The Stories Y ou Missed in 2011 10 events and trends that were ove rlooked this year , but may be leading the headlines in 2012. BY JOSHUA E. KEATING | DECEMBE R 201 1 India's Military Buildup China's new aircraft carrier - - actually just a refitted Gorbachev-era Soviet model purchased for $20 million from the Russians -- made international headlines when it began sea trials this year, signaling Beijing's growing military ambitions in East Asia. But it isn't the only Asian giant investing heavily in new military hardware. Indi has kept pace with its neighbor to the north and, in some areas, is actually exceeding it -- a development that, though much less noted, is a sign of the growing militarization of the region as a new generation of emerging powers with global ambitions jockeys for regional supremacy. India is now the world's largest weapons importer, according to a 2011 report by arms watchdog SIPRI, accounting for 9 percent of the world's international arms transfers -- most from Russia -- between 2006 and 2010. India will spend an estimated $80 billion on military modernization programs by 2015, according to an estimate from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. In particular, India is focusing on sea power, a crucial new area of competition. The country is planning to spend almost $45 billion over the next 20 years on 103 new warships, including destroyers and nuclear submarines. Bycomparison, China's investment over the same period is projected to be around $25 billion for 135 vessels, The St ori es Y ou Missed in 2011 | Foreig n Polic y htt p:/ /www.f oreig n polic y .com/a rticles/2011/1 1/28/the storie s y ou mis ... 1 of 12 30-Nov-11 10:32 AM
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On Jan. 1, Estonia became the 17th country to adopt the euro, but it might be a while before it has company.
Poland was due to join the eurozone in 2012, but that goal has been indefinitely postponed. ("If you base a
monetary union on aspirations and being pro-European, you may have problems in 10 years," Jan Filip Stanilko,
a Polish analyst, told cnbc.com.) In April, Bulgaria's center-right government pushed back a plan to join in
2013, citing the need for more preparation. Romania's president also suggested its 2015 target date could bepushed back by "one or two years." Latvia and Lithuania had been keen to follow Estonia into the eurozone as
well, but both now say their current target dates are unrealistic, and Lithuania's central bank chief has
cautioned that membership is "not a must-have-or-die thing."
Only two years ago, eurozone membership was being touted as a solution to Eastern Europe's debt worries. A
leaked IMF report even recommended that the process be accelerated, arguing that "euroisation" would not
only help with the debt problem but also mean "removing uncertainty and restoring confidence."
But these countries now worry about the straitjacket that being in a currency union has put on troubled
European economies as they push to recover.
The shift in opinion in what U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once defined as new Europe, where
countries have long yearned for European integration, has been as rapid as it's surprising. Membership in the
EU club isn't what it used to be.
KAY NIETFELD/AFP/Getty Images
Mexico's Drug War Moves South
While the drug violence near Mexico's northern border has become a major political issue in the United States,
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less noticed has been the disastrous effect the conflict is having on countries to the south. Drug mafias such as
the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels, in search of new territory and looking to escape the Mexican government's
crackdown, are increasingly setting up shop in the politically fragile states of Central America.
With the addition of Belize and El Salvador this year, all seven countries in Central America are now on the
White House's list of major drug-trafficking states. Sixty percent of the cocaine that enters the United States
through Mexico first travels through Central America, according to a Congressional Research Service report.Homicide rates in four of the seven countries have increased significantly in the last five years -- in Honduras,
they've more than doubled.
In May, Guatemala saw its worst massacre since the 1996 end of its civil war, when 27 people were decapitated
by drug gangs in the country's north. Entire regions are now effectively under the control of the Zetas, Mexico's
second-largest drug cartel, which has access to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and has even built
its own airstrips in the jungle. The Guatemalan government launched a major military offensive against the
Mexican cartels in the first few months of this year, but failed to expel them. There are widespread reports that a
number of Guatemalan politicians are receiving kickbacks from the gangs or otherwise tied up in cartel activity.
Until now, the cocaine itself has been processed almost exclusively where coca is grown in the Andean region of
South America. But in March, the first cocaine-processing lab ever discovered in Central America was found in
Honduras. In El Salvador, which has also seen its crime rate skyrocket, Sinaloa and the Zetas are believed to
have established alliances with local gangs such as the infamous Mara Salvatrucha.
This isn't just Mexico's drug war anymore.
JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Peak Camel?
Shortly before his death in 1960, English explorer and Arabist St. John
Philby predicted that the camel would disappear from Arabia within 30 years. At the time, he was laughed at, but today, ultramodern Saudi Arabia
is increasingly relying on camel imports, a shift that has had the largely
overlooked effect of putting a strain on herds around the world.
The stock of meat-producing camels in the kingdom decreased from a high
of 426,000 in 1997 to just 260,000 today, a drop of 39 percent, according to
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Thousands of camels are
slaughtered every year during the hajj pilgrimage -- hence the need for imports.
But where to get them? The animals were once as common as squirrels in Pakistan, but the country's camel
population is now down to about 700,000 thanks largely to demand from the camel-racing industry in Saudi
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year. Nineteen attacks were reported off the coast of Benin in 2011, after none in 2010. There were also six off
the Nigerian coast and three off the coast of Ghana. Many more likely go unreported. In October, the presidents
of Nigeria and Benin held the region's first ever head-of-state summit devoted to piracy.
