Will the United States attack China?

'On the outskirts of Shanghai, in a run-down neighborhood dominated by a 12-story white office tower, sits a People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors,' according to the New York Times.

'The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlours and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.'

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood,” according to the New York Times.

The real issue to the attack is the US' Rules of Engagement in Cyberwarfare. In the days of David Patraeus, Pentagon and Washington drafted counter-responses to cyberattacks and foremost among the responses is a high chance and possibility of military strikes.

The Rules of Engagement as propounded by Pentagon targeted Iran majorly. Washington as at then believed the series of cyberattacks on the US was coming from Iran till experts proved the fictitious fact wrong.

Washington and Pentagon in the formulation of the Rules of Engagement were so abrasive. It was at the time when Israel was making heinous and calculative moves to launch an attack on Iran and bring Washington in.

Now that China is 'behind' the attacks though the allegation has been denied by the Chinese embassy in Washington, will the United States in the long run go ahead and fulfil the mission of her Rules of Engagement by attacking China?

United States can Kill US citizens with al-Qaeda Link

The legal basis for using drone strikes to kill US citizens has been disclosed in a leaked Justice Department memo.

US officials can authorise the killing of Americans abroad if they are leaders of al-Qaeda or its allies, according to the document obtained by NBC News.

Lethal force is lawful if they are judged to pose an "imminent threat" and their capture is not feasible, it adds.

US drone strikes against militant suspects in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan are deeply controversial.

Under President Barack Obama the US has expanded its use of drones to kill hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects, arguing that it is acting in self-defence in accordance with international law.

Critics argue the drone strikes amount to execution without trial and cause many civilian casualties.

Legal framework
The undated 16-page Department of Justice white paper published by NBC gives more details of the justification for the use of drones outside recognised war zones.

A US study last year suggested Pakistani civilians were being "terrorised" 24 hours a day by drones
It says sovereignty is not deemed to have been violated if the host nation gives its consent, or is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted.

It also sets out a "legal framework" for the use of lethal force against US citizens in foreign countries.

It concludes that such killings do not violate the US Constitution as long as:

An informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US

Capture is infeasible and the US continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible. The operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

The paper adopts a broad definition of "imminent threat", saying it is not necessary to produce evidence that a specific attack is being planned if the target is generally engaged in plotting against the US.

'Remarkable document'
It also asserts that courts should not play a role in reviewing or controlling such decisions. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the white paper was a "pretty remarkable document".

Anwar al-Awlaki was among three Americans killed in drone strikes in Yemen in 2011. Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said in a blog post the paper revealed "both the recklessness of the government's central claim and the deficiencies in the government's defense" of its drone strike policy.

"This sweeping authority is said to exist even if the threat presented isn't imminent in any ordinary sense of that word, even if the target has never been charged with a crime or informed of the allegations against him, and even if the target is not located anywhere near an actual battlefield," Mr Jaffer added.

The ACLU has helped the relatives of three Americans who died in drone strikes sue the Pentagon and CIA. Their lawsuit claims the deaths were unconstitutional.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda suspect born in the US state of New Mexico, was killed by an unmanned plane in September 2011.

Samir Khan, a naturalised US citizen who produced an online magazine promoting al-Qaeda's ideology, died in the same missile strike.

Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was born in Colorado, was killed a month later.

The Obama administration has been under growing pressure from politicians in Congress to share more details of its drone strike programme, including secret legal documents.

Last month the UN launched an inquiry into the impact of drone strikes on civilians.

U.S Military Trains Coup Plotters

Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has admitted bluntly the failure of U.S. military training to instill respect for human rights in a Malian army now accused of massacring Arabs and Tuaregs as it fights its way north into rebel-held territory. "We didn't spend probably the requisite time focusing on values, ethics, and a military ethos," Ham acknowledged, saying that most U.S. training for the Malians focused on tactics, strategy, and "technical matters."

Since 1985, the United States has sponsored approximately 156 Malian military officers and non-commissioned officers at U.S. professional military schools and given them training focused on professionalizing the military forces. Over the past three years, this funding has reached at least roughly $400,000 annually, and it is possible U.S. intelligence agencies have also funneled in support as well. Sadly, Mali is hardly an isolated case of U.S. military assistance programmes operating with dangerously little oversight and lacking a compelling central rationale.

