Banyan

STRIKING a double-fisted blow for public health and safety, Chinese authorities on May 1st launched a pair of wide-ranging new crackdowns, one on smoking in public places and another on drink-driving. Both address serious problems in China, but for now it seems only the drink-drivers need change their evil ways.

There is no shortage of them. China last year reported catching 526,000 impaired drivers, a rise of 68% over the previous year. Alcohol-related fatalities are not tallied separately but traffic deaths last year totaled 65,000 nationwide.

The newly implemented amendment to China’s Road Traffic Safety Law imposes stiff new penalties, including criminal charges, on drivers caught with blood alcohol levels of .08% or higher. Licenses may be revoked for five years or, for drink-drivers who cause serious accidents, for life. Previous penalties allowed for small fines and lost driving privileges for as little as three months.

Matching the new standards is a vigorous enforcement campaign. Random checks have become commonplace on roads across China. In Beijing alone, 7,000 officers have manned 1,400 checkpoints since the crackdown began. Indeed,your correspondent has already blown into a breathylzer three times. Police have also deployed nail strips to stop cars from fleeing and tear gas to handle drivers who turn rowdy at the checkpoints.

They have also publicised the cases of those caught. Among the most prominent public examples was Gao Xiaosong, a well-known musician and film director sentenced to six months in jail and fined 4,000 yuan ($615) for injuring three in an accident he caused May 9th while driving at more than three times the legal limit.

Authorities are already claiming success. Police reported that alcohol-related accidents fell to 1,458 nationwide during this year’s May 1st Labour Day holiday, a decline of 27.6% compared to last year. Far less successful has been the new effort to ban smoking in restaurants, bars, internet cafes and on public transport. China is home to more than 300m smokers, and a well-developed culture of social puffing. Smuggling is common, but the government monopoly on legal cigarettes has also been an important source of revenue. This has widely been seen as a factor in the half-hearted nature of previous anti-smoking campaigns. But according to officials at China’s Centre for Disease Control, the 513 billion yuan ($77 billion) earned by the government in 2009 was far outpaced by related health costs.

The new ban, with only vague provisions on penalties for smokers or public venues that tolerate them, is barely being heeded. This failure is not the first. In the Ming Dynasty, the Chongzhen emperor banned smoking and called for penalties on a par with those for treason. The Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty likewise considered smoking a heinous offense, but also failed to curb it. Perhaps they should have used tear gas.

SO IT'S official. Thailand’s largest opposition party, Pheu Thai, will be led by the sister of its exiled leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, in the general election to be held on July 3rd. Yingluck Shinawatra is Mr Thaksin’s 43-year-old younger sister, a businesswoman with virtually no experience of politics. She was "nominated" to lead the party on May 16th—although handpicked by Mr Thaksin would probably be a better description of the process.

The choice of Ms Yingluck will invigorate many Pheu Thai supporters, but dismay others. Mr Thaksin, who was deposed in a coup in 2006, is revered by his supporters as a populist hero who put the concerns of the poor first with his innovative social and economic programmes, especially in the countryside. To them, often red shirts in Thailand’s colour-coded politics, Ms Yingluck will be the next best thing to having the man himself back in charge. Mr Thaksin is banned from politics in Thailand and would face charges if he returned. He is keen to stress his closeness to Ms Yingluck, and described her after her nomination as his "clone".

Others, however, will worry about this kind of talk. Some of Mr Thaksin’s own supporters have long been concerned about turning the party into merely a fan club for Mr Thaksin. They would rather see it evolving into something more broadly based. Appointing Ms Yingluck, however, seems to confirm the Thaksinisation of the party. Nonetheless, even those opposed to the appointment within Pheu Thai argue that government-inspired court orders banning most of the other Pheu Thai leaders from participating in politics meant that in reality the choice was pretty thin.

Much now will depend on Ms Yingluck, an unknown political entity. Will she emerge as a politician in her own right, or be content to remain merely as a clone for her elder brother? Certainly her first public pronouncements after her "nomination" were pretty bland. There was some talk of reconciliation to heal Thailand’s bitterly divided politics, and a suggestion that being a woman she will be better able to achieve this than a man.

