Playing With Fire (Lee Kwan Yew Interview)

NATO's future is at stake in Afghanistan, warned Asia's senior statesman, and unless America's European allies abandon appeasement and the United States realizes Afghanistan cannot succeed as a democracy, the world balance of power will shift in favor of Russia and China.

In an exclusive interview with United Press International, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, long known as the Kissinger of the orient, took the Europeans to task for balking at casualties in Afghanistan. He blamed "short memories" that have forgotten that "America came to rescue them in two world wars," which has rekindled the "appeasement" of the 1930s.

The United States, said this key player in every major Asian event for almost half a century, "should realize Afghanistan cannot succeed as a democracy. You attempted too much. Let the warlords sort it out in such a way you don't try to build a new state. The British tried and failed. Just make clear if they commit aggression again and offer safe haven to Taliban, they will be punished."

Now known as the "minister mentor" of Singapore, who turned a malarial island into a city of skyscrapers that thinks like a great power and is more important to the global economy than most big countries, Lee fears failure in Afghanistan will alter the world balance of power in favor of China and Russia. These two powers "would be faced with a much weakened West in the ongoing global contest."

Europe's NATO allies have turned a deaf ear to Bush administration requests to send additional troops to bolster the 21,000 U.S. and 20,000 NATO soldiers now in Afghanistan. Canada warned last month it would pull its 2,500 troops out early next year unless NATO agrees to send reinforcements. In Afghanistan last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates took the European allies to task for contributing to this rising violence in the fight against the Taliban as some of them "don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations." Hoping to show the example, Gates committed an additional 3,200 troops -- all Marines -- to the Afghan war.

The Europeans have cut defense budgets back to a stage where they cannot afford to send additional helicopters, aircraft for evacuating wounded, or troops to the Afghan theater where only British, Canadian, Dutch and U.S. troops conduct offensive operations. Responding to criticism at home, even these have been sharply curtailed in recent months. The other 22 NATO members have placed caveats on the use of their troops designed to keep them out of harm's way.

The Taliban uses privileged sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas where President Pervez Musharraf has warned the United States it cannot conduct military operations. Most European terrorist trails also track back to what is known as Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Asked about the "Pakistan-terrorist nexus," Lee Kuan Yew -- "Harry" to his close friends -- replied, "We should learn to live with it for a long time. My fear is Pakistan may well get worse. What is the choice? Musharraf is the only general I know (there) who is totally secular in his approach. But he's got to maneuver between his extremists who are sympathetic to Taliban and al-Qaida and moderate elements with a Western outlook. … There is an interesting study of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency that says 20 percent of the Pakistani army's officer corps is fundamentalist (and therefore pro-Taliban, an organization that was originally organized and subsequently controlled by ISI until Sept. 11)."

"Any U.S. interference in Pakistan would result in its four provinces becoming four failed states. And then what happens to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? It's a horrendous festering problem," he said.

Iraq was a mistake, Lee said. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al-Qaida or Sept. 11. It was a costly diversion from the war on al-Qaida. "I cannot see them winning, and by that I mean able to impose their extremist system ... even if we can't win, we mustn't lose or tire. We cannot allow them to believe they have a winning strategy and that more suicide bombers and WMD will advance their cause and give them a chance to take over."

The "Islamist" bomb, said Kuan Yew ("the light that shines far and wide," in Chinese), has already traveled from Pakistan to Iran "and the U.S., the Europeans, even the Russians, will (now) have to make up their minds whether to allow Iran to go nuclear." He took Russian President Vladimir Putin to task "for playing a game, posing as the nice guys with Iran, supplying nuclear fuel, and making it look as if America is causing all this trouble. But if I were Russia today, I would be very worried about Iran acquiring the bomb, because Russia is more at risk than America. The risk Israel runs is another dimension.

"Russia is at risk," he explained, "because whether it's the Chechens or Central Asian Muslim states that were former Soviet Republics, none are friendly to Moscow. Next time there's an explosion in Moscow, it may be a suicide bomber who isn't wearing an explosive jacket, but something a lot bigger. It would certainly be in Russia's interest to say … to Iran, 'this far and no further.'"

But Lee said, "It could also be that Russia no longer knows how to stop it, in which case the Russians will be opening the door to a very dangerous world of nuclear proliferation. You can also be quite sure that … when Iran gets the bomb, the Middle East will go nuclear."

