US, ASEAN to reaffirm ties at NY summit

Endy M. Bayuni, The Jakarta Post, New York | Fri, 09/24/2010 9:19 AM A | A | A | - Klipping the Jakarta Post

It will be a short luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on Friday, but organizers still call it a summit, the second of its kind involving the president of the United States and the leaders of ASEAN.

President Barack Obama has invited ASEAN leaders, who usually gather in New York at this time of the year for the UN General Assembly, to meet with him to discuss ways of further enhancing relations between the US and the 10 countries from what Washington officials increasingly describe as a dynamic region.

Conspicuously missing will be the big stature of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Instead, Vice President Boediono checked into the nearby InterContinental Hotel Barclay on Thursday as soon as he landed here to represent Indonesia.

Myanmar is the other country not represented by its top leader, probably just as well as Obama will likely raise tough questions about the November general elections that the Myanmar junta is organizing.

The gist of the meeting isn’t likely to generate the attention of the international media more drawn into the Burma issue.

The leaders will take up where they had left off after the inaugural US-ASEAN summit in Singapore in November, when they identified areas for closer and deep cooperation, including in trade and investment, regional security, disaster management, food and energy supply and climate change.

Boediono made the short visit here to also meet with former president Bill Clinton and lunch with entrepreneurs and meet with the Indonesian community in New York.

As a further sign of greater US engagement with ASEAN, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to travel to Hanoi later this year for the East Asia Summit (EAS), an annual meeting involving the 10 ASEAN countries and China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

The EAS, with ASEAN driving the process, now appears to be the chosen venue to build an East Asian Community, especially now that Russia and the US have both agreed to the terms set for their involvement.

Washington overcame the last hurdle when Clinton last year signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation that effectively bound countries to commit to working toward peace and stability in the region.

While Indonesia and other ASEAN countries welcome the greater engagement of the US with the region, they are wary that Washington would use this as a platform to forge alliances to counter the rapid rise of China.

Clinton raised eyebrows when she urged China to guarantee maritime security in the South China Sea during a meeting with ASEAN counterparts in Hanoi in June.

China has insisted that the overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea should be resolved by countries in the region to the exclusion of others.

With China embroiled in a similar territorial dispute with Japan, another US ally, ASEAN fears a new kind of cold war between the US and China is evolving.

“I don’t think ASEAN should be dragged into this conflict,” an ASEAN diplomat said.

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muradali_shaikh | Fri, 24/09/2010 - 09:09am

How the CIA ran a secret army of 3,000 assassins
By Julius Cavendish in Kabul
Thursday 23 September 2010
The US Central Intelligence Agency is running and paying for a secret 3,000-strong army of Afghan paramilitaries whose main aim is assassinating Taliban and al-Qa'ida operatives not just in Afghanistan but across the border in neighbouring Pakistan's tribal areas, according to Bob Woodward's explosive book.
Although the CIA has long been known to run clandestine militias in Afghanistan, including one from a base it rents from the Afghan president Hamid Karzai's half-brother in the southern province of Kandahar, the sheer number of militiamen directly under its control have never been publicly revealed.
Woodward's book, Obama's Wars, describes these forces as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qa'ida and Afghan Taliban havens there. Two US newspapers published the claims after receiving copies of the manuscript.
The secret army is split into "Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams", and is thought to be responsible for the deaths of many Pakistani Taliban fighters who have crossed the border into Afghanistan to fight Nato and Afghan government forces there.
There are ever-increasing numbers of "kill-or-capture" missions undertaken by US Special Forces against Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters, who hope to drive rank-and-file Taliban towards the Afghan government's peace process by eliminating their leaders. The suspicion is that the secret army is working in close tandem with them.
Although no comment has been forthcoming, it is understood that the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, Gen David Petraeus, approves of the mission, which bears similarities to the covert assassination campaign against al-Qa'ida in Iraq, which was partially credited with stemming the tide of violence after the country imploded between 2004 and 2007.
The details of the clandestine army have surprised no one in Kabul, the Afghan capital, although the fact that the information is now public is unprecedented. There have been multiple reports of the CIA running its own militias in southern Afghanistan.
The operation also has powerful echoes of clandestine operations of the 1990s, when the CIA recruited and ran a militia inside the Afghan border with the sole purpose of killing Osama bin Laden. The order then that a specially recruited Afghan militia was "to capture him alive" – the result of protracted legal wrangles about when, how and if Osama bin Laden could be killed – doomed efforts to assassinate him before 9/11.


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