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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the US commitment of over 100,000 troops for any length of time will depend heavily on the rate at which forces can be withdrawn from Iraq, with this in turn depending on the levels of violence there.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)

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.

One aspect of the global economic crisis that is rarely discussed is the hole in government budgets caused by the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the mind-boggling expense of weapons systems like Trident or advanced combat aircraft or aircraft carriers. In the United States, the War on Terror enabled President Bush to double the military budget; excluding the supplemental cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. US military spending accounts for some $700 billion a year, roughly the same as Obama’s stimulus plan, and the cost of the wars may be as much as three trillion dollars. What makes this myopia worse is that conventional military spending does not appear to contribute to a sense of security, if it ever did. Indeed, conventional war-fighting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has contributed to a cycle of violence and provided an argument for the mobilisation of young men around Islamic extremist causes. This pervasive and contagious insecurity is likely to become worse as the global economic crisis unfolds and the effects of climate change are increasingly felt.

I use the term ‘human security’ to describe what is needed to address the every day insecurities experienced by people in different parts of the world – in violent conflicts, in mega cities riddled by criminal gangs as in Latin America, or even in seemingly safe places in Europe or North America. ‘Human Security’ offers an alternative to the binary language of allies and enemies that characterises the War on Terror. It is about the security of Afghans and Iraqis as well as the security of Americans and Europeans, about the security of individuals and not just states and borders. Human security also links the issues of violence to material deprivation and environmental risk. While my focus remains security in the traditional sense of personal safety, those traditional concerns cannot be disentangled from poverty and joblessness, or vulnerability to disease and natural or man-made disasters.

One of the ways of thinking about human security is in terms of the extension of domestic security. We in the West are used to the idea that security at home is the result of an effective rule of law and the availability of emergency services like police, ambulances or firefighters. Indeed, these were the kind of agencies that responded to 9/11 or 7/7. Security abroad, on the other hand, is assumed to be the responsibility of military forces and to take the form of war or the threat of war. If the 9/11 suicide bombers had been American citizens, it would have been very difficult for President Bush to frame the tragedy as an attack by a foreign power on the United States and to initiate the War on Terror. In the case of 7/7 the suicide bombers were all British. It would have been very odd if the British government had responded by declaring war on, say, Huddersfield where they had all gone to school. The UN Charter prohibits war; nowadays peace should be assured by the enforcement of international law, rather than through war. So human security is about extending the way we do security at home globally.

Read the full article here

Image source: VinothChandar

 A seductive narrative of military progress in Afghanistan is spreading among United States analysts. The real story is more complicated.

There has in March 2010 been a cautious drumbeat of optimism about the United States’s military effort in Afghanistan. A series of briefings from senior military figures has begun to suggest that real progress on the ground is being made. A number of articles from astute observers confirms the picture of a turning-point having been reached (see Fareed Zakaria, “A Victory for Obama”, Newsweek, 22 March 2010)

The more hopeful atmosphere among American strategists and analysts in the early spring of 2010 draws in particular on two developments: the apparent expulsion of Taliban elements from the centre of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province (which in turn anticipates a probable move to take control of the city of Kandahar city in coming months); and the Pakistani security forces’ capture on 8 February 2010 of a senior Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and some of his close associates.

At first sight, these two events do indeed support the argument that the United States and its Nato/International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) partners are making significant advances. It is appropriate then to assess them in the context of the broader military picture in Afghanistan and the region.

An embedded enemy

The first piece of evidence for a turning tide is the steady advance of American forces on areas where Taliban militias operate in Helmand. This fuels the consistent perception that the Taliban is a both a homogenous and an “external” entity: an integrated grouping which enters a region from elsewhere to occupy territory. The argument, which underpins much of the military analysis of recent operations, generates the conclusion that Taliban units can be or are being “expelled” from parts of Helmand; and that their comrades who must have similarly moved in to take control of most of Kandahar city can and must also be evicted.

The mindset at work here is both enduring and notably impervious to contrary evidence. Its lineage can be traced to the mid- and late-1990s, when the view took hold among western agencies that the Taliban was composed of a network of militants trained in Pakistani madrasas who had then “inflitrated” across the border. The implication is that the Taliban are not ordinary Afghans but in essence outsiders; and that the US-led coalition is engaged less in counterinsurgency than in a fight to liberate much of Afghanistan from foreign (or at least non-local) forces.

However, both experience on the ground and what is known of the longer-term history of the Taliban make this case hard to sustain. A truer understanding of the movement needs to take into account the mujahideen struggle against the Red Army in the 1980s, a decade before the name “Taliban” emerged to describe the new formation. A valuable source here is a new Taliban “memoir” which both describes a fascinating personal trajectory and reveals the deep Islamist motivation that from the start fired the anti-Soviet campaign (see Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, C Hurst, 2010).

The evidence of Abdul Salam Zaeef’s account is that the mujahideen may have tended to live at a certain distance from the society around them – but they belonged fully to Pashtun society and were in no way “outsiders”. By the early 1990s, as much of Afghanistan was descending into rampant and brutal warlordism, they formed the core of an expanding Taliban movement. True, some militants did join the struggle from Pakistan and elsewhere – including the nucleus of what became al-Qaida – but the Afghan Taliban were always far more “embedded” in or close to their own communities than the dominant western perception assumed.

The point is very relevant to the current campaign in central Helmand. There, many Taliban militants have indeed been dispersed into local communities – but (rather as they retreated from Kabul in November 2001) they have not been “defeated” in the conventional sense of that term. The same logic applies to the image of Kandahar city as a Taliban stronghold which will have to be besieged and “taken”; for if Taliban elements are immersed in the city’s very social fabric, the notion of defeat and eviction makes very little sense (see “Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection”, 8 October 2009).

This suggests that the apparent political willingness among some western governments to envisage negotiation and compromise with “moderate” sections of the Taliban may be a more realistic way forward than the dream of vanquishing the enemy on the battlefield – if indeed this proposal were to be accepted on the other side (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, “War and peace: A Taliban view”, Asia Times, 26 March 2010). Some respected analysts (such as those associated with the of the International Crisis Group) in any case take a different view, arguing strongly that certain designated leaders at least – such as Abdul Ghani Baradar himself – be brought before the International Criminal Court to answer war-crimes charges (see Candace Rondeaux & Nick Grono, “Prosecuting Taliban War Criminals”, International Herald Tribune, 24 March 2010).

An interested region

The second piece of evidence adduced for optimism about the Afghan war is the newfound activism of Pakistani security agencies against members of the Afghan Taliban. This includes the detention of leading figures in the Quetta shura in northern Balochistan, and the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (see Shibil Siddiqi, “’Strategic depth’ at heart of Taliban arrests”, Asia Times, 24 March 2010).

The Pakistani operations have been interpreted as a welcome shift by the Pakistani army and the powerful Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) towards greater collaboration with US/Nato forces in the “anti-terrorist” struggle.

Here again, as with the perception of the nature of the Taliban, there is a misunderstanding. Pakistan’s fundamental calculation is the need to maximise its political influence in a future Afghanistan (see Shaun Gregory, “Pakistan and the “AfPak” strategy”, 28 May 2009). This would give the country its much-vaunted “strategic depth” to counter the regional superpower of India, and provide a buffer against Russian and other intrusions to the north and west. The Islamabad elite is particularly concerned about the close relationship that the Hamid Karzai regime has developed with India, including enhanced links with Indian military intelligence (see Kanchan Lakshman, “India in Afghanistan: a presence under pressure”, 11 July 2008).

Pakistan’s military worries too that the Afghan president is reaching out to elements of the Taliban, perhaps even in ways that go further than what his United States overlords would wish. A pro-Indian Karzai regime that is dealing with the Taliban is simply not something that Pakistan can accept. In this light, the real aim of Pakistan’s policing actions is not to aid the United States and far less to help Karzai: it is to gain more leverage over the Taliban.

These considerations of national interest also cast the US-led military operations in Helmand and elsewhere in a very different light. The US and it coalition partners are – following the new strategy outlined by Barack Obama in his West Point speech on 1 December 2009 – continuing to build up their troop-strength towards a total of around 140,000 on the ground; but this “surge” will not be the real dynamic of change in Afghanistan (see “Afghanistan: new strategy, old problem”, 3 December 2009).

Rather, Afghanistan’s future will be decided by the evolving interaction between (principally) Kabul and Islamabad, with other regional powers – Delhi certainly, but also Tehran, Beijing and even Moscow – playing a role and seeking advantage. The US/Isaf’s massive financial and military commitments lead western states naturally to regard themselves as the masters of Afghanistan’s destiny; but the hard reality is that emerging regional geopolitics are consigning the west more and more to the sidelines (see Harry Reid, “We are doing all the fighting but China will win the peace”, Herald [Glasgow], 25 March 2010).

This regional dimension accentuates the United States’s predicament. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the proclamation of approaching victory in a grinding war has often been followed by further reversals. And behind the noise and smoke of combat, other interested parties are quietly reordering the “grand chessboard”. A conflict now approaching its tenth year has more surprises to come.

In a piece for the International Movement for a Just World, William Rees maps out a vision for what he calls ‘Survival 2100.’ The goal of such a strategy would be “to engineer the creation of a dynamic, more equitable steady-state economy that can satisfy at least the basic needs of the entire human family within the means of nature.” The alternative, Rees argues is to “succumb to more primitive emotions and survival instincts abetted by cognitive dissonance, collective denial, and global political inertia.”

The call from Rees echoes the sentiment coming from many different – and often unusual – quarters that are responding to the major implications for security and survival of the combined ecological, political and economic crises that either characterise or are looming in the international system.

While some of the ideas in the piece may need some further thinking through (eg. “The world community will have to agree to fund worldwide social marketing programs to ameliorate “pushback” and bring the majority of citizens on board” – ie. people will need to fund a campaign to convince themselves!), the fundamental focus is sound. Rees identifies the need for a genuinely strategic approach to the governance and management of the global environment and the global economy. Once one thinks through the real costs of inaction on issues like climate change (global insecurity and a greater potential for conflict is but one such cost), the costs that we account for in global market failures take on a different character. Rees argues that “As any good economist will acknowledge, government intervention is legitimate and necessary to correct for gross market failure. Indeed, resistance to reform makes hypocrites of those who otherwise tout the virtues of market economies. Truly efficient markets require the internalization of heretofore hidden costs so that prices tell consumers the truth.”

Such ideas are not radical at all, simply a reflection of doing the sufficient cost-benefit analysis that planning for long-term survival requires. Therefore the message for national defence planners is clear –attempting to ‘maintain control’ over global insecurity is ultimately futile, the time to put the principles of prevention and sustainability at the heart of national security planning is now.

The full article on the JUST website is available here.

Image source: hundrednorth.

National security in the traditional sense is connected with the idea of sovereignty; territorial security means freedom from risk of danger of destruction and annihilation by war, physical violence and/or aggression from outside. Traditional threats emanate from inter-state conflict and cross-border aggression. Since the nation state is supposed to have a monopoly of power for protecting the life and property of the members of the nation, they are deprived of power to defend themselves against aggression. The focus therefore previously being on external threats, state security has dominated the national security agenda.

With progressing globalisation, borders have become increasingly irrelevant, thus reducing the probability of external aggression. Conversely threats to a country’s security emanate internally because of lack of economic development, unemployment, failing internal security because of religious, sectarian and/or ethnic strife, shifting of identities in the wake of globalisation, radicalisation of society and growing terrorism thereof being recent additions. It has not been possible in our relatively new nation state to properly work out the national identity and borders, both traditional (external) and internal security threats have started to overlap. Societal security is the prime responsibility of the state; our rulers have generally cold-shouldered this to our lasting detriment, as we can now see on graphic display.

Societal threats undermine national cohesion and identification with the state, the resultant radicalisation and extremism results in law and order situations, rioting, rise of criminal gangs and gang wars, due to money-laundering and easy availability of weapons because of the nexus between corruption, organised crime and terrorism. A credible accountability system is missing, without proper investigation, effective prosecution and delivery of swift, untainted justice is not possible. Perjury is not only rampant but is the order of the day, credible witnesses are in short supply and even they are susceptible to influence, by use of money and/or the force of public office. Our Supreme Court (SC) has become captive to endless bureaucratic manoeuvring, fighting a losing battle against a virtual bag of administrative tricks to defy and/or frustrate their judgments and instructions. Both the NICL and Haj cases are likely to enter the “Guinness Book of Records’, sophisticated filibustering making them into an endless exercise without a likely outcome. Failure to fulfil the main function of maintaining law and order to protect lives and properties of its citizens and ensure impartial, even-handed justice hastens the deterioration of the state and its institutions.

The failing identification with the state impacts negatively on the connection between citizen, the government and the army. This dissolution of the Pakistani identity results in growing influence of foreign interests, this spawns intervention and support for secessionist movements like in Balochistan. Duly fanned by a well-meaning but immature media, paying little attention to core national interests, the vacuum provides a robust platform for promoting radical ideas, readymade for religious exploitation by extreme elements, making an alternative form of a purely Islamic state with all its ramifications resonating with the public.

The spread of terrorism is detrimental to economic growth, the bad investment climate and the lack of development is extremely detrimental to the economy. The diminishing value of individual lives makes killing condonable and justifiable (Karachi killing, collateral damage). Despite the so-called truce between the warring political parties within the coalition government, hundreds of people have died during the past month alone.

The consequent ugly cycle of unemployment and high inflation leads to stagflation. There is flight of both capital and manpower from the country, weakening the economy further. The failing economy destroys jobs and incomes, creates more poverty and destabilises society leading to fuel riots, electricity riots, water riots, food riots, etc, desperation in the mass psyche of citizens, suicides, destruction of families, etc. This creates favourable conditions for criminals and terrorists, further impacting negatively on the overall security. This diverts the right amount of attention and the material support necessary for external security.

A whole process of cataclysmic changes is taking place in the political, economic and social transformation in South Asia. The structures of governance being diversified and differentiated, only lip-service is given to poverty reduction and improving governance. In such conditions corruption is rampant. The Anna Hazare backlash we are seeing in India was waiting to happen, the more violent form being manifest in the four decades-old Maoist Naxalite movement. With an economic transition in the region, the majority of countries have inculcated globalisation to address their economic crisis. This has accelerated the process of growth but the impact of globalisation has not been accompanied by the reduction in poverty or improvement in human development through the formation of social capital. Increases in population growth is by itself a time-bomb.

Pakistan’s security interests can be best served if elements having disruptive potential to our socio-political profile are contained, thereby giving no excuse or opportunity to our detractors and enemies to take undue and adverse advantage. Factors responsible for the declining social and human security and strengthening of extremism have to be identified. The human element remains the biggest resource for Pakistan, the government must utilise this to promote safety of the population and counter the threat of extremism engulfing this nation.

The political leadership and all other stakeholders (who have a vital role to play) must agree to cooperate and formulate a national strategy to eradicate this menace. To cope with external threats, Pakistan has to keep up both conventional and nuclear deterrence necessary but should at the same time aim at socio-political solutions for long-term sustainable alleviation of our problems.

The army has had increasingly to deal with internal strife instead of securing the borders. Other than drawing crucial reserves away from countering the aggressive defence postures of the Indians, they are forced to devote time and effort to burgeoning internal problems of different dimensions. Fighting against ones own population can put stress on any army in the world, raising adverse perceptions among the populace, extremely dangerous for a country that thrives on glorifying its armed forces.

The international media is fully mobilised against Pakistan’s critical national security assets, but of more serious concern is not only the erosion of local media support, but rather an antagonistic view from some motivated sections. The compromise of the media’s integrity is extremely detrimental to the national aims and objectives. The concerted campaign against the ISI, and by extension the army, is deliberately motivated despite our sacrifices not being matched in the war against terror by all the coalition partners in Afghanistan put together.

The unfortunate irony is that an instrument of war – the armed forces – is also the ultimate guarantor of internal peace. One can understand it not being part of the decision-making process where democracy is institutionalised, in less developed countries this is a paradox. This leaves absolute power, at least in democratic theory, in the hands of a pre-modern feudal and agrarian mindset elected through a tainted process on fraudulent votes, as the ultimate arbiters of nation security and societal society, and by default, the destiny of the nation. Who will make the change?

(Extracts from Part-II of the Talk on ‘Linkages between Socio-Political Factors and National Security” given recently at the National Defence University (NDU), Islamabad).

Article source: EastWest Institute

Image source: NB77

Over the weekend the Obama administration was greeted by a chorus of commentators urging the United States to respond militarily to the situation in Libya. But the choices now facing the administration are complex and demand both speed of response and common sense.

The negative scenarios are easily sketched out. The administration does not want a failed state, a protracted civil war, a major disruption in oil supplies, a humanitarian catastrophe, or to look feckless at a moment of great import. Nor does it want to make the hopefully democratic transitions across other parts of the Middle East more daunting.

In foreign policy, however, it is always easy to sketch out what you don’t want to happen. Putting a positive agenda on the table is much trickier business. This explains why President Barack Obama’s National Security Council staff has been pulling some very late nights.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Blowing up a runway or imposing a no-fly zone are not silver bullets. And one would hope that after the experience of both Afghanistan and Iraq—and earlier interventions such as Kosovo and Bosnia—we understand that war is a dangerous, uncertain business. This is not to minimize the brutality of Moammar Qaddafi’s attacks on his own people or to urge inaction. It is to counsel thoughtful action designed with an endgame firmly in mind.

Consider the following questions. If we arm the opposition, what happens if some of those weapons fall into unfriendly hands? Do we really think that the situation in the Middle East requires more weapons on the ground? Or what if we impose a no-fly zone and attacks on the ground continue or escalate? Do we consider resorting to a ground offensive? Do we want the United States involved in three ground wars in three Islamic countries at the same time? Neither the rebels nor our national interest would benefit from a half-hearted intervention that does not achieve its goals.

With this in mind, here are the things that the administration should do right now. Fortunately, they appear to be trying to work through them already:

• Leave all options on the table. We should not immediately commit to the use of force. But we shouldn’t take it off the table, either. There are scores of options beyond a no-fly zone or arming the rebels that might be appropriate—from jamming Libya’s communications system to making clear to Libya that any further aerial attacks will mean significant parts of its air force will be destroyed on the ground. The president needs to take a hard look at the full range of options available and creatively employ the best mix likely to achieve the best results.
• Quickly build a consensus with other nations. It is imperative that the United States find common cause with other nations about the best course of action. This might be through the United Nations, NATO, the African Union, the Arab League, or the European Union—or some combination of any of the above. There needs to be a broader umbrella of states that are vested in the outcome beyond the United States.
• Explain the course of action. President Obama, in consultation with Congress, needs to make a clear and compelling case to the American public about what he believes to be the best option before using military force or ruling it out. He needs to articulate the potential risks and rewards of this strategy, and how this is tied to our fundamental interests as a nation and a people. We would far prefer a president who is brutally honest about the hard choices ahead than one who blithely paints a rosy scenario that evaporates in the hot desert sun.
• Keep trying to peel away Qaddafi’s inner circle. Through every channel possible—the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, and beyond—the administration needs to get the message to Qaddafi’s coterie that they are on the wrong side of history and that the only way to potentially save themselves is to get out now. Further defections will further rattle the regime and help restore some of the momentum robbed from the rebels as they are bombarded with air strikes and attacks from a mad—and power mad—government.

