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The war in Lebanon
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The ultimate political and strategic consequences of the conflict in Lebanon may already be discerned. On one side, Israel cannot achieve the principal aims it declared at the beginning of the offensive, launched in response to the abduction of its two soldiers by Hizbullah on 12 July. But it can expect Hizbullah to enter a process leading to the dismantling and distancing from the border of a major part of its military capability, so long as Israel is willing to accept mutual concessions. On the other side, Hizbullah is likely to see its major demands met, but at a higher price than it anticipated.
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North Korea's missile tests
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On 5 July 2006, North Korea undertook its most extensive ballistic missile tests in three decades of missile development. All but one – the first-ever test of a longer-range Taepo-dong-2 – were launched successfully and with evident precision. But the tests were a political and diplomatic disaster for Pyongyang. Pyongyang is isolated as never before, even as it asserts that the tests were wholly within its sovereign rights, and that additional measures might yet prove necessary to protect its national security. Without question, a major threshold had been breached between Pyongyang and the outside world, with especially keen reverberations in Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul. The pivotal issue at present is whether the prevailing situation will go from grim to something much worse.
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Terror in India
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The 11 July 2006 bomb blasts in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), which killed 207 people and injured a further 714, were the deadliest terrorist attacks since those of 11 September 2001 on the United States. The seven bombs, placed on suburban trains, exploded in an 11-minute period and paralysed the transportation and communication networks of India’s financial and commercial capital. Not only did the attacks put into sharp relief some of the tensions in Indian society and the wide array of terrorist threats, they also patently underscored an urgent need to bolster the country’s intelligence capabilities.
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Kosovo's future
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The next six months should see major steps towards deciding Kosovo’s future, an issue which has serious international and regional implications: internationally, the province’s fate is being carefully studied as far away as the Caucasus, where different parties to conflicts there hope to extract advantages from precedents which may be set in the heart of Europe; regionally, developments in Kosovo could have an impact on the future political stability of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
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It is hard to see the SCO as a true geo-political alliance with a uniform agenda that poses a threat to the West. Nor, however, has the organisation so far realised the potential to contribute to stability and development in Central Asia. Tensions between its members – tensions that are only likely to be amplified by any future enlargement – are too pronounced to make the SCO very effective as a regional actor.
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