Though good examples of successful U.S. military training programmes exist but lots of headline cases have gone badly wrong over the years -- from training Indonesian troops that carried out atrocities in East Timor to the billions poured into the Egyptian military to the scores of tainted graduates from the School of the Americas that ran riot in Central America during the 1980s.

In looking at the patterns of U.S. military assistance, the question is not who gets American military aid, but who doesn't. In 2012, the United States delivered bilateral security assistance to 134 countries -- meaning that every country on Earth had about a 75 percent chance of receiving U.S. military aid. Once you weed out places like North Korea and Vatican City, you are pretty much assured of receiving military aid no matter how large or small your country, no matter how democratic or despotic your regime, no matter how lofty or minimal your GDP.

There has been almost zero discussion of how to better focus U.S. military assistance around clear objectives and direct it to countries where it can make a lasting difference. And these aren't insignificant sums when taken together. The administration requested $9.8 billion in security assistance funding for fiscal year 2013.

Much of this military assistance -- through programmes like Foreign Military Financing; International Military Education and Training; Non-proliferation, Anti-terrorism, Demining, and Related Programmes; International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement; Peacekeeping Operations; and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund -- is supposed to be overseen by the State Department with the Defense Department doing the heavy lifting of actually delivering aid and training.

The rationale on paper for such assistance is straightforward and usually receives uncritical congressional support. U.S. military aid helps train security forces, finance the purchase of military equipment, bolster the ability of law enforcement to tackle the illegal narcotics trade, and shape cooperation on non-proliferation issues.

But more than anything, the Pentagon has always insisted that spreading military assistance so broadly is all about building relationships with fellow militaries -- a cost effective way of establishing contacts who will pick up the phone in a ministry of defence when needed. For many, U.S. dollars propped up an autocratic military in Egypt, other argue that it was the senior flag relationships between the Pentagon and Cairo that kept the military from opening fire on democratic protesters during the Arab Spring.

But U.S. military aid looks much better on paper than in practice, in large part because it is often delivered as if on autopilot without a reasoned discussion of its merits. The State Department largely offers rubber-stamp approvals, and the Foreign Service currently lacks personnel with the expertise needed to engage in a rigorous debate with the Pentagon about who deserves aid and why.

As Gordon Adams of the Stimson Center has argued, the State Department's "internal capacity to plan, budget, and manage these programmes needs to be seriously strengthened." This, combined with the general tendency of Congress to treat military spending requests as something just short of a papal writ, has meant that U.S. security assistance programmes receive very little oversight.

Equally troubling, military and economic assistance are treated as quite different creatures. For economic assistance, the United States has increasingly insisted that aid recipients at least demonstrate some marginal commitment to democracy and open markets. Not so on the military side, where concerns about corruption, the rule of law, and human rights are treated as something we are too polite to ask about.

Indeed, we probably would offer military training to everyone if it were not for the minor restrictions imposed by Senate Democrats like the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. military assistance to known thugs and war criminals that violate human rights with impunity. Yes, having military-to-military contacts through U.S. military training and aid is often useful and can build important relations and lasting trust.

But it is equally true that the list of U.S.-trained officers that have led coups against their sitting governments is a lengthy one in countries ranging from Honduras to Haiti to the Gambia. Contrary to what Ham's remark suggested, a few months spent studying tactics and logistics in Kansas or Georgia rarely seems to slow down a power-hungry colonel when he is hell bent on toppling the elected government that just threatened to cut his budget.

Underwriting security assistance to countries with autocratic leadership or nations that are of little strategic significance doesn't make much sense. U.S. military aid and training should be concentrated in a far fewer countries rather than being sprinkled all around the globe like fairy dust in hopes that good relations result.

Nations should be chosen to receive such military aid and training based on their commitment to reform -- both within the military and within the broader structures of democratic governance, free markets, and respect for human rights. Such aid should be a reward for high-performing countries, not a party favour dispensed at the door.

General Ham sounded genuinely surprised that American-trained officers were up to nefarious deeds. Apparently Ham is not much of a history buff -- a U.S. trained captain led a coup against the government of Mali just last March.

Courtesy: Foreign Policy Analysis