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Israeli military calculations towards Iran
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Iran’s apparent interest in a nuclear weapons capability, which it denies, has sparked concerns in Israel mirroring those of the United States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Yet there is a unique edge to Israel’s worries: the concentration of three quarters of its population on a narrow strip of coastline from Ashkelon to Haifa makes it extremely vulnerable to nuclear strikes. Israel’s presumed second-strike capability might severely damage its attacker, but there would be no Israeli state left to take satisfaction. Israelis are not the first to notice this asymmetry. Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani remarked five years ago that ‘the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality’. Now, several converging developments have reignited Israeli concerns about the prospect of an undeterrable adversary in its vicinity.
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Nuclear energy expansion in the Middle East
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A statement on 31 October by a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency, indicating that six Arab states have shown interest in nuclear power, has provoked concerns that Iran’s apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities may be prompting some of its neighbours to think about doing the same. Building up a nuclear power infrastructure might be part of a future hedging strategy. However, it is important to distinguish between the proliferation-prone parts of the nuclear fuel cycle that give rise to fears about Iran’s intentions – uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing – and the benign civil nuclear energy purposes that have been under study in the Middle East for some time.
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Europe’s Islamist terrorism problem
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There is a rising Islamist terrorist threat in Europe. In a 9 November 2006 speech, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director-general of Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, warned that germinating ‘self-starter’ local terrorist outfits in the United Kingdom were contemplating WMD attacks, actively pursuing some 30 plots in the UK alone, and forging operational links with al-Qaeda collaborators in South and Central Asia. She added that MI5 was monitoring some 200 groups, comprising over 1,600 known individuals, of potential terrorists. These developments show that the counter-terrorism effort demands both robust domestic integration and interdiction policies as well as a more concerted Europe-wide response.
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Islamist radicalism in Central Asia
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The Fergana Valley has long been seen as a fulcrum of regional religious extremism; yet while violent incidents have occurred sporadically, most notably on the Tajik-Kyrgyz border in May 2006, Fergana has not yet lived up to this reputation. The reasons can, in part, be traced to better state surveillance, detection and coercion capacities in the region, but also to changing patterns of Islamist activity – and, perhaps more mundanely, to the lack of mainstream appeal that these groups have for traditional and moderate sections of the Muslim community. However, a very real sense of political alienation can be said to exist in the Fergana Valley. It is providing the raw materials for Islamist recruitment, albeit not currently manifested in widespread violence.
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Thailand after the coup
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After months of political instability, on 19 September 2006 the Thai armed forces, led by army Commander-in-Chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, seized power in the country’s first coup since 1991. The coup leaders justified their actions primarily on the basis of the government’s alleged corruption of the democratic process and the stresses and strains imposed as previous caretaker leader Thaksin Shinawatra exploited social divisions for political gain. The military’s intervention may have a positive impact on the country’s Muslim-dominated deep south, where the former government displayed incompetence and heavy-handedness in responding to a separatist insurgency. But the coup has been received ambivalently in Thailand and abroad, and the country has entered a period of political fragility.
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