When this reporter last interviewed Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in May 2001, he said his biggest concern about the future "is an Islamist bomb and mark my words it will travel." It now has done just that courtesy of Pakistan's A. Q. Khan, the anti-American father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. When asked this week about the advisability of the United States or Israel bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, Lee fell silent. He was about to express an opinion, then changed his mind. "I can express no views on that," he said lowering his voice.

Lee's second-biggest concern eight years ago was China's challenge to the global status quo. No longer. "Will China be to the 21st century what America was to the 20th?" we asked.

If the Chinese leaders stay on their present course, Lee answered, "The peaceful rise of China's power will prevail. They are determined not to challenge any existing power, meaning America, EU, Russia, but just make friends with everybody. Given the rules of the game now that China is in WTO, they can only grow stronger year by year, and within three or four decades, China's GDP will equal America's, their technology will be equal to what was long regarded as the world's only superpower, and their GDP will be larger than America's.

"And all that stems from what they have long studied in details in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. … They are sending 250,000 students abroad every year, and even though they may lose 60 percent to 70 percent of them to other countries, they don't care because they know many of them will come back eventually. … They want to avoid building a pre-World War II Japan or Germany. Territorial conquest is not necessary as it once was.

"You don't have to be a genius to know that they are producing five times as many engineers and scientists as the Americans. … They are everywhere (in the world) today. Can you be everywhere while focused on Iraq? In the Caribbean you have one Embassy in Barbados that serves six other tiny island countries. The Chinese have an embassy in each place. And that's what you call your front yard."

"They won't invade," Lee responded, "and try to take over militarily. That would be far too costly for them all over the world. … Can the Chinese land troops in Taiwan and establish and hold and widen a beachhead? The answer is no. Can they conquer Taiwan militarily? Again, no. They can only inflict damage." Today, Lee added, "Taiwan goes to America to get its technology, which then transits to China. If they take back Taiwan, it becomes Chinese without the same freedom of access to U.S. technology and research labs. So why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?"

The actual interview had some goodies for ya.
http://www.upi.com/International_Security/Emerging_Threats/Analysis/2008/02/08/interview_lee_kuan_yew_—_part_1/1475/

UPI: How do you see Iraq?

Lee: I do not want to say anything that would hurt President Bush because I believe he went in with the best of intentions. He put his trust in Dick Cheney. And I had trust in Dick Cheney as the voice of experience — oil business executive, defense secretary during the first Gulf War (1990-91). But I don’t know what happened to Dick Cheney. He allowed himself to believe with Richard Perle and the neocons you could change Iraq. How could you change Iraq, a 4,000-year-old society that is not malleable? Everybody knows the troubles the British had during and after World War I. Ideology should have no place when making geopolitical assessments.

George W. Bush, whatever his faults, is not walking away from what was started, which is just as well otherwise further damage will be done.

Q: And the next president?

A: Of all the candidates who will inherit the problem, I prefer John McCain. He will see this thing through. Walking away from it would also have disastrous consequences. If Afghanistan is a failed state, it’s not your fault. No one has ever made sense out of it. But if you leave Iraq in its present state, you will have even bigger problems throughout the entire Middle East. The Shiites will get together. The Iraqi Shia will become dependent on Iran, and the Iranians will have mastery of that critically important Gulf area.

Q: So what is your recommendation about Iran’s nuclear ambitions?

A: Is it now unstoppable. They are a very old civilization. Unlike the Arabs, apart from Mesopotamia valley, they rank with the Chinese, as history’s two principal civilizations worth talking about. And I think the mullahs and others want to go back to the days of empire.

Q: So should we be talking to them at the highest level, the way Henry Kissinger went to China?

A: (Chuckle) But you haven’t got a Kissinger or a Brzezinski to do that anymore. Where is the successor generation of geopoliticians?

Q: In fact, democracies don’t produce great statesmen anymore. Why?

A: You now have, and I don’t know how long this phase will last, mass media domination, owned by a group of media barons who want constant change for their balance sheets.

Q: So the power of mass media has made it impossible for a great statesman or woman to emerge and last any length of time?

