微妙ですが（苦笑

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A silver lining for Japan

The economic suffering here has been harsh and long, but at last political change is coming

Bill Emmott in Tokyo
The Guardian, Friday 20 February 2009

In the race to report the worst economic contraction among rich countries this year, Britain is being run close by another island nation: Japan, the world's second biggest economy. Japan is, however, winning the contest for the country with the most shambolic politics - this week its finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, resigned after turning up drunk to a press conference after the G7 summit in Rome last weekend. Nevertheless, Japan stands a good chance of being one of the few countries to benefit from the economic crisis.

Many Japanese would find that hard to believe. Unemployment is rising sharply; the big, famous Japanese names such as Toyota, Panasonic and Sony are all making losses; exports are plummeting; and manufacturing output has dropped to a level last seen in 1983. Any Briton who thinks the reason our economy is weak is that we no longer have much manufacturing should come to Japan, for the reason Japan is weak is that it has too much (20% of GDP, compared with 10% in Britain), making precisely the things that everyone has just stopped buying, such as cars and fancy televisions.

So where is the silver lining to all those clouds? It lies in politics, and the sharp kick in the pants that the economic crisis is about to give to the old political elite. A general election must be held by October at the latest, and could be forced much sooner. The same outfit - the Liberal Democratic party, which is actually a conservative group - has run the country for the whole of the past half century, barring nine months in 1993. The LDP survived even the country's stagnation during the 1990s, when Japan's financial crash destroyed its banking system. But, finally, the LDP is running out of road as fast as it long ago ran out of ideas. The prime minister, Taro Aso, has an approval rating that would shame even George Bush.

As a result, the main opposition, the Democratic party of Japan, a centre-left group, is miles ahead in the opinion polls. Its leaders are plotting what they will do when they win power in a manner reminiscent of Labour in 1997, though with a touch of 1979 Thatcher too. The party's secretary-general, Yukio Hatoyama, says that as soon as it wins, the DPJ will outline its policies and fire any bureaucrat who won't support them.

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アフガニスタンにいる理由

よい質問はよい回答よりも重要なことが多い、ということです。

Sen. Fritz Hollings

Posted February 18, 2009 | 12:09 PM (EST)

Why are we in Afghanistan?

I keep asking the question, "Why are we in Afghanistan?" No one has a good answer. A few without television respond, "To get Osama." But everyone agrees that he is somewhere in Pakistan. Then the answer is: "As President George W. Bush said, 'to spread democracy.'" The Brits tried to spread democracy for years. The Russians tried to spread communism for years. But democracy must come from within. I helped liberate Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, sixty-eight years ago and they have yet to opt for democracy. We liberated Kuwait eighteen years ago and they have yet to opt for democracy. In the Muslim world more important than freedom and democracy is tribe and religion. We have made the good college try for over seven years and now should realize that we are not going to teach warlords to like democracy and grow cotton instead of poppies.

Now some answer to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for Al Qaida. I called the State Department after 9/11, and it reported Al Qaida in forty-five countries, including the United States, but not Iraq. Now we have spread Al Qaida to Iraq and determined to have Al Qaida grow in Afghanistan. What we can't understand is that we are creating terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban were our best friends in Charlie Wilson's War -- the only war we've won since World War II. I helped Charlie on the Senate side. I didn't know what was going on, but he was getting Israel to send Stinger missiles to Muslim Pakistan to shoot down the Russians. Now we are determined to turn our former friends into enemies and destroy Pakistan. Yesterday I read an article that it won't be long before charging President George W. Bush with war crimes for killing civilians in Pakistan with drones. Now the same charge could be made against President Obama. Five years ago, I was in Pakistan to learn that Osama bin Laden had a sixty percent approval rating and President Bush was at ten percent. I wouldn't advise an America to walk the streets of any city in Pakistan today. We are ruining Pakistan. Finally, I'm given the answer, "to stabilize Afghanistan." The best way to stabilize is to get out. It became a matter of conscience for me years ago. I always remember the Wartime Prayer found in Eleanor Roosevelt's papers:

それでも国防費は減らない

Don't Bet on Obama Reining in Defense Spending

BENJAMIN H. FRIEDMAN | 18 FEB 2009
WORLD POLITICS REVIEW

Many Americans believe that Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress will lower defense spending and restrain the militaristic foreign policy it underwrites. The coming years should destroy that myth. America's overly aggressive and fiscally reckless defense policy will survive the Democratic majority.

The Obama administration inherits runaway defense spending and leadership of a military that wants more. Non-war or base defense spending will be more than $515 billion in fiscal year 2009. Adjusting for inflation, that's 40 percent higher than the defense budget when George W. Bush took office. Add the wars, nuclear weapons research, veterans, and homeland security, and you get about $750 billion. That is more than six times what China spends, 10 times what Russia spends and 70 times what Iran, North Korea and Syria spend combined.

This explosion in spending comes despite a historically benign threat environment. Invasion and civil war, which traditionally justified militaries, are unthinkable here. North Korea and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with decaying economies, shoddy militaries, and aversion to suicidal behavior, they pose little threat to the United States. Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should worry Americans, unless we put our troops on their frontiers. And unlike us, they are out of the revolution export business. Terrorism is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.