Given Qaddafi’s instability and absolute irresponsibility there is a chance that his forces will commit some atrocity that is so far beyond the pale—bombing a grade school or hospital, openly gunning down scores of unarmed protestors in front of an television crew—that the administration will feel that it has no choice but to act immediately regardless of the state of its planning. Let’s hope the rebels and their supporters in the outside world can find common cause and some practical plans before that happens.

John Norris is the Executive Director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

This article originally appeared on the CAP website.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines food security as “all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. However, due to a complex range of interconnected issues from climate change to misguided economic policies, political failure and social marginalisation, over 2 billion people across the world live in constant food Insecurity. It is important to take a sustainable security approach to look at the importance of “physical and economic access to basic food” by exploring the links between food insecurity and violence.

A recent article published by the journal Conflict, Security & Development examines food riots as representations of insecurity and looks at the relationship between contentious politics and human security.

Thomas O’Brien, author of the article, argues “the upheaval caused by a food riot can lead to lasting instability and violence as social and political structures are challenged”. Global rises in basic food prices triggered demonstrations and often violent protests in “over 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in 2007-08”. The article puts recent food riots and the current global food crisis in historical perspective. Food riots are about more than “just access to food”.  They represent dissatisfaction with political structures and perceived injustices.

It is important to note that “the extreme nature of the rise in food price in the absence of much evidence of food shortages, left a sense of something unnatural about the way food markets were working”. Although poverty, weak states, ineffective civil society and lack of political freedom all contribute to food insecurity and the possibility of violent food riots, we cannot ignore to challenge underlying transnational and global power structures: “146 protests in 39 countries over the 1976-92 period were linked to the imposition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies.” Food security is fundamental to human security and needs to be approached by addressing underlying causes and drivers. A sustainable response to food insecurity would take global cooperation, justice and equity as key requirements.

An often mentioned driver of food insecurity is climate change. Climate change already has a great impact on global security concerns and the physical, social and economic effects will undoubtedly only be exacerbated in the near future. Increasingly high temperatures and little or inconsistent rainfall have devastating effects on crop yields in places such as India, Africa’s Sahel region and the mid-western United States.

The catastrophic food crisis in Niger in 2005 for example was largely attributed to the effects of climate change and competition over limited resources. Years of too little and too inconsistent rainfall have meant devastating droughts and diminishing harvests in this Sahel country of west Africa which has the highest birth rate in the world. Increasingly advanced desertification due to climate change means competition and potentially violent conflict, over limited resources such as water and arable land, intensifies.

In the 2005 food crisis however, although thousands of children died of malnourishment, Niger had produced enough food to feed its population. The real issue was a food shortage in neighbouring Nigeria. Nigeria has an economy based primarily on oil exports with a significantly weakened agricultural sector. Instead of Niger feeding its own population, much of the harvest was sold to wealthier Nigeria at prices much higher than anyone in Niger could have afforded. This is a good example of why free market economy and trade liberalisation do not necessarily benefit all parties involved. Writing about the great famines of the last century, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted “a drought is natural but famine is man-made”. What this tells us is that although the challenges we face by climate change are serious threats, there is much that can be done to ensure more food security through political and economic policies.

Farmers in Niger are struggling. But so are farmers in Jamaica. In contrast to Niger, Jamaica has a wealth of fruit, vegetables, fish and an abundance of fertile land. About one fifth of this island’s population is employed in the agricultural sector. Still, farmers are struggling to survive because they cannot compete with the much lower prices of subsidised agricultural imports from the USA. As cheap foreign products flood the market, Jamaican prices are driven down which makes local food production by and large unprofitable. As they rely more on foreign food imports, Jamaicans will be increasingly vulnerable to price volatility on the global marketplace. With the average Jamaican spending about half of household income on food, such vulnerability to price changes is a real danger to food security.

Importing less foreign food products is a difficult matter for Jamaica because of the strict trade liberalisation policies imposed on the country through its debt relief agreements. One could also argue that if it is cheaper for Jamaica to import food than to produce its own, why should it still encourage its local agricultural sector? When a country is dependent on food imports, it cannot assure food security for its population.

So far US imports have been much cheaper than local Jamaican produce. 2012 however has seen the “worst US drought in 50 years” according to last month’s Aljazeera article entitled Food riots predicted over US crop failure. “Grain prices have skyrocketed and concerns abound the resulting higher food prices will hit the world’s poor the hardest- sparking violent demonstration” says the newspaper. Corn is a primary staple in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South America, and prices have already gone up 60 per cent since June because “the United States accounts for 39 per cent of global trade in corn and stockpiles are now down 48 per cent” due to the drought.

Price fluctuations on the global food market do not affect all people in the same way as “people in wealthy industrialised countries spend between 10 to 20 per cent of their income on food. Those in the developing world pay up to 80 per cent. According to Oxfam, a one per cent jump in the price of food results in 16 million more people crashing into poverty.”

A sustainable approach to food security would address underlying forces such as climate change, economic and political policies and social marginalisation.

Paul Rogers, expert on global conflict and consultant to the Oxford Research Group on global security, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Costing the Earth. When asked whether free markets can help feed us, he replied:

“It will contribute in some way, but I think it is fairly minimal. There are far more important things to consider. Look at it this way: Back in the world food crisis in the early 1970s, which was the worst for about 80 years, there were about 450 million people malnourished.  Now the figure is closer to 800 million. Now, that malnourishment and lack of food is not generally because there isn’t enough food to go around. Even at the height of that crisis there was still half the normal reserve. It is because people cannot afford to get the food or to buy the food. […]  If you are looking at the situation of poor people across the majority world, there has to be some way in which we can actually improve the production of food in and around those areas to provide greater resilience in the face of what is coming because beyond all of this is the whole issue of climate change. I think we will have a wakeup call this year in terms of what might come.” 

This article focuses on the complex role that oil has played in many conflicts on the African continent. It begins by highlighting oil’s influential role within war at a wider international level and provides a brief theoretical base from which to explore oil’s role in the African continent. Then, the article provides evidence of petroleum’s impact on violent conflicts in three African countries, namely Angola, Sudan and Nigeria, in order to highlight oil’s multi-faceted role on war in Africa.

The full article can be accessed here.

Image source: Maks Karochkin

Following the vote at the UN Security Council, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States have embarked on military action against Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. They have been careful to include a few Arab states in this new coalition of the willing. But these three countries are the driving force behind the imposition of a no-fly zone and the attacks on the government’s military positions and forces. Yet among the permanent and non-permanent member of the Council who were asked to authorize “all necessary measures” to protect civilians rebelling against the regime, the BRIC powers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China were conspicuously absent. The implications of this Security Council vote will be far greater than just what happens to the Gaddafi regime for it also tells us something about the role of the new candidates for global leadership.

Brazil, Russia, India, and China are all represented on the Council at the moment — Brazil and India currently hold non-permanent seats — and collectively have become the face of what has been presented as the irreversible shift in global power toward a multipolar world. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has breathlessly ascribed to these four countries the ability to dramatically alter the global economic landscape over the next 50 years. If such projections are accurate, the key question is whether these new powers will seek to overturn the existing US-led order or simply join it as more equal partners. This question extends to China’s “peaceful rise,” the way that India and Brazil climb their way to the top-tier of global politics, and Russia’s re-emergence on the back of sustained high energy prices.

China and Russia are not surprisingly reluctant to engage in Western-led military action under the principle of the “responsibility to protect.” Both countries have significant internal turmoil and both prefer to hold on to the option of responding with brute force to domestic opposition if push comes to shove. For India and Brazil the story is not quite so straight forward. Although neither country has been particularly enthusiastic about the concept of a responsibility to protect, both have spent considerable political capital to appear like responsible stakeholders and serious players on the world stage. Both would dearly love a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with its power of veto and prestige of higher social status. Both look to the United States to facilitate such a move and assist with dampening the protests of their respective regional rivals, Pakistan and Argentina. So far India has been very successful in winning U.S. and UK support, and Brazil is hoping that a visit by President Obama this past weekend will spur the United States to join France in publicly supporting a Brazilian seat.

In the short term, however, the Brazilian and Indian abstentions on the Libya vote will not likely have helped to advance their plans for permanent membership of the Security Council. President Obama’s strategy for dealing with America’s relative decline and the rise of these new centers of power has been to try and co-opt potential challengers wherever possible into existing structures rather than set up showdowns for the decades to come. Yet this strategy is not fool-proof and leaves plenty of room for new powers to resist the liberal foundations of the U.S.-led order painstakingly constructed since 1945.

The uprisings across the Arab world have thrown up a number of problems for Western powers. Their time-honored position of attempting to ignore the deep marginalization of large swathes of the “majority world” and to contain or manage corrupt regimes for the sake of assured energy supplies and intelligence cooperation has come apart at the seams. The brutality of the Gaddafi regime and the belated and chaotic response of rightly incensed countries such as Britain, France, and the United States have forced the hands of these reluctant interveners at the 11th hour.

The Western response to the Libyan crisis has not addressed how this fundamental tension between a responsibility to protect vulnerable people and a global order based on the principle of national sovereignty can be resolved with the full participation of the emerging BRIC powers as well as the established trans-Atlantic ones. The people of Libya may be glad that such a large and difficult question has not been allowed to prevent outside assistance as they face down Gaddafi’s forces. But the United States and its allies will not be able to ignore this problem for long if a peaceful transition to a new global order is to be achieved in the years to come.

Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Ben Zala manages the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group. He works on issues of global security and great power politics and is also a member of the editorial team of the academic journal Civil Wars (published by Routledge).

This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus. 

There will be no sustainable security if we do not equally value the needs, experiences and input of men and women. A new report published by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), funded by ActionAid and Womankind Worldwide, examines the role women play in local community peacebuilding in Afghanistan, Liberia, Nepal, Pakistan and Sierra Leone. The report states “despite the increased international attention to women’s participation in peacebuilding, the achievements and challenges facing women building peace at the local level have been largely overlooked”.

Last week’s Guardian article entitled Who creates harmony the world over? Women. Who signs peace deals? Men points to some surprising data on female participation in official peacebuilding initiatives. “There have been no female chief mediators in UN-brokered peace talks and fewer than 10% of police officers and 2% of the soldiers sent on UN peacekeeping missions have been women”, reports the article. Furthermore, “fewer than one in 40 of the signatories of major peace agreements since 1992 have been female […] and in 17 out of 24 major accords- including Croatia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Liberia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo- there was zero female participation in signing agreements”.

An excerpt from The Guardian datablog:

The IDS report found that “women are more likely than men to adopt a broad definition of peace which includes the household level and focuses on the attainment of individual rights and freedoms such as education, healthcare and freedom from violence. In contrast, men have a greater tendency to associate peace with the absence of formal conflict and the stability of formal structures such as governance and infrastructure”. It is important to include women in formal peace mediations and agreements as “peace means different things to women and men because of their unique experiences as a result of war”. 

Additionally, the research established that women have a lot of experience, and are principal actors, when it comes to mediating and decision making within the home and the family. Women are also more likely to come together collectively to create change. However, their “experiences building trust and dialogue in their families and communities are frequently dismissed as irrelevant or are not sufficiently valued by national governments, and the international community”.

Some barriers to women’s participation in peacebuilding include: restrictive social norms and attitudes, violence against women and girls, poverty and economic inequality and inequality in access to education. The report suggests empowering women through access to justice, creating safe spaces for women’s participation and changing attitudes towards peace and valuing women’s contribution as key elements to support women peacebuilding.

The 2000 United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 calls for “equal participation for women in the maintenance and promotion of sustainable peace”.

Only yesterday, Foreign Secretary William Hague called upon UN Security Council resolution 1325, announcing to the UN General Assembly that the UK  “will contribute £1 million this financial year to support the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict”. “It’s our purpose in gathering here this morning to ensure that preventing sexual and gender-based crime in conflict and post-conflict situations is an urgent priority for the international community”, William Hague declared, and went on to say “We are convinced in the United Kingdom that we can do more to help […] we can do it as a permanent member of the Security Council, a leading member of NATO, the European Union and the commonwealth and as a nation with one of the most extensive international development programmes in the world.”

The IDS report states that although Security Council resolution 1325 was passed in 2000, it has since then been almost totally ignored, not least by the UN itself. Hopefully this time, the international community, including the UK government, will take serious steps towards its implementation. At the same time, it is important to commit to preventing sexual and gender-based crimes, not only in “conflict and post-conflict situations”, but also in times of “peace”.

No sustainable peace and security will ever be possible, if women’s voices are marginalised and if women and men do not work together equally on national and international peace mediations and agreements.

IDS, ActionAid, Womankind Worldwide report From the Ground Up can be read here.

The Guardian, Who creates harmony the world over? Women. Who signs peace deals? Men is available here

The Guardian, datablog Women’s participation in peace- how does it compare is available here

Remarks by the Foreign Secretary William Hague to the UN General Assembly can be read here

UN Security Council resolution 1325 is available here

Image Source: United Nations Photo

Those concerned with the issue of militarisation as a driver of global insecurity are increasingly looking at the issue of cyberwarfare as the weapons of war become ever closely associated with the digital age. Waging war in the cyber domain raises some truly momentous questions about the nature of warfare, the laws of war and even what counts as self-defence. Nuclear expert, Scott Kemp has written an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists arguing that like the missed opportunity of the dawn of the nuclear age (in which possessing nuclear weapons was viewed as more important than the consequences of proliferation), policymakers today have an important opportunity to consider the implications – both intended and unintended – of cyberweapons.

The article argues that in the early 1940s “The United States rushed into the nuclear age eager to cement its technical superiority, disregarding warnings of key statesmen and scientists that a decades-long nuclear arms race would ensue.” Kemp believes that we currently stand on the edge of a similar military revolution to the beginning of the nuclear age and that it is not too late to think carefully about the long-term consequences of creating a new “weapon of the weak.”

Looking to the future, Kemp argues that “For states that have little to lose on the cyber front, an offensive approach may be interesting. But for the United States and other highly developed nations whose societies are critically and deeply reliant on computers, the safe approach is to direct cyber research at purely defensive applications.” Unlike the wrong-headed approach to nuclear weapons (in which a small clique of countries believed that they could develop a huge military advantage without opening a Pandora’s Box of imitation and proliferation of that same technology), the article argues for a much more strategic and far-sighted approach to the development of cyberwarfare capabilities.

Such an approach would be based on an understanding of one of the central problems of world politics – known in the scholarly literature as the ‘security dilemma’ – in which arming oneself in order to defend against potential threats makes others feel threatened, who then in turn respond by arming themselves, thus starting a downward spiral of insecurity. Actions aimed at making yourself more secure today can in fact make you less secure tomorrow. As Kemp writes “Though Israel and the United States may have vast resources to support sophisticated and creative cyberweapons programs, it is worth remembering that such advantage could be its disadvantage: Each new cyberattack becomes a template for other nations – or sub-national actors – looking for ideas.”

The article is a rare piece of rational and honest analysis in an area that is fast moving up the lists of national defence priorities in countries around the world. If Kemp is right and we are at an “Acheson and Lilienthal moment of the digital age”, then such clear-headed and strategic thinking about this new domain of warfare is going to need a great deal of support.

The full article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists can be accessed here.

Image source: WFB

In an interview with the Independent newspaper, Dr Fatih Birol, the Chief Economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, has warned that most governments and members of the public underestimate the rate at which the world’s oil supplies are running out. Dr Birol suggested that global production is likely to peak in around ten years – a decade earlier than most governments predict. In addition, Dr Birol highlighted the very real danger of an ‘oil-crunch’ within the next five years which could have an adverse impact on potential recovery from the current global recession.

Dr Birol’s comments are in keeping with sustainable security analysis, which highlights competition over resources as one of the key threats to global security. “One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day,” Dr Birol said. “The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously.”

Long after the political uprisings in the Middle East have subsided, many underlying challenges that are not now in the news will remain. Prominent among these are rapid population growth, spreading water shortages, and growing food insecurity.

In some countries grain production is now falling as aquifers – underground water-bearing rocks – are depleted. After the Arab oil-export embargo of the 1970s, the Saudis realised that since they were heavily dependent on imported grain, they were vulnerable to a grain counter-embargo. Using oil-drilling technology, they tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat. In a matter of years, Saudi Arabia was self-sufficient in its principal food staple.

But after more than 20 years of wheat self-sufficiency, the Saudis announced in January 2008 that this aquifer was largely depleted and they would be phasing out wheat production. Between 2007 and 2010, the harvest of nearly 3m tonnes dropped by more than two-thirds. At this rate the Saudis could harvest their last wheat crop in 2012 and then be totally dependent on imported grain to feed their population of nearly 30 million.

The unusually rapid phaseout of wheat farming in Saudi Arabia is due to two factors. First, in this arid country there is little farming without irrigation. Second, irrigation depends almost entirely on a fossil aquifer – which, unlike most aquifers, does not recharge naturally from rainfall. And the desalted sea water the country uses to supply its cities is far too costly for irrigation use – even for the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia’s growing food insecurity has led it to buy or lease land in several other countries, including two of the world’s hungriest, Ethiopia and Sudan. In effect, the Saudis are planning to produce food for themselves with the land and water resources of other countries to augment their fast-growing imports.

In neighbouring Yemen, replenishable aquifers are being pumped well beyond the rate of recharge, and the deeper fossil aquifers are also being rapidly depleted. Water tables are falling throughout Yemen by about two metres per year. In the capital, Sana’a – home to 2 million people – tap water is available only once every four days. In Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.

Yemen, with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, is becoming a hydrological basket case. With water tables falling, the grain harvest has shrunk by one-third over the last 40 years, while demand has continued its steady rise. As a result the Yemenis import more than 80% of their grain. With its meagre oil exports falling, with no industry to speak of, and with nearly 60% of its children physically stunted and chronically undernourished, this poorest of the Arab countries is facing a bleak and potentially turbulent future.

The likely result of the depletion of Yemen’s aquifers – which will lead to further shrinkage of its harvest and spreading hunger and thirst – is social collapse. Already a failing state, it may well devolve into a group of tribal fiefdoms, warring over whatever meagre water resources remain. Yemen’s internal conflicts could spill over its long, unguarded border with Saudi Arabia.

Syria and Iraq – the other two populous countries in the region – have water troubles, too. Some of these arise from the reduced flows of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which they depend on for irrigation water. Turkey, which controls the headwaters of these rivers, is in the midst of a massive dam building programme that is reducing downstream flows. Although all three countries are party to water-sharing arrangements, Turkey’s plans to expand hydropower generation and its area of irrigation are being fulfilled partly at the expense of its two downstream neighbours.

Given the future uncertainty of river water supplies, farmers in Syria and Iraq are drilling more wells for irrigation. This is leading to overpumping in both countries. Syria’s grain harvest has fallen by one-fifth since peaking at roughly 7m tonnes in 2001. In Iraq, the grain harvest has fallen by a quarter since peaking at 4.5m tonnes in 2002.

Jordan, with 6 million people, is also on the ropes agriculturally. Forty or so years ago, it was producing more than 300,000 tonnes of grain per year. Today it produces only 60,000 tonnes and thus must import over 90% of its grain. In this region, only Lebanon has avoided a decline in grain production.

Thus in the Arab Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Because of the failure of governments to mesh population and water policies, each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed, and less irrigation water with which to feed them.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian website.  

A recent article on this website entitled The United States, Niger & Jamaica: Food (In)security & Violence in a Globalised World explored some of the possible links between climate change, food insecurity and violence. Many current articles in the media warn of growing food insecurity as global warming and climate change have devastating effects on crops, livestock and even fisheries. A piece in yesterday’s Guardian states that if extreme weather becomes the norm (which it has) then “starvation awaits”.

