Newsletter No. 607
News-Analysis
May 6, 2007

 

THE JAPANESE “SELF-DEFENSE FORCES” MAY BE HEADING TO AFGHANISTAN

In yet another sign of the Abe Administration’s itchy trigger finger, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma announced on the 4th that the government would be studying the enactment of a new law to allow the SDF to be deployed to Afghanistan. Kyuma made his comments after meeting with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

His specific words were reported as follows: “Japan wants to consider to what extent its Self-Defense Forces would be able to extend support for Afghanistan's reconstruction efforts… The special antiterrorism measures law presupposes that a war is still under way and does not assume that the SDF may provide help to rebuild a country, so it is difficult to interpret the law as enabling the SDF to provide reconstruction-related help… We may have to enact a new law depending on the situation… We would like to conduct a study as to whether we can draw up a law to enable a broad range of activities, such as those for enabling the SDF to go to help a country rebuild itself.”

Analysis

This new Japanese initiative is probably not unrelated to Prime Minister Abe’s recent visit to Washington. Recall that we discussed in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 537 that Vice-President Cheney had called for more Japanese involvement in Afghanistan, and as a result Tokyo increased its embassy staff in that country. I remarked at the time that it seemed like only a small response to Cheney’s call.

I suspect that when Abe was in Washington the Bush Administration pushed him once again to do more in Afghanistan, and that Kyuma’s public comments are the first indication of what “doing more” might involve.

Needless to say, neither the US nor the UN has been showing any respect at all for the Japanese Constitution. We should expect this from people of Bush’s caliber, but it is sad to see the UN violating its own principles in this respect. First we saw it in late August 2006 when the UN asked for the ASDF’s services in Iraq (see Shingetsu Newsletter No. 374), and now we seem to be seeing it in Afghanistan as well. Since when did the United Nations enter the business of asking countries to violate their own highest laws?