Well, are they going or staying? UPDATED

UPDATED: President Roh speaks!  You can read two Yonhap reports on President Roh’s thoughts on the operational command transfer issue—here’s one, and here’s the other.  Here are the money shots:

• “South Korea is the only country which does not have wartime operational control of its troops in the world,” Roh said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency. “The world’s 11th biggest economy, also its sixth-biggest military power, does not have wartime control.” 

• “The wartime operational control is the core of self-defense, and self-defense is the core of a self-reliant country,” he said. “When we have wartime control, we also can take the initiative in military talks with North Korea to ease tension and build up military confidence measures on the peninsula.”

• “Some say it is time that the U.S. should treat South Korea as a sovereign state. This will be able to make South Korea-U.S. relations develop in a rational and normal way,” he said, noting that the U.S. has made the decision to resolve the wartime control issue to prevent it from becoming a persistent problem in the alliance.

• “To make the military one of the most advanced in the world requires the target year of 2012, but it makes little difference if it happens earlier,” he said.

• “It’s most appropriate to fit it to the timing of (U.S. forces) moving into the Pyeongtaek base,” Roh said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency.

• “Our defense capability has been continuously strengthened,” Roh said. “Even if we get back the wartime operational control now, we can exercise it.”

• “We don’t have to worry too much. U.S. troops will be continuously stationed (here) and the number does not have any decisive meaning. The quality-based capacity is important,” he said.

• “There is nothing wrong and our national security is perfect. The South Korean military’s capability is sufficient and the Korea-U.S. alliance will not be shaken,” Roh said.

There you have it.

ORIGINAL POST: This is now giving me a headache.

A senior Pentagon official apparently told Yonhap that the United States would reduce its forces on the Korean Peninsula after it transfered wartime operational command to Korea.

The Korean Defense Ministry, however, said no USFK reductions were in the works. Instead of reductions, there would be a “realignment.”

Now today, you have Korean Vice Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan saying the transfer of operational command would not lead to a USFK withdrawal or reductions in U.S. forces deployed to the peninsula.

He also said he believed the U.S. official’s preferred date of transfer—2009—was proposed only symbolically as this would be the year the Yongsan Garrison would be transferred to Pyeongtaek and U.S. forces in Korea reduced from 37,500 to 25,000 men. The Korean side would prefer to assume operation command in 2012.

The date of the transfer appears to be a rather sensitive issue. The Chosun Ilbo, citing an unnamed source quoting an unnamed U.S. official (make of that what you will), seemed to suggest that the U.S. proposal to transfer command at an earlier date is the Pentagon’s way of giving Korea the bird:

The U.S. is playing tit-for-tat by offering to hand over wartime operational control of troops to Korea at what experts say is the unfeasibly early date of 2009-2010, a high-ranking official speculated Monday. Seoul aims at the “withdrawal” of wartime control of Korean troops, as it is officially termed, in six years’ time. “Perhaps this is a counterattack motivated by anger because [U.S. authorities] feel Korea is seeking the 2012 withdrawal for political reasons,” the official said.

A Korean source quoted a U.S. official as saying in recent bilateral discussions that Korea will not realistically be ready to exercise independent control of its forces even by 2012, but since that deadline appeared to be politically motivated, there was no reason for Washington to cling to military logic either.

Hey, no reason for us to take South Korea’s defense seriously if Seoul wants to play political games with its own security.

GI Korea, BTW, has an outstanding post on why the United States deserves the opportunity to leave South Korea with honor and how South Korean politicians seem to be working hard to prevent this. Read the post IN ITS ENTIRETY, but just to cite his conclusion:

[S]houldn’t liberation from the Japanese after World War II, 36,000 lives lost during the Korean War, and over 50 years of stability and economic development on the Korean peninsula provided by the United States be at least worth an honorable redeployment of US forces from the Korean peninsula? Is that asking too much?

Is that too much to ask? Well, I guess if you blame the U.S. for Japan taking over the peninsula in the first place (and don’t really acknowledge the U.S. role in liberation Korea at any rate), view U.S. participation in the Korean War as selfishly motivated by Cold War logic and, at the very least, the minimum price Washington should have paid for dividing the country (assuming for a moment you don’t view U.S. intervention itself as a crime that prolonged the war and prevented national reunification), and look at those 50 years of stability and economic development as a half-century of neocolonial exploitation at the hand of South Korean capitalists, military dictators and American imperialists *, I guess it probably would be too much to ask.

Luckily for both sides involved, these migraines will probably diminish—at least in the short term—after the South Korean presidential elections next year. The election results in 2007 may buy Seoul and Washington some time to transform the alliance in ways that take into account the changes in the capabilities and interests of the parties involved in an atmosphere of greater trust. But for that, we’ll just have to see.
* Just for the record, yes, this sums up the world view of some individuals and groups in South Korea, although I have no reason to believe the Roh administration as a whole subscribes to such views.