Seoul has own fears over US surge

SEOUL - United States President Barack Obama set off a wave of speculation in the South Korean capital when he declaimed before American troops at Osan Air Base, south of Seoul, last month that "many of you served in Iraq", "others served in Afghanistan", "others among you may deploy yet again" - and "every American appreciates what you are trying to do".

The troops, gathered in a large warehouse facility at the end of Obama's recent swing through Northeast Asia, cheered at the tributes to service in the Middle East, but remained politely silent at the mention of deploying "yet again". Where and why, some asked as the president took off on Air Force One, waiting nearby, to return to Washington.

South Korean politicos and planners were asking the same questions after Obama on Tuesday told another crowd of young American military people, the cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, that he was ordering another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan early next year. Would soldiers from US forces in South Korea be joining them, and did the Pentagon plan to replace them - or reduce American troop strength in the South from the current level of 28,500?

Neither the Americans in Korea nor Koreans in positions of power and influence quite believed the assurance from the Pentagon, made to top officials of South Korea's Defense Ministry before Obama's speech, that the US would not be sending troops from Korea to Afghanistan. They had heard that one several years ago, before the US deployed a brigade of the US Second Infantry Division to Iraq from the historic invasion route to Seoul, reducing US troop strength in the South to about 37,000.

Obama's remarks resonated in other ways too. Could he really be serious when he said the US would be withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan in a year and a half? He took care to argue that Afghanistan was not like Vietnam, where the US-backed South Vietnamese government fell to defeat two years after the Americans had pulled out. He did not, however, allude to Korea, where US troops have been guarding the South since the signing of the Korean War armistice in July 1953 ended the bloodiest conflict in northeast Asian history.

The future of the US in Afghanistan appears if anything as clouded as it ever was, and still is, in Korea. The two cabinet secretaries who should know the answers, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both waffled when members of a US congressional committee asked them how firm was that 18-month commitment. Talk about "review" and "circumstances" permeated their vague responses.

Similar responses would dominate the US position in South Korea, where almost any scenario seems possible. Special envoy Stephen Bosworth is preparing to visit North Korea next week on a mission that's superficially intended to draw North Korea back into six-party talks on its nuclear weapons program, but here are two things that nobody in his (or her, thank you, Hillary) right mind is about to believe.

The first is that North Korea, in yet another carefully wrought "agreement", will honestly do away with its nukes. Please. Dear Leader Kim Jong-il's pride, power, even his position, rest on his boast that he's made North Korea a nuclear power. Whatever else emerges from six-party talks, it will not be a "nuclear-free" North Korea.

Second, is that Bosworth, while in Pyongyang, will spend his whole time there saying that North Korea must attend six-party talks or else.

Bosworth's visit was originally to have been for only one night, from December 8 to December 9, but now the State Department is saying that he will stay there until December 10. The last place Bosworth will stop off before going to Pyongyang is Seoul, and the first capital he'll visit after the trip will also be Seoul.

He will have a lot of explaining to do about what he's actually said in all that time there. Clearly, in the context of six-party talks, Bosworth is going to remind the North Koreans of all the good things they can count on, on the sidelines of six-party talks, if they'll only live up to their previous agreements on giving up their entire nuclear program.

Bosworth may even find a way to hint at the "peace treaty" that North Korea wants in place of the Korean War armistice and the possibilities of diplomatic relations between Pyongyang and Washington. Such talk is anathema in Seoul, where everyone from think-tank analysts to government officials will tell you North Korea is engaging in one great con game to get the US to pull out all its troops without giving up a thing, notably its weapons of mass destruction.

North Korean gamesmanship is extremely hard to figure. While appearing to soften its position in recent weeks, in the run-up to the Bosworth mission, Kim Jong-il late last month received Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie.

Presumably, Liang was armed with more than vague declarations about how China and North Korea were bound as close as "the lips to the teeth", to use one hoary phrase from Chinese propaganda. He may have come with promises of military equipment to replace some of North Korea's outdated, broken-down gear, and he may also have discussed what to do to match the shiny new stuff that South Korea is acquiring from the US or making on its own for its increasingly modern defense establishment.

Memories of Chinese support for North Korea during the Korean War have faded, but they explain why South Korean policy-makers worry whenever there's another sign of an American pullback - or concessions in talks with North Korea that everyone knows will go nowhere.

The fact that Liang's trip followed closely on that of China's Premier Wen Jiabao certainly suggested ongoing Chinese support for Kim Jong-il's rule, despite United Nations sanctions imposed after North Korea's second nuclear test on May 25.

No way is China going to do anything that might precipitate the North's collapse.

Kim Jong-il, however, faces problems at home that go beyond the hunger and disease that never go away - or even his apparent commitment to establish his third son as his successor.

Redenomination of the North Korean currency - it was announced this week that two zeros have been cut from the value of banknotes - has, according to reports spread in Seoul, panicked a small but rising middle-class that hoped to one-day change the near-useless North Korean won they had hoarded into Western currency or Chinese yuan. There were reports, not substantiated but widely quoted in the absence of any harder evidence, of suicides, protests, even killings in Pyongyang.

North Korea's upper-upper class, the elite around Kim Jong-il and his top aides, are assumed to have squirreled away hard-currency for years, while most North Koreans have so little money that currency devaluation means nothing. However, a restive middle-class of low-level traders and officials, living off a black-market that the regime wants to wipe out, poses a challenge that cannot be curbed so easily by mass arrests.

North Korea said nothing about the currency change, but Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency praised the Korean people, "demonstrating their mental power of self-regeneration and fight against hardships" for "strenuous efforts to build a strong, prosperous and powerful socialist nation". The commentary made an unusual acknowledgement, saying there were "quite a few things that are still in shortage" but "nothing is impossible for the Korean people".

Bosworth, in his two days in Pyongyang, may hear about some of the problems, indirectly, by inference, in official talks and perhaps directly from diplomats from other countries if he's able to spend time with them. North Korea will doubtless want to drag out talks with the US, perhaps calling for a second round, but is not exactly negotiating from a position of strength.

Under the circumstances, it's always possible, as the US extends and extends again its presence in Afghanistan that Obama's words to the troops here about deploying "yet again", reducing the American troop presence in the South, will prove to have been a serious portent. Certainly, North Korean strategists and mind-readers of US policy-makers would hope so as they gird to make Bosworth the next victim of their skills.

By Donald Kirk