None of this, however, will worry her opponent, Abhisit Vejjajiva, the prime minister and leader of the Democrat Party. He is an experienced politician, although one who will also be seeking his first mandate from the electorate; he only came to power in 2008 after the courts dissolved the previous Thaksinite ruling party.  Polls put the two main parties roughly neck and neck, so it should be an exciting race, spiced up by Ms Yingluck. If she wins, it will mean not only the restoration of the Thaksinites—the country will also get its first ever female prime minister.

SOMETIMES it seems that the founding-father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, has spent more time trying to tear himself away from running the island-state than he did ruling it in the first place. Now 87, he was Singapore’s first prime minister, serving for 31 years until 1990.

Rather than gracefully slipping into the background, however, he remained in the cabinet after 1990 as Senior Minister. Still unable to give it up, in 2004 a new post of Minister Mentor (MM) was invented for him in the cabinet of the government headed by his son, Lee Hsien Loong.

On May 14th, however, the elder Lee announced that he was finally resigning from the cabinet. Goh Chok Tong, Mr Lee's successor as prime minister, also declared that at the age of 69 he too was resigning his position as senior minister in the cabinet. But, inevitably, it was Mr Lee who grabbed all the attention. For any other politician of his age, the announcement could be taken as a final ending to a glittering career. Indeed, much of the mainstream Singapore media treated the event as such.

Not a bit of it. For a start, he will retain the parliamentary seat that he won (uncontested) in the general election on May 7th. He is sure to continue making plenty of speeches from the back benches, as he did in the last parliament, on almost every topic under the sun. He will doubtless continue to open hospitals, intervene in public debates and write more books, all in his stated quest to keep Singapore on the straight and narrow.

To quote the man himself (from 1988): “Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel that something is going wrong, I will get up. Those who believe that after I have left the government as prime minister, I will go into a permanent retirement, really should have their heads examined.”

More significant, perhaps, is the manner of his latest (semi-) going. The party that he helped to create, the People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore continuously since independence, has just endured its worst pasting at the polls since separation from Malaysia in 1965. Due to the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post voting system, the opposition won just six out of the 87 contested seats. More significantly, however, the PAP share of the vote dropped to a dangerously low 60.1%. Only a decade ago the party was getting 75.3%.

In the election post-mortems currently being conducted within and without the PAP, the party acknowledges that it has ceased to connect with the voters as it once did. And the prime culprit for some is Mr Lee himself. Once a supreme electoral asset, he is now something of a liability, especially with those under 40 who don’t remember the glory days. The straight-talking, almost bullying tone that served him well in the past doesn’t wash anymore with a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan and self-confident electorate.

Too often, his party colleagues were left to do the political fire-fighting after another round of old fashioned plain-speaking from MM. He upset ethnic Malays with remarks that they had not adapted well to Singapore, and then during the middle of the campaign he infuriated many when he said people who voted against the PAP in one particular constituency would have “five years to live and repent” their decision. That constituency went to the opposition, and the PAP government lost its very good foreign secretary.

Within the PAP, and for many other Singaporeans, Mr Lee remains a revered figure. But it’s also clear that new generations of Singaporeans are ready to move onto a new era, and the PAP will have to reflect that or wither. It’s unclear whether a few men in white coats took MM aside to finally do some plain speaking of their own, or whether Mr Lee took the decision himself to resign from the cabinet. But the result is the same; the founding-father will continue to opine, but the PAP will have a little more room to change and adapt to a changed electoral landscape.

JUDGING what Pakistanis really think about current affairs can be tricky. Do you ask the English-speaking chattering classes in the cities for their views on the death of Osama bin Laden, or try to find some way to hear what less-educated, rural folk conclude? Aside from venturing to places like Abbottabad, or specially-planned trips to see flood victims or assess life nearer the border of Afghanistan, many journalists, especially foreigners, are likely to end up hearing more from the better-off, English-speaking Pakistanis who live not far from their hotels.

So a new poll on the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, by Gallup in Pakistan, makes for interesting reading. Researched between May 7th and 10th, it was run in both towns and rural areas, among a decent-sized sample of 2,530 people of various linguistic, educational and class backgrounds. The interviews were done in person, not over the phone, which means it reaches a wide range of people.

