Were the Taliban Casing Yongsan?
By what unhappy accident did the muses of Seoul’s urban planning put a large mosque with a significant population of Pakistani fundamentalists in its congregation smack-dab on top of Hooker Hill? Walking through Itaewon shortly after 9/11 and shortly before my DEROS date, watching chitrali hats and shalwar kamiz coexist uneasily with spandex mini-dresses, Dimple scotch, and crowded nightclubs frequented by U.S. military personnel, I confess to having thought: it’s just a matter of when.
A Pakistani man who claims to be a member of the Taliban has been arrested for passing through South Korea 17 times on a fake passport, police said Friday, revealing problems with the country’s immigration control ahead of a summit of the world’s 20 major economies in November, according to Yonhap News. [….]
“He entered Korea with his own passport in 2001 and stayed through June 2003. He confessed that he was asked by Taliban leaders to collect information about the U.S. military bases in Korea,” an office with the Seoul police said. [Korea Herald]
The 31 year-old man entered Korea under the false pretense of being a religious leader of “a local mosque in Korea.” This isn’t the first report of Taliban and other al-Qaeda-linked groups operating in South Korea, either. This is from 2008:
A total of 74 foreigners were arrested or expelled by the National Intelligence Service over last five years in 19 terror-related cases, on charges of plotting attacks, goading anti-American sentiment and spying on the U.S. Forces Korea, according to classified documents released Sunday. Some of them allegedly had connections to al-Qaeda. “We obtained secret information that some Muslim extremists planned an attack on U.S. Army bases in Korea, so we expelled the people related to the plot,” an NIS official said. [….]
According to the NIS report, eight members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a Southeast Asian militant Islamic organization, were expelled from Korea after a plot to attack foreign embassies in Korea had been discovered in Oct. 2004.
Expelled, mind you, not waterboarded — and if the tales told to me by Army CID or fellow prosecutors are at least partially true, that would mean these guys got off lighter than suspected drug dealers in the hands of the Korean National Police.
Recently, the NIS has arrested a number of people involved in illegal foreign exchange transactions and drug smuggling linked to the Taliban. In Feb. 2007, 10 South Asians were arrested over illegal foreign exchange transactions worth W40 billion in collaboration with a global hawala or informal money remittance network. In May, four Arabs were arrested for smuggling in drugs from Afghanistan linked to the Taliban. In July, two Arabs were arrested trying to supply the Taliban with acetic anhydride, a key material for heroin manufacture, via Korea. [Chosun Ilbo]
Aside from putting most of Hooker Hill — and the awful King Club in particular — off limits, I’m not sure how one mitigates this risk consistent with the principles of basic human equality, and generally not punishing whole groups for the actions of a repellent few. Besides which, if you shut down one club, the soldiers will overcrowd some other place. Curfews will work to some extent, but I suspect this risk will exist as long as Seoul is full of American soldiers.
Another dangerous facet of these reports is that if North Korea wanted to hit Americans in South Korea, reports like these offer the North Koreans plausible deniability.