Although it is important to recognise that climate change is real and that it is a threat to global security, we should seriously start to focus on what we can do to affect change. Integral to a sustainable securit approach is to tackle and address the long-term, root causes of insecurity and conflict. This can easily seem like a daunting task, especially when it concerns “big issues” such as climate change. There are however many things that can be done: some on a policy level, and others on a community level.

A recent report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) draws the attention of policymakers to “urban and peri-urban horticulture, and how it can help to grow greener cities in Africa” because “production of fruit and vegetables in and around urban areas has a clear comparative advantage over rural and other sources in supplying urban residents with fresh, nutritious – but highly perishable – produce all year round. It generates local employment, reduces food transport costs and pollution, creates urban green belts, and recycles urban waste as a productive resource.”

The FAO report says that by the end of this decade, 80% of the world’s fastest growing cities will be African and as more and more people are moving from rural to urban areas in search of a better life, African cities are finding it hard to cope: “more than half of all [African city] residents live in overcrowded slums; up to 200 million survive on less than US$2 a day; poor urban children are as likely to be chronically malnourished as poor rural children”. The report, which draws its conclusions and recommendations from 31 country case studies, suggests that across the Africa continent 40% of residents in cities already have home gardens and “most of these urban farmers are able to meet their nutrition needs and still produce enough to sell in markets”. The commercial production of fruit and vegetables provides livelihoods for thousands of urban Africans and food for millions more. But unfortunately market gardening has grown with little official recognition, regulation or support.

One way to address food insecurity is definitely to help those most affected by price volatility of food become less dependent on the free market. Formally and institutionally encouraging people to grow some of their own food seems like a great idea, not only for African cities, but for people around the world. As a matter of fact, the city of London has many community gardens to “support and advocate for food producing gardens and their role in individual and urban food security”.

Image source: Gates Foundation

In a year of intensified repression against human rights defenders and democratic activists by many of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes, Freedom House found a continued erosion of freedom worldwide, with setbacks in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. For the fourth consecutive year, declines have trumped gains. This represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual assessment of the state of political rights and civil liberties in every country in the world.

In 2009, declines for freedom were registered in 40 countries, representing 20 percent of the world’s polities. In 22 of those countries, the problems were significant enough to merit downgrades in the numerical ratings for political rights or civil liberties. Six countries moved downward in their overall status designation, either from Free to Partly Free or from Partly Free to Not Free. The year also featured a drop in the number of electoral democracies from 119 to 116, the lowest figure since 1995.

A series of disturbing events at year’s end reinforced the magnitude of the challenge to fundamental freedoms, including the violent repression of protesters on the streets of Iran, lengthy prison sentences meted out to peaceful dissidents in China, attacks on leading human rights activists in Russia, and continued terrorist and insurgent violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen.

Read the full report at Freedom House

The Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF) recently published a Policy brief by Tani Marilena Adams, proposing and outlining the concept of “chronic violence” to “characterise the crisis of escalating social violence that currently affects about one-quarter of the world’s population”.

Basing her analysis largely on Latin America, Adams approaches “chronic violence” from a sustainable security standpoint, arguing that violence itself should not be seen as the disease to be controlled, and the problem to be solved, but rather as a symptom of many complex underlying issues that need to be addressed. The policy brief proposes “a conceptual framework that contemplates both the multiple forces that reproduce chronic violence and their complex and perverse consequences in order to contribute to a new approach to this problem that addresses critical challenges that continue to elude or confound many stakeholders.”

Six propositions about “chronic violence” are put forth encouraging an inclusive, sustainable and long-term approach to security by combining social, economic and political concerns. Rapidly increasing social inequality is highlighted as one underlying driver of “chronic violence”. Exacerbated through globalisation and access to mass media, the majority of the world population perceives itself as “second class citizens”, marginalised and excluded from political processes and economic opportunities. 

Weak and corrupt states and state institutions are also seen as a major driver of “chronic violence”. When the state is (or is perceived to be) incapable or unwilling to protect its citizens, non-state and illegal actors will step in, which in turn “undermines the possibility of unified state governance”. This argument was recently echoed in a piece written exclusively for this website by Elizabeth Wilke. Although the argument for strong and effective states is convincing, the idea that a state’s legitimacy is so closely linked to its monopoly of violence can be dangerous and needs very careful consideration in order to avoid militarising state responses to social unrest. 

Perhaps one of the most important ideas to take away from this policy brief is that “chronic violence” as a social condition is not likely to be reversed in the near future and that policymakers and stakeholders need to address the underlying drivers of violence in the long term in order to build sustainable security.

The full article on the NOREF website is available here.

Image source: Shehan Peruma

The following briefing from Crisis Group illustrates the Islamist radicalisation of ethnic Somalis in Kenya, and the causes behind the trend. Decades of economic marginalisation of the Somali-dominated North Eastern Province border region has combined with government and public suspicion of ethnic Somalis to produce an unpleasant climate where either Somali loyalty is questioned, or Somalis are accused of ‘taking over’ when they move into the cities or succeed in business and politics. On the other hand, this has been compounded by the shift of East African Muslims in general away from Sufism and towards the conservative strand of Wahhabi Islam that posits the Muslim umma against the secular state, thereby enabling Somalia-based Al-Shabaab to capitalise on grievances in Kenya and encourage oppositional and even irredentist tendencies. The response of the government has overwhelmingly been one of force.

Particular forms of marginalisation have exacerbated the grievances resulting from economic underdevelopment and government violence. Until recently, poor Muslim children were often excluded from mainstream education, restricting their options to Wahhabi-dominated madrasas which promoted the radicalisation of disaffected young Muslims. The Muslim establishment itself is also frequently dismissed as elitist and tied to the government (regardless of who happens to be in power at the time). This includes the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims (SUPKEM) which, despite its closeness to the regime, has failed to modify the heavy-handed state responses to Muslim radicalisation.

Crisis Group recommends that the Kenyan government cease to view the issue of radicalisation purely through an anti-terrorist lens and recognise the difference between ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’. It is not necessarily a given that the former lead to the latter; and by addressing the issues of marginalisation of Somalis in particular and Muslims in general, Kenya can impede the growth of Al-Shabaab style militancy within its own borders.

Overview, 25 January 2012

Somalia’s growing Islamist radicalism is spilling over into Kenya. The militant Al-Shabaab movement has built a cross-border presence and a clandestine support network among Muslim populations in the north east and Nairobi and on the coast, and is trying to radicalise and recruit youth from these communities, often capitalising on long-standing grievances against the central state. This problem could grow more severe with the October 2011 decision by the Kenyan government to intervene directly in Somalia. Radicalisation is a grave threat to Kenya’s security and stability. Formulating and executing sound counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation policies before it is too late must be a priority. It would be a profound mistake, however, to view the challenge solely through a counter-terrorism lens.

Kenya’s North Eastern Province emerged as a distinct administrative entity dominated by ethnic Somalis after independence. It is, by most accounts, the worst victim of unequal development. A history of insurgency, misrule and repression, chronic poverty, massive youth unemployment, high population growth, insecurity, poor infrastructure and lack of basic services, have combined to produce some of the country’s bleakest socio-economic and political conditions.

Two decades of conflict in neighbouring Somalia have also had a largely negative effect on the province and Kenyan Somalis. The long and porous border is impossible to police effectively. Small arms flow across unchecked, creating a cycle of demand that fuels armed criminality and encourages clans to rearm. Somali clan-identity politics, animosities and jingoism frequently spill over into the province, poisoning its politics, undermining cohesion and triggering bloody clashes. The massive stream of refugees into overflowing camps creates an additional strain on locals and the country. Many are now also moving to major urban centres, competing with other Kenyans for jobs and business opportunities triggering a strong official and public backlash against Somalis, both from Somalia and Kenya.

At the same time, ethnic Somalis have become a politically significant minority. Reflecting their growing clout, Somali professionals are increasingly appointed to impor­tant government positions. The coalition government has created a ministry to spearhead development in the region. A modest affirmative action policy is opening opportunities in higher education and state employment. To most Somalis this is improvement, if halting, over past neglect. But the deployment of troops to Somalia may jeopardise much of this modest progress. Al-Shabaab or sympathisers have launched small but deadly attacks against government and civilian targets in the province; there is credible fear a larger terror attack may be tried elsewhere to undermine Kenyan resolve and trigger a security crackdown that could drive more Somalis, and perhaps other Muslims, into the movement’s arms. Accordingly, the government should:

    * recognise that a blanket or draconian crackdown on Kenyan Somalis, or Kenyan Muslims in general, would radicalise more individuals and add to the threat of domestic terrorism. The security forces have increased ethnic profiling but otherwise appear relatively restrained – especially given past behaviour; still, counter-terrorism operations need to be carefully implemented and monitored, also by neutral observers;

    * develop effective, long-term counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation strategies. A link exists between radicalisation and terrorism, but counter-terrorism tactics aimed only at stopping Al-Shabaab and other militant groups should not become the only official response. Counter-radicalisation – reducing the appeal of radicalism – and de-radicalisation – persuading people who are already in radical organisations to leave them – are long-term processes that require tact and patience.

    * allocate, along with donors, additional state and development resources to North Eastern Province and elsewhere to rectify decades of neglect and end some of the social problems that drive radicalisation;

    * study madrasas, perhaps through a local university, to learn which are most radical and influential, both to better understand the problem of their radicalisation and to moderate extremist teachings; create a Muslim Advisory Council of respected leaders, open to hardliners, but representing all Kenyan Muslims, that is responsive to the community’s concerns and aspirations, able to articulate its message to those in power and competent in formulating the reform measures needed to improve its well-being; and

    *develop a process, with community input, for selection of a Grand Mufti: Kenya, unlike many African countries, has no supreme Muslim spiritual leader whose primary function is to provide spiritual guidance, and when necessary, make binding pronouncements on vexed issues by issuing edicts (fatwa). It would be difficult, of course, to find a unifying figure, given the sectarian and regional tensions, but it should be feasible.

Because of the policy immediacy relating to Kenya’s intervention in Somalia, this briefing focuses on Kenyan Somali radicalisation. The growth of Islamic extremism among Kenyan and Tanzanian Muslims on the coast will be the subject of a future study. The recommendations, nonetheless, apply to all of Kenya.

Nairobi/Brussels, 25 January 2012

To view the original Overview and download the full report, click here

Image Source: tik_tok

(This piece was originally published by Channel 4 News on Tuesday 22 January 2013 and is the first of two parts)

Britain is on standby and the US is already transporting French troops into Mali. But a new paper says the west is “betting on the wrong horse” by intervening in the region.

Now well over a decade after the beginning of the so-called war on terror, yet again, another western nation is leading a military intervention against Islamist paramilitaries based in a largely ungoverned region of a state in the Global South, write Anna Alissa Hitzemann and Ben Zala for the Oxford Research Group.

The hostage situation in Algeria that developed late last week is just the latest in a series of western hostage takings in recent years, demonstrating the increasing radicalisation of elements in the region.

The French-led intervention in Mali is only one of many in a growing list of attempts to control outbreaks of political violence and terrorism with military means.

As the intervention gathers pace, it is worth reflecting on the lessons from similar operations over the past decade or so. From the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to the attempts to control Islamist-inspired political violence in Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia and separatist rebellions in Burma, Indonesia and elsewhere, the resort to military force has singularly failed to achieve the aims set for it.

Common to all of these examples is the reluctance to match military operations against rebel groups and insurgents with serious, long-term efforts to address the factors that underlie the feelings of resentment and marginalisation that drive such conflicts.

As the commentary and analysis of events in Mali follow the fortunes of the military battles of France and its other western and African allies, it is worthwhile examining the political, socio-economic and cultural divisions which have sparked the uprising in the north of Mali.

Background to the northern uprising

The factors that led to the current Malian crisis are complex but can largely be attributed to unintended consequences of the war against Gaddafi. It is clear that the 2011 crisis in Libya, followed by foreign intervention and Nato’s military involvement, and the consequent fall of Gaddafi’s regime, had a crucial role to play.

After losing the war in Libya, hundreds of Malian mercenaries (many of whom had been recruited among former Tuareg rebels) who had been an integral part of Gaddafi’s army, returned home. They brought with them an arsenal of weapons and ammunition as well as experience.

These soldiers who returned to Mali from Libya played a key role in the formation of the largely Tuareg-led secular MNLA (Azawad National Liberation Movement), which in a matter of months, took over several key towns in the north of Mali, declaring an independent Azawad state.

The situation in the north of Mali led to widespread frustration within the military over the government’s incompetence or unwillingness to deal with the issue and reclaim their territory. Ultimately, it led to the April 2012 military coup by Amadou Sanogo against Mali’s elected government and president Amadou Toumanie Touré.

Interestingly enough, Sanogo himself had received extensive training by the United States as part of the $600m (£380m) spent by the US government in efforts to train military of the region to combat Islamic militancy.

The actions of the separatist MNLA group and the consequent military coup and inability of the Malian government and military forces to control the situation led to a violent conflict in Mali’s north which includes four main groups: the secular MNLA and the religiously motivated AQMI (Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb), Ansar Dine and MUJAO (Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa).

AQIM, the group most closely linked to the international terrorist network Al-Qaeda, has been present in Mali for several years now, has taken several European hostages over the last few years and is said to be made up of mostly Algerians and Mauritanians with much financial support from abroad.

Tuareg rebellion and the paths not taken

The formation of the Tuareg-led MNLA movement and its desire for an independent Azawad state has in fact deep roots and a history going back to the first Tuareg rebellion of 1963. Tuaregs led significant armed struggle and resistant movements against colonisation by the French and later the central Malian government.

Long-term sustainable security and stability for Mali will not be possible without seriously addressing the long-standing and deep-seated grievances that stem from the marginalisation of the northern territories and their peoples.

The political, socio-economic, educational and cultural marginalisation of the north cannot be ignored. With the effects of climate change, increasing desertification and the government’s reluctance to implement meaningful development programmes, Tuareg and other nomadic communities see no viable future and feel abandoned by the Malian state.

Grievances also stem from past brutal repressions of Tuareg movements, as well as the state’s failure to adhere to the Algerian brokered peace agreements between Tuareg rebels and the government. Even after the Tuareg rebellions of the early to mid 1990s, the Malian government still remained unwilling or unable to implement the education programmes and development projects which were promised and are necessary to alleviate poverty and a deep sense of disenfranchisement.

It would have been wise to negotiate and come to an agreement with the MNLA at the early stages of the current crisis. Both Burkina Faso and Algeria pushed for a diplomatic solution to this crisis instead of military intervention.

Burkina Faso’s president, Blaise Compaore, West Africa’s mediator on the Malian crisis, had organised talks between MNLA, Ansar Dine and the Malian government in Ouagadougou in December. A ceasefire was agreed and all parties approved to adhere to further peaceful negotiations. T

he talks which had been planned to continue this January have now been interrupted due to the French military intervention in Mali. The chance of finding a solution to combating Islamic extremism in northern Mali would be significantly better if the Malian and French military sought a way of collaborating with the Tuaregs.

This is a challenging task but a task that is unavoidable over the long-term. It is the resentment towards the central government over the marginalisation of the northern territories and its population that in part has helped Islamists gain strength.

By Anna Alissa Hitzemann and Ben Zala, Oxford Research Group. Channel 4 News publishes part two of the report tomorrow

Image source: Defence Images

On May 11, the UN approved new international rules to govern how land is acquired abroad. These Voluntary Guidelines (VGs), the outcome of several years of protracted negotiations, are a response to growing global concern that nations and private investors are seizing large swaths of overseas agricultural land owned or used by small farmers and local communities for food, medicinal, or livelihood purposes. FAO head Jose Graziano da Silva describes the VGs as “a starting point that will help improve the often dire situation of the hungry and poor.”

It’s hard to quibble with the intent of the guidelines. They call for, among other things, protecting the land rights of local communities; promoting gender equality in land title acquisition; and offering legal assistance during land disputes.

Unfortunately, however, any utility deriving from the VGs will be strictly normative. As their name states explicitly, they are purely optional. A toothless set of non-obligatory rules will prove no match for a strategy that is striking both for its scale and for the tremendous power of its executioners.

Oxfam estimates that nearly 230 million hectares of land (an area equivalent to the size of Western Europe) have been sold or leased since 2001 (with most of these transactions occurring since 2008). According to GRAIN, a global land rights NGO, more than 2 million hectares were subjected to transactions during the first four months of 2012 alone. One of the largest proposed deals—an attempt by South Korea’s Daewoo corporation to acquire 1.3 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar—failed back in 2009. Still, even larger investments are being planned today, including a Brazilian effort to acquire a whopping 6 million hectares of land in Mozambique to produce corn and soy (Mozambique offered a concession last year).

The Brazil-Mozambique deal illustrates another striking element of scale: transactions are not limited to wealthy, developed nations preying on the developing world. Developing nations in Africa, Latin America, and Africa are acquiring farmland as well, and developed countries like New Zealand are some of the targets. Nevertheless, capital-rich countries in East Asia and the Gulf (along with large western corporations and agribusiness firms) are indeed spearheading the majority of the investments, with most of the land located in impoverished African states.

Who are these investors? They include the likes of China and Saudi Arabia, along with companies such as Goldman Sachs. According to the Oakland Institute, prestigious universities such as Harvard and Vanderbilt are joining the farmland craze as well. These wealthy nations and institutions are acquiring land in corruption-prone African countries—such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya—and in areas populated by the rural destitute.

Given the power imbalances at play—wealthy nations and institutions feasting on land in desperately poor and often undemocratic countries—it is folly to assume that land-seekers will suddenly embrace, en masse, a set of voluntary rules promoting sustainable and equitable investor practices. Land-lusting nations and investors are driven by immediate needs—promoting food security back home and making profits, respectively—and they have neither the incentive nor the obligation to slow down and adjust their investments in response to the wishes of distant international bureaucrats.

What, then, can we expect from this race for the world’s farmland? Proponents of large-scale land acquisitions predict positive consequences in countries hosting investments: Better technologies for local farmers, job opportunities for rural laborers, and enhanced crop yields. Critics paint a drastically different picture. They warn that rural communities will be robbed of land that they have long owned or accessed, with devastating ramifications for food security and livelihoods.

While some preliminary research supports the positive narrative (a German government study, for example, projects that a sugar production project in Mali will create 5,000 jobs), the bulk of available data (which includes analyses from the World Bank, International Land Coalition, and Oxfam) buttresses the negative narrative. In Sierra Leone and Mozambique, investors’ promises of jobs to smallholders have gone unfulfilled. And in Ethiopia, an Indian conglomerate is producing food for export on land previously used to cultivate an indigenous staple crop.

Perhaps the most troubling implication of all, however, is the potential for conflict. While it is risky to attribute direct causation between natural resource inequity and conflict, there are clear links between resource security and national security. The case of India is illustrative, because, as I have written previously, many of its national security concerns are tied to natural resource issues. The nation’s Maoist insurgency—which Delhi often refers to as its “gravest internal security threat”—is based in Indian coal country, and is fueled in great part by the belief that Indian firms and the government exploit coal resources with little regard for the needs of locals. Tensions with Pakistan are tied to water, thanks to long-standing disagreements over riverwater allocations in Kashmir. And Delhi’s concerns about China’s activities in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) are linked to energy, because China, like India, is scouring the IOR for the resource. Furthermore, India-China border tensions occur over the Himalayan Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, an unusually water-rich area and hence strategic territory for both water-starved nations.