It turns out that Pakistanis, as ever, believe in conspiracies. Although two-thirds, roughly, reckon that America trampled on Pakistani sovereignty in the Navy Seals’ raid to kill bin Laden on May 2nd (perhaps surprisingly, as many as 23% concluded that sovereignty was not infringed), nearly half (49%) thought that the whole incident was actually staged for some reason or other. Only 26% thought the al-Qaeda chief was really killed on the night in question. As for how Pakistanis sum up bin Laden himself: 44% concluded he was a “martyr”, while 26% preferred to call him a “criminal”.

The Pakistani fondness for conspiracies seems to have two causes. First, the conspiracy theory often turns out to be right: those who have seen the army’s hand in politics, or who reckon that spies, spooks and terrorists are meddling across their country, trying to shape developments, are proven correct more often in Pakistan than almost anywhere else. Banyan said as much, in reference to the arrest of an American CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, in February.

A second reason for the popularity of conspiracy theories, however, is that ordinary people feel powerless. They feel that the powerful make their decisions out of sight, with little public scrutiny. Public funds, whether raised by taxes or aid, are spent with little scrutiny. There’s a lively press, noisy television shows, great exchanges of opinion and rage among politicians, commentators, lawyers and activists. But getting people to agree on facts is difficult. One Pakistani former ambassador to America put it nicely over a cup of tea last week, suggesting that “we love conspiracies because wherever there is a lack of information then rumours thrive”.

This chimes with other findings in the Gallup poll. The one institution that Pakistanis have generally reckoned is reliable, the army, has taken a battering over the bin Laden affair. Nearly half of those polled (48%) think that the army “connived” in the American raid on Abbottabad at the start of the month, representing a widespread and unusual criticism of the institution (considering so many of the respondents disapproved of the attack).
Still, there is a consolation for the men in uniform: the civilian leaders are even less well liked, as 57% of respondents saw complicity by their elected leaders.

Update: More than 80 people have been killed in north-west Pakistan in two suicide attacks, according to Pakistan's police.

A WEEK ago South Korea observed “Children’s Day”, an occasion when every school and office is closed, and the nation’s families march off in unison to chaebol-owned theme parks like Lotte World or Everland. Cynical expat residents are fond of asking “isn’t every day Children’s Day?” They mean it sarcastically but their sarcasm is itself ironic. In reality the other 364 days of the year are very tough for Korean youngsters.

Results of a survey released last week by the Institute for Social Development Studies at Seoul’s Yonsei University show that Korean teenagers are by far the unhappiest in the OECD. This is the result of society’s relentless focus on education—or rather, exam results. The average child attends not only regular school, but also a series of hagwons, private after-school “academies” that cram English, maths, and proficiency in the “respectable” musical instruments, ie piano and violin, into tired children’s heads. Almost 9% of children are forced to attend such places even later than 11pm, despite tuitions between 10pm and 5am being illegal.

Psychologists blame this culture for all manner of ills, from poor social skills to the nation’s unacceptably high rate of youth suicide, which is now the leading cause of death among those aged 15-24. Recently, a spate of suicides at KAIST, a technology-focused university, has drawn national attention. For most students the pinnacle of stress is reached somewhat earlier, in the third year of high school. This is the year in which the suneung (university entrance exam) is taken. Tragic reactions to the stress it creates are all too common.

Every suneung period is accompanied by national soul-searching and endless newspaper articles, but nothing ever seems to change. For hundreds of years civil service examinations were the only means by which social advancement was possible; testing became the means by which a person’s value in Korean society would be defined. In this ultra-competitive country, no parent wants their child to be seen as a B student.

Private education of course also costs a great deal of money, and is a major factor in South Korea’s low birth rate—it is a lucky couple these days who can afford to raise two or more children. South Korea is due to achieve the perilous status of being a “super-aged” country by 2026. Between those demographic consequences and the sheer misery it inflicts on its young, South Korea’s approach to education is starting to look like a matter of two steps forward, three steps back.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

AS HER government prepared to deliver its first budget on May 10th Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, launched her latest plan to stop asylum-seekers reaching the country by boat. Three days earlier, Ms Gillard announced Australia had struck a deal with Malaysia to swap refugees. After the arrangement comes into force, the next 800 boat people to land on Australia’s shores will be sent to join the thousands of asylum-seekers who are already waiting to have their claims processed in Malaysia. In return, Australia will admit 4,000 of the group stuck in Malaysia who have already been assessed as refugees, taking them in over a period of four years.

