Category: Article

At the beginning of February, ISAF sources announced that a major military offensive was about to be mounted in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This was Operation Moshtarak (“together”), involving 15,000 US, British and Afghan National Army troops, and would concentrate on clearing Taliban and other paramilitary groups from two areas, one of them centred on the town of Marja. The publicity given to the operation appeared designed partly to encourage civilians to evacuate areas under Taliban influence, but would also serve to highlight the capabilities of coalition forces at a time when support for the war in the United States and Britain was fragile.

Given the size of the operation, it is likely that it will provide a major focus for western media attention for some weeks, but to get a full measure of its significance requires seeing it in the wider context of the conflicts in Iraq and Pakistan, and of the Status of the al-Qaida Movement. There have, in particular, been significant developments in both Iraq and Pakistan, with each likely to have an impact on what is now happening in Afghanistan.

Iraq 

The additional deployments of US troops to Afghanistan will take the overall numbers of NATO forces up to about 140,000 by the latter part of the year, with many thousands of private security personnel operating in the country as well. The ability of the Pentagon to maintain the US commitment of over 100,000 troops for any length of time will depend heavily on the rate at which forces can be withdrawn from Iraq, with this in turn depending on the levels of violence there.

The main independent assessment of Iraqi civilian casualties, Iraq Body Count, has reported that overall numbers of civilian deaths due to violence fell in 2009 compared with the five previous years, but the in-year decline that was evident in 2008 did not continue through to the end of 2009. Moreover, the pattern of violence showed distinct trends during the year, indicating an insurgent capability that remained potent and dangerous. During the early part of the year, there were many attacks on Shi’a communities, with mosques and markets being targeted, but in August and October there were two major sets of attacks on government ministries in secure parts of Baghdad. The ability of paramilitary groups to penetrate secure zones caused great concern, especially as one of the main effects was to kill scores of civil servants and injure many hundreds.

The change of emphasis in the attacks appeared to indicate a specific plan to demoralise the civil service and thereby destabilise the Malaki government in the run-up to the planned March elections. There were further major attacks in Baghdad in December and January. Most recently these have included the bombing of the forensic science laboratories of the Ministry of the Interior and the coordinated bombing of three large hotels frequented by western journalists and business people. The hotel attacks, in particular, were on very well-protected and supposedly secure buildings and were further evidence of the capabilities of the insurgents.

Of added concern during January and early February, was a series of attacks on Shi’a communities. These were mostly centred on pilgrims going to the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala. In the first week of February, more than a hundred were killed in three attacks, with hundreds more injured. The combination of parallel operations against government offices and Shi’a communities suggested a capability and determination on the part of the insurgents that gave little sign of them being in retreat.

The Obama administration intends to remove all US combat troops from Iraq by the latter part of this year, but this is somewhat misleading in that many of the remaining forces, likely to be in excess of 50,000, are being reconfigured into “advice and assist” brigades (AABs) that may have as their main function the cooperation with Iraqi Army and police units as they expand their capabilities, but also retain full combat capabilities. If the current levels of violence persist and quite possibly escalate, then it will be very difficult for the Pentagon to maintain its intended timetable for withdrawal. That, in turn, will have an impact on the ability of the US Army and Marine Corps to maintain their enhanced deployments in Afghanistan.

Pakistan

The Obama administration’s policy towards Pakistan has three components:

• encourage closer relations with India,
• encourage the Pakistani military to be far more aggressive in controlling paramilitary groups, especially in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), in Baluchistan and North-West Frontier provinces, and
• engage much more heavily in its own military activities within Pakistan. 

Washington recognises the Pakistani security context in which India, with more than six times the population and a far stronger military, is seen as the constant threat to the integrity of the state. There is, moreover, a pervasive fear of encirclement as India increases its commitments to Afghanistan. Last month, the Director of Indian Military Intelligence paid a visit to the Karzai administration in Kabul, a visit that received little media coverage in India but was seen in Islamabad as further proof of interference in its own sphere of influence. In difficult circumstances, the Obama administration is trying to ease Pakistan’s fears, but this may prove problematic, not least because of an India domestic perception that paramilitary groups in Pakistan represent a serious threat to the country. The prolonged attack on Mumbai over 15 months ago still resonates in India and there is a widespread assumption that those behind the attack had a degree of official backing.

In encouraging the Pakistani Army to be more active in controlling paramilitary groups, the United States faces three difficulties. One is that the Army is not geared to sustained counter-insurgency operations, and in recent operations it has not devoted sufficient forces to do more than limit the influence of the groups. Secondly, the elite Army establishment is not willing to engage in operations within the country that might limit the capabilities of the Taliban and related militias across the border in Afghanistan. Against this, the United States is aided by the antagonism of many influential Pakistanis to the numerous bombing and other attacks within Pakistan. During 2009, there were around 3,300 people killed within Pakistan as a result of such attacks, and this lost the Pakistani Taliban and other groups much domestic support. However, this is complicated by the persistent opposition within Pakistan to more US military involvement within the country which brings us to the third problem relating to US policy.

During the course of 2009, the United States substantially increased its military involvement in Pakistan. One aspect was an intensified programme of counter-insurgency training, one result being a recent attack on a US training unit near Bajaur Agency, killing three US soldiers and injuring two others. A far greater involvement in Pakistan has been the rapid increase in the use of armed drones in attacks on al-Qaida and Pakistani Taliban leadership elements. In 2009 there were 53 drone attacks, the largest number in any one year, and there were 12 more in the first five weeks of 2010. Many of the attacks now use multiple armed drones – in a single incident on 2 February, nine armed drones fired a total of 19 missiles in an attack on a village in the Degan area of North Waziristan. This was close to the border with Afghanistan’s Khost Province, where Taliban militias have successfully filled a security vacuum, left when US forces vacated some of their more remote military outposts. The attack was the largest use of armed drones so far and is reported to have killed 31 people.