So far, the only example of large-scale land acquisitions contributing to widespread instability is Madagascar, where the aforementioned 2009 Daewoo bid caused a local outcry, helping spark public protests that ultimately brought down the government that had agreed to the deal (the new government immediately annulled it). Still, several land accords have sparked localized conflict. Last year, a Ugandan mob, furious about an Indian firm’s decision to clear space in a rainforest for sugarcane production, killed an Indian man. The threat of future land-induced conflict is very real. Last year Kenyans told of being forcibly evicted from Tana Delta to allow investors to build a sugar plantation, and promised to fight back “with guns and sticks….It will be war.”

Ominously, these land acquisitions often occur in nations already riven by conflict, and so the volatile mix of factors at play—land, food insecurity, and poverty—could well trigger more strife. Take Pakistan, for example, where the ability of the Taliban to take control of the Swat region several years ago was facilitated by its exploitation of land-based class divisions. With Islamabad having offered a 100,000-person-strong private security force to protect foreign land investor holdings, the possibility of violent land-based conflict in the deeply food-insecure nation is particularly acute (however, there is no evidence as of yet of major foreign land acquisitions in Pakistan). Consider Indonesia as well. Here, a Saudi firm has acquired more than a million hectares of land for food production on a Jakarta-controlled estate in Papua, a province embroiled in separatist insurgency. With non-Papuans expected to be imported in to provide labor for this project, the chance of ethnic-driven unrest is high.

Don’t expect these risks and threats to disappear anytime soon, because there is little reason to expect the investments themselves to cease in the near-term. The factors that first sparked these land acquisitions during the global food crisis of 2007-08—population growth, high food prices, unpredictable commodities markets, water shortages, and above all a plummeting supply of arable land—remain firmly in place today.

Still, while the troubling outcomes of these deals cannot be wished away, their harmful effects can be blunted. And this can best be done not by announcing nice-sounding yet non-binding international guidelines, but rather by establishing firm and clear national laws and policies in the countries hosting investments. National governments should establish robust land-use regulations that emphasize food security and resource equity; offer legal assistance to local farmers to ensure that their rights are safeguarded in the contracts governing land deals; and strengthen land registries so that land is better protected from foreign exploitation.

Granted, given that many of the governments hosting these investments are not known for promoting the well-being of their masses, this all represents a tall order. Yet given the high stakes, it is also a necessary order. The world is already overburdened by food insecurity, unemployment, and conflict; let’s hope that appropriate measures are taken to ensure that large-scale land acquisitions don’t exacerbate these global scourges.

Michael Kugelman is the South and Southeast Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, and lead editor of The Global Farms Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food Security, to be published by Island Press this coming fall. He can be contacted at or on Twitter @michaelkugelman

Image source: Planète à vendre

The following article from the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Strategic Comments focuses on the threat posed to Nigerian security by the Boko Haram Islamist group.  By placing Boko Haram in a religious context, both historical and geographical, the author examines its recent emergence as an ideological player in Nigerian society.  However, while articulating its vision through an Islamist framework, the group is largely focused on local issues of economic and religious marginalisation in the north, where 75% of the population live in poverty, compared with 27% in the south. The article also touches on conflict in the Niger Delta over control of resources, in a wider reference to the troubles facing the government in Abuja.

Boko Haram: Nigeria’s growing new headache

With a suicide car-bombing of the United Nations building in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in August, and recent deadly attacks in the northeastern states of Yobe and Borno, Islamist group Boko Haram has announced its return to the stage, two years after it was supposed to have been defeated. The radical group, which used to confine itself to drive-by shootings, is more violent than ever, adding to the pressures on Nigeria’s security forces. Faced with the sect’s calls for an Islamic caliphate and increasingly sophisticated guerrilla tactics, Defence Minister Bello Halliru Mohammed recently compared Nigeria’s current position to ‘the United States … after 9/11’.

In a series of high-profile attacks this year, Boko Haram has also burnt down a hotel in its headquarters city of Maiduguri, assassinated a candidate in the race to become governor of Borno, and bombed the national police headquarters in Abuja. More than 100 people died in the Yobe and Borno attacks earlier this month. Although the group draws its inspiration from a broader Islamist agenda, it is also motivated by local economic and religious grievances,

Boko Haram’s activities are one of several factors behind Nigeria’s largest military deployment since the 1967–70 Civil War. Following repeated outbreaks of violence in the country’s north and centre troops have been stationed in about ten states, including Borno, Kaduna, Plateau and Bauchi. Meanwhile, the country’s immigration authorities, in conjunction with a military task force, have tightened control along the borders with Chad, Cameroon and Niger, because of suspicion that some Boko Haram members come from neighbouring countries, taking advantage of porous borders.

Islamic extremism in Nigeria
The small religious sect that formed in 2002 is officially called Jama’atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda’Awati Wal Jihad, or ‘People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad’. However, it has become known by the name given to it by locals: Boko Haram, which in the Hausa language means ‘Western education is unlawful’. It is not northern Nigeria’s first extremist Islamic movement; these first appeared in the early nineteenth century when Islam in the area was dominated by the Sokoto caliphate (whose sultan currently remains the key spiritual leader for Nigerian Muslims). They spread across all northern states through the so-called Sokoto jihad. Under British rule the state’s authority was challenged by the Islamist, anti-colonial trans-Saharan Mahadist movement, which opposed foreign presence and the unification of the northern and southern protectorates.

Since independence in 1960, power has shifted from the Muslim north to the Christian south. The Iranian revolution of 1979 resulted in growing demand for sharia law to be adopted across Nigeria. In addition, Saudi-sponsored missionaries from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan and other countries began in the 1990s to promote Wahhabi doctrine and orthodoxy. This helped lead to the adoption of sharia law in 12 northern states between 1999 and 2001.

In the 1980s Islamist militants belonging to the Maitastine movement became prominent in Kano and other northern states and were at the centre of violent disputes with government forces. Maitastine extremists, rejecting Muslims who had, in their eyes, gone astray, lived in secluded areas to avoid mixing with mainstream Muslims, and rejected material wealth on the grounds that it was associated with Western values. The government believed it had repressed the movement in the 1980s but it re-emerged in Kano and Jigawa in 2005, and is now present in almost all northern states.

Common factors among militant groups have included vocal criticism of the country’s leadership as corrupt, unjust and unable to deal with social and economic problems; and rejection of Western values that, in their view, caused society and some clerics to abandon the tenets of Islam and to embrace secularism.One such group, the Muslim Brothers, attracted educated young people in the 1970s amidst economic and social crisis and high unemployment. An internal fracture between Sunnis and Shiites led the latter to establish the militant Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), which did not recognise the Nigerian state and engaged in violent clashes with government forces until 1999. Later it renounced violence and became part of the national government.

Over the past decade, new groups of militant Islamists have grounded their ideology more firmly in deteriorating socio-economic conditions, especially in the northern areas. Among this new wave was Muhajirun, whose upper and middle-class leaders from northeast Nigeria and recruited young unemployed to its cell-based network. In 2003 the group launched its first attack in Maiduguri, capital of Borno state, and soon began attacking government officials and police, often seizing weapons and ammunitions. It carried the Afghan flag and was later known as the ‘Nigerian Taliban’ even though it appeared to have no actual link with the Afghan Taliban.

Boko Haram emerges
Boko Haram developed out of Muhajirun. The introduction of sharia law in the north was not enough for its members, who wanted the adoption of Islamic rule across the country. Statements issued by the group also indicated an attempt to align the Nigerian struggle to jihad in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nigeria lies on the so-called ‘tenth parallel’ and its persistent divide between Christian south and Muslim north has also been blamed for Boko Haram’s rise. The pastoral nomadic north has traditionally lagged behind the farming south in terms of economic development. In the Middle Belt of the country, where these two different ways of life meet, competition over land usage, exacerbated by religious, ethnic and political divisions, has resulted in intense violence with central states suffering over 10,000 deaths in the last ten years. Plateau state and its capital Jos witnessed some of the deadliest outbreaks in 2010. This stark polarisation – 75% of northerners live in poverty compared with 27% of those in the south – is a factor behind local insurrections such as that of Boko Haram. According to former federal minister Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, ‘most of the apparent ethnic and religious crises in the north, and the youth violence and criminality in the south, can be linked to increasing economic inequality.’

From the outset the group was led by Mohammmed Yusuf, who had previously been associated with the IMN and had been part of the committee implementing sharia law in Borno state. Yusuf’s third arrest for incitement to violence and support of terrorism in 2009 led to days of violence between his followers and the police, and resulted in his death under unclear circumstances while in police custody. His deputy, Abubakar bin Muhammad Shekau (also known as Abu Muhammad) is now believed to be the group’s leader.

The group has mainly engaged in small-scale attacks against government and security targets, but first made international headlines in July 2009 when five days of intense attacks against ‘Westernised’ clerics and elites left more than 700 people dead in Maiduguri and forced 5,000 to flee. The extent of the violence showed that Boko Haram was capable of mobilising thousands of people and was better trained and armed than government forces had thought. Boko Haram also appeared to be strengthened – and sought to adopt the new name – following a prison break in 2010 in which 700 convicts escaped.

Boko Haram draws its membership from unemployed and marginalised youth. There have been rumours of splits within the movement since 2009, but in 2011 internal differences became more evident as some elements including the Yusufiyya Islamic Movement (YIM) condemned the targeting of civilians and distanced themselves from attacks against places of worship.

Escalation of the group’s attacks was seen on 24 December 2010, Christmas Eve, when two churches were attacked in Maiduguri, and in the series of incidents in 2011. These indicate that the group has become more sophisticated, that its confidence is growing and that it is no longer simply a local problem but a threat to national security.

Official reaction
The government has reacted by deploying troops to the region from 2004 onwards. In recent weeks, house-to-house armed searches by the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Maiduguri have prompted Boko Haram to relocate its base to Damaturu, capital of Yobo state, to which, in turn, additional forces have been deployed to strengthen an already substantial military presence. The federal government has approved the establishment of permanent operational bases for JTFs in the states of Bauchi, Yobe, Borno, Gombe, Taraba and Adamawa. While the overall size of the military contingent is unclear, local reports indicate that troops returning from peacekeeping operations in Kaduna (north-central Nigeria) and elements of the Army’s 1st Division, also deployed in Kaduna, have been put on stand-by to join the JTFs. In addition, some of the 2,400 troops engaged in Darfur, Sudan, under the United Nations, due to return to Nigeria in mid-late November, will be assigned to operations in the northeast.

The Nigerian Army has a long-standing relation with its American counterparts which includes the provision of training. There has been speculation that some 300 Nigerian soldiers were sent to the United States to receive counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and bomb-disposal training specifically aimed at fighting Boko Haram. However, Nigerian Army sources were reported as denying this. US officials would not comment on whether such activities were linked to Boko Haram.

Use of the military can be problematic. Former American Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell recently noted that the military and the police in Nigeria are national forces, not local. This means that troops operating in the north are unlikely to share ethnic and cultural background with the local population. Human-rights abuses have been reported following army deployments in the north and some Boko Haram attacks have been carried out in response to the actions of government forces.

A further problem is that rampant corruption weakens the judicial system. Early arrests showed that some Boko Haram militants were the children of the affluent upper class. In subsequent investigations, tardiness, absence of transparency and lack of convictions suggested a willingness to protect some of those detained.

A 2008 diplomatic cable from the American embassyin Abuja, published by the Wikileaks website, highlighted another problem: it was common practice for Islamist terrorist suspects to be released from jail and handed over to imams for re-education.  According to the cable, the imams ‘contended that the so-called de-radicalization efforts of the State Security Service were not only ill-conceived, but also ineffective, counter-productive, and unimpressive.’

The increased sophistication of Boko Haram’s attacks may be partly explained by growing foreign support. There has been speculation – though without hard evidence – about interaction with al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, including possible training of Nigerians. In August 2011 General Carter Ham, Commander of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), said it was likely that Boko Haram had established contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and with al-Shabaab. He described this as, if confirmed, ‘the most dangerous thing to happen not only to the Africans, but to us as well’.In November, Algerian Deputy Foreign Minister Abdelkader Messahel said he had ‘no doubts that coordination exists between Boko Haram and al-Qaeda’, citing intelligence reports and common operating methods.

Intersection with other groups
Boko Haram is just one of the many security challenges confronting President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. For the past 15 years Nigerian forces have been combating ethno-nationalist rebels, as well as militia groups which oppose foreign exploitation of resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The most prominent of these are the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF) and the Niger Delta Vigilantes (NDV).

Such groups do not view Boko Haram favourably, since it has stolen the limelight and attracted government attention and resources. MEND and other Delta groups, which had gone relatively quiet since a 2009 amnesty, are determined to shift back the official focus and have threatened to resume attacks against oil installations. The Niger Delta groups tend to dismiss Boko Haram as irrelevant to Nigeria’s future, and to condemn its tactics. They have declared themselves ready to employ their most violent armed wings, such as NDV’s ‘Icelanders’, if Boko Haram were to shift its operations further south. They would see such a move as an attempt to negotiate a lucrative deal with the government similar to that which the Delta regions rebels have enjoyed as a result of the amnesty.

Serious threat
Boko Haram is now believed to consist of 300 fighters with a wide network of supporters numbering in the thousands. It receives some foreign financial support and, following the attacks it launched over the past 12 months, has made itself known outside Nigeria. However, it would be premature to label Boko Haram as another branch of the al-Qaeda franchise alongside organisations such as AQIM and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The group certainly draws part of its inspiration from the wider Islamist agenda but even the attack against the UN building in Abuja appears to have been motivated by domestic grievances – the UN is seen as aligned with the Nigerian government. There is nothing to indicate that Boko Haram will not remain a domestic, inward-looking movement.

However, the group does represent a serious threat. In an already highly polarised country of 150 million people and nearly 350 ethnic groups speaking 250 languages, where about 50% of the population is Muslim and 40% Christian, and where nearly three-quarters of the people live on less than $1.25 a day, the potential for inter-ethnic and religious violence remains high. Poverty and unemployment in the north, coupled with population increase and government’s inability to deal effectively with non-state groups, can turn northern states into an ideal recruitment ground for extremists and a springboard from which they could expand into the rest of the country. The Abuja attacks suggest that this is already occurring.

Article Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies

Image Source: pjotter05

John Brennan, President Obama’s senior adviser on counter-terrorism, highlighted the linkages between extremist violence and political, social and economic factors in a speech on 6th August at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank.
 
Although Brennan identified Al-Qaeda as the biggest threat to US security, much of the speech was devoted to the importance of non-military solutions to the problem of violent extremism: “any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors, the conditions that help fuel violent extremism.” Brennan described how part of the current US national security strategy is “a political, economic and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people – security for their communities, education for their children, a job and income for parents and a sense of dignity and worth.”
 
Time will tell how this sentiment will translate into policy. However, increased focus on the route causes of insecurity is certainly welcome. 
 
The full speech can be downloaded here. 
Photo: Getty Images
 
 
 

“The climate agenda goes well beyond climate,” said Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert at a recent Wilson Center event. “In the last 60 years, at least 40 percent of all interstate conflicts have had a link to natural resources” and those that do are also twice as likely to relapse in the five years following a peace agreement, said Neil Levine, director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID.

Development, peace, and climate stability are “the triple-bottom line,” said Smith. “How would you ever think that it would be possible to make progress on one, while ignoring the other two?” Levine and Smith were joined by Alexander Carius, managing director of Adelphi Research, who pointed out that climate change is both a matter of human security and traditional security. For example, as sea-level rise threatens the people of small-island states, “it also affects, in a very traditional sense, the question of security and a state’s sovereignty,” he said.

The Triple-Bottom Line

Conflicts are never attributable to a single cause, but instead are caused by “a whole pile-up, a proliferation, a conglomeration of reasons” that often include poverty, weak governance, traumatic memory of war, and climate change, said Smith. “Climate adds to the strains and the stresses that countries are under,” and works as a “risk-multiplier, or conflict multiplier,” he said.

Focusing development and peace-building efforts on those regions experiencing multiple threats is both a “moral imperative” and a “self-interested imperative,” said Smith. “We benefit from a more prosperous and a more stable world.”

There are currently one and a half billion people in the world living in countries that face these interlinked problems, said Smith, “and interlinked problems, almost by definition, require interlinked solutions.” Responding to the needs of these people requires developing resiliency so that they can respond to the consequences of climate change, which he called “unknown unknowns.”

“What we need are institutions and policies and actions which guard us not only against the threats we can see coming… but against the ones we can’t see coming,” said Smith. The strength and resilience of governments, economies, and communities are key to determining whether climate events become disasters.

Interagency Cooperation

“Part of making the triple-bottom line a real thing is to understand that we will have to be working on our own institutions, even the best and most effective of them, to make sure that they see the interlinkages,” said Smith.

But even though individuals increasingly understand the need to address security, development, and climate change in an integrated fashion, “institutions have only limited capacities for coordination,” said Carius. Institutions are constrained by bureaucratic processes, political mandates, or limited human resources, he said. “Years ago, I always argued for a more integrated policy process; today I would argue for an integrated assessment of the issues, but to…translate it back into sectoral approaches.”

Levine expressed optimism that with “a whole new avalanche of interagency connections” being established in the last few years, U.S. interagency cooperation has become “the culture.” However, if coordination efforts are not carefully aligned to advance concrete programs and policies, they run the risk of “getting bogged down in massive bureaucratic exercises,” he said. “‘Whole of government’ needn’t be ‘all of government,’ and it needn’t be whole of government, all of government, all the time.”

Building Political Will

Europe has a “conducive political environment to making [climate and security] arguments,” said Smith, but the dialogue has yet to translate into action. In 2007, the debate on climate and security was first brought to the UN and EU with a series of reports by government agencies and the first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change on security at the UN Security Council, said Carius. However, none of the recommendations from the reports were followed and “much of the political momentum that existed…ended up in a very technical, low-level dialogue,” he said.

More recently, the United Kingdom included energy, resources, and climate change as a priority security risk in their National Security Strategy. And Germany, which joined the UN Security Council as a rotating member this year, is expected to reintroduce the topic of climate and security when they assume the Security Council Presidency in July. These steps may help to regain some of the political momentum and “create legitimacy for at least making the argument – the very strong argument – that climate change has an impact on security,” said Carius.

Image source: DfID

Article source: The New Security Beat

The Mekong River is very important for millions of local communities along the mainstream and its tributaries who depend heavily on the river’s natural ecosystem functions. The health of the river is the health of the communities. Changes in the river basin mean a lot to those marginalized people who too often have no voice and have limited alternatives for sustaining their livelihoods.

The villages along the Mekong mainly depend on fishing and agriculture that require irrigation water from the river. Dam construction in China has already caused impacts to the river ecosystems and subsequently downstream communities. Water-level fluctuation has been the most destructive impact from unannounced releases at upstream dams in China. Most of the Mekong’s fish species are migratory and their migration instincts depend on the natural flow of the river and the health of ecosystems. Some of the fish that are vulnerable to these changes are endangered species such as Mekong Giant Catfish.

Local fishermen depend heavily on migratory fish species. They have learned for generations how to successfully fish each migration for a given season, and how to manage the resulting food and income literally harvested from the river each season. Although the fish population decline already witnessed in parts of the Mekong is the result of many factors, dam construction is the most serious. Already, many restaurants in a province along the Mekong in Thailand are forced to import fish from the Tonle Sap Great Lake of Cambodia.