The timing of Ms Gillard’s announcement was hardly accidental. The refugee deal has triggered yet more controversy over an issue that has dogged her since she was elected as leader of a minority Labor government last August. She must be hoping this row can be buried quickly beneath the debate around the budget over the coming week. That is unlikely.

Among rich countries, Australia’s asylum-seeker numbers are not so great: it received 8,250 applications last year, putting it at 15th among 44 asylum-receiving industrialised countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Yet images of boat people arriving in northern Australian waters, after paying people-smugglers in Asia for passage, have played badly in suburban Australia. The asylum-seekers themselves, frustrated at the length of their detention, and in some cases by the rejection of their claims, rioted recently at Christmas Island, Australia’s main detention centre in the Indian Ocean. In March, another group of detainees set fire to a centre at Villawood, in Sydney. The riots and fire only fuelled accusations by the conservative Liberal-National opposition that the government had lost control of asylum policy.

Yet some of the government’s problems seem to be of its own making. When Labor came to power in 2007 under Kevin Rudd, Ms Gillard’s predecessor, it promised to ditch the so-called “Pacific Solution” instituted by John Howard, the former conservative prime minister. This had involved intercepting boats and sending asylum-seekers to languish for years in Australian-built camps on Nauru and Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, while their claims were assessed; many detainees in both places anyway ended up in Australia.

Although Labor promised a more humanitarian approach, much of what it has done since then, especially since Ms Gillard seized control of the government, has been bringing it ever closer to the policy it once condemned. Last year she floated the prospect of setting up a regional processing centre in Timor-Leste; that idea has since collapsed. Shortly before she announced the deal with Malaysia, it emerged that Australian officials—including Mr Rudd, now foreign minister—had approached Papua New Guinea about re-opening the Manus Island detention centre; that may yet go ahead.

The government has managed to drop other aspects of its once high-minded stand against the previous cabinet’s policy. At one point it had ruled out the opposition’s demands to reopen the Nauru detention centre. Nauru, it said, had not signed the UN refugee convention, which applies certain humanitarian conditions to the treatment of asylum-seekers. But neither has Malaysia. And while Labor once chastised the Howard government for labelling boat people as “queue-jumpers”, Ms Gillard herself has since adopted similar language. She says boat people who land in Australia will be sent straight to Malaysia, to “the back of a very long queue”.

The government defends its deal with Malaysia on two main grounds. It says it is about “burden-sharing” the responsibility of resettling refugees currently in Malaysia; and it is aimed at undermining the “business model” of criminal syndicates involved in people-smuggling.

In these respects, Canberra’s deal has support from the UNHCR. Richard Towle, its representative in Australia, says the Australia-Malaysia arrangement is a “first concrete step” that falls within proposals for regional co-operation against people-smuggling that were discussed at talks in Bali in March. He also differentiates the “Malaysia Solution” from the “Pacific Solution”. The latter, he says, was not about Australia sharing a regional burden with countries that faced similar problems; it was more about Australia passing its own responsibilities onto others.

For all that, the UNHCR opposes all mandatory detention of asylum-seekers, including Australia’s policy. Mr Towle says that many among the 6,800 people, including 1,000 children, now detained in places such as Christmas Island and Villawood “don’t need to be there.”  He adds: “Mandatory detention of asylum-seekers coming to Australia is causing significant psychological harm to people, including incidents of self-harm and suicide. We are deeply concerned about that.” 

(Picture credit: AFP)

SINGAPORE belongs to a small category of places where a parliamentary election resulting in a victory of 81-seats-to-six, in favour of the ruling party, can be taken as a breakthrough for the opposition. Within that small category, it is probably unique in that the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) dominance relies on neither electoral fraud nor physical intimidation. Yet its dominance has been nearly absolute since 1965, when Singapore separated from Malaysia and began life as an independent city-state.

After the election on May 7th the PAP still faces few obvious constraints in pursuing its policies. It has a huge parliamentary majority, well above the two-thirds it needs to change the constitution. But this was its worst result since 1965 both in terms of the number of successful opposition candidates (the previous best was only four, in 1991), and in the PAP's share of the overall vote.  At 60.1%, this compared poorly with the 66.6% it won in the previous election in 2006, which was itself disappointing after a 75.3% haul in 2001.