From a US perspective, the use of drones in Pakistan has been one of the very few examples of successful counter-terrorism activities in the region in recent years, and there is evidence that it has had an effect in weakening both the al-Qaida movement and the Pakistani Taliban. Because of this, such attacks are likely to be maintained at a high level and may even increase. There is, though, a substantial problem in that such attacks are seen by many sectors of public opinion in Pakistan as direct threats to the sovereignty of the country. This means that there is a difficult balance of political risk in that the large-scale use of armed drones, however effective from Washington’s perspective, may overturn the domestic opposition to internal paramilitary attacks and thereby prove counterproductive. What may further upset this balance is evidence of increasing Indian involvement in Afghanistan, including the activities of numerous Indian construction companies, the extensive training programmes for the Afghan judiciary and public administration, and the close links between the Afghan Army and the Indian military.

Afghanistan

Developments in Iraq and Pakistan may both have influence on the war in Afghanistan in the coming months, and that war is already taking on an unusual course. One aspect is the intensity of the fighting throughout the winter months, in contrast to the usual pattern of recent years where there has been a lull in the fighting. The change is in part due to the determination of coalition forces to increase pressure, now that more troops have been deployed, but it is also due to the versatility and adaptability of the Taliban paramilitaries. They have become far more adept at avoiding open conflict where they would face the greatly superior firepower of coalition forces, but they have also become far more proficient at the use of roadside bombs and, on occasions, taking the war to major towns and cities, including Kabul.

This is significant, because in the past six months, coalition forces have redeployed units away from some of the more remote areas, concentrating more on larger urban populations. Taliban responses have therefore included urban attacks to demonstrate their capabilities while they have also sought to extend their control of rural areas in the absence of western forces. They have been aided in this latter move by corruption and maladministration by the Kabul government, often to the extent that Taliban governance in a particular district receives a guarded welcome because of its ability to impose order, however rigid and even brutal that order may be. The coalition’s current Operation Moshtarak may actually involve relatively little contact with Taliban paramilitaries and may therefore be seen as a success as troops slowly move into areas previously under Taliban control, albeit hindered by large numbers of roadside bombs. This could actually be a misleading impression given the capacity of Taliban elements to melt away and reform elsewhere from western troop concentrations.

More generally, it remains clear that the Obama administration is keeping to its twin-track approach of attempting to put much heavier military pressure on the Taliban and their associates, while simultaneously being willing to negotiate with some elements. It is here that the US domestic dimension is highly relevant. The view from Washington is that serious progress must be made in Afghanistan in the next 12 to 18 months, or else the already weak domestic support for the war will ebb away still further. This time constraint has two implications. One is that there will be an assumption in Pakistan that the United States will not maintain its military forces in Afghanistan so that Pakistan must look to a post-American future. From Islamabad’s perspective, that future must include substantial Taliban involvement to ensure Pakistani influence, and that can result either from a negotiated settlement or a marked degree of Taliban success in the conflict. Thus, whatever Pakistan does about its internal paramilitaries, it will tend not to assist in the defeat of the Taliban across the border.

The second implication is that Taliban planners may now have come to recognise that time is on their side – indeed the massive increases in US forces in Afghanistan should best be seen as indicators of Taliban prowess. This view is supported by recent reports that more foreign fighters, from right across the Middle East and beyond, are willing to join the conflict alongside the Taliban. If the view from Washington is that a way out of the mire is negotiating an acceptable settlement from a position of military strength, it is certainly possible that this is precisely the same view held by the Taliban leadership, except that the Taliban definition of “acceptable” may be very different from that in Washington.

 

This article is also available as a PDF and can be downloaded here.

The South Sudan Referendum Commission made the final results of the referendum public in Khartoum on February 7, 2011.  It reported that more than 2 million people voted for secession from the North while 1.8 million votes were needed to split Africa’s largest country into two independent states.   This referendum was conducted in fulfillment of the requirement of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in Kenya in January 9, 2005.  The South Sudan referendum was the most vital element of the CPA.  The CPA also ended 22 years of civil war, which caused massive destruction and suffering, as well as significant displacement of the different ethnic groups of North and South Sudan.  Meanwhile, the two governments of North and South Sudan have begun the process of disengaging national institutions to form two separate and independent countries as well as to look to the challenges and expectations that lie ahead.

General fears are being expressed about what the political situation of the new state will be after it gains independence. Some observers call it a failed state in waiting that will be marred by political instability and ethnic tensions.  The central question is now that the referendum is over, what is next on the agenda? What are the key issues that need to be ironed out before July 9, 2011 the timetable set in CPA as official disengagement and birth of newest African state? The main protagonists in the referendum from both the National Congress Party (NCP) and Sudan People’s Libration Movement (SPLM) have not agreed yet on several post-referendum issues. Critical components of those negotiations will cover citizenship, foreign debt succession, currency, assets including oil revenues, Nile water sharing, borders and the status of civil servants.

The complex part, according to legal experts, is that the CPA did not clearly spell out the fate of Southerners living in the North in case of separation. According to some estimates there are over 2 million Southerners living in the North.  It stands to reason that NCP will predictably argue that Southerners in the North will forfeit their Sudanese citizenship; hence rights of employment, ownership, residency and entry to North Sudan could all be revoked. More so the critical challenge is with regards to the many Southern citizens who are employed by various state institutions, particularly in the military and police force. How the status of Southern citizens will be settled and what are the mechanisms that will be adopted by both the NCP and SPLM to overcome some of these and other associated issues are questions that remain unsolved. 

Another important contestation is the sharing of oil revenue. The conflict between the ethnic groups, government and militias was fuelled by the significant oil reserves developed by foreign companies.  This exacerbated the conflict because the huge potential profits increased the incentives for control of the land, resulting in all kinds of human rights violations.  The South is rich with almost 60% of the oil wells but the pipes run through the North. The South fully depends on the North to sell oil. Experts in this field argues that that for the next five years Southern Sudan will have to rent the Northern oil pipeline, refineries and facilities at Port Sudan to sell its oil. If not handled diplomatically this could trigger a wave of unrest, raids and attacks on the South.