A: I’m not sure. It depends on the nature of the crisis that must be faced. When a real crisis sets in, a matter of life and death, opinion formulators realize this is no time to be pontificating, but a time to stay the course with someone who understands what this is all about. Short of that, the media help put a leader on the pedestal and then start chopping away at the pedestal until he/she falls in disgrace. That’s part of the cycle of constant change. Watch Sarkozy in France. They hoisted him up to prominence and now they’re already attempting to bring him down through his personal life.

Q: So we’re doing the right thing?

A: No. Iraq was a mistake. I’ve said this before and I said this in the presence of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the invasion, at an IISS conference two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when someone asked me what will happen in Iraq. In October 2002, I was in Washington and became quite convinced an invasion would take place. On the way home, I stopped in London and asked Tony Blair to brief me. After 45 minutes, I said, “Look I accept the argument that with British and American military capabilities it would be a walk over, but then what do you do the day after? Blair replied, “That’s up to the Americans.” I then said to Blair, “If you were in charge, what would you do?” His political adviser then stepped in and said, “We would appoint the strongest pro-Western general and then get out quickly.” So I repeated all that at the IISS conference and explained this reflected the institutional memory of what the British had been through in Iraq in the early 1920s. Paul Wolfowitz stood up in high dudgeon. So to placate him, I said, “Of course the British don’t have the resources you have.”

Q: Did Wolfowitz ask anything of you?

A: Yes, he came to my office to ask that Singapore send police trainers to Iraq. I had known Paul since his days as an ambassador at the State Department. I said, “Paul, do you realize how long it takes to train a policeman in Singapore? And that’s only in one language, English, and it still takes two years. And you want me to teach Iraqis how to do it in three months in English? No, he replied, we’ll supply translators. This is an emergency, he said, and many nations are helping us. So I replied OK, but we’ll do it in Amman, Jordan, not Baghdad, where we would become the targets of suicide bombers. When he told me they had disbanded Saddam’s police force, I became very nervous. Because when the Japanese came down here in World War II, 20,000 of their troops captured 90,000 British, Indian and Australian troops. They sent them into captivity, but they left the local police in charge, and kept all the other positions of the British administration intact — from power management to the gas board — and simply put Japanese in charge of each British position. And 20,000 Japanese troops moved on to Java. But in Iraq, you disbanded everything, and tried to run things without the former Baath party officials who had been in charge of civil administration. You created an ungovernable vacuum.

Q: Why do you think this was so?

A: From Day One, the idea of remaking Iraq, without the civil service in place and without recalling Saddam’s army to service, showed a frightening lack of understanding of local conditions and elementary facts of political and economic life in Iraq. In ancient days, those who invaded and conquered China on horseback got off their horses and applied themselves to the more difficult job of governing.

Q: Did Iraq have anything to do with al-Qaida?

A: Of course not, as became clear in the daily sessions the imprisoned Saddam spent with his Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator over several months before his execution. But U.S. authorities were convinced Saddam was secretly supporting al-Qaida with weapons and training and maybe even WMD. So therefore the imperative became the elimination of Saddam.

Q: Switching to Pakistan, most terrorist trails in the United Kingdom and most recently in Germany via Turkey, track back to training camps and madrassas in the tribal areas that straddle the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

A: We even had a terrorist of Pakistani descent here in Singapore.

Q: So what’s your view of what should be done about the Pakistan-terrorist nexus?

A: (Laughs for several seconds) We should learn to live with it for a long time. My fear is Pakistan may well get worse. What is the choice? (President) Musharraf is the only general I know who is totally secular in his approach. But he’s got to maneuver between his extremists who are sympathetic to Taliban and al-Qaida and moderate elements with a Western outlook. We forget that right after Sept. 11 he was given a stark choice by President Bush: either you abandon your support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan or face the disintegration of Pakistan. There is an interesting study of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency that says 20 percent of the Pakistani army’s officer corps is fundamentalist.

Q: So what do you feel the United States can do there now?

A: There is very little, if anything, the U.S. can do to influence the course of events in Pakistan that wouldn’t make matters worse. Any U.S. interference in Pakistan would result in Pakistan’s four provinces becoming four failed states. And then what happens to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal? It’s a horrendous festering problem. The Feb. 18 elections may bring a little clarity and hopefully democratic stability to Pakistan, but I am not holding my breath.

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