The opposition tapped a vein of resentment towards the PAP. Despite its success in making Singapore a rich, clean, law-abiding and pleasant city, the PAP has alienated many voters. A common perception is that it has lost touch with the concerns of the less well-off—about rising prices, especially of housing, and about the rapid influx of immigrants, notably from China. Of the population of just over 5m about a quarter are immigrants. 

Some also feel the PAP is arrogant and high-handed, in its discrimination against opposition-held constituencies in the allocation of funds for upgrading public housing, and in its bullying tactics towards opposition politicians. 

The emergence in this election of social-networking sites on the internet as a focus for opposition politicking changed the tone of the campaign. Even the docile mainstream media were forced to devote more coverage to the opposition, lest readers forsake them for the newer outlets.

So the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, has struck an unusually humble tone, both during the campaign, when he actually apologised for some PAP missteps, and in acknowledging the landslide victory, which prompted him to promise some PAP “soul-searching”.

This tacitly acknowledges that Singapore’s winner-take-all electoral system leaves the losers even less proportionally represented than do most first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems. Singapore has a sort of “FPTP-Plus”. In 1988 it introduced “Group Representation Constituencies” (GRCs), into which some single-member constituencies were merged. The enlarged areas that resulted are contested by slates of candidates. The justification is to ensure representation for ethnic minorities, from which the slates have to include candidates.

Another effect however is to make it hard for the opposition, which is fragmented into a number of tiny parties, to find the resources or candidates to contest these seats. It has also helped unknown PAP candidates enter parliament on the coat-tails of the ministers who typically “anchor” a PAP slate. In this election, all but 12 of the seats were subsumed by four-, five- or six-member GRCs. The opposition had never won one, and often failed to contest most seats.

This time the opposition co-ordinated and fielded candidates in all but one of the seats—that held by Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong—where, on nomination day, opposition candidates arrived 35 seconds too late to register.

Moreover, two veteran opposition MPs—Low Thia Khiang of the Workers’ Party, and Chiam See Tong of the Singapore People’s Party—abandoned their single-member seats to take on the PAP in GRCs.

For Mr Chiam, the gamble did not pay off. His GRC slate lost, as did his wife, Lina, by just over 100 votes, when she stood in his former constituency. She is now eligible for one of three parliamentary seats, with limited voting rights, available to the best-performing losing opposition candidates. Mr Low and the Workers’ Party, however, triumphed, both in his former seat, and in the opposition’s first-ever GRC victory, in the Aljunied constituency, where he succeeded in toppling Singapore’s foreign minister, George Yeo.

Mr Yeo and his colleagues aside, both opposition and government can claim some sort of satisfaction from the election result, as can voters. Singaporeans, who seem still to trust the PAP to do an efficient job, in the aggregate want not an alternative government but a stronger opposition. And they have got one.

The danger for the opposition, as Cherian George, author of an excellent book on the politics of Singapore in the 1990s, pointed out in an online column, is that having succeeded in teaching the PAP a lesson at the polls, it will now “have to face the daunting possibility that the government actually learns it.” 

TRUTH and reconciliation panels are all the rage these days. Most are created in the aftermath of cataclysmic political events. Sadly, few scale the lofty heights attained by the post-apartheid hearings in South Africa, which lent their name to the genre. It is all the harder to hold the perpetrators to account when they are still in positions of power. Witness Sri Lanka’s feeble stab at investigating its wartime conduct, while at the same time its government furiously denounces a UN report into alleged war crimes committed in the final months of the conflict.

Last May parts of Bangkok resembled a war zone, as combat troops faced off against “red-shirt” protesters, some of them armed. In the bloody aftermath, the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, promised a proper inquiry into the nation’s worst outbreak of political violence since 1992. A truth-and-reconciliation commission was appointed and legal investigators began to work through their caseloads of the dead and injured. A year on however not a single case has been prosecuted. The truth commission is similarly stalled. With elections coming soon, there seems little hope of a breakthrough in apportioning blame for the killing of the 92 people who died. 

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has stepped into the breach with a detailed, 154-page report on what happened last year. “Descent into Chaos” pieces together how the red shirts set up protest camps in Bangkok’s city centre and the subsequent actions of the government and its security forces. The report does an impressive job of marshalling the known facts, talking to those directly involved and describing the violence, including the use of military snipers in “live-fire” zones around the protest camp.