Moreover, there is the Abyei issue, which is considered the key point to a lasting peace between North and South Sudan.  Abyei is a fertile region that has oil deposits between North and South Sudan. But Abyei’s future is very much up in the air, and observers worry the region could again erupt in civil war.  Fear is pushing the Ngok Dinka, the town’s dominant ethnic group, to consider declaring Abyei part of the South, even though they know that move might provoke the North to try to take Abyei by force.

Sudan’s predominantly Muslim and Arab North and the largely Christian South fought a war that led to the deaths of many people. If Abyei’s status is left unresolved, the area will be caught between two nations, possibly triggering a return to conflict in Sudan.   The 2005 peace agreement, which ended the war, promised the people of Abyei their own referendum on whether to be part of the North or South. The Abyei referendum was supposed to be held simultaneously with the main Southern referendum, but the two sides failed to agree on who was eligible to vote.  As a result, the Abyei referendum has been postponed indefinitely. 

Nevertheless, what are the lessons that Africa could derive from the successful referendum? As a consequence of this, South Sudan will be the second country to obtain independence after the decolonization period and will become the United Nation’s 193rd member.  Indeed the necessity for the future sovereign Sudanese states to cooperate and to build and maintain two economically viable states is fundamental in order for political, economic and social development to take place. 

On the other hand, many African leaders and policy makers fear that the independence of Southern Sudan could trigger some old claims of secession across the African continent and inside Sudan itself.  For example, years before Sudan’s south began casting votes for secession, the woes of Africa’s largest country were defined by the ethnic bloodshed in the western Darfur region.  Now, international mediators and rights groups are calling for stronger efforts to settle the eight-year Darfur conflict, fearing that the breakaway of the South may push Khartoum’s leaders to clamp down harder on dissent and place stricter limits on an international role in Darfur and other areas that remain under its direct control.  This may result in the Darfur rebels being inspired by the South and perhaps even potentially finding an ally in the new Southern independent state.

Indeed, other international actors’ interests could play a leading role not to allow North and South to return to war. China has invested heavily in Khartoum by supplying them with a military arsenal in the form of long-range attack missiles and other arms. Equally so, the United States is providing aid and other humanitarian assistance to the South. South Africa is another new player, using carefully orchestrated moves to enter the arena,  already occupied by China and United States.

Finally, a complex range of issues including international treaties, currency, borders, foreign debt, oil revenue, Nile water sharing, property, citizenship and other economic issues must be addressed before July 2011, when the CPA interim period ends.  Nevertheless, the Southern Sudan referendum processes were largely peaceful and gave a good start to the creation of a new nation.

This article was originally published on TheAfrican.org blog

Image source: expo_2020

 

A hurricane of crises across the world – financial meltdown, economic recession, social inequality, military power, food insecurity, climate change – presents governments, citizens and thinkers with a defining challenge: to rethink what “security” means in order to steer the world to a sustainable course.  The gap between perilous reality and this urgent aspiration remains formidable.

After years of steep rises in defence spending in the United States, a plateau is now being reached under Barack Obama. This still means that spending will continue at a level close to the peak years of the cold war. In Europe there is a marked contrast between west and east. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that military spending in eastern Europe rose by 143% from 1999-2008, whereas in western Europe the increase was just 5% (see Andrew Chuter & Pierre Tran, “Financial Crisis Creates Bleak Spending Outlook”, Defense News, 9 September 2009).

A part of the explanation for the contrast is the relatively higher priority given to public spending on health and education across western Europe; but it also implies that defence budgets were already under some pressure in the run-up to the current financial crunch, a situation reinforced by the very heavy levels of government borrowing that the crisis entailed.

As a result, many analysts see a tough period ahead for the military, especially in Britain and France. Indeed, the Defense News analysts cited above liken “France’s defense budget” to “the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and stays up as long as he does not see the gaping void below. The moment the character realizes there is nothing underfoot, he plummets into the abyss”.

Some of the smaller countries, becoming aware of what is – or is not – “underfoot”, have already begun to retrench. Belgium, for example, is expected to close up to a dozen of its thirty military bases; its armed forces, which numbered 44,000 in 1994, are likely to drop to 34,000 by 2013 and possibly to 30,000 by 2015 (see “Further Cuts Expected for Belgian Military: Report”, AFP/Defense News, 9 September 2009).

Britain faces a defence review, whoever wins the general election due by early June 2010. The review will be substantially finance-driven and the defence industries are already lobbying hard to protect major programmes. The CEOs of Britain’s largest companies, including BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Rolls Royce, held a press conference in August 2009 to call for increased defence spending if Britain was to hold its own as one of the world’s leading states and not “lose its position at the top table” (see Tim Webb, “Defence firms make plea for more spending”, Guardian, 1 September 2009).

The British have a particular problem in that the next government will be looking for tens of billions of pounds of savings in public spending, at the very time that spending commitments on large military projects will reach a peak. These include the replacement for the Trident nuclear-missile system, thousands of new armoured vehicles for the army and, above all, the two massive new aircraft-carriers and the prohibitively expensive American F-35 multi-role aircraft that will be deployed on them (see “Gordon Brown‘s white elephants”, 26 July 2007).

A timely search

In such circumstances, and especially in the light of the conduct of the highly controversial  “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, it might seem sensible to conduct a much more general security analysis rather than a traditionally narrow defence review. In some respects Britain’s national-security strategy (updated in June 2009) has started to do this, since it does pay serious attention to issues such as climate change, socio-economic divisions, marginalisation and mass migration. The trouble is that the framework and conclusions remain constrained by a narrow attitude of protecting the state from the impacts of such trends rather than addressing the underlying issues – “old thinking” always rules (see “The politics of security: beyond militarism”, 2 July 2009).

