Tension between North and South Korea

Just two days after the discovery of its enriched uranium for its nuclear program, the hostile dictatorship of North Korea fired artillery against South Korea earlier today, for about an hour on the island of Yeonpyeong. The attack left two South Korean marines dead, and left 16 wounded including soldiers and civilians. It is probably the deadliest attack between the two discontent countries in over fifty years.

In a country where people are brainwashed, shut off from the rest of the world, cell phones and computers banned, no economy, no food, citizens are thrown in concentration camps and suffer from disease and starvation, one would wonder how North Korea is so powerful? One of those factors is primarily its communist dictatorship run by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il, and their ability to have acquired technology from the now-defunct Soviet Union, and have grown its men into the fourth largest standing army in the world.

The more friendly, U.S. backed South Korea has responded to the attacks by putting its military on high alert, while North Korea has indicated that if any further retaliation, serious consequences will follow. The situation between the two Koreas seems to be tittering on the brink of getting very out of hand. For one, South Korea knows that North Korea is not exactly a country to fool around with and will be destroyed, prompting intervention from American forces; and secondly, if another Korean war does occur, most likely China will cease from providing food and investment to North Korea, since they have relayed heavily on China due to Kim Jong-Il’s dictatorial leadership.

The United States has condemned the attacks, and President Obama is apparently ‘outraged’ and the six party talks between the U.S., North Korea, South Korea, Russia, Japan and China, have stalled. But why he is outraged, remains unclear, since it should not be any surprise to anyone that North Korea has been secretly planning assaults against South Korea since basically the end of World War II, and there have been minor attacks taken place several times over the last fifty years.

Most likely, as violence increases from North Korea, the United States will enforce sanctions against North Korea, which of course, will do absolutely nothing.

NATO putting on the pressure to pull out of Afghanistan

Last weekend President Obama hopped all over the financial summits in Asia to discuss global economic reform, and now this weekend, he is meeting with leaders at the NATO summit in Lisbon concerning the War in Afghanistan.

As many may remember, President Obama repeatedly stated that he wanted troops to come home by 2011 and handover the responsibility to Afghan forces. Now it appears that officials are more or less focusing to withdraw the 100,000 troops, which included the 30,000 troops ordered by President Obama last year, by 2014.

The reason for this?

Mainly because Afghanistan has shown very little signs of stabilizing itself.

It shouldn’t appear to be such a shocker to President Obama, nor for any official in our Federal Government, as Afghanistan remains one of the top unstable governments in the entire world and has dealt with a continuous civil war for many decades, both from the invasion from the Soviet Union in the 1970’s, to an internal war throughout the 1990’s which resulted in the Taliban. Yet every time there seemed to be a war going on in Afghanistan, it was never able to build itself into a stabilized country.

I seem to recall we also went into Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. Yet after years of fighting a war in that country, Iraq is still quite unstable and the place is pretty much uninhabitable.

Of course, the primary reason for going into Afghanistan back in 2001 in the first place, was to overthrow the Taliban and dismantle the al-Qaeda network, as a direct result of the September 11^th terrorist attacks. Since that time, the U.S. Military has been unsuccessful in capturing the real ringleader behind those attacks, Osama bin Laden, ranging from theories that he is dead, or hiding out someplace in Pakistan.

President Obama has quite a bit to deal with right now in the Middle East, from leaving Iraq, to stabilizing Afghanistan, and apparently ignorant over Iran’s nuclear program.

At the NATO summit, leaders are pressuring President Obama to implement a better strategy for exiting Afghanistan by that time. While NATO has no exact departure date to be set in 2014, it is projected that the new war efforts in Afghanistan will cost American taxpayers $125 billion through these next three and a half years. Never mind the fact that the United States has enough problems on its plate including servicing its $14 trillion national debt, and providing health care for veterans that just returned from Iraq.

The real question remains as to when the United States does in fact leave Afghanistan, is that country going to be able to sustain itself as a stable government with democracy and its Afghan forces; or will it just become another breeding ground for future generations of al-Qaeda, again posing as a threat to our country’s national security, and the rest of the world?