It is, by necessity, a partial account: HRW does not have access to official data, such as forensic tests on shooting victims. But it is not a partisan effort. While there is plenty of blame for trigger-happy soldiers, the red shirts are not spared. Armed “black shirts” allied to the reds appear to have instigated the first deadly clashes on April 10th and to have joined ensuing battles against the army. Grenades were fired into army bases and police posts. Armed men stormed a hospital where soldiers were reportedly billeted.

While red-shirt leaders claimed the mantle of peaceful, non-violent protest, they urged their own supporters to prepare for war. “Bangkok will be a sea of fire,” vowed one leader. This was not far off the mark: arson attacks spread across the city as the army closed in on the protest camp. Other leaders made similar blood-curdling speeches on stage.

The report cites evidence that troops fired repeatedly on unarmed protesters and on volunteer medics trying to assist the injured. At least four medics died, including a nurse at a temple on May 19th, the day that troops dispersed the protests. Red shirts were killed with single shots to the head, an indication that snipers were employed. Video footage obtained by HRW shows a military sniper in action, with a colleague acting as a spotter.

Bangkok may have resembled a war zone, but this was not an armed conflict, according to Brad Adams, HRW’s executive director for Asia. He told a press conference on May 3rd that Thailand was obliged to use only non-lethal force against civil disturbances. But it seems “the laws of war didn’t apply in Thailand last year,” he said.

Such legal niceties may be lost on Thais who argue that the troops were justified in using deadly force, given the presence of black-shirt gunmen in the crowd. Why did the red shirts encourage these rogue elements? On the other hand, most of the firepower was on one side, hence the high death toll among protesters, most of who carried nothing more dangerous than a stick or a rock, if that. Could they have been stopped by non-lethal methods? Did the army exert proper control over its rank-and-file?

The answers have spent the past year lost in the fog. This is precisely why truth-telling tends to be seen as a necessary start to healing the wounds. It might be too much to expect a single report to capture all the complexities of the chaos. HRW should be commended for trying. It is up to those in power in Thailand to push the process forward.

WOKEN by the deafening thump of rotor blades, Haji Bashir Khan crept onto his roof and watched, under a warm and moonless sky, as American special forces stormed his neighbour’s compound. “Yes, we were scared—we don’t have terrorism here,” says the restaurateur. He heard shooting and screams, then felt an explosion as a grounded helicopter was destroyed. The blast broke his bedroom window and strewed blackened bits of the chopper over a nearby wheat field.

Mr Khan and others in Abbottabad, a garrison town north of Islamabad, say the raid that killed Osama bin Laden lasted for 40 minutes and Pakistani soldiers turned up only after the Americans had departed. That delay, even though three army regiments are camped on a base just a few minutes’ stroll away, and the ease with which helicopters swooped in from Afghanistan, suggest some limited Pakistani co-operation. The government, braced for public anger or revenge attacks by jihadis, al-Qaeda or otherwise, says grimly that it was caught unawares by the raid (though it also claims, somewhat confusingly, to have given some intelligence help beforehand).

Much harder to swallow are its claims that Pakistan’s blundering spies had no idea that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living, probably for years, not in a remote cave on the Afghan frontier but cradled in the arms of retired and serving generals in the pleasant, hillside town. It prefers to plead incompetence, since it would be far more painful to admit the alternative: that Pakistan's secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), or rogue elements within it, had long harboured Mr bin Laden and that Pakistan’s leaders only acquiesced in his killing, if at all, moments before the Navy Seals did the job.

Pakistani complicity is the likelier explanation. Mr bin Laden might well have had the gall to risk hiding in plain sight by the military cantonment in Abbottabad, where residents say they regularly submit to identity checks and police visits at home. Yet his prolonged stay at a specially built, high-walled compound, with many of his family flocking in from Yemen, required a network of help. That he had relatively few guards on the spot also suggests he trusted others for security. So it is unsurprising that, to the growing fury of Pakistani spies, many informed observers conclude he must have had help from the ISI.

Either way Pakistan, and especially the ISI, now looks deeply humiliated. India’s hawks crow that their bitter rival can never be trusted; noisier American congressmen want to slash the $3 billion in military and civilian aid that America sends to Pakistan. President Asif Zardari and other civilian leaders have floundered in their response. Relations with America that were already cool, especially between spy agencies, have turned icy as criticism of the ISI grows.