Riverbank gardens are another important source of food and income generation for locals. In the dry season, when the water level is low and villagers are not growing rice, gardens along the riverbank serve as their main resource. Upstream hydropower operations result in unpredictable water levels, which locals have never experienced before, and result in damage or loss to their crops and investment. Consequently, these conditions cause more negative impacts beyond just food and economic insecurity, including social and cultural problems.

Local Responses and Empowerment

In response to these developments, communities along the Mekong River have established the “Network of Thai People in Eight Mekong Provinces” because of their concern for the impacts they’ve already experienced from dams in China and those anticipated to result from the construction of additional dams in the lower basin. The problems they are already experiencing make locals realize that the dams planned for the river in Lao and Cambodia will be even more devastating.

One of their main strategies has focused on conducting local-level Thai Baan (villager) research to develop scientific evidence for use in their fight with those in support of more dam development. For example, this data could be used to sue the government and related authorities if the proposed Xayaburi dam is allowed to proceed. The research and data will also serve as an important tool for mobilizing, uniting, and empowering local communities in many other ways. Recently the “Network” organized a protest in Bangkok and engaged in other activities to campaign against the planned dams, including the creation and installation of big posters stating their opposition to the planned projects along the Thai-Lao border in all eight provinces.

Of course, another important avenue has been the Thai media who have increasingly covered Mekong hydropower development issues. This coverage reflects the concern of Thai people for protecting their natural resources. Although these concerns are not uniformly widespread throughout the whole country, the people in the eight provinces and those involved in environmental and social movements are intensely aware. In some cases, domestic dam construction is still a controversial issue and can cause conflict among Thais between supporters and those who oppose additional domestic hydropower development. As for the Mekong mainstream dams, it seems no one supports them.

The issue of the dams played a small role in the national elections this past July. People in the eight provinces of Northern and Northeastern Thailand form the core supporters of the Pheu Thai Party. During the election, the “Network” organized a forum aimed at sending a message to the politicians. The new Yingluck Administration has not yet made any statements on the proposed Mekong dams. However, the “Network” plans to send a message to the new government and their representatives stating their concerns and interests. Local people in the eight provinces believe that the new government should want to listen to their concerns because they won the election largely with the help and support of people in these areas.

The first strategy of Living River Siam is to strengthen civil society enough to participate meaningfully in water management. The second strategy is focused on the politics of knowledge. This means using information and knowledge as a tool for the local communities to engage on policy decisions. Living River Siam organizes trips to meet with local communities in the eight provinces to give them information, collect data, and listen to their concerns. We work with them to set up the network and support local activities. We also spread their voices by organizing conferences, producing publications, organizing field trips for media and decision makers to visit the local communities, working with the media, cooperating with international organizations, and working with governmental sub-committees on the issue. One of our main activities is working with the communities along the river to collect data and conduct Thai Baan (villager) Research, research done by villagers based on local knowledge. We also use the research model as a tool for building a Mekong civil society network. The first goal is to elevate the voices of locals and ensure that their rights are recognized in water resource management. The second goal is to protect and maintain river ecosystems that are healthy enough to sustain local livelihoods.

Multilateralism and Institutional Improvements

The Mekong River Commission (MRC) should do more to work with civil society partners. This should include producing and providing information and knowledge for civil society organizations which could be used to support their outreach and engagement activities. Conversely, local communities, NGOs, and other civil society organizations can help the MRC conduct necessary research. This sort of relationship would also help to level the current power imbalance that exists among many of the main actors. An important new mechanism that should be established is a Mekong Community Fund. Such a fund will provide a path for communication while also supporting local participation in the various activities of the MRC. Ideally, the MRC office in each member country should establish an appropriate mechanism that allows for people’s participation in research, education, and engagement.

Furthermore, the creation of a People’s Commission of the Mekong River or Mekong Community Network set up by local communities, NGOs, and academics that have been working or directly experiencing these issues would be an important linkage between the MRC and citizens of member countries. It can either be an independent organization or established as a department of the MRC. The first step would be to organize a meeting for representatives of local communities. Past activities of the MRC have not served as a genuine forum for Mekong communities. In 2012, Living River Siam plans to organize an international meeting of Thai Baan Research network in the Mekong Basin. As we know that each Mekong country has different political and social systems and are in different stages of development, this research model can provide a strategy for the Commission or Network as it is not necessarily a political tool aimed at dam supporters or government.

Such an organization would also be a great target for support from the donor countries that traditionally fund the MRC. Their contributions to this new People’s Commission of the Mekong River would support the further development of an active, engaged, and responsible civil society in the Mekong Basin, while also developing new educational tools and providing a clear mechanism for the two-way transfer of knowledge.

For More Information on Living River Siam, visit their website in English or Thai

Article source: Stimson Center

Image source: Roberto Moretti

In this feature for the Bonn International Center for Conversion, Marius Kahl explores the security threats posed by widespread possession of small arms and light weapons in South Sudan, and some of the practical measures that can be taken to contain these threats.

Article: The Challenge of Managing State-owned Small Arms and Light Weapons in South Sudan

Picture Source: ENOUGH Project

How can the state violence in Syria be stopped? Daniel Serwer argues in the Atlantic that, given the Syrian regime’s complete failure to protect its own citizens it may be morally justifiable to arm the Syrian opposition; however from a realist perspective it is neither ‘possible nor wise’ as a means to topple Assad and bring about accountable politics. A violent reaction to the state’s overwhelmingly superior violence would not only destroy the opposition’s legitimacy, but would eventually draw them into a militarised conflict that they could not win.

Serwer strongly advocates mass-participatory non-violent approaches which use tactics that are difficult to attribute to single individuals. In the end, removing the regime’s ability to instil fear will be the surest way to ensure its downfall, as seen in the cases of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, and Serwer argues that this is still possible, even now after so much bloodshed.

Why the Syrian Rebels Should put Down Their Guns

It is remarkable how quickly we’ve forgotten about nonviolence in Syria. Only a few months ago, the White House was testifying unequivocally in favor of nonviolent protest, rather than armed opposition, against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime’s awful crackdown. Even today, President Obama eschews military intervention. Yesterday, Yahoo News’ Laura Rozen offered the views of four experts on moving forward in Syria. While one doubted the efficacy of arming the opposition, none advocated nonviolence. When blogger Jasmin Ramsey wrote up a rundown of the debate over intervention in Syria, nonviolence wasn’t even mentioned.

There are reasons for this. No one is going to march around Homs singing kumbaya while the Syrian army shells the city. It is correct to believe that Syrians have the right to defend themselves from a state that is attacking them. Certainly international military intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, and arguably Libya saved a lot of lives. Why should Syrians not be entitled to protection? Isn’t it our responsibility to meet that expectation?

First on protection: the responsibility belongs in the first instance to the Syrian government. The international community is not obligated to intervene. It may do so under particular circumstances, when the government has clearly failed to protect the population. I don’t see a stomach for overt intervention in the U.S. Nor do I think the Arab League or Turkey will do it without the U.S., as Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests.

The Syrian government has not only failed to protect, it has in fact attacked its own citizens, indiscriminately and ferociously. Self-defense and intervention are justified. The question is whether they are possible or wise, which they do not appear to be.

The Free Syria Army, an informal collection of anti-regime insurgents, is nowhere near able to protect the population. Their activities provoke the government and its unfree Army to even worse violence. It would be far better if defected soldiers worked for strictly defensive purposes, accompanying street demonstrators and rooting out agents provocateurs rather than suicidally contesting forces that are clearly stronger and better armed. A few automatic weapon rounds fired in the general direction of the artillery regiments bombarding Homs are going to help the artillery with targeting and do little else.

Violence also reduces the likelihood of future defections from the security forces. For current Syrian soldiers weighing defection, it is one thing to refuse to fire on unarmed demonstrators. It is another to desert to join the people who are shooting at you. Defections are important — eventually, they may thin the regime’s support. But they aren’t going to happen as quickly or easily if rebels are shooting at the soldiers they want to see defect.

But if you can’t march around singing kumbaya, what are you going to do? There are a number of options, few of which have been tried. Banging pans at a fixed hour of the night is a tried and true protest technique that demonstrates and encourages opposition, but makes it hard for the authorities to figure out just who is opposing them. The Arab variation is Allahu akbar called out for 15 minutes every evening. A Libyan who helped organize the revolutionary takeover of Tripoli explained to me that their effort began with hundreds of empty mosques playing the call to prayer, recorded on CDs, at an odd hour over their loudspeakers. A general strike gives clear political signals and makes it hard for the authorities to punish all those involved. Coordinated graffiti, marking sidewalks with identical symbols, wearing of the national flag — consult Gene Sharp’s 198 methods for more.

The point is to demonstrate wide participation, mock the authorities, and deprive them of their capacity to generate fear. When I studied Arabic in Damascus a few years ago, I asked an experienced agitator friend about the efficacy of the security forces. She said they were lousy. “What keeps everyone in line?” I asked. “Fear,” she replied. If the oppositions resorts to violence, it helps the authorities: by responding with sometimes random violence, they hope to re-instill fear.

Could the Syrians return to nonviolence after everything that’s happened? As long as they are hoping for foreign intervention or foreign arms, it’s not likely. Steve Heydemann, my former colleague at the United States Institute of Peace, recently suggested on PBS Newshour that we need a “framework” for arming the opposition that would establish civilian control over Free Syria Army. This is a bad idea if you have any hope of getting back to nonviolence, as it taints the civilians, making even the nonviolent complicit in the violence. It’s also unlikely to work: forming an army during a battle is not much easier than building your airplane as you head down the runway.

What is needed now is an effort to calm the situation in Homs, Hama, Deraa, and other conflict spots. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is visiting Damascus, could help. The continuing assault on Homs and other population centers is a major diplomatic embarrassment to Moscow. The opposition should ask for a ceasefire and the return of the Arab League observers, who clearly had a moderating influence on the activities of the regime. And, this time around, they should be beefed up with UN human rights observers.

If the violence continues to spiral, the regime is going to win. They are better armed and better organized. The Syrian revolt could come to look like the Iranian street demonstrations of 2009, or more likely the bloody Shia revolt in Iraq in 1991, or the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, which ended with the regime killing thousands. There is nothing inevitable about the fall of this or any other regime — that is little more than a White House talking point. What will make it inevitable is strategic thinking, careful planning, and nonviolent discipline. Yes, even now.

Article Source: the Atlantic

Image Source: Yunchung Lee

The third, fully revised and updated, edition of Contemporary Conflict Resolution written by Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse and Hugh Miall has just been released and includes a chapter on ‘Environmental Conflict Resolution.’

The authors – three of the most eminent conflict resolution experts writing today – track the debates around environmental scarcity and degradation and the relationship to conflict. Key themes such as ‘Tragedies of the Commons’ and conflicts of interest over climate change are addressed as well as multilateral and other responses.

The authors argue that “The social cost of mitigation and adaptation is far lower than the cost of unrestricted climate change. The problem is that different individuals, interest groups and states perceive very different costs and benefits, and institutions capable of balancing global costs and benefits do not yet exist” (p. 297).

Different strategies and analytical approaches are examined by the authors who conclude that “The supreme test for the human species is to learn collectively how to understand and anticipate … ‘unintended’ systemic effects of human action and, even at this late hour, to succeed in adapting conflict resolution approaches for overcoming local ‘tragedies of the commons’… to a global setting” (p. 304).

More information (including ordering) can be found on the Polity website.
 

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne have both highlighted potential defence spending cuts should their parties come to power. In a pamphlet for the think tank Reform, Cable identified nine ideas for budget savings, which included scrapping the Trident nuclear missile system as well as other defence procurement programmes including tranche three of the Eurofighter aircraft. Osborne, following a speech at a conference organised by the Spectator magazine, echoed Cable in citing the Eurofighter project and also identified the project to build 2 new aircraft carriers and a £2.7 billion order for 25 A400 transport aircraft as specific potential savings.

Whether these statements amount to anything more than political posturing in the run up to the general election remains to be seen. However, such statements will likely increase the pressure for a rigorous 2010 defence spending review following the general election. Whilst the scrapping of ‘white elephant’ defence projects is welcome, any savings should not just be absorbed by the spending deficit, but go hand in hand with a realignment of spending that contributes towards tackling the route causes of global insecurity that are highlighted on this site.

Kenya’s troubled relationship with Somalia and its own population of ethnic Somali citizens is coming to a head. Kenyan troops crossed the border on 16 October 2011 as Operation Linda Nchi (“Protect the Nation”) got underway. In response, hundreds of fighters from the Somali militia called al-Shabaab converged on the town of Afmadow in southern Somalia to meet them.

In an ominous sign of the most likely trajectory of this expedition, a suicide-attack on 19 October close to the building in Mogadishu hosting talks between Kenyan and Somali ministers killed five people. Al-Shabaab has threatened further attacks on Nairobi. “Kenya doesn’t know war. We know war”, the group’s spokesman told the BBC. “The tall buildings in Nairobi will be destroyed.”
The attacks in Kampala in July 2010 suggest that Kenyans would do well to heed the warning. The grenade-attack on a bar in Nairobi on the night of 23-24 October hich injured thirteen people adds to its immediacy. But Kenyans would also be advised to look even closer to home to understand why it is they find their country at war.

The insecurity complex

To some observers, the Kenyan government is behaving creditably. “African countries that step up to tackle an African problem, rather than sitting back and then complaining when the West tries to do it for them, are to be applauded”, writes the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall. There is some merit to the argument that Kenya is simply reacting to provocation from across the border. Many outside Kenya are familiar with the murder of David Tebbutt and the abductions of his wife Judith, the now-deceased Marie Dedieu, and the medical workers Blanca Thiebaut and Montserrat Serra.

But readers or viewers outside Kenya may be less familiar with the long-running disruption to humanitarian efforts, raids on border-posts, and fears of terrorist attacks in Nairobi caused by al-Shabaab. It is worth noting that no evidence has yet been provided by the Kenyan government that al-Shabaab carried out the abductions; while this seems plausible, little effort has been made in Nairobi to prove the case for war.

The actions of the Kenyan military in the second half of October 2011 are, in many respects, an extension of existing policy. The Kenyan police have long been providing training to their Somali counterparts on behalf of the Transitional National Government in Mogadishu. The Kenyan government has also made considerable efforts to bolster anti-al-Shabaab militias in southern Somalia, including the recruitment of Kenyan-Somalis on the Kenyan side of the border.

In the meantime, the government has grumbled about the burden placed upon it by anti-piracy efforts. It has also been content, in the words of a report from the Center for American Progress, to profit “from humanitarian traffic through its port and its status as an international development hub”. Indeed, the same report argues, Nairobi has experienced an “economic boom as a result of Somali diaspora investment.”

Such measures have done little to check the insecurity in border areas, however. Some local commentators were therefore relieved by the invasion and bullish in their forecasts. “Al Shabaab is used to pinching the bottom of a goat and now that they pinched that of the lion, that is more fiercer and more prepared, it should be in for trouble”, Mathew Buyu of the United States International University in Nairobi told The Standard newspaper. For its part Kenya’s navy set its army counterparts a poor example when its efforts to rescue Marie Dedieu resulted in the deaths of two officers after their boat capsized.

The security response

The Kenyan security forces seem to be eager for the fight, but there are many reasons to think that they are ill-suited to their mission. The armed forces stayed out of the post-election violence of January 2008 for the most part; at the time, responsibility for suppressing protests and subsequent clashes was left to the police and the paramilitary General Service Unit. The armed forces were, however (according to Human Rights Watch) “responsible for horrific abuses, including killings, torture and rape of civilians” in a security crackdown along the western border later in the same year (see “All the Men Have Gone: War Crimes in Keny’a Mt. Elgon Conflict”, Human Rights Watch, 27 July 2008).

The Kenyan military is not attuned to winning hearts and minds. Nor is it used to fighting wars; its only major campaign since independence was the campaign against Somali irredentists seeking secession from Kenya and absorption by Somalia during the 1960s.

The task of establishing a buffer-zone in southern Somalia will be difficult enough, even more so the apparent goal of taking and holding the city of Kismayo that has been part of military planning over the past couple of years. Whatever the objective, there is, as other analysts note, little reason to think Kenya will succeed where the battle-hardened Ethiopians failed in recent years.

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, whose armed forces are part of the African Union peacekeeping effort in Somalia, is another sceptic. In conversations with the United States assistant secretary of state, Johnnie Carson, and other senior American diplomats in January 2010, Museveni described the Kenyan military as a “career army” and wondered “Is Kenya used to fighting like this?”

The US seems to agree, or at least it did in December 2009 when one diplomat portrayed any plan by Kenya to occupy parts of southern Somalia “as a bad idea that would more likely add to Somalia’s instability than to help stabilise the country”. The state department has been noticeably silent since the Kenyan operation began.

The Kenyan problem

But Kenya’s military adventure cannot usefully be considered solely in terms of an external threat from Somalia. There is, as with all conflicts, no single reason why the country finds itself at war. A complex mix of local politics and economics is at play, as well the activities of al-Shabaab.
The strong presence of al-Shabaab inside Kenya reflects the region’s troubled history. Ever since the British colonial government and Kenyan nationalist leaders rode roughshod over the demands of Kenya’s Somali population to be allowed to join with Somalia at independence in 1963, the relationship between Kenyan-Somalis and the state has been fraught.

The opposition to Somali secession resulted in a low-intensity war in northeastern Kenya between 1963 and 1967. The official number of insurgents killed is 2,000, but it is likely that many more died during the war. Thousands more were forced from their homes during a campaign of compulsory resettlement. Once the war was over, promised development funds never materialised. Without any stabilising effect from Nairobi in the form of a legitimate state presence, northeastern Kenya remained prone to tremors emanating from across the border.

As Somalia spun into crisis in the 1980s, so cross-border incursions by armed gangs became more common. But efforts by the Kenyan government to restore a semblance of order made little effort to discriminate between those from Somalia itself and those from the local Somali population of the North Eastern Province. Restrictions were placed on movement on Kenyan-Somalis and the community was subject to numerous incidents of gross human-rights abuses. None was as significant nor remembered with as much bitterness by Kenyan-Somalis as the Wagalla massacre in February 1984 when at least 1,000 civilians were killed by the Kenyan security forces.

The continued failure of successive governments to extend the full benefits of citizenship to Kenyan-Somalis has, unsurprisingly, meant that al-Shabaab has built up networks of support within Kenya itself (see the UN Security Council report of 18 July 2011). “We are not part of Somalia, and the Kenyan government treats us as second-class citizens”, mayor Mohammed Gabow from Garissa town told al-Jazeera in 2009. “It’s a dilemma”.
Such a sense of grievance has been reinforced on a regular basis. A security crackdown targeted at Somalis living inside the Kenyan border in October 2008, for instance, was described by Human Rights Watch as “a deliberate and brutal attack on the local civilian population”.

The recent military action has been followed quickly by promises of tough action against Kenyan-Somalis. On 19 October 2011, a junior minister responsible for internal security, Orwa Ojodeh, promised parliament “a massive operation to get rid of Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda here in Nairobi.” Al Shabaab is, Ojodeh claimed, “a big animal with its main network in Kenya and only a fraction of it extending into Somalia.” Kenyan-Somalis now face tighter movement restrictions, which MPs representing them claim are both unconstitutional and unrelated to the conflict in Somalia.