For some of the military think-tanks this is perhaps to be expected. These may well be quite innovative in analysing new threats; but their standpoint, reflecting the professional military perspectives that inform them, is to safeguard the homeland using familiar strategies and tactics honed over many years. They are rarely in a position to say to government that long-term security – which must include avoiding the potentially catastrophic global impacts of climate change – requires preventative action that has little or nothing to do with military strategy and much more to do with the transition to a low-carbon economy (see “A new security paradigm: the military-climate link”, 30 July 2009).

Similarly, trying to maintain security in a deeply divided world in which marginalised majorities can so easily be radicalised simply cannot be done by what amounts to “liddism”, i.e. keeping the lid on things. This is especially the case in an era of irregular warfare. After all, a few thousand insurgents tied down nearly 200,000 of the world’s best equipped troops in Iraq for six years, and the reinvigorated war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year in October 2009.

Here and there some attempts at new thinking can be found, but even relatively progressive think-tanks have to depend on support from defence industries. Two of the British centres, the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) and Demos, have each produced quite interesting studies on security – though both were part-financed by defence companies. There are hardly any sources of funding for truly innovative work apart from a handful of trusts, often with Quaker connections; but these are desperately trying to fund many different activities from a very small pool of money.

There are however some welcome signs of fresh thinking, many of which revolve around the idea of “sustainable security”. The Center for American Progress in Washington has published a useful paper entitled In Search of Sustainable Security, which seeks to link “national security, human security and collective security to protect America and our world”. This week, the Geneva Centre for Global Security issues a study of what it terms “national sustainable security” as part of its programme on globalisation and transnational security.

A prime resource

The Oxford Research Group (ORG), a small independent think-tank in Britain, started a project in 2006 called “Moving Towards Sustainable Security”. An early result stemmed from work commissioned by Greenpeace International, explicitly underpinned  by a request for some “blue-skies” thinking from the ORG.

The result was a paper, Global Responses to Global Threats. This sought to link the issues of socio-economic divisions, marginalisation and environmental constraints as the major future determinants of insecurity – and to respond to them not with militarised policies but with a security approach focused on the underlying causes. The paper circulated quite widely and a more popularised version, Beyond Terror: The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World, was subsequently published in German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese (see Chris Abbott, “Beyond terrorism: towards sustainable security”, 17 April 2007).

In order to widen knowledge of this kind of approach, ORG launches a new website on 10 September 2009. This –https://sustainablesecurity.org/ – highlights the interconnected drivers of insecurity and provides many examples of different approaches; in terms both of analysis and policy recommendations, it is an invaluable resource guide to new ways of thinking about and practising “security”.

This is the kind of initiative that could make a substantial contribution to promoting more effective, sustainable and emancipatory approaches to security. But even to get this far, for a project with very modest funds, is an uphill struggle. To put it in perspective, the cost of a single F-35 strike-aircraft would finance the Oxford Research Group’s entire programme of work, including its sustainable-security project, for more than a hundred and fifty years. It is to help ensure that the world lasts so long – and the current hurricane of crises is reversed – that the group’s work is so important.

The publication of the Strategic Defence and Security Review and the Coalition’s first National Security Strategy provided ample opportunity for the government to deliberate on the strategic implications of climate change for the UK.  Yet while claims that we continue to live in a post-Cold War ‘age of uncertainty’ lay at the heart of both documents, on  closer reading there is very little to suggest that uncertainty about climate change was a concern for those who conducted the review. Despite a significant amount of intellectual debate, the wording of these documents remains remarkably close to that of the UK’s first National Security Strategy, published over two years ago.

Whilst this lack of attention to climate change is unacceptable, it is – to some extent – understandable given the more ‘visible’ threats of terrorism, cyber-attacks and the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the marginalisation of environmental factors stands in stark contrast to the tone of a speech delivered by William Hague just prior to the publication of the SDSR. The Foreign Secretary stated that ‘climate change is among the biggest foreign policy challenges we face over the next century as it underpins our security and prosperity’.

Hard Times for Soft Power

The SDSR was a missed opportunity to review the UK’s place in the world. A key theme to emerge from the fallout surrounding the Review is that much greater emphasis is to be placed on strategic thinking in the UK over the coming years.  This was encapsulated in the Public Administration Committee’s recent warning that ‘a lack of strategic thinking at the heart of government threatens the UK’s national interests’ and raises ‘serious concerns’ about Whitehall’s capacity to provide the strategic analysis and assessment needed to support the Foreign Secretary’s mission of extending the UK’s ‘global reach and influence’.

We can hence expect to see the government addressing how, as a country, we can improve strategic thinking. This will most likely encourage a rethinking of how we educate our leaders and the wider policy community, and of the types of structures and institutions that will be required to support such efforts. As part of this education, due consideration will need to be given to the many different dimensions of strategy that will be pertinent in the coming century, and the climate change dimension cannot be divorced from this process.

While there is still a need for highly granulated forms of climate change knowledge, what we do know is that the process will have implications for the way security is managed in many parts of the world where the UK has significant economic and strategic interests. We must therefore reflect on what any detrimental developments in these areas will mean for the way in which the UK secures its interests in the twenty-first century. We have already seen the devastating impact of the global economic meltdown on the UK and its ability to manage its debt, not to mention the repercussions throughout the rest of the EU. The defence sector has been adversely affected, as has the UK’s ability to project ‘soft power’ through diplomatic missions, development programmes and aid. The 2006 Stern Review showed how economic crises on a similar, if not larger, scale are not hard to envisage as the world is forced to come to terms with new environmental conditions.

Read the full article at RUSI

Image source: U.S. Geological Survey

A new poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a University of Maryland initiative, has found that, in 15 out of 19 nations, a majority of those surveyed felt that their national government should give a higher priority to tackling climate change.