Spooked, the Pakistanis are already warning the Americans not to consider any more such raids. But it is clearly a tempting prospect. An obvious next target would be Mullah Omar, the ageing Afghan Taliban leader, whom the ISI is also accused of protecting. American agents snooping in Pakistan’s cities in the past year may have turned up other useful leads but chosen not to act until Mr bin Laden had been dealt with. Some conspiracy theorists even fret that the Americans could go after Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Usually smooth-speaking ISI men have been giving garbled accounts of what Pakistan was up to. More telling is the gobsmacked silence of their boss, General Ashfaq Kayani, the powerful army chief who had long denied that Mr bin Laden was hidden in Pakistan. On April 23rd he had brushed away American grumbles that too little was being done to fight terrorists, saying blithely they would soon be beaten and “we in Pakistan's army are fully aware of the internal and external threat to our country”. All the more galling for him, he said these words at Abbottabad’s military academy, within waving distance of the al-Qaeda leader’s safe-house.

The general may take some more knocks. Several foreign allies, such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, speaking on May 3rd, have called for support to Pakistan’s civilian leaders to continue, while saying that its military chiefs must answer tough questions about their spies. Yet any Western pressure will be calibrated with the civil war next door in Afghanistan in mind.

It is unclear how much will change there after the beheading of al-Qaeda. Optimists see glimmers, if for example the Americans at last push Pakistan to start a long-postponed campaign against the Haqqani network, which attacks Western forces in east Afghanistan from Pakistani bases. Al-Qaeda itself may be written off as irrelevant in Afghanistan, where intelligence folk say its fighters number fewer than 100. And if the more powerful Taliban accept that Mr bin Laden is dead, it may feel released from a Pashtunwali honour code about protecting guests and so disavow ties with al-Qaeda. A Western demand for them to do so has been the biggest block to planned peace talks. The Taliban may be spurred to act, fearing that whatever support it gets from inside Pakistan is in jeopardy.

But it is not clear that the Taliban will grow any more amenable just yet, and few observers think talks would get far given the many groups that would have to be involved. The Taliban's leaders will watch to see whether Mr bin Laden’s death softens Westerners’ already flagging will to fight on in Afghanistan, and whether plans to get many troops out in the next three years are hardened up—which would in turn weaken Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. The fallout from Mr bin Laden's death in South Asia is only just beginning.

SINGAPORE’S general elections rarely draw much attention from beyond the shores of this tiny island-state. After all, the result is hardly in doubt. The People’s Action Party (PAP), founded by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow “men in white”, as they are known, has won every election since independence—and usually by a huge margin. Indeed, in the last parliament the opposition won just two contested seats, and that was considered a good-ish result for them.  So when the current general election officially kicked off on April 27th, anyone could be forgiven for struggling to stifle a yawn.

Yet now that we are into the short campaigning period, with polling day set for May 7th, the political atmosphere seems to be at least as intense and combative as in any British or American election. It’s almost as if the opposition parties think that they really can win a handful of seats! But surely not?

The big outdoor rallies, held between 7pm to 10pm in the evenings, are packed—one friend estimated that there were probably about 40,000 people at a Workers’ Party stadium rally that she attended. They are festive but well-ordered affairs. The thousands who go along listen carefully to the arguments put over from the podium; they really do want to hear about a viable alternative to the PAP. Indeed, some enthusiastically talk about this election being a “watershed”. Opposition politicians argue that now is the time for “change”—and many actually seem to believe in it.

Older and wiser heads however counsel me against taking too much of this too seriously. In a country where political debate is normally quite limited, the election campaign period serves as a safety valve, they say—people can blow off a bit of steam and then we can all return to a peaceful, stable, PAP way of life, just as before. The iron laws of Singaporean electoral arithmetic will prevail, as ever.

Maybe so, but there is undoubtedly something a bit different going on this time. Specifically, the opposition has altered its tactics, mounting an unusually concerted attack on the PAP. And there are real issues now that the opposition can exploit.

On tactics, the opposition is contesting more seats than ever before. In previous elections, such was the PAP’s lock on the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), each of which returns up to six MPs as a single-party block, that the non-PAP parties rarely bothered to contest even half. Now, only Lee Kuan Yew’s GRC will be unopposed. The Workers’ Party, the biggest of the six main opposition parties, is concentrating its firepower in just one GRC, Aljunied. Its five candidates there include all its top leaders, most prominently Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh. Judging from the campaign so far, they certainly have the best hope in a long time of taking down a prized GRC. If they do manage it, that would constitute something of a political tsunami by Singaporean standards—and they would also claim a very prominent PAP scalp, that of George Yeo, the foreign minister.