West African pirates are a bit more traditional than their Somali counterparts -- they tend to go after a ship's
cargo rather than kidnapping for ransom money. Sailors have been tied up, beaten with rifle butts, and whipped
with electrical cables. In some cases, entire crews have been shot. Whereas Somalia's piracy is often seen as afunction of the country's on-land instability, the same can hardly be said of Ghana, one of Africa's most stable
and peaceful democracies, with a projected growth rate of 13.5 percent in 2011. It's thought that the region's oil
boom is proving a draw for modern-day pirates.
And it's not just Africa. Indonesia's International Chamber of Commerce reported this year that pirate attacks
are at their highest level since 2007. Even Peru, where piracy is virtually unheard of, saw an attack this year on
a Japanese fishing trawler by a gang of criminals calling itself the "pirates of the sea." Overall, the first nine
months of this year saw 352 attacks -- a record level. In the past two years, the United States, Europe, and even
China have launched military initiatives to battle piracy. But as the numbers show, the potential riches of
high-seas crime make it very hard to stop the rise of new-age buccaneers.
Asia's New DMZ
While the world was transfixed by events in the Middle East this February, a century-old territorial conflict in
Southeast Asia briefly became a shooting war when Cambodia and Thailand came to blows over a long-disputed
religious site, a clash that may foreshadow growing instability in an increasingly volatile region.
The two neighbors have long argued over ownership of the 11th-century Preah Vihear Temple, a UNESCO
World Heritage site, in a quarrel dating back to the drawing of the border between Siam and then-French
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Cambodia in the early 20th century. In 1962, the U.N.'s International Court of Justice awarded ownership of the
temple -- originally Hindu, now Buddhist -- to Cambodia, but Thailand has never completely accepted the
judgment. In recent years, Abhisit Vejjajiva, who was prime minister from 2008 until last August, upped his
aggressive rhetoric under pressure from the Thai nationalist "Yellow Shirt" movement and sent troops into the
region.
From Feb. 4 to 16, the two sides continually exchanged artillery fire in the disputed area -- each country claimsthe other started it -- with as many as 28 people killed and thousands of civilians displaced. "This is a real war. I
is not a clash," proclaimed Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Thankfully, if it was a war, it was a very short and limited one. In July, the United Nations imposed a
demilitarized zone around the temple and ordered both countries to withdraw their forces. The truce is being
monitored by Indonesian observers, but the dispute has led some to argue that Southeast Asia's regional body --
ASEAN -- needs its own peacekeeping force. Tensions have eased somewhat since Abhisit was voted out of office
in favor of "Red Shirt" -- backed Yingluck Shinawatra.
Although the crisis seems to have abated for now, it's just one episode of a period of intense political turmoil for
Thailand, a key U.S. ally in counterterrorism and counternarcotics campaigns. The country has seen large-scale
and often violent demonstrations by the largely rural Red Shirts and the royalist Yellow Shirts, and is facing an
insurgency in the south by Islamist militants who were accused by Amnesty International this year of
perpetrating war crimes against civilians. The possible return of Yingluck's brother Thaksin, the exiled former
prime minister and business tycoon who is still wanted on corruption charges in his home country, is another
potential flashpoint.
MAK REMISSA/EPA
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Speaking in Prague near the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama promised a renewed U.S.
"commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." At the end of last year, the
administration achieved two of the planned steps toward that goal with the ratification of the New START
nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia and the hosting of a 47-nation conference on nuclear security. Butprogress on Obama's other major pledge, a "new international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material
around the world within four years," has been much slower going.
The United States can't account for 5,900 pounds of "weapon-usable" nuclear material that it once shipped
overseas to help other countries' civilian nuclear programs, according to a Government Accountability Office
report issued in September. "Theoretically, we know [where the nuclear material is kept]. But we don't have a
good accounting of where it all is," one source familiar with the report told Wired .
Budget-cutting in Congress may also be hampering the U.S. effort to secure dangerous nuclear materials,according to analysis by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. A House bill this year would have
slashed the White House funding request for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), a program to secure
nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union, by $85 million. The GTRI funding was preserved in the Senate
version of the bill, but Congress already cut $123 million from GTRI in 2011.
The threats in question are quite real. In June, six men were arrested in Moldova for trying to sell a kilogram of
stolen uranium worth at least $20 million. There have been 500 cases of attempted cross-border smuggling of
nuclear materials in the last 15 years, according to U.N. data. Many more likely go undetected. Meanwhile, a bill
introduced in both the House and Senate in 2009 that would strengthen penalties for nuclear smuggling is still
stuck in committee. Congress also shows no sign of endorsing the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
(CTBT), an agreement signed 15 years ago by President Bill Clinton but never ratified. The administration has
promised a renewed push to get CTBT passed but hasn't set a date for bringing it before the closely divided
Senate.
New START may have been progress, but the finish line of a world without nuclear weapons is still a long way
off.
Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images
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