Asean
Pakistan–United States relations at the brink
Author: Alicia Mollaun, ANU This year will be remembered as annus horribilis for Pakistan–United States relations. CIA contractor Raymond Davis kicked off the downward slide when he gunned down two Pakistanis in Lahore, creating an enormous diplomatic immunity circus, which saw the media, politicians and even President Obama entering the fray. Next, ‘the 2 May incident’, as Pakistanis refer to it, or the CIA covert operation that killed Bin Laden , pushed relations to the brink, and many thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse. But it did. On 26 November, NATO forces accidently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in Mohmand Agency. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister said the attack ‘demonstrated complete disregard for international law and human life and was in stark violation of Pakistani sovereignty’. Pakistan–US relations are on life support . Pakistanis don’t trust the United States and Americans don’t trust Pakistan. Recent public polling showed that 55 per cent of Americans view Pakistan as an enemy and 69 per cent of Pakistanis view the United States as an enemy. Malaise doesn’t just exist at the ‘street’ level. Adm. Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate inquiry that the Haqqani network was a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In Pakistan, well-known cricketer turned political candidate, Imran Khan led a two-day sit-in to block NATO supply routes in protest against the NATO strikes that killed Pakistani soldiers. Can the downward spiral be reversed in 2012? One key thing that will drive relations (again) in 2012 is Afghanistan. Afghanistan has become too central to the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. While ideally the US and Pakistan should conduct a bilateral relationship without a continual focus on Afghanistan, the unfortunate reality is that the US desire to eliminate terrorism and get out of Afghanistan militarily means that Pakistan has become a lever of US policy in Afghanistan. The United States needs Pakistan to achieve a political settlement in Afghanistan that will earn it a modicum of respectability. One of the key things highlighted by Pakistani academics when talking about Pakistan–US relations is that both parties agree on what needs to happen to achieve a stable, secure Afghanistan, but the mechanisms on how to achieve these goals differ greatly. Pakistan’s strategic calculus is at odds with the US’. The military has hedged its bets using the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban to counter the future US withdrawal and India’s increasing influence in Afghanistan. At the same time, the US calls publically for Pakistan to sever all ties with the Haqqani network and conditions military and civilian aid on terrorism cooperation. Pakistanis complain loudly that the United States simply doesn’t understand Pakistan. That is probably true. Few understand how much the ‘threat’ of India colours Pakistani perceptions of the world. Pakistanis genuinely fear being encircled by India and are anxious that Afghanistan too will fall under India’s influence — hence the support for militant networks. So who will have to make more concessions to the other? In 2012, it is likely to be the United States. As 2014 draws closer, the onus falls on the US to work with Pakistan constructively because soon, the US will need Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States. Pakistan is too important to ignore and needs to be viewed through a new strategic lens. Moving forward, Pakistan is not only crucial to a political settlement in Afghanistan, but is a state with nuclear weapons, a strong army, weak democracy, as well as an economy that is unable to provide opportunities for an ever-increasing and youthful population. The problems facing Afghanistan have defined the last decade in the region, Pakistan will define the problems of the region over the next decade — and all policy makers need to be congnisant of this. Alicia Mollaun is a PhD candidate at the Crawford School at ANU and is based in Islamabad. Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan and the United States Pakistan: US losing hearts and minds in the battle against terrorism United States and China: Will positive relations endure?
Author: Alicia Mollaun, ANU
This year will be remembered as annus horribilis for Pakistan–United States relations.
CIA contractor Raymond Davis kicked off the downward slide when he gunned down two Pakistanis in Lahore, creating an enormous diplomatic immunity circus, which saw the media, politicians and even President Obama entering the fray.Next, ‘the 2 May incident’, as Pakistanis refer to it, or the CIA covert operation that killed Bin Laden, pushed relations to the brink, and many thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse. But it did. On 26 November, NATO forces accidently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in Mohmand Agency. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister said the attack ‘demonstrated complete disregard for international law and human life and was in stark violation of Pakistani sovereignty’.
Pakistan–US relations are on life support. Pakistanis don’t trust the United States and Americans don’t trust Pakistan. Recent public polling showed that 55 per cent of Americans view Pakistan as an enemy and 69 per cent of Pakistanis view the United States as an enemy. Malaise doesn’t just exist at the ‘street’ level. Adm. Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate inquiry that the Haqqani network was a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In Pakistan, well-known cricketer turned political candidate, Imran Khan led a two-day sit-in to block NATO supply routes in protest against the NATO strikes that killed Pakistani soldiers.
Can the downward spiral be reversed in 2012? One key thing that will drive relations (again) in 2012 is Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has become too central to the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. While ideally the US and Pakistan should conduct a bilateral relationship without a continual focus on Afghanistan, the unfortunate reality is that the US desire to eliminate terrorism and get out of Afghanistan militarily means that Pakistan has become a lever of US policy in Afghanistan.
The United States needs Pakistan to achieve a political settlement in Afghanistan that will earn it a modicum of respectability. One of the key things highlighted by Pakistani academics when talking about Pakistan–US relations is that both parties agree on what needs to happen to achieve a stable, secure Afghanistan, but the mechanisms on how to achieve these goals differ greatly.
Pakistan’s strategic calculus is at odds with the US’. The military has hedged its bets using the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban to counter the future US withdrawal and India’s increasing influence in Afghanistan. At the same time, the US calls publically for Pakistan to sever all ties with the Haqqani network and conditions military and civilian aid on terrorism cooperation.
Pakistanis complain loudly that the United States simply doesn’t understand Pakistan. That is probably true. Few understand how much the ‘threat’ of India colours Pakistani perceptions of the world. Pakistanis genuinely fear being encircled by India and are anxious that Afghanistan too will fall under India’s influence — hence the support for militant networks.
So who will have to make more concessions to the other? In 2012, it is likely to be the United States. As 2014 draws closer, the onus falls on the US to work with Pakistan constructively because soon, the US will need Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States.
Pakistan is too important to ignore and needs to be viewed through a new strategic lens. Moving forward, Pakistan is not only crucial to a political settlement in Afghanistan, but is a state with nuclear weapons, a strong army, weak democracy, as well as an economy that is unable to provide opportunities for an ever-increasing and youthful population. The problems facing Afghanistan have defined the last decade in the region, Pakistan will define the problems of the region over the next decade — and all policy makers need to be congnisant of this.
Alicia Mollaun is a PhD candidate at the Crawford School at ANU and is based in Islamabad.
Asean
ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon
Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University
The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.
Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.
Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.
Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.
A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.
Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.
Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.
ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.
In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.
This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.
What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.
It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.
Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…
Markets
Tiger Trade Launches SGX Trading, Meeting Demand from Asian Investors
Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).
SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
(more…)Asean
Can Asia maintain growth with an ever ageing population ?
To boost productivity in the future, Asian governments will have to implement well-targeted structural reforms today.
Asia has been the world champion of economic growth for decades, and this year will be no exception. According to the latest International Monetary Fund Regional Economic Outlook(REO), the Asia-Pacific region’s GDP is projected to increase by 5.5% in 2017 and 5.4% in 2018. (more…)
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