18,578 respondents in nations that comprise 60 percent of the world’s population were polled. However as Sam Roggeveen at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank, suggests, those surveyed were not asked what action they wanted their governments to take or how much they would be willing to pay for it. When the Lowy Institute polled Australians in 2008, more than half suggested they would only be willing to spend $10 (AUD) or less per month on top of their existing electricity bill. Although it is positive that public opinion regarding the need for action on climate change is building, in the months leading up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen more must be done in order to couple the desire for action with the reality of the costs involved.

148 states have supported a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling on state users of depleted uranium weapons to reveal where the weapons have been fired when asked to do so by affected countries.

The resolution was passed by a huge majority, with just four countries opposing the text. As with previous UN resolutions in 2007 and 2008, the UK, US, Israel and France voted against. The number of abstentions was down on previous years after Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Luxembourg and Slovenia voted in favour. Nevertheless, abstentions were still registered by Australia, Canada, Denmark and Sweden amongst others. The Russian Federation also abstained, while China declined to vote.

The resolution was triggered by growing concern over the US’s failure to release information on the whereabouts of at least 400,000kgs depleted uranium munitions used in Iraq. Question marks also remain over whether the weapons have been used in Afghanistan, Somalia and Chechnya. Research by ICBUW has shown that the rapid release of targeting data after conflicts is crucial in reducing avoidable civilian exposures; recommendations that national authorities monitor soil and water contamination and, where necessary, decontaminate sites, are also reliant on this data.

The UK, US and France maintain that it is up to the users of the weapons to release this data at a time and in a manner of their own choosing. While the UK has shared information on their use of the weapons in Iraq in 2003 with UN agencies, the US has made no effort to do so. It is now 19 years since the first major use of depleted uranium in Iraq.

In a joint statement explaining their position during the first round of voting at the First Committee, the UK, US and France wrote: “[Operative paragraph 6] requests that states that have used depleted uranium in armed conflict to provide information about its use. We have serious doubts on the relevance of such a request, according to IHL [International Humanitarian Law]. We consider that it is up to each state to provide data at such a time and in such a manner as it deems appropriate.”

The attempt by these countries to try and conflate the resolution with IHL has been challenged by legal specialists, who pointed out that it is not a question of whether it is appropriate under IHL but rather whether the request in itself is reasonable. It is clear that 148 states felt that it was.

Reacting to the vote, an ICBUW spokesperson said: “It is abundantly clear that even the most conservative mitigation measures are made much more difficult by the failure of states to promptly identify where the weapons have been used.

“The US, UK and France’s ongoing apparent policy of non or limited disclosure is outrageous and at odds with their legal obligations to protect civilians and the environment during and after conflict.

“The feebleness of their attempted justification for their position makes clear that they have few concerns over the long-term impact of these munitions on civilians, and are instead solely interested in protecting their toxic and outdated weapons. This is the strongest level of support for a resolution on this issue yet and we believe it reflects a growing impatience with the users of these weapons.”

On learning of the results, UK campaigners reacted angrily, accusing the UK government of hypocrisy and of ignoring the wishes of its own parliament. In the run up to the vote, 90 Members of Parliament had signed a motion calling on the government to support the resolution, while representatives from all the main UK parties had written to the press to highlight the text.

A spokesperson for the UK Uranium Weapons Network said: “The UK’s decision to vote against the resolution is extremely disappointing. Sites contaminated by land mines, cluster munitions or depleted uranium all represent a post-conflict hazard to civilians.

“All these sites require remedial work and, as a vast majority of states recognise, including those states that have had to endure the impact of these weapons, this work is impossible without full transparency over where the weapons have been used.”

As with previous years, the resolution was submitted by Indonesia on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement. In addition to the general call for transparency, it also recognised the importance of implementing recommendations by UN agencies to help mitigate the hazards from depleted uranium. Discussion over the long-term impact of these weapons is ongoing but the World Health Organisation and International Atomic Energy Agency both call for sites to be marked, and where necessary decontaminated. The United Nations Environment Programme has called for a precautionary approach to the use of the weapons due to ongoing uncertainties about the environmental behaviour of uranium contamination.

Resolutions passed in 2007 and 2008 accepted the potential risk from depleted uranium weapons and called for more focused research on affected states. This research has been hindered the lack of transparency from users.

The full list of abstainers is as follows: Albania, Andorra, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Micronesia, Palau, Poland, Portugal, Rep of Korea, Rep of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Sao Tome and Principe, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, TFYR Macedonia, Turkey and Ukraine.

Article source: International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons

Image source: BlatantWorld.com

Long-time and widely respected arms control watcher, Michael Krepon has written an interesting post on the Arms Control Wonk website about the perils of assuming that a negotiated outcome is always a good one. As the phrase goes, “the devil is in the detail” and looking very carefully at the relationship between militarisation and the provisions that get contained in treaties is all important.

Krepon puts forward his top three worst treaties or treaty provisions all of which “sought to constrain conflicts and eminently usable weapons without addressing the underlying reasons for war.”

Very interesting reading in light of the on-going problems with the role of long-range conventional weapons (both offensive and defensive) in the US-Russian ‘new START’ treaty and any potential successor agreements. Also raises a number of issues that should be in the forefront of the minds of those trying to find a negotiated settlement to the Iranian nuclear dispute.

The full article can be accessed here.

Image source: UN.

What do Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Nigeria all have in common? They are very populous, Muslim-majority countries, all facing constant political unrest and on the brink of collapse. And yet they are also all part of Goldman Sachs’ “Next Eleven,” the much-anticipated extension of its fabled category of “BRICs” — comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Perhaps no term has so captured the global analyst community since the coinage of “emerging markets” itself. Even international relations theorists have tried to make BRICs a concrete object of study at academic conferences, shunting aside traditional approaches to understanding rising powers. BRICs has also inspired comical copy-cats such as BRICSAM (adding South Africa and Mexico), CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa), and VISTA (Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Argentina).