It is true that some Kenyan-Somalis and migrants from Somalia are working actively in support of al-Shabaab in Nairobi. They play a vital role in the organisation through raising and transferring funds for the insurgency, handling contraband, recruiting new fighters and providing medical treatment to the injured. Moreover, support for al-Shabaab has recently grown amongst the wider Muslim community in Kenya. Strong efforts were made by the opposition in the 2007 election campaign to court the support of Muslim voters dismayed by the Kenyan participation in renditions and security purges linked to the global “war on terror”.

But Islamophobia plays well with certain sections of an increasingly evangelised Christian Kenyan middle class. Several incidents – the terror attacks of 2002 in Mombasa, the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998, and (more distantly) the Norfolk Hotel bomb on new-year’s eve 1980 – are cited as evidence of a Muslim propensity for violence. A government that holds an annual national prayer breakfast can expect a war against self-proclaimed jihadists to play well with some voters, at least until the casualties begin to mount.

Al-Shabaab can operate inside Kenya only because of much wider problems that have (according to the International Peace Institute) also allowed organised crime to gain a foothold in Kenya. These include porous borders, impunity, corruption and the complicity of leading political figures have created a conducive environment for the groups’s activities. It is relatively easy to move illicit funds in and out of the country and use it as the base for the movement of illegal goods, be it cocaine or smuggled charcoal from Somalia.

If the Kenyan government is serious about checking al-Shabaab’s operations, there are other ways of achieving this goal than invading southern Somalia. But if accusations by the US government are true, implementing measures that would also restrict international organised crime will be politically indelicate.

In this light, al-Shabaab can be understood as a Kenyan problem as well as a Somali one, and insecurity within Kenya’s borders can be said to be a product of the shortcomings of the Kenyan state as well as the instability in its stateless neighbour. With the state’s footprint of effective rule far smaller than the boundaries drawn on a map, insecurity has been endemic in Kenya’s periphery for decades. This no-man’s-land makes up vast swathes of territory thousands of kilometres long and hundreds deep. The state’s presence is often invisible, policing inadequate, firearms readily available and the resident populations engaged in fierce competition for grazing and water.

At times of crisis, such as political upheaval or drought, that equation often produces bloodshed. Even as troops massed on the Somali border over the weekend of 14-16 October, for instance, clashes between Borana and Somali communities some 500 kilometres inside the border took the lives of ten people.

It is hard, furthermore, to argue that al-Shabaab presents any greater risk to the residents of northern Kenya than Ethiopian cattle-raiders. In just one incident in early May 2011, up to sixty-nine Kenyan citizens were killed along that border after they crossed just inside Ethiopia to buy food at a market.

The development lens

So why do tourists and aid workers abducted or killed by al-Shabaab seem to matter more to the government in Nairobi than the many more of its citizens killed along the border with Ethiopia? In addition to the ideas discussed above, the answer might lie in developments in and around the Lamu archipelago over the past few years.

Lamu is a designated “world heritage site” and was long a sleepy backwater – a stopping-off point on the hippy trail, and a destination for other adventurous travellers attracted by its beguiling mix of tropical paradise and rich Muslim culture. Now host to numerous high-end hotels, Lamu and nearby resorts account for nearly a quarter of all tourists who head to Kenya’s Indian Ocean beaches. Tourism is a vital part of the economy, bringing in $800 million a year at a time when the shilling is plummeting in value. Tourists are, as expected, cancelling their holidays in line with travel advice from the British and French governments.

Tourism matters to this story only insofar as the development of Lamu has meant Kenya’s major economic interests have encroached on the internal, unofficial buffer-zone that once protected the key centres of economic activity in southern, highland parts of the country from the more unstable periphery. Lamu has become an important part of ambitious development plans funded by China that involve the wider northeast African region.
The area has been earmarked as a hub for transport links, a new port, an oil pipeline stretching from South Sudan, and a refinery. Whereas once the Kenyan government could afford to turn a blind eye to events on the archipelago and its hinterland, the area now matters. And not just to Kenya; landlocked Ethiopia and South Sudan see such ties to Kenya as a way of escaping from their own difficult relationships with Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan.

Both investors and likely customers have viewed recent events with trepidation. The threat of piracy unnerves shipping companies and political instability concerns other investors. The Kenyan government has sought to reassure those who will ultimately pay for the projects. The archipelago is, President Mwai Kibaki said in July 2011, “the next frontier of development in our country and region”. In part because of that, Lamu now finds itself on the frontline of a war.

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.  

Many in the west are blind to the fact that poverty and social injustice create a breeding ground for conflict. “An Iraqi youth recently said to me that if he and his family were hungry and he couldn’t get a job, he would go to fight with whoever will pay him. Wars are not only about armies and bombs, but about economic instability.”  This is the view of Zaib Salbi, founder of Women for Women International.  She is one of more than 1000 female activists, business leaders and politicains attending the Fifth International Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society in Deaville October 17/18 2009.

Read the full article here.

The closing weeks of 2009 have seen an intensive focus among western policy-makers and media on the war in Afghanistan. The long-awaited surge in American troop deployments ordered by President Barack Obama, whose effects will be seen as 2010 unfolds, sets the scene for increased combat. The new United States strategy is mainly a response to the increased activity of Taliban and other militias; there are even claims by Mulla Sangeen that 80% of Afghanistan is under Taliban influence (see “Taliban claim control of over 80pc of Afghanistan”, PakTribune, 22 December 2009). This may be an exaggeration, but the many elements opposed both to the Hamid Karzai regime and the foreign military presence in Afghanistan have undoubtedly increased the movement’s influence (see “Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection”, 8 October 2009).

There is something of a conundrum here, for the surge is being launched in a period where many argue that al-Qaida itself – the original target of the invasion of Afghan in October 2001, rather than its Taliban hosts – is actually in decline. This narrative cites the retreat of key al-Qaida leaders to western Pakistani districts where they are under constant risk of drone-attacks (which have killed many middle-ranking operatives) and are pressed by the Pakistani army to contend that al-Qaida is a diminishing threat. The implication is that if the Taliban in Afghanistan can be sufficiently squeezed into a degree of political acquiescence, then the war there can actually be won.

True, civil planners in the United States take a far more cautious view on this issue than their military equivalents (see Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Civilian, military planners have different views on new approach to Afghanistan”, Washington Post, 26 December 2009). But the military strategists who played a central role in the discussions preceding the new strategy are at the forefront of policy, and they are active in disseminating the case that the al-Qaida movement is in decline.

The call of home

This makes Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab’s attempt on 25 December 2009 to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit after its journey from Amsterdam even more worrying. There is still more speculation than hard fact about the operation, but what little detailed information there is suggests that the young Nigerian had some connections with Yemen.

Most of the focus of the United States war on al-Qaida since 9/11 has been on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq; relatively little attention has been given to the two states on either side of the Gulf of Aden – Yemen and Somalia. Any surplus resources away from the middle east and southwest Asia have tended to be devoted to Algeria and Mali as potential sites for al-Qaida activity.

True, Washington has looked with concern at Somalia as the internal troubles of this “failed state” have intensified; the expanding power of the al-Shabab Islamist militias – which may have loose connections with al-Qaida – in Somalia have deepened the US’s involvement here (see Harun Hassan & David Hayes, “Somalia: between violence and hope”, 15 July 2009). There is much clearer evidence, however, that Al-Qaida is active in Yemen; indeed, the group calling itself “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP) has claimed responsibility for the Northwest Airlines attack.

Four elements of the Yemeni context are relevant in clarifying a complex situation:

* Many Yemenis fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and were welcomed back afterwards. Osama bin Laden himself is half-Yemeni.  More recently, a Saudi clampdown and conflict in western Pakistan have encouraged many more Yemeni paramilitaries to return home (see Ginny Hill, “Yemen: the weakest link”, 31 March 2009)

* The Yemeni state does not control much of its territory, and its capabilities are further limited by a rebellion in the north; the latter is being waged with Saudi aid, including cross-border bombing raids by Royal Saudi air force F-15 strike-aircraft (see Michael Horton, “Borderline Crisis”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, January 2010).  A separatist movement in the south presents yet further problems to a beleaguered government

* The government lacks the resources to maintain security. Yemen faces severe economic difficulties, in part because its oil reserves are now severely depleted and because it has been badly affected by the international financial downturn (see Fred Halliday, “Yemen: travails of unity”, 3 July 2009)

* There has long been an Islamist paramilitary movement within the country; past attacks include the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2000 and the attack on the Limburg tanker in 2002 (see Fred Halliday, “Yemen: murder in Arabia Felix”, 13 July 2007).

AQAP received a particular boost in February 2006 when twenty-three prisoners escaped from a prison in Sana’a. The group, which appears to have had support from sympathetic security officials, included the current AQAP leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi (see Sudarsan Raghavan, “Al-Qaeda group in Yemen gaining prominence”, Washington Post, 28 December 2009). In the subsequent period AQAP has become steadily more active; for example, it launched an attack on the US embassy in Sana’a and tried to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s head of counter-terrorism.

The developments in Yemen in these four years have already prompted a strong response from the United States. The Pentagon has more than doubled military aid to Yemen, and committed over $70 million to training Yemeni security forces. There is a US special-forces presence in the country, and strong support from Washington for air-strikes against presumed AQAP targets; these include two bombing-raids on 17 and 24 December 2009 that are reported to have killed more than sixty militants (see Barbara Starr, “U.S. fears Yemen a safe haven for al Qaeda”, CNN, 28 December 2009).

The government of Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, is working increasingly closely with the United States. The connection was expanded following a visit from the head of US Central Command, General David H Petraeus, in July 2009. The full extent of the cooperation is hidden, but it is likely that US forces are directly involved in Yemen’s internal operations – quite probably with armed drones and possibly US carrier-based strike-aircraft (see Eric Schmitt & Robert F Worth, “U.S. Widens Terror War to Yemen, a Qaeda Bastion”, New York Times, 27 December 2009).

The inner story

The rhetorical force of President Obama’s response to the Northwest Airlines attack makes it more than likely that Yemen will evolve into another military front against al-Qaida. This in turn will increase the perception that, after apparent reversals in Iraq and western Pakistan, the movement has staged a major comeback.

The problem with this narrative is that it perceives al-Qaida as a clearly-structured and hierarchical movement with a coherent world plan. The reality, supported by developments in Yemen, is more complex (see Fawaz Gerges, “Al-Qaida today: a movement at the crossroads”, 14 May 2009). It is more accurate to say that al-Qaida has elements of a movement, a belief-system, a franchise and a very informal cluster of networks, yet at the same time it is widely dispersed and has relatively few internal interconnections.

Many of the informal networks revolve around Islamist paramilitaries who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s or in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 2000s. Some of the links have been consolidated by groups coalescing in detention-centres across the world, including Guantánamo. There are also indications that paramilitaries of several nationalities have moved to Yemen in recent years.

The term “al-Qaida” is therefore best used to connote a loose rather than a ight or integrated movement. It is thus possible for the “old” leadership in western Pakistan to be under pressure while the broader movement continues to evolve. Similarly, it is also possible for the movement to have lost support in Iraq, Pakistan and the wider Islamic world (in large part because of the civilian deaths its attacks have inflicted) while it is still capable of attracting dedicated young men – including the scion of a wealthy Nigerian family – prepared to give their lives to the cause (see “Al-Qaida’s afterlife”, 29 May 2008).

The US-led war in Yemen is likely to expand in the early months of 2010. It is not easy to see what else the Obama administration feels it can do, given that the Christmas Day attack came close to killing hundreds of people above Detroit. 

But if the issue is seen through the other end of the telescope – a task that becomes ever more vital – and an increased American involvement in Yemen may well prove to be a hugely welcome gift to al-Qaida and its affiliates. Already its propagandists are at work, pointing to the civilian casualties of the December air-raids (as of those in the coalition’s latest Afghanistan attacks).  They will go on to develop a very clear narrative of the “far enemy” now extending its war against Islam to yet another country.

Barack Obama may make an impressive speech on relations with the Islamic world in his Cairo speech of June 2009 – but this is seen as merely a sham. Instead, what will be portrayed is a “crusader” enemy that occupies Iraq and Afghanistan, exerts control over the Pakistani government, equips and aids the “Zionist” armed forces that suppress the Palestinians, and now kills Muslims in yet another country. It is a powerful and dangerous narrative, and one that retains great potency.

SIPRI has published a policy paper examining arms flows into sub-Saharan Africa. The summary of the report below indicates that even legal transfers into the continent have implications for peace and security, not only because many SALW (small arms and light weapons) make their way illicitly to rebel groups or countries under UN embargo, but also because, “The supply of arms can be argued to to have been an incentive for the recipients to try to achieve their goals via violence instead of dialogue.”  The summary also touches on the motives behind supplier countries’ weapons sales, which include securing access to natural resources in the mineral-rich continent.

There is a general need for more clarity throughout the arms-transfer process, as African governments themselves are not necessarily forthcoming in their reasons for wishing to purchase weapons, despite regular expressions of support for international arms control initiatives. With the waters this muddied, arms purchased both legally and illegally pose a serious threat to security in Africa.

(To view or purchase a copy of the full policy paper, please go to the Publications page on the SIPRI website)

Pieter D. Wezeman, Siemon T. Wezeman and Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, SIPRI Policy Paper 30 – Summary, December 2011

Concerns regarding arms transfers to sub-Saharan Africa are widespread and have motivated worldwide efforts to control arms flows. Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) accounted for 1.5 per cent of the volume of world imports of major arms in 2006–10. Although this is low by global standards, with little indigenous arms-production capacity in the region, most countries are fully dependent on arms imports.

States in sub-Saharan Africa have received major arms from a wide variety of countries all over the world. China, Russia and Ukraine are consistently among the largest suppliers. Other countries that play a relatively modest role as arms exporters globally are significant arms suppliers to individual countries in sub-Saharan Africa or provide a significant proportion of the major arms supplied to the region as a whole. Due to a lack of accurate information, no comprehensive picture of transfers of small arms and light weapons (SALW) and other military equipment to the region can be given, but available open source information shows that transfers of such equipment to the region in 2006–10 was common.

The motives for arms transfers to sub-Saharan African destinations are diverse, including direct financial revenues—even if they are small compared to revenues from sales to other regions—and strengthening political influence in sub-Saharan Africa in order to gain access to natural resources and to further the security interest of the supplier.

Intergovernmental transparency is necessary for an informed debate about how the military needs of sub-Saharan Africa states should be taken into account in discussions on arms control in the region. While countries in the region regularly express support for conventional arms control initiatives, their low level of participation in the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA)—the key intergovernmental reporting instrument on conventional arms—casts doubts on their willingness to actively control arms. Public debate about arms procurement is often based on incomplete and confusing information which emerges only after key decisions have been made. Even those governments that have been more forthcoming with public information about their arms procurements tend to remain reluctant to discuss the rationale and underlying threat assessments in public or in the parliament.

Case studies show that supplies of SALW and major arms play a role in armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa; even supplies of relatively small quantities of older weapons can have a notable impact on conflicts. The uncertainty about the impact of arms transfers to conflict areas in sub-Saharan Africa is reflected in the experience of 2006–10. In several cases it could be argued that arms supplies have contributed to a government’s ability to legitimately maintain or restore stability in its country, including with the use of force against rebel groups. In a number of cases, exporting countries have supplied arms to governments in the region which supported efforts to achieve these objectives and in line with UN statements or actions. The least controversial arms supplies are those aimed at improving African states’ capabilities to participate in peace operations, even though these supplies remain insufficient to fulfil the needs of regional peacekeepers.

However, in many cases arms supplied to sub-Saharan Africa have had clearly undesirable effects.

1. The supply of arms can be argued to have been an incentive for the recipients
to try to achieve their goals via violence instead of dialogue.
2. Arms have been used in human rights violations.
3. Arms recipients often do not have the capability to secure their stockpiles
and weapons have been lost or stolen, including by rebel groups.
4. Arms recipients have deliberately diverted weapons to targets of UN arms
embargoes or rebel groups in neighbouring countries.
5. Arms supplied to governments have been turned against those governments
in military coups d’état.

As a result of ambiguity about the impact and desirability of arms transfers, arms export policies by individual supplier countries vary widely. Some suppliers appear reluctant to supply arms to most countries in the region; others seem to consider only UN arms embargoes as a reason not to supply arms. The ambiguity is also reflected in the inconsistent approach of the international community to conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa: whereas arms embargoes have been agreed in relation to some conflicts, in other cases no embargo has been imposed.

Weapons used in conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa by government forces have in general been delivered with the consent of the governments both in the supplier and recipient countries. Nonetheless, it appears that the illegal arms trade continues to play a role in the procurement of arms by both government and rebel groups in the region even though there is no hard evidence of widespread large illegal supplies from outside the region into sub-Saharan Africa in 2006–10. However, there have been regular instances of weapons flows within the region to, in particular, rebel groups in violation of UN embargoes. To better understand the nature of the illegal arms trade in sub-Saharan Africa, information about interceptions by government authorities of illegal arms transfers and related legal activity should be centrally collected, for example in the annual national reports
on the UN Programme of Action on SALW.

The lack of transparency in arms flows to sub-Saharan Africa obstructs an informed debate on the proposed arms trade treaty (ATT) and would be a serious obstacle to its verification. A starting point for improving transparency would be to support initiatives on corruption in the arms trade. Interest in the corruption issue and increasing willingness by governments to discuss it could be a stepping stone towards more transparency in arms procurement. If sub-Saharan African states want to persuade arms suppliers—which regularly hinder arms exports by refusing export licences—that they have legitimate reasons to procure arms, they should be more forthcoming about their motives.

Article Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

Image Source: Enough Project

A report published on the 30th September by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates that 25 million more children will be malnourished by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. The report predicts that climate change will lead to price increases for the most important agricultural crops: rice, wheat, maize and soybeans. Wheat prices are projected to increase globally by 170 – 191% whilst rice prices may increase by 113 – 121%.

The study: Climate Change: Impact on Agriculture and Costs of Adaptation, uses the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report’s A2 scenario with a best estimate temperature rise of 3.4 degrees centigrade and a likely range of 2.0 to 5.4 degrees centigrade. However, the report does not account for: the effects of increased variability in weather caused by climate change; the loss of agricultural lands due to rising seas levels; climate change induced increases in pests of diseases; or increased variability in river flows as glaciers melt.

“Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change, because farming is so water-dependent. Small-scale farmers in developing countries will suffer the most” not Mark Rosegrant, director of IFPRI’s Environment and Production Technology Division and report co-author. Gerald Nelson, IFPRI senior research fellow and report lead author suggested, “This outcome could be averted with seven billion U.S. dollars per year of additional investments in agricultural productivity to help farmers to adapt to the effects of climate change. Investments are needed in agricultural research, improved irrigation, and rural roads to increase market access for poor farmers. Access to safe drinking water and education for girls is also essential.”

The full report can be downloaded here.

Climate-related disasters could significantly impact military and civilian humanitarian response systems, so “an ounce of prevention now is worth a pound of cure in the future,” said CNA analyst E.D. McGrady at the Wilson Center launch of An Ounce of Preparation: Preparing for the Impact of a Changing Climate on U.S. Humanitarian and Disaster Response. The report, jointly published by CNA and Oxfam America, examines how climate change could affect the risk of natural disasters and U.S. government’s response to humanitarian emergencies.

Connecting the Dots Between Climate Change, Disaster Relief, and Security

The frequency of – and costs associated with – natural disasters are rising in part due to climate change, said McGrady, particularly for complex emergencies with underlying social, economic, or political problems, an overwhelming percentage of which occur in the developing world. In addition to the prospect of more intense storms and changing weather patterns, “economic and social stresses from agricultural disruption and [human] migration” will place an additional burden on already marginalized communities, he said. 

Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America said the humanitarian assistance community needs togalvanize the American public and help them “connect the dots” between climate change, disaster relief, and security. 

As a “threat multiplier,” climate change will likely exacerbate existing threats to natural and human systems, such as water scarcity, food insecurity, and global health deterioration, said Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (ret.), president of CNA’s Institute for Public Research. Major General Richard Engel, USAF (ret.), of the National Intelligence Council identified shifting disease patterns and infrastructural damage as other potential security threats that could be exacerbated by climate change.

“We must fight disease, fight hunger, and help people overcome the environments which they face,” said Gunn. “Desperation and hopelessness are…the breeding ground for fanaticism.”

U.S. Response: Civilian and Military Efforts 

The United States plays a very significant role in global humanitarian assistance, “typically providing 40 to 50 percent of resources in a given year,” said Marc Cohen, senior researcher on humanitarian policy and climate change at Oxfam America. 

The civilian sector provides the majority of U.S. humanitarian assistance, said Cohen, including the USAIDOffice of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. These organizations provide leadership, funding, and food aid to developing countries in times of crisis, but also beforehand: “The internal rationale [of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance] is to reduce risk and increase the resilience of people to reduce the need for humanitarian assistance in the future,” said Edward Carr, climate change coordinator at USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance.

The U.S. military complements and strengthens civilian humanitarian assistance efforts by accessing areas that civilian teams cannot reach. The military can utilize its heavy lift capability, in-theater logistics, and command and control functions when transportation and communications infrastructures are impaired, said McGrady, and if the situation calls for it, they can also provide security. In addition, the military could share lessons learned from its considerable experience planning for complex, unanticipated contingencies with civilian agencies preparing for natural disasters. 

“Forgotten Emergencies” 

Already under enormous stress, humanitarian assistance and disaster response systems have persistent weaknesses, such as shortfalls in the amount and structure of funding, poor coordination, and lack of political gravitas, said Cohen. 

Food-related aid is over-emphasized, said Cohen: “If we break down the shortfalls, we see that appeals for food aid get a better response than the type of response that would build assets and resilience…such as agricultural bolstering and public health measures.” Food aid often does not draw on local resources in developing countries, he said, which does little to improve long-term resilience. 

“Assistance is not always based on need…but on short-term political considerations,” said Cohen, asserting that too much aid is supplied to areas such as Afghanistan and Iraq, while “forgotten emergencies,” such as the Niger food crisis, receive far too little. Furthermore, aid distribution needs to be carried out more carefully at the local scale as well: During complex emergencies in fragile states, any perception of unequal assistance has the potential to create “blowback” if the United States is identified with only one side of a conflict.

Engel added that many of the problems associated with humanitarian assistance will be further compounded by increasing urbanization, which concentrates people in areas that do not have adequate or resilient infrastructure for agriculture, water, or energy. 

Preparing for Unknown Unknowns

A “whole of government approach” that utilizes the strengths of both the military and civilian humanitarian sectors is necessary to ensure that the United States is prepared for the future effects of climate change on complex emergencies in developing countries, said Engel. 

In order to “cut long-term costs and avoid some of the worst outcomes,” the report recommends that the United States:

• Increase the efficiency of aid delivery by changing the budgetary process;
• Reduce the demand by increasing the resilience of marginal (or close-to-marginal) societies now;
• Be given the legal authority to purchase food aid from local producers in developing countries to bolster delivery efficiency, support economic development, and build agricultural resilience;
• Establish OFDA as the single lead federal agency for disaster preparedness and response, in practice as well as theory;
• Hold an OFDA-led biannual humanitarian planning exercise that is focused in addressing key drivers of climate-related emergencies; and,
• Develop a policy framework on military involvement in humanitarian response.

Cohen singled out “structural budget issues” that pit appropriations for protracted emergencies in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur against unanticipated emergencies, like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Disaster-risk reduction investments are not a “budgetary trick” to repackage disaster appropriations but a practical way to make more efficient use of current resources, he said: “Studies show that the return on disaster-risk reduction is about seven to one – a pretty good cost-benefit ratio.” 

Edward Carr said that OFDA is already integrating disaster-risk reduction into its other strengths, such as early warning systems, conflict management and mitigation, democracy and governance, and food aid. However, to build truly effective resilience, these efforts must be tied to larger issues, such as economic development and general climate adaptation, he said. 

“What worries me most are not actually the things I do know, but the things we cannot predict right now,” said Carr. “These are the biggest challenges we face.”

Article source: The New Security Beat

Image source: Oxfam International

As the long running tensions over the set of islands in the East China Sea appear to be coming to a head, the time for thinking through the alternatives to the militarisation of this conflict seems to be well and truly upon us.

The conflict raises interesting issues about sovereignty claims based on offshore territories, particularly as we face a climate-constrained future as well as the increasing importance of competition over scarce resources. The latter is fast becoming one of the most important global trends if one thinks about the potential ‘drivers’ of conflict and even war.

Spiralling naval spending in the region has been tracked by analysts for some years now, and flashpoints such as the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands could show rampant military spending and arms racing for the dangerous trends that they are if things deteriorate rapidly. Arms racing helps to reinforce security dilemmas (the problems of interpreting the motives of potential adversaries and responding in-kind by arming yourself thus creating a spiral towards ever increasing militarisation). Arms racing also discourages the development of what Ken Booth and Nicholas Wheeler refer to as ‘security dilemma sensibility’ – the ability to “perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others. In particular, it refers to the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear.”

But what is particularly important to note in relation to this crisis is the interaction between the trends of increasing militarisation and competition over resources. The potential hydrocarbon resources beneath the ground around the islands as well as the rich fishing grounds in the surrounding waters gives the competing claims to sovereignty a particular strategic bite.

Imposed on top of this is the effect of unresolved historical tensions and fierce nationalist sentiment in some quarters of both Japan and China. The coverage of the dispute in the media has been particularly important. Kevin Clements and Ria Shibata have noted that “this might be expected in China, which has a state-run media. In democratic Japan and Taiwan, however, the media have also promoted official and unofficial nationalist positions on the conflict. This has been accompanied by a marginalising or silencing of moderate voices favouring negotiated non-violent solutions to the conflict.” Interestingly, the most constructive voices calling for calm who have been able to cut through the jingoism and sabre rattling have been the business community concerned with the bigger picture issues of losing trade and tourism between China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. 

Clements and Shibata have outlined five initial steps that could be used to de-escalate the issue and begin the difficult but unavoidable process of a negotiated solution. In the longer-term, both regional powers and important external players will need to put addressing the inter-linked trends of militarisation and increasing competition over strategic resources at the heart of any attempts to avoid the worst case scenarios playing out.

Image source: Al Jazeera English. 

The term “global war on terror” has long since been dropped from the United States’s official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the “long war”, has similarly fallen by the wayside, to be succeeded in March 2009 by a less overtly combative Pentagon formulation: “overseas contingency operation”. But it is easier for the Barack Obama administration to redefine the conflict it is involved in than to change the bleak current reality in three main flashpoints – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq:

* the coordinated suicide-attack and rocket-attack in the early morning of 28 October 2009 on two high-profile civilian targets in Kabul – the Bekhtar guest-house and Serena Hotel – are a sign that the deepening insecurity in Afghanistan reaches even to the heart of the capital. The Bekhtar incident ended in the deaths of twelve people, including five United Nations staff who were helping to oversee the re-run of the presidential election on 7 November

* the devastating market-bombing in Peshawar, also on 28 October, are part of a widening insurgency in Pakistan. The attack killed over ninety people, and coincided with the arrival of United States secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the country for high-level talks with Pakistani leaders

* the suicide-bomb operations against Iraq’s justice ministry and the administrative headquarters of Baghdad’s region on 25 October – which killed at least 155 people and wounded over 500 – are a reminded that violence in Iraq remains endemic and that insurgents retain the capacity to strike close to the heart of power.

The rising tide

In Afghanistan, the great concern over the Kabul assaults is accentuated by awareness of four serious security developments elsewhere in the country:

* the war is continuing to spread to previously peaceful areas. German troops in Kunduz province in the north of the country, for example, are involved in direct combat for the first time in over six decades (see Nicholas Kulish, “German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality”, International Herald Tribune, 27 October 2009)

* the increasing effectiveness of the attacks on foreign troops. United States forces are suffering relentless casualties: sixty-seven troops have been killed so far in October 2009, including seven on 27 October in multiple, “complex” bomb-attacks on an armoured vehicle in Kandahar province

* after the United States withdrew troops from four bases in Nuristan province in northeast Afghanistan (and adjacent to Pakistan), it has effectively fallen under the control of a Taliban network led by Qari Ziaur Rahman, a leader with close links to al-Qaida (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, “Taliban take over Afghan province”, Asia Times, 28 October 2009)

* it is now becoming ever more clear that the United States forces and the wider Nato/International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) coalition is facing military opposition from groups that extend beyond Taliban militias and some loosely associated warlord networks; these include scores of local militias that have very little to do with the Taliban but work to protect their own power-bases and resist what they see as a foreign occupation.

All war is local

The implication of these trends is that a transition from insurgency to a broader insurrection may be occurring – and that deploying even more American and allied troops (as Barack Obama and his advisers are currently discussing) risks increasing rather than diminishing the military challenge (see “Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection” [8 October 2009] and “AfPak: the unwinnable war” [16 October 2009]).

Some US military and political officers on the ground are beginning to register these dynamics. Matthew Hoh, a senior US state department official and former marine who was based until recently in Zabul province, explained his resignation on 10 September 2009 by referring to his experiences in the Korengal valley and elsewhere. These, he is reported as saying:

“taught him ‘how localised the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometres away.’ Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases. ‘That’s really what shook me,’ he said. ‘I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism’” (see Karen De Young, “U.S. official resigns over Afghan war”, Washington Post, 27 October 2009).

The Barack Obama administration has yet to decide whether to deploy up to the 40,000 additional troops requested in General Stanley A McChrystal’s report; it still appears to want to delay the decision until political stability can be established in Kabul (through the 7 November re-run of the presidential election, and perhaps the formation of a national or emergency government). But the core dilemma remains: that deploying more troops is in current conditions likely to prove counterproductive, and only deepen the military quagmire.

There is a close parallel here with what is happening across the border in Pakistan. An extensive operation by the Pakistani army in Waziristan, launched with a certain fanfare on 17 October 2009 as attempt to occupy this key region and decisively curb Taliban control there, is too facing the reality of an intractable and well-organised opposition resistant to straightforward military solutions.

The Pakistani offensive lacks the equipment, the flexibility and the combat-troop levels (perhaps as many as 50,000) that would all be required to subdue the entire district; as a result, it now has the more limited aim of neutralising the influence of some important militia leaders. Even this will be hard enough. In addition, cities such as Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore as well as Peshawar have endured high-profile insurgent assaults; and the Peshawar explosion on 28 October is further evidence that the army’s well-publicised operations cannot prevent (and may indeed provoke) violent incidents elsewhere in Pakistan.

The Baghdad blues

Amid this comfortless prospect, the situation in Iraq has appeared to present more hopeful evidence that here at least – both before and since United States forces started their partial withdrawal from Iraq’s cities on 30 June 2009 – Washington’s military strategy was showing the desired results.

At the same time, the very concentration of focus on “AfPak” during much of 2009 has tended to mean that the continuing severe violence and tension in parts of the country have been underplayed. There has, for example, been a series of bombings against Shi’a-populated areas whose resulting carnage is barely conveyed by the death-tolls: over 120 killed in the strikes against markets in Sadr city in April and June, seventy-one dead at a Shi’a shrine in Baghdad in April, forty-four  killed at a Shi’a mosque in Mosul in August. This is but a partial list.

The intention seems clear: to polarise Shi’a and Sunni communities and provoke further conflict. But those responsible have other targets, including the Iraqi government’s infrastructure and its security forces (which are supplemented, despite the ending of full-scale American patrols in urban areas, by US troops in what amount to joint operations).

It is in these circumstances that the insurgents have expanded their tactics by launching large-scale assaults against major government centres. In August 2009, these destroyed or inflicted serious damage on the foreign, finance and health ministries (with 102 people killed and more than 500 wounded); the 25 October attacks hit two more centres. An especially serious aspect of this approach is the suggestion that the militants’ ability to penetrate government buildings is possible only with a degree of collaboration from inside Iraq’s security forces.

The real debate

The death of the United Nations staff in the Kabul attacks on 28 October is a further significant aspect of the current situation. It shows that some militant groups deliberately target the more neutral expatriates precisely because their work involves efforts to resolve conflicts in times of intense difference. The input of UN agencies – such as the World Food Programme, five of whose officials were killed in an attack at its Islamabad offices on 5 October 2009 – can help provide space for limited progress even amid conflict, and this is what the more extreme elements in a dispute can find intolerable.

In this respect the Kabul incident belongs to a pattern includes the assassination of Count Bernadotte by militants of the Israeli rightwing Lehi group in Jerusalem in September 1948, and the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 which killed the envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty-one others. In the latter case, the Baghdad canteen of the UN complex was in the early months of the Iraq war was one of the very few “neutral spaces” where Iraqis and expatriates of widely differing backgrounds and attitudes could meet informally. That was reason enough for it to be vulnerable; the human and psychological damage hugely diminished the UN’s role in attempting to heal wounds and avert the continuation of violence.

This adds a problematic element to the argument that the United Nations should play a more prominent and strategic role in current and future “international interventions” (see Pierre Schori & Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, “Afghanistan: peacekeeping without peace”, 26 October 2009). This is difficult enough to achieve when a military conflict has become rooted or where powerful trends point in that direction; it is made even harder when insurgent factions precisely seek to destroy UN personnel and disrupt their activities.

All this focuses a chilling beam onto the troubles of the United States and its allies (see Ahmed Rashid, “Trotsky in Baluchistan” [National Interest, November-December 2009]). There seems little hope of immediate respite. The conflict in what has become known as “AfPak” has since 2006-07 continued even through the winter months, while the hoped-for peace in Iraq is looking brittle.

If there is a way ahead, it rests not on short-term calculations about troop numbers but on a larger reassessment by the Barack Obama administration of the entire US security posture in the middle east and southwest Asia (see “A world in need: the case for sustainable security”, 10 September 2009). This will have to do more than crisis-manage the dire problems inherited from George W Bush; what is needed is no less than a move beyond military-led thinking to an integrated understanding of what security in the 21st century actually is. 

EU attitudes to peacebuilding have always assumed that it essentially applies to other people, who live outside of the Union’s developed borders. However, since the financial crisis of 2008 and the austerity that followed, the certainties underpinning western models of aid and conflict-resolution have taken a knock from the riots and protest movements shaking cities from Athens to London. While not equating the various reactions and levels of violence across the continent, Dan Smith suggests in both this piece and a follow-up post that EU peacebuilding efforts would be well-directed inwards. In particular, he highlights a growing alienation from professionalised political systems, and how a very small number of actors can cause havoc against a background of marginalisation, both real and perceived. He therefore recommends that we focus our attention on the context against which people act, rather than on the actors themselves, because it is only through ‘mobilising social energy for building peace’ that individuals can find a place in society and disaffection can be tackled at its root cause.

In 2001 – a different time and a different world – the EU Gothenburg summit agreed to make the prevention of violent conflict a priority for the EU. Measured by money, it’s now the world’s biggest player in peacebuilding. But look around Europe now and we can ask, should peacebuilding also start to be a priority inside the EU?
The EU’s peacebuilding

Since 2001 the European Commission has spent €7.7 billion on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, more than any government or other international organisation and about 10 per cent of its total spending on external aid.

A recent evaluation concluded the money has been well spent overall, albeit with room for improvement – the sort of balanced conclusion you expect from a review like that. The report finds that the EC has undertaken and supported some pretty good work in places as different as the western Balkans, the DRC, Nepal and Central Asia. Not everything works, but nothing has been done that is actually harmful, much that is distinctly beneficial to the common good, and important lessons have been learned.
That was then

The Gothenburg decision was taken at a different time. The Euro and the big enlargement had been decided. Confidence, expansiveness and optimism were in the air. If confidence was shaken by 9/11, the beginning of “the war on terror” and the start of the build-up to invasion of Iraq, nonetheless it was an era of growth and of projecting the EU’s core mission of enlarging the zone of peace to far flung corners of the world.

But in 2007 came the sub-prime crisis in the US and the start of the international credit crunch. In September 2008 Lehman Brothers went down and the world started to be very, very different.
Tragedy and reflection

In fact, for my own organisation, International Alert, things had already started to change. In 2005, the day after London was awarded the Olympic Games of 2012, the city was visited by the worst terrorism it has experienced, far more lethal than anything inflicted in 25 years of war by the Provisional IRA – in four bomb attacks (one on a bus and three on underground trains), 52 people were killed (plus the four bombers) and over 700 severely injured. The city was quiet for the next few days and people worried about whether it was safe to use the bus and tube and go to work.  Two weeks later four more bombs were discovered before they detonated.

In that over-heated atmosphere, on the next day, a policeman shot and killed a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes. It has since been proven that he had no connection with terror groups of any kind. It has been proven that the police had no basis in fact for following him. They panicked and a young man lost his life. I reflected on this and its implications in a post on the day a permanent memorial was dedicated to his memory.

For me and for colleagues at Alert, this awful incident was very immediate: our office happens to be five minutes’ walk from the station where Menezes was shot. Like many others we reflected on these events and we wondered whether skills we have learned in trying to build peace in Africa, Eurasia and Asia since we started up in 1986 might be useful in Britain. We made contact with groups working on community conflict and cohesion and compared notes. Might what we do in Beirut, Monrovia or Kathmandu have some bearing, some relevance in Bradford, south London or Bristol?

The answer was yes (and we now have a programme of activities in the UK), not because we have a magic technique but because we start with a dispassionate analysis of the context of conflict and use a vision-based approach. We don’t only start with ‘what’s the problem and how do we handle it?’ – but with ‘where do we want to be in x years’ time?
This is now

In the summer of 2011, England had its riots. We look around Europe and we see different sorts of disaffection and action: the anger in the anti-austerity, anti-government riots in Greece, the thin patina that people tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland, the youth movements in Spain, the simmering anger in Italy. Even in a country self-proclaimed by an opinion survey to be among the 2two or three happiest in the world* – Denmark’s capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple of years. And at the psychotic and extreme end,  Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya in July 2011 and the discovery of a series of murders of immigrants by right-wing extremists in Germany;

I am not equating these events. This atmosphere of dissatisfaction and violence does not arise everywhere from the same source, the same social groups or the same politics.

But they are nonetheless connected, not by motive or participants, but by the political and social landscape in which they occur.

It is a landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. It is challenged by economics as job opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes. Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the young. Ordinary people feel they are paying the price for mistakes they did not make while those who had the biggest part in the errors in politics and finance are paying a much smaller price.

Some people direct their anger about the injustices at the political establishment, some at the finance world and some – in their confusion at this diminished sense of belonging – against immigrants. But even when the anger is mis-targeted and even when the accusations are false, the feelings that lie behind are real. And sometimes lethal.
Bringing peacebuilding home

How might a peacebuilding approach look? Standard procedure for working in fragile states – rule number one – is to start with context. Which means starting with questions and an open mind.