A military posture of restraint -- one focused on U.S. defense rather than quixotic efforts to promote social transformation and dampen all instability -- would allow us to spend half what we do on defense. We'd be safer for it, because lower spending would discourage us from meddling in others' conflicts.

The Pentagon doesn't see things that way, of course. True, Obama's principle defense advisers, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have recently spoken about hard choices ahead. But they support budgets that avoid those choices. Both claim that the United States should devote a minimum of 4 percent of gross domestic product to defense, even in peacetime. Because GDP generally rises, this would ensure an annual increase in defense spending, liberating it from old-fashioned considerations like enemies. Base defense spending is about 3.3 percent of GDP. Getting to 4 percent would require a $94 billion a year increase.

ロボットと戦争の倫理／法

ブルッキングスが素晴らしい報告書を書いております

Military Robots and the Laws of War

Military Technology, U.S. Military, Defense, Defense Strategy, Technology
Peter W. Singer, Director, 21st Century Defense Initiative
The New Atlantis

WINTER 2009 —More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.

It is true that Afghanistan and Iraq have done much to puncture that understanding of war. The vaunted theory, so beloved in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, of a “network-centric” revolution in military affairs can now be seen more clearly as a byproduct of the 1990s dotcom boom. The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, and date. Amid this ecstatic hype, it is not surprising that many security studies experts, both in and out of the defense establishment, latched onto the notion that linking up all our systems via electronic networks would “lift the fog of war,” allow war to be done on the cheap, and even allow the United States to “lock out” competition from the marketplace of war, much as they saw Microsoft doing to Apple at the time.

Nor is it surprising that now analysts are writing off high-tech warfare altogether in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. Insurgents armed with crude conventional weapons have proven frequently able to flummox their well-equipped American foes. Many observers increasingly seem to believe that if irregular warfare is likely to be the future of armed conflict, advanced technologies have no great role.

These “all or nothing” attitudes are each incorrect. High technology is not a silver bullet solution to insurgencies, but that doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t matter in these fights. In fact, far from proving the uselessness of advanced technology in modern warfare, Afghanistan and Iraq have for the first time proved the value of a technology that will truly revolutionize warfare—robotics.

When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had no robotic systems on the ground. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots on the ground in Iraq; a year later there were 2,400; by the end of 2008, there were about 12,000 robots of nearly two dozen varieties operating on the ground in Iraq. As one retired Army officer put it, the “Army of the Grand Robotic” is taking shape.

It isn’t just on the ground: military robots have been taking to the skies—and the seas and space, too. And the field is rapidly advancing. The robotic systems now rolling out in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than ones already in service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even they are just the start. As one robotics executive put it at a demonstration of new military prototypes a couple of years ago, “The robots you are seeing here today I like to think of as the Model T. These are not what you are going to see when they are actually deployed in the field. We are seeing the very first stages of this technology.” And just as the Model T exploded on the scene—selling only 239 cars in its first year and over one million a decade later—the demand for robotic warriors is growing very rapidly.

The truly revolutionary part, however, is not robots’ increasing numbers, or even their capabilities. It is the ripple effects that they will have in areas ranging from politics and war to business and ethics. For instance, the difficulties for the existing laws of war that this robotics revolution will provoke are barely beginning to be understood. Technology generally evolves much more quickly than the laws of war. During World War I, for example, all sorts of recent inventions, from airplanes dropping bombs to cannons shooting chemical weapons, were introduced before anyone agreed on the rules for their use—and, as to be expected, the warring sides sometimes took different interpretations on critical questions. While it is far too early to know with any certainty, we can at least start to establish the underlying frameworks as to how robots will reshape the practice and the ethics of warfare.

RMAの議論とも直結してくる興味深い話です。

アフ・パック問題

オバマ政権の「ベトナム問題」を表す新しい言葉が出てきました（笑）

The 'Af-Pak' problem

Obama recognizes that Afghanistan and Pakistan represent two fronts in the same war.

February 16, 2009

Just in case he had any doubts about the challenges ahead, U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke was welcomed to South Asia last week with a bomb in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar and coordinated attacks in the Afghan capital of Kabul that left 26 dead. Afghanistan's intelligence chief said there may have been contacts between the assailants in Kabul and militants in Pakistan, underscoring that the neighboring countries represent two fronts in one war. The Obama administration has recognized this with Holbrooke's portfolio, which is now being called "Af-Pak."

Holbrooke is there to review U.S. policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan; findings will be delivered to a NATO summit in April, when allies undoubtedly will be asked to contribute more troops and aid for the fumbled war effort. The full extent of that failure has become clearer with new assessments of Taliban gains in the last two years through guerrilla hit-and-run strikes, roadside bombs and suicide attacks. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said last week that support for the Taliban has grown in response to the corruption and ineffectiveness of the U.S.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Where do we go from here? Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has asked for an Iraq-style "surge" of about 30,000 troops in Afghanistan to beat back Taliban gains and step up training of the Afghan army and police. President Obama rightly asked him to define the mission and endgame before authorizing the full deployment. Exactly what are the military objectives? Are we there for years or decades? Are we trying to stabilize the country or build democracy?

As with most wars, there is no purely military solution to this one. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of the surge in Iraq, argues that troops must be accompanied by economic and reconstruction aid to help strengthen the central government. That would be true if the Afghan government were competent and the international community held it accountable for the aid it receives.