All this clearly has the PAP a bit rattled, if Lee Kuan Yew’s comments are anything to go by. Fighting his own 14th election, the 87-year-old “Minister Mentor” (MM), as he is officially known, has been warning voters of the dire “consequences” of voting against the PAP. “You must expect the PAP to look after PAP constituencies first”, he told reporters. Thus if the unfortunate voters of Aljunied really do have the temerity to vote out the PAP, they will have “five years to live and repent”, according to MM. Asked if this sort of provocative language could cause a backlash against the PAP among voters, MM himself remained wholly unrepentant: “I am 87. I am speaking the truth. I do not want to be hypocritical.” So there.

The rising cost of everyday goods and services in an already expensive city is the main worry for Singaporeans, and this has become the main campaign message for many opposition politicians. Immigration has become part of the mix too; opposition candidates argue that the steady stream of low-cost workers coming to Singapore depresses wages for Singaporeans, thus adding to their worries about rising prices. Some parties argue for reductions in taxation, or special help for the elderly and other groups. The PAP argues that Singapore should stick to its traditional free-market, low-welfare policies, arguing that the best way to combat rising prices is to help the already flourishing economy grow even further. Last year Singapore achieved the second-highest growth rate in the world, after Qatar.

The PAP should still win comfortably. But given their past electoral hegemony, if they lose even one GRC—or, at the very extreme realms of possibility, two—that would be a shock. At the very least, this time round the PAP will know that it has been in a fight.

THE communist government of Laos has big plans for the country's economy, which is yet the smallest in South-East Asia. By harnessing the power of the Mekong river, which runs the length of the country, the government hopes to quench the region’s perpetual thirst for electricity and to transform Laos into “the battery of South-East Asia”. Throughout April however representatives from most of the country's neighbours, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia—the nations that the Lao government has hoped would become its biggest customers—failed to endorse its plan to build a huge dam at Xayaburi, which was supposed to be the first of a series to cross the lower stretch of the Mekong.

The multinational Mekong River Commission (MRC) expressed concerns about the rigour of the environmental assessment carried out by the Lao government, and in particular the effects of the dam on the Mekong delta region in southern Vietnam. Given the importance of the Mekong ecosystem, which supports tens of millions of people, such concerns are hard to ignore. Ecologists have argued that the construction of the dam will push dozens of species of migratory fish into extinction, turn sections of the river into reservoirs and, by diminishing fish stocks, reduce the main supply of protein for riverside communities. It is estimated that about 2,000 villagers will also have to be resettled. Similar worries have plagued China's efforts to dam the source of the Mekong.

As it was unable to reach a consensus, the MRC agreed to take the proposal to ministerial level. The way forward is unclear, given the wide differences of opinion between the MRC's members. Vietnam, which, as the site of the delta arguably has the most reason to worry after the dam’s environmental impact, would like not only to scrap the dam, but impose a ten-year moratorium on all new hydropower projects on the lower Mekong. Cambodia and Thailand wish to see further research into the environmental effects. Thailand’s position is complicated though; a Thai company won the contract to build the $3.5 billion dam, and one of its state-owned enterprises has a 25% equity share in the project.

A further problem concerns the MRC's lack of clout. As a consultative body, it cannot prevent any of its members from acting unilaterally. After the meeting the Lao energy minister, Viraphonh Viravong, who is also head of the Lao delegation to the MRC, promised to "consider to accommodate all concerns", but warned that further environmental studies would take longer than Laos was willing to wait. Indeed the patience of the Lao authorities may already have run out. A report in the Bangkok Post includes photos that appear to show that construction at the site is already under way.

Construction of the dam at Xayaburi risks opening the proverbial floodgates. The Lao government has proposed a further 11 hydropower projects along the lower Mekong, which will be harder to oppose if the river has been dammed already. The potential exists for the dam to turn into another regional flashpoint. Lao rhetoric towards Vietnam, its closest ally, has been unusually bullish. Of course were Laos to disregard Vietnam’s completely the region’s brand-new battery might be left trying to bring power to a broken circuit.