This makes it very difficult for politicians to bring a peacebuilding approach to their own home patch. At home, they are supposed to know the answers. That’s what we have politicians for – and then we get to choose which answers we like best. Or who answers best, which is not always the same thing.

A peacebuilding approach would not look necessarily at the numbers involved in each action, even the riots. It is a staple of peacebuilding to acknowledge that in countries with a population of tens of millions, it only takes a few hundred unemployed young men, some leaders ready to act, and access to weapons – and you have a war. The IRA’s active forces probably numbered well below 1,000 throughout three decades of war in and over Northern Ireland.

No, rather than the numbers, it’s the background that counts, the social, political and economic context in which this occurs. And the question is whether that background fosters peaceful relations or not.

Last year the UK government brought out its Building Stability Overseas Strategy to guide its approach to peacebuilding in developing countries. Here is some of its analysis, full of resonance for Europe’s current social and political challenges. I have already drawn on it for clues for its resonance for the English riots. But its clues about what questions to ask are so useful it’s worth repeating them (but hurdle over the bullet points if you remember them) (and also get a life – come on).

    * ‘The stability we are seeking to support … is built on the consent of the population, is resilient and flexible in the face of shocks, and can evolve over time as the context changes…
    * ‘Effective local politics and strong mechanisms which weave people into the fabric of decision-making – such as civil society, the media, the unions, and business associations – also have a crucial role to play.
    * ‘All sections of the population need to feel they are part of the warp and weft of society, including women, young people and different ethnic and religious groups.
    * ‘Jobs, economic opportunity and wealth creation are critical to stability. Lack of economic opportunity is cited by citizens as a cause of conflict, and is often the most significant reason why young people join gangs…
    * ‘Without growth and employment, it is impossible to meet the basic needs of the population, and people’s aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children…
    * ‘While an inclusive and legitimate political system is a requisite for stability, confidence in the future comes when people see that their needs and expectations are being met on the ground.’

On the basis of this kind of analysis, you would look at social inclusion/exclusion and marginalisation; at the degree of hope and confidence in the future – or their opposites; at our political institutions – both national and local; at the condition of the economy and whether economic policies are creating opportunities; and at the space for civil society and for bodies such as business associations and trades unions to represent people, articulate concerns and influence politics.
How peacebuilding at home would look

Peacebuilding looks different from one country to the next. But the golden thread that connects it all, expressed in abstract terms, is mobilising social energy for building peace. We work out what form this will take based on need, opportunity and ability in the country where we’re working: police reform, starting new institutions to promote transparency, cultural peace festivals, women’s forums, joint  micro-investment projects involving genocide victims and perpetrators in Rwanda, getting multinationals and community organisations round the table together, communications across the conflict lines, getting conflict-divided communities to cooperate on adaptation to climate change – and much more. Consistently, the theme is people coming together, their energy becoming synergy.

In our atomised societies, bringing people together, asking questions, listening carefully for answers, and shaping common actions: never in the past 60 years has there been such a shortage of this, never has it been more needed.

Growing youth unemployment is causing hurt and anger that a return to economic growth will not be enough to calm. Something else is needed too. It really does seem time to expand the mandate of peacebuilding to include the EU countries themselves.

___________________________

* Denmark was ranked top in 2010 in a Gallup poll reported by Forbes in 2010 but more recently may have been shaded out by Norway.

Article Source: Dan Smith’s Blog

Image Source: how will i ever

Living in an era plagued by a nuclear threat and arms race, wherein nations continue to nurse the ambition of producing nuclear weapons or acquiring the means to do, nuclear disarmament is possibly the most vital issue in the field of global security.

There has been a global realization that nuclear disarmament is an important first step towards achieving general and complete disarmament at a later stage. A number of important steps have been taken towards achieving this end. However given the current international environment, the global non-proliferation regime faces challenges on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East and when progress towards nuclear disarmament appears to have stalled, some believe that traditional instruments of non-proliferation policies have lost their relevance.
  
In the light of the above, Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zones (NWFZ) seem to be one of the most promising disarmament mechanisms. They have been recognized by the international community as a “step by step” approach in the process of arms control and disarmament . They are regarded as an effective non-proliferation tool as they fence off one entire region from nuclear weapons. In doing so, they rectify a ‘loophole’ in the NPT which allows the deployment in non-nuclear weapon states of nuclear weapons controlled by the nuclear weapon states . In this sense, NWFZ stop one form of horizontal proliferation.
  
The rationale behind setting up NWFZ is the direct correlation between denuclearization and peace.  All states seek nuclear weapons for their deterrent potential, often pursuing them because they fear that that their neighbours are developing such weapons. In the light of such concerns, many a time, countries refuse to sign global disarmament treaties; if the neighbour that concerns you the most has not joined, what do you gain by joining?  The NWFZ play a significant role in acting as a possible solution for fixing such problems. This agreement, generally in the form of an international treaty prohibits the deployment, use, production, transfer and possession of nuclear weapons within a specified geographical region by all countries within that region. In addition to this, the treaty prohibits nuclear weapon states from deploying weapons in these areas and permits the IAEA to conduct regular inspections of the region’s nuclear activity.  Such treaties act as restraining forces on countries of that region preventing them from building or acquiring a nuclear arsenal by removing the danger of other countries doing the same.
  
The idea of NWFZ was conceived with a view to prevent the emergence of new nuclear weapon states. As early as 1958, the Polish government, which feared the nuclearization of West Germany and wanted to prevent the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory, put forward a proposal called the ‘Rapacki Plan’ for a NWFZ in Central Europe. In the political climate of the 1950s, the plan had no chance of becoming an international agreement. Nonetheless, several of its elements were later adopted as guidelines for the establishment of NWFZ and several such zones came up in different parts of the world in the subsequent years. 
  
The first of such zones was established in Latin America in 1967 through the Treaty of Tlatelolco. All 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries are parties to this treaty (however, all countries became parties to this treaty over a period of 30 years), which bars nuclear material from the area except for peaceful purposes.  Since then the regions adopting NWFZs have been expanding. Following the Treaty of Tlatelolco, a similar treaty was adopted for the South Pacific region in 1985 known as the Treaty of Rarotonga. This zone includes Australia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Western Samoa and prohibits the use of nuclear energy even for peaceful purposes. The treaty of Bangkok was signed next in 1995, whereby a NWFZ was established in Southeast Asia covering the seven members of the ASEAN, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos . 
  
The Pelindaba Treaty was concluded in 1996 creating a NWFZ in Africa but has not yet come into force as it has not been ratified by the required number of states. Austria and Mongolia announced their non-nuclear posture in 1999 and 2000 respectively making them single state zones, while the fifth NWFZ was created in Central Asia covering the five former Soviet Central Asian republics- Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan- in September 2006. 
  
Certain uninhabited areas of the globe have also been formally denuclearised. They include the Antarctica under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty; Outer Space, the moon and other celestial bodies under the 1967 Outer Space treaty and the 1979 Moon agreement; and the seabed, the ocean floor and subsoil thereof under the 1971 Seabed Treaty .
  
Some experts have questioned the relevance and benefits of NWFZs. They believe that the role of NWFZs has been grossly exaggerated. However, NWFZs are only the means towards an ultimate aim; they are not the sole method to eliminate nuclear weapons.  Moreover, experts claim that only the “easy” areas have been included within NWFZs, while areas such as Europe, North America, Northeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, which either include an existing Nuclear Weapon State (NWS) or border with them have not been included into NWFZs.  Even in the so-called ‘easy’ areas, NWFZs have not been fully implemented, the case being Africa, where the treaty has still not come into force. Despite these limitations, the role of NWFZs towards disarmament and a general peace building process can not be minimised. 
  
The objective of this paper is to trace the development of the idea of a NWFZ in the Middle East and to analyse the factors and elements which have stood in the path of the creation of such a zone despite the fact that enthusiasm and initiatives for a NWFZ have come from both sides- Israel and the Arab world. 

A report from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the al-Qaida Strategic Planning Cell (SPC) on the progress of the campaign.

The last report we presented to you was commissioned and prepared in the wake of President Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009 (see “The SWISH Report (15)”, 11 June 2009). At the start of his second year in office, we are pleased to offer you a further analysis. As per as your instructions, we will once again be frank in our assessment of your movement’s prospects.

We will start by summarising the main points of our more recent work for you. For some time we have emphasised that the George W Bush administration was very good for you – much of the United States military activity could easily be represented by your associates as an assault on Islam, with the United States/Israeli links being particularly useful. Iraq, especially, could be represented as a “crusader/Zionist plot aimed at the heart of Islam”. We advised you that a John McCain administration would be greatly preferable to one led by Barack Obama (see “The SWISH Report (11)”, 11 September 2008); and we suggested that Obama’s election would present you with difficulties (see “The SWISH Report (12)” (6 November 2008). The impact of his Cairo speech confirmed this view.

We indicated that from your perspective there were promising developments in a range of locations: among them Somalia (where Washington might become more deeply involved in assaults on local enemies), Iraq (where a continuing war might interfere with planned US troop withdrawals), and Afghanistan (where the new administration showed signs of pursuing what it regarded as a “good war”). There was therefore still the prospect that your “far enemy” would become even more mired in intractable difficulties, with conflict in Afghanistan carrying the added potential for instability in Pakistan.

We also noted aspects of Israel’s behaviour that were of value to you. Among them was the Gaza assault of December 2008-January 2009. “Operation Cast Lead” was widely covered by the Arabic TV news channels and provided sustained and concentrated evidence of Arab suffering. This was highly useful to you, even if your movement receives little direct support from Palestinians.

We highlighted too the the risk for you that Iran might elect a moderate president, thus downgrading the perception in Israel of an existential threat and exposing Israel in turn to the risk that the Obama administration would exert serious pressure on it to compromise with the Palestinians. A settlement would, in our view, be very damaging to your movement. It was then a favourable outcome for you that Iran’s incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, did enough in June 2009 to ensure that he would stay in office.

We further reported – recalling your invitation to be unvarnished in our analysis – the problem that ensued when Islamist governance of the kind you espouse was implemented briefly in some parts of Pakistan: namely, that it had initially delivered stability but rapidly became unpopular. This had echoes of Afghanistan’s experience in the late 1990s, where the early welcome to and acceptance of the incoming Taliban did not last.

We therefore concluded by strongly doubting that your plans for a radical caliphate can be realised as long as you pursue your current approach to governance; and thus recommending that you review your ultimate aims in this area. This, in our view, remains your fundamental long-term predicament. You cannot achieve your aims in governance without a degree of moderation that we think, given your present culture and experience, you are unlikely to develop. Yet that does not mean that your enemy is winning.

A movement in decline?

Many western analysts have for some months taken the view that yours is a movement in decline. Your losses of middle-ranking leaders to drone attacks have been serious; the instability in Pakistan has little to do with the actions of your paramilitary cohorts; the Saudi crackdown on dissidents and the accompanying re-education programme has had some effect; and your movement has not staged any direct attacks on your “far enemy” or those associated with it for many months.

We acknowledge this view but think it is mistaken. You have indeed lost many key people, but they have been rapidly replaced by members of a younger generation. Moreover, whereas many of the older generation had experience against Soviet conscripts in 1980s Afghanistan the new generation has fought highly professional and exceptionally well-equipped American troops, as well as being more radical in outlook.

We would also point to the near-success of the Detroit attack on 25 December 2009; the destruction of key members of a CIA team in Khost province on 30 December; and, above all, the consolidation of your movement in Yemen, where the 3,000 Yemenis who have fought US troops in Iraq in recent years have brought you great benefits.

We would mention too the ongoing violence in Iraq, especially the manner in which your associates in that country have become adept at destroying government offices, despite the levels of security that such operations have to overcome.

The “far enemy” and your prospects

These elements of current experience largely counterbalance the claims that you are in retreat. At the same time, we judge that events may move against you in three respects. The first is that the Barack Obama administration has not yet expanded its military operations in Yemen, even though the Detroit attack was designed to do just that. John McCain would undoubtedly have “gone in big” but Obama has not done so, and is unlikely to greatly expand operations. For your movement this is a real setback.

The second trend is that the modification of the American troop presence in Iraq is not in your favour. In a rather clever move, the US army is establishing a series of support-brigades that are designed to aid the development of Iraqi national forces but also have immediate combat-potential. The number of troops in the country will, we expect, fall from around 120,000 to 50,000 during 2010; this smaller number will have relatively low visibility while being readily available should your associates maintain their activity. The artful part of the US plan is that it will appear that such activity is being controlled by government forces, thus reassuring most Iraqis in a manner that is thoroughly unhelpful to you.

The third circumstance relates to an environment that is more congenial to you, Afghanistan and Pakistan; but there are problems here as well. The Pakistani army’s activities will almost certainly not extend to taking full control of the border districts, so their effects will not incite the levels of violence that you would most wish to see across the country.

Again, the major expansion of foreign troops in Afghanistan is excellent news for you. But there are indications that these forces will make determined efforts to win over elements of the insurgency with bribes, roles in government and other inducements. As we have made clear in the past, the George W Bush administration was your greatest ally, but the new administration is far more intelligent.

Two elements, as yet existing in potential only, may influence the evolving situation. The first is whether Barack Obama has understood that the Afghanistan war is essentially unwinnable, and will require a degree of compromise that is much greater than currently contemplated. The second is that any appearance of serious compromise in the country might cause domestic opposition on a scale that would threaten Obama’s re-election in 2012.

We conclude by drawing a lesson from the experience of recent years: that you cannot achieve your ultimate aim of a radical caliphate founded on your particular understanding of Islam’s distant past, but that you will continue with the conflict even so. Your enemy, for now at least, will pursue its strategy in a manner that delivers real value to you. We suspect, though, that this enemy may be more intelligent than you believe. For you, hubris may turn out to be the greater threat.

We rather think that, given this conclusion, you may not require more work from us; but rest assured that we stand ready to provide further assessments should you so desire.

Wana

South Waziristan

21 January 2010

“The only risk is wanting to stay,” beams a Colombian tourism ad, eager to forget decades of brutal internal conflict; however, the risk of violence remains for many rural communities, particularly as the traditional fight over drugs turns to other high-value goods: natural resource rights.

La Toma: Small Town, Big Threats

In the vacuum left by Colombia’s war on drugs, re-armed paramilitary groups remain a threat to many rural civilians. Organized groups hold footholds, particularly in the northeast and west, where they’ve traditionally hidden and exploited weak governance. Over the past five years, their presence has increased while their aims have changed.

A recent PBS documentary, The War We Are Living, profiles the struggles of two Afro-Colombian women, Francia Marquez and Clemencia Carabali, in the tiny town of La Toma confronting the paramilitary group Las Aguilas Negras, La Nueva Generacion. The Afro-Colombian communities the women represent – long persecuted for their mixed heritage – are traditional artisanal miners, but the Aguilas Negras claim that these communities impede economic growth by refusing to deal with multinationals interested in mining gold on a more industrial scale in their town.

For over seven years, the Aguilas Negras have sent frequent death threats and have indiscriminately killed residents, throwing their bodies over the main bridge in town. At the height of tensions in 2010, they murdered eight gold miners to incite fear. Community leaders know that violence and intimidation by the paramilitary group is part of their plan to scare and displace residents, but they refuse to give in: “The community of La Toma will have to be dragged out dead. Otherwise we’re not going to leave,” admits community leader Francia Marquez to PBS.
La Toma’s predicament is further complicated by corruption and general disinterest from Bogota. Laws that explicitly require the consent of Afro-Colombian communities to mine their land have not always been followed. In 2010, the Department of the Interior and the Institute of Geology and Minerals awarded a contract, without consultation, to Hector Sarria to extract gold around La Toma and ordered 1,300 families to leave their ancestral lands. Tension exploded between the local government and residents.

The community – spurred in part by Marquez and Carabali – geared into action; residents called community meetings, marched on the town, and set up road blocks. As a result, the eviction order was suspended multiple times, and in December 2010, La Toma officially won their case with Colombia’s Constitutional Court. Hector Sarria’s mining license as well as up to 30 other illegal mining permits were suspended permanently. But, as disillusioned residents are quick to point out, the decision could change at any time.

“Wayuu Gold”

Much like the people of La Toma, the indigenous Wayuu people who make their home in northeast Colombia have also found themselves the target of paramilitary wrath. Wayuu ancestral land is rich in coal and salt, and their main port, Bahia Portete, is ideally situated for drug trafficking, making them an enticing target. In 2004, armed men ravaged the village for nearly 12 hours, killing 12, accounting for 30 disappearances, and displacing thousands. Even now, seven years later, those brave enough to lobby for peace face threats.

Now, other natural resource pressures have emerged. In 2011, growing towns nearby started siphoning water from Wayuu lands, and climate change is expected to exacerbate the situation. A 2007 IPCC report wrote that “under severe dry conditions, inappropriate agricultural practices (deforestation, soil erosion, and excessive use of agrochemicals) will deteriorate surface and groundwater quantity and quality,” particularly in the Magdalena river basin where the Wayuu live. Glacial melt will also stress water supplies in other parts of Colombia. The threat is very real for indigenous peoples like the Wayuu, who call water “Wayuu gold.”

“Without water, we have no future,” says Griselda Polanco, a Wayuu woman, in a video produced by UN Women.

The basic right to water has always been a contentious issue for indigenous peoples in Latin America – perhaps most famously in Cochabomba, Bolivia – and Colombia is no different: most recently 10,000 protestors took to the streets in Bogota to lobby for the right to water.

Post-Conflict Land Tenure Tensions

Perhaps the Wayuu and people of La Toma’s best hope is in a new Victims’ Law, ratified in June 2011, but in the short term, tensions look set to increase as Colombia works to implement it. The law will offer financial compensation to victims or surviving close relatives. It also aims to restore the rights of millions of people forced off their land, including many Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples.

But “some armed groups – which still occupy much of the stolen land – have already tried to undermine the process,” reports the BBC. “There are fears that they will respond violently to attempts by the rightful owners or the state to repossess the land.”

Rhodri Williams of TerraNullius, a blog that focuses on housing, land, and property rights in conflict, disaster, and displacement contexts, wrote in an email to New Security Beat that there are many hurdles in the way of the law being successful, including ecological changes that have already occurred:

    “Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the fact that many usurped indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories have been fundamentally transformed through mono-culture cultivation. Previously mixed ecosystems are now palm oil deserts and no one seems to have a sense of how restitution could meaningfully proceed under these circumstances. Compensation or alternative land are the most readily feasible options, but this flies in the face of the particular bond that indigenous peoples typically have with their own homeland. Such bonds are not only economic, in the sense that indigenous livelihoods may be adapted to the particular ecosystem they inhabit, but also spiritual, with land forming a significant element of collective identity. Colombia has recognized these links in their constitution, which sets out special protections for indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, but has failed to apply these rules in practice. For many groups, it may now be too late.”

As National Geographic explorer Wade Davis said at the Wilson Center in April, climate change can represent as much a psychological and spiritual problem for indigenous people as a technical problem. Unfortunately, as land-use issues such as those faced by Afro-Columbian communities, the Wayuu, and many other indigenous groups around the world demonstrate, there is a legal dimension to be overcome as well.

Article Source: New Security Beat

Image Source: Philip Bouchard

SustainableSecurity.org Associate Editor Professor Paul Rogers’s latest article for openDemocracy highlights the fact that many leading military analysts in the United States are increasingly alert to the link between security and climate change. If, at the same time, these analysts could expand their view of whose security is at risk, the policy consequences could be immense. 

Read the full article here.