hankyoreh

Yesterday the Lee administration and ruling Grand National Party (GNP) announced their plan for assistance in Afghanistan, which involves a large-scale increase in Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) personnel and the deployment of soldiers to protect them. The reason they are giving is that the deployment of soldiers is inevitable to protect civilian workers, but anyone can see that redeployment of military forces is at the heart of the assistance plan. An emphasis on sending PRT personnel is merely a smokescreen to avoid criticisms of the deployment of more than twice as many military troops than civilian workers. In essence, the Lee government is acknowledging that this is a deployment without legitimacy or justification.

Whether the goal is to protect civilian workers or to engage in combat, sending troops to Afghanistan given the country’s current state is madness, and it must be stopped. Since the whole region has now been transformed into a battlefield, it cannot be said that there will be South Korean troops being sent to provide protection for PRT workers will not experience combat. From the standpoint of Afghanistan’s rebel army, all foreign soldiers deployed to Afghanistan are enemies who should be killed. Given that more than 50 U.S. troops died in Oct. alone, there is a very strong chance we will see casualties among the South Korean forces. Even Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said in his response to the National Assembly the day before yesterday, “There could be inevitable hostilities, and there could be casualties.”

Deployments and losses are acceptable as long as public's sympathy for the justification has been established. However, the Lee government has been unable to produce any worthy justification thus far. Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan says that South Korea has an obligation to contribute to the war on terror in order to become a “global Korea,” and he has presented a logic that assistance in Afghanistan is necessary in order to establish conditions for the continued stable stationing of U.S. Forces in South Korea, but this is utterly unconvincing. The war in Afghanistan has long since gone beyond the level of the “war on terror” to become a full-scale war, and the talk about conditions for stationing USFK appears to be nothing more than a cheap ploy to legitimize deployment by provoking citizens’ anxieties about national security. If some of the USFK are transferred to Afghanistan, it would be in accordance with the “strategic flexibility” agreement between South Korea and the U.S. and has nothing to do with the issue of South Korean troop deployments to Afghanistan, something that Yu Myung-hwan surely knows better than anyone.

For the Lee government to rush into a decision on its military deployment policy at this point in time cannot be read as anything but an attempt to curry favor with the U.S. prior to U.S. President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to South Korea. Seeing the government endangering young lives by redeploying forces even as the U.S. itself remains undecided on additional deployments, one cannot help asking who the Lee government really stands for. The Lee government should cancel plans for redeployment.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]