The defeat of the Afghan government after the withdrawal of US forces has sparked debate over the strength of American commitments in places such as Taiwan and South Korea.

Since the 1950-1953 Korean War, the American military has retained authority to control hundreds of thousands of South Korean forces alongside the roughly 28,500 US troops in the country if another war breaks out.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has made obtaining "operational control," or OPCON, of those joint forces a major goal of his administration, but delays over the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues, appear to have made that impossible in its remaining term.

"We have to take the Afghanistan crisis as a chance to strengthen self-defense capability through OPCON transfer," Song Young-gil, a lawmaker who serves as chief of Moon's Democratic Party, said in the title of a Facebook posting.

Asked about the effect the US withdrawal from Afghanistan could have on the South Korea-US alliance, an official of the presidential Blue House said it was carefully monitoring and considering the Afghan crisis but did not elaborate.

In Washington, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told a briefing on Tuesday that President Joe Biden had no intent to withdraw troops from South Korea and Europe.

South Korea's Song said the two countries' alliance was necessary to not just counter North Korea but maintain the balance of power and peace in northeast Asia.

"But we also need to have the attitude to foster cooperative self-defense, that we defend our country ourselves, which is why we have to take over wartime OPCON transfer as soon as possible," he added.

Song's post took aim at a Twitter message by US columnist Marc Thiessen on Monday comparing South Korea to Afghanistan, saying if it "were under this kind of sustained assault, they would collapse just as quickly without US support."

The lawmaker said it was slanderous to compare South Korea's advanced military and economy to Afghanistan, adding that the South was well equipped to counter impoverished North Korea.

 

Taiwan will hold

Taiwan would not collapse like Afghanistan in the event of an attack, Premier Su Tseng-chang said on Tuesday, offering an indirect warning to powerful neighbor China not to be "deluded" into thinking it could take the island.

China, which claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has been ramping up military and diplomatic pressure to force Taipei into accepting Chinese sovereignty, causing concern in Washington and other Western capitals.

The defeat of the Afghan government after the withdrawal of US forces and flight of the president has sparked discussion in Taiwan about what would happen in the event of a Chinese invasion, and whether the US would help defend Taiwan.

Asked whether the president or premier would flee if "the enemy was at the gates" like in Afghanistan, Su said people had feared neither arrest nor death when Taiwan was a dictatorship under martial law.

"Today, there are powerful countries that want to swallow up Taiwan using force, and likewise we are also not afraid of being killed or imprisoned," he said. "We must guard this country and this land, and not be like certain people who always talk up the enemy's prestige and talk down our resolve."

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is overseeing an ambitious military modernization program to bolster the domestic arms industry and make Taiwan a "porcupine" equipped with advanced, highly mobile weapons to make a Chinese invasion as difficult as possible.