Sadly, it seems that economists have been infected with diplomacy’s proclivity for seeking to have their favorite state included in the hot club irrespective of merits. In doing so, they often fail to ask the right questions beyond which acronym rolls of the tongue most easily. By focusing on simple headline indicators like population size, GDP growth rate, and equity indices (Egypt’s stock market grew ninefold from 2004-9), most analysts miss key questions like the degree of inequality and ethnic volatility, levels of unemployment and corruption, proportion of military control of the economy, whether a stable succession plan to the next generation of leadership is in place, the sustainability of investments, quality of economic diversification efforts, capacity to absorb commodity price shocks, and resilience to capitalize the financial sector in times of crisis.

Clever turns of phrase can fool many except those who actually spent time in emerging markets and ask tough questions. To research my first book The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century, I traveled through over 40 such nations, and found that most of them are so deeply divided between their seemingly first world urban districts and business elites and their often largely third world masses and crumbling infrastructure (hence “second world”) that it is unwise to predict their fate more than five years out. The events in Egypt were not the result of the rising expectations of the middle class, since the country barely has one despite its impressive growth rate in recent years. Rather, it has been a revolt of the alienated and marginalized — a phenomenon similarly underway in Libya, Bahrain and Iran. In such places, revolution is far from inconceivable, it is inevitable.

The fundamental instability of second world countries — which includes all the BRICs and the “Next Eleven” — hasn’t stunted the ambitions of research reports which project straight-line growth to 2040. And yet already, three decades before Goldman Sachs’ projections, it’s increasingly commonplace to drop the “R” (Russia), leaving the more viable BICs as the new core of emerging markets. Still we should be concerned, for if you read the fine print of Goldman’s projections for India, the prerequisites for India to achieve BRIC-like dreams includes improving governance, raising basic education achievement, increasing the quality and quantity of universities, controlling inflation, introducing a credible fiscal policy, liberalizing financial markets, boosting trade with neighbors, elevating agricultural productivity, and cleaning up the environment. As if this list isn’t generic yet daunting enough, it makes no mention of the Maoist inspired Naxalite movement that has racked close to half of India’s states.

I don’t know what sexy acronym our leading investment banks’ rock-star economists will come up with next, but I hope their indicators will start to factor in whether a large population is being harnessed or whether it is seething youth bulge, and whether economic growth is coming at the cost of ecological sustainability. More convincing than most of the countries celebrated as BRICS, CIVETS, or VISTA are places like Kazakhstan (perhaps add a “K” and spell BRIC correctly?) that have made tough decisions and cleaned up their banks, or Malaysia, which is diversifying its economy and beating the oil curse.

In my travels through dozens of emerging and frontier markets, I’ve concluded that they are highly differentiated and need to be understood one at a time, with regional trends often more significant than global ones. It is promising that Bank of America has just announced a partnership with leading political risk advisory firm Eurasia Group to provide geopolitical insights both for wealth management clients and to adjust portfolio allocations. This approach may not yield sexy categories like BRICs, but is far more likely to teach us that not all emerging markets actually emerge.

Parag Khanna, Ph.D, is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, just published by Random House.

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review and is reproduced on Parag Khanna’s website. 

Every Nato plane that either takes troops or runs missions into Afghanistan will leave Manas airbase, just north of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. In the month of March 2010 alone, the base transited more than 50,000 troops, with contracted companies supplying more than 12.5 million tonnes of fuel to the planes. Through its own tense recent history, Manas has mirrored the high geopolitical and financial stakes. In particular, contracts with two western fuel suppliers have proved so controversial that they became the subject of an investigative report by a sub-committee of the US House of Representatives. The report was published just before Christmas. 

The Congressional investigation had been set up to investigate allegations that the two companies — “Red Star” and “Mina” — had paid bribes to former Kyrgyz presidents in order to secure fuel contracts. In the event, neither this nor a local investigation uncovered direct evidence that either company paid bribes. It was, however, shown that the contractors had carried out secret negotiations with the President’s sons and helped manufacture a paper trail to deceive Russians (who, it appears, believed the oil was for civilian rather than military purposes).

For all the questionable activities, however, the issue of the two companies’ activities made no waves.  Kyrgyzstan continued to receive $60m a year from the US for the use of the base and further fees for allowing Nato planes to take off and land there. At different times, the US sweetened the deal with contributions to Kyrgyzstan’s development. Yet the companies and their entrepreneurs, opportunists who saw the American need for reliable supply of oil in the post 9/11 world, made much more considerable fortunes. 

The size of the contracts was large by any standards. Every year, Red Star and Mina supplied $300 million of fuel to the base, aggregating to a sum of no less than $2 billion. They also supplied oil to Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase. 

The contracts were justified on account of the high risk involved. Yet Scott Horton, a Washington-based lawyer who gave evidence to the sub-committee, dismisses this argument: “What did this company do? Where are its people? This company came from nowhere and has no experience. The Kyrgyz want to close them down and they have every right to do so”.

As the extent of their wealth became clear,  hostility to the two companies built up inside Kyrgyzstan. It was during the latter days of the Bakiyev regime that claims circulated about the companies bribing the president and his son Maxim Bakiyev. These claims triggered the Congressional Committee investigation as well as a local Kyrgyz investigation. While neither investigation uncovered direct evidence of bribes — nor indeed of any substantial relationship between the companies and Presidential businesses — the smoke was regarded widely as proof that there must be fire. Horton says that the Congressional report leaves open the bribing issue.

Political changes following the collapse of the Bakiyev regime raised the tempo in this long-running dispute. Not only is there a new president, Roza Otunbayeva, but recent parliamentary elections have produced some nationalist politicians and businessmen ready to use the issue to political advantage. 

Otunbayeva visited President Obama recently to demand the Kyrgyz government be allowed a role in the supply of fuel to the base.  The country had its own oil company, she said, and it could handle the fuel supply just as well as Western companies.  The State oil company has connections with GazpromNeft [the oil arm of the hydrocarbon behemoth Gazprom], and its manager is a former GazpromNeft official. 

Otunbayeva was pushing at an open door, it seems. Pakistan, the other country used by the US to supply fuel to US operations, was looking increasingly wobbly. When Hilary Clinton visited Bishkek recently, she told the President that the country’s national oil company could work alongside Red Star and Mina, and share the fuel supply with them. The new policy was laid out in the Department of Defense’s award in November of a 12-month contract to Mina, which specified that the DOD could involve another company in the fuel supply. The western companies, whose legal entities are domiciled in Gibraltar, but whose officials live in London and Dubai, accepted the inevitable.

It seems the moment has also arrived for the Kyrgyz to push for the whole contract. Edil Baisalov, a former chief of staff to President Otunbayeva, and today an opposition politician pressed this argument with the author: “The state owned enterprise would do the business better. I don’t understand the Pentagon’s point about guarantees of uninterrupted supply. How can a Gibraltar-based offshore company guarantee more than the state of Kyrgyzstan and the state of Russia, that a trilateral agreement would provide for? The 50% arrangement with the State oil company is a foot in the door. The Americans are providing 50% of the supply, and the rest will be done by the state company. We believe this could be a great breakthrough in this trilateral settlement. 

For Baisalov, it is a matter of principle that the companies are no longer operating in Kyrgyzstan: “They are controversial, we have been very critical of them as spoiling and corrupting. They are not transparent. So we don’t want them to have anything to do on our territory”.

The message, it seems, was hammered home in late December, where Kyrgyz state tax police raided the offices of Mina in Bishkek, demanding documents. The Congressional sub-committee saw this as a matter of great concern, and included in its report the following remarkable comment:

“Within days of this agreement, Mina came under legal pressure from Kyrgyz state authorities that could indicate an attempt to shut it down entirely, thereby making the Kyrgyz/Gazprom joint venture the exclusive supplier to the base. According to Mina and Red Star, political and business interests in Kyrgyzstan are coordinating with Russian interests to shut Mina out of the fuel supply at Manas altogether. […] Mina’s attorneys were able to forestall the raid, but they believe that, without political protection from the United States, it is only a matter of time before they are run out of business. If the companies’ fear comes true, the likely consequence would be that the Kyrgyz-Russian joint venture would control the entire Manas fuel supply.’

Reports from Bishkek suggest that the company is currently locked in battle with the Kyrgyz authorities, which is attempting to close down its operations and exclude its staff.  The scene of the action is the Hyatt Hotel, now defended like a fortress. One local observer described the atmosphere in Bishkek as very tense: “Arrests are possible. Something has to give.’

The implications of complete Russian control of oil supplies to Manas certainly gave the authors of the Congressional Report pause for thought. While they lambast the Department of Defense for not investigating Red Star and Mina’s ownership structure before giving them the initial contract, they also advise the American authorities to take some lessons from the events in Ukraine where Russian fuel suppliers used the lever of a monopoly oil supplier to force up prices. (In truth, Horton observes that the Russian Gazprom has been involved in the fuel supply since the outset of the Mina operation.)

The wider lesson to be drawn from this tense battle between Western companies and the Kyrgyz does not relate to money or contracts, but to geopolitics. Some observers say that the contract has enabled Kyrgyzstan to add flesh [and profit] to its relationship with Russia. Under former Presidents, the country looked West rather than East. Today, the Kyrgyz authorties prefer to look East.

Russia, certainly, is unlikely to attempt to cut off oil at a moment’s notice to American operations in Afghanistan. The Kremlin is too content for American money and for the US to continue fighting the Taliban. But it does mean that the Department of Defense will have to work with those whose business and political practices are no less murky than those of its former Western allies. Not for the first time, the war in Afghanistan has made strange bedfellows out of its participants.

 

Nick Kochan is a writer specialising in the field of finance and financial crime.

This article orignally appeared on openDemocracy. 

The global financial economic crisis continues to have significant bearing on small states in the areas of trade, tourism, remittances and aid and is compounding many of the challenges already confronting these countries, such as deepening unemployment, and budgetary pressures on critical areas of state expenditure. The latter include defense and internal security commitments. Caribbean economies have been particularly hard-hit by the global downturn, being vulnerable to perennial disasters such as hurricanes and particularly prone to shocks in tourist activity and international oil price fluctuations.

In addition to these perils, the region’s political leaders have been racked by the economic and social effects of serious crime and violence associated with the increasingly insidious drugs and arms trade and gang-related violence. In response, some governments have resorted to the adoption of exceptional legal and security measures such as the co-opting of military forces to augment the manoeuvres of civil authorities.

This paper provides an outlook of the imperative of Caribbean Community members to seek out and obtain foreign aid amidst a fiercely competitive global market in which traditional international donors are similarly challenged by their own domestic and strategic priorities. It draws upon a recently inaugurated multi-year program, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) sponsored by the government of the United States to illustrate how the deployment of multilateralism and consensual decision-making as tools of statecraft have crystallized a reserve of otherwise competing and differential interests.

Background

The Caribbean Sea is one of a limited number of internationally dispersed sub-regions which include the South China Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Somalia Coast and the Gulf of Aden where extremely high levels of shipping activity is matched by correspondingly low levels of maritime policing. The region holds key routes and approaches to the continental US from the Atlantic Ocean – the Windward Passage and the Panama Canal. It is a reputed locale for hundreds of ports, marinas and harbors and facilitates the shipping of manufactured goods as well as petroleum, natural gas, ammonia and other primary products, such as copper out of South America. Many of these items are considered “high premium cargo” by global standards, throwing into focus the significance of locale and commercial linkages.

The Panama Canal is a key choke point for international trade flows and has attained near maximum capacity. Major expansion work on the canal is scheduled for completion in 2012. Once this occurs some of the already existing tensions in the US logistics systems will be alleviated with the redirection of substantial volumes of the maritime trans Pacific route containership services between the US west coast ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Seattle/Tacoma, to the east coast. Significantly, Petro-China’s acquisition in 2010 of Aramco based in St. Eustacius, one of the largest oil storage and shipping corporations in the Caribbean, with an 11.3 million barrel capacity, has made lawful commerce the more prodigious for the region.

The immediate challenge confronting Caribbean governments is securing territorial waters and airspace from the insidious passage of drugs and firearms and other illegal cargo. According to the United Nations 2010 Annual Drug Report, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia have endured as the world’s primary sources of cocaine while 36% of the world’s cocaine user population resides in North America.  Moreover, trafficking flows have continued to be dominated by market forces.

The Maritime Analysis Operations Centre (MAOC-N) has reported that the most common source of drug seizures has occurred in sailing vessels traveling between the Caribbean and Europe followed by freight and other motorized vessels. Further, approximately 51% of intercepted shipments in the Atlantic begin their journey out of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has deemed drugs “ the highest value illicit commodity “ currently being trafficked internationally,  and representing the most dangerous flow of profits that feeds into the long-term income sources of organized crime.

Two tiers of countermeasures have been spelled out by the UN to successfully tackle the problem. The first is the building of national and international capacity to track and respond to the pandemic. This is a long-term and collaborative venture in respect of which the region’s political leaders have registered their commitment. The other is the requirement for “special intervention” in particularly distressed parts of the world. Given the immediate imperative to suppress illicit traffic flows in the Caribbean Basin, this region undisputedly qualifies for the second category of intervention. Such a mandate inevitably exacts prohibitive demands on domestic treasuries due to the reserve of assets and trained manpower that would need to be harnessed.

Most Caribbean economies are heavily reliant on their service sectors for generating national revenue.  Furthermore, the global economic downturn of 2008 followed in close succession by the sharp decline of service sectors, particularly tourism, pushed many countries into a sharp and sustained recession. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by service sector recorded in 2008 when the downturn began seeping in was: Antigua and Barbuda – 71%; the Bahamas – 80%; Barbados – 80%; Belize – 68%; Dominica – 63%; Guyana – 48%; Jamaica- 71%; St Kitts and Nevis – 72%; St Lucia – 78%; St Vincent and the Grenadines – 70%; Trinidad and Tobago – 44%. Simultaneously, external debt portfolios were buckling.  Between 2007-2008, Jamaica’s already stood at $10.1 billion; Dominica- $290,000; Guyana -$734 million and St. Vincent and the Grenadines -$253 million.

Amidst the specter of budgetary deficits and International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention, governments have been overtly canvassing for various forms of aid among intergovernmental bodies of the donor community and long-standing allies.  To this end overtures were made to the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada- countries that have historically provided funding and in-kind support to international communities that are committed to fighting drugs and spurring human security and alternative development programs.

 A Caribbean-United States Security Framework was inaugurated in May 2010 around which inter-governmental consultations and dialogue have synthesized into common ground. This Framework comprises:

1) Joint-Caribbean/United States Framework for Security Cooperation Agreement

2) A Caribbean/United States Declaration of Principles; and

3) A Caribbean/United states Program of Action

 Thus far, $45 million has been committed to the Partnership by the US government for the Fiscal Year 2010 with a further $79 million for Fiscal Year 2011.The 2011 Foreign Aid request has allocated no more than $73 million towards military and economic aid.

 The US government has drawn upon an array of sources for funding including the Development Assistance Fund, the Economic Support Fund, the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement and Foreign and Military Accounts. US support also goes toward non-monetary items such as the provision of command and control systems, radios, logistical and maritime support to increase maritime interdiction capability, information sharing and maritime support for the Regional Security System as well as technical assistance aimed at improving financial crime investigations.

The under-listed CARICOM states have already benefited from CBSI endowments:

NON-RANDOM SAMPLE OF FUNDS COMMITTED TO CARICOM MEMBER COUNTRIES FOR DOMESTIC PROGRAMS UNDER US-SPONSORED CBSI (Source: US Department of State)

NAME OF COUNTRY	ENDOWMENT IN US DOLLARS
Antigua and Barbuda	$1.7 million
Dominica	$1.7 million
Grenada	$1.7 million
Guyana	$3 million
St Lucia	$108,000
St Vincent and the Grenadines	$1.7 million
Suriname	$450,000
Trinidad and Tobago	$700,000
Barbados	$1.6 million

 

The CBSI will eventually include a US vessel with an international crew deployed to the region while Caribbean Training Logistical Support Teams will commit themselves to a platform for leading US engagement and support for maritime interdiction. A fillip to this would be the capacity of the support vessel to deliver a mobile professional training program, limited onboard classroom berthing/messing for students, its possession of a centralized supply source for spare parts and a capability to deliver cargo.

 This Program is bolstered by three significant benchmarks

1) Political consensus that heralds a “new era of partnership”

2) A standardized legal regime, in which the internationally accepted vehicle continues to be the United Nations system of drugs and crime conventions; as well as region-specific accords including but not necessarily limited to – the Agreement Concerning Cooperation in Suppressing Illicit Maritime and Air Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances in the Caribbean Area 2003; the 1996 Treaty Establishing the Regional Security System to which members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States are signatories and the 1989 Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Mutual Assistance and Cooperation for the Prevention and Repression of Customs Offences in the Caribbean Zone

3) The collective assets of regional security forces, among these US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM); the British Royal Navy; the Regional Security System (RSS); the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard and Air Wing and the Venezuelan Escuardia, which when viewed in tandem, constitute a collective force presence.

This is clearly a win-win for the Caribbean. Through consultation and dialogue Caribbean Community members have partnered with the US  and resolving common and competing priorities and concerns amidst the ebb and flow of resources at their disposal.

Image source: Len@Loblolly

Serena Joseph-Harris is a former High Commissioner of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.