Category: Article

Max G. Manwaring, a Professor of Military Strategy in the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College has written an interesting piece on what he calls the “new security reality” in which business-as-usual approaches are of little use.

Manwaring focuses particularly on the changing nature of threats posed by non-state actors (insurgents, transnational criminal organizations, terrorists, private armies, state proxies etc.) who are able to exploit trends and circumstances such as poverty, social exclusion, environmental degradation, and political economic-social expectations for violent ends. He argues that from a US military point of view, “the enemy has now become a state or nonstate political actor that plans and implements the long-term multidimensional kinds of indirect and direct, nonmilitary and military, nonlethal and lethal, and internal and external activities that threaten a given society’s general well-being and exploits the root causes of internal and external instability.”

Such a change in the global security environment must surely result in changes in our risk analysis and threat assessments. In a piece for the International Relations and Security Network, Myriam Dunn Cavelty writes that “In order to identify risks, elaborate scenario-based approaches combining expert-knowledge from various fields are used. The aim of these undertakings is to develop a concrete basis for political action by ranking the identified risks by their estimated probability and severity: the more likely and the more damaging, the more urgent the response.” Yet while many governments around the world have begun to place a greater emphasis on understanding the factors that drive conflict (rather than just the instances in which conflicts are expressed in forms of violence around the world), not enough is being done to bridge the gap between threat analysis and policy response. It is one thing to accurately identify new drivers of insecurity, but quite another to find ways of mitigating them through preventive public policies. Central to this must be a greater emphasis on prevention in civil service training and recruitment programmes across a number of areas.

For example, a report by the Center for American Progress released last year noted that “While there have been a number of well-received conflict prevention trainings by and for U.S. government officials, they are too few in number and insufficiently available to all interested foreign affairs officials.”

Of course, for militaries, the changed threat environment that Manwaring and others are pointing to means not only a need for new training but also for a cultural shift in the way they think about the utility of their traditional tool – the use of force. For Manwaring, “…power has changed. It is no longer combat firepower. Power is multidimensional, and more often than not, is nonkinetic (soft). It is directed at the causes as well as perpetrators of violence.”

Addressing the causes of insecurity requires what groups such as Saferworld and others refer to as ‘upstream conflict prevention.’ This can easily become a catch-phrase used by governments and NGOs with little effect on actual policies, a point picked up on by Saferworld in their excellent new briefing on what upstream prevention actually looks like in practice.

Thinking through the consequences of the changing nature of global security, both in terms of threat assessments and policy responses to those threats (military and non-military), will certainly require new approaches at the broad conceptual level. The fact that this is being touched upon by think tanks, NGOs and even army war colleges is surely a good sign – is sustainable security an idea whose time has come?

Image source: Utah National Guard.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced a draft summary of a report that warns of a predicted increase in the number and intensity of extreme weather events.  As outlined below by Marlowe Hood for Agence France Presse, the 800-page report goes some way to addressing a subject largely untouched by their landmark 2007 report on climate change, and adds to the growing body of evidence outlining the potential security implications of a warmer planet.  Their findings, such as more frequent summer heat waves in Europe, and flooding in South Asia are supported by the findings of other climate monitors such as the UK Met Office Hadley Centre (2010).

The report gives weight to the argument for climate change mitigation out of concern for human security, with its most troubling conclusions predicting major shocks for regions already vulnerable and ill-equipped to provide for the security of their inhabitants, such as West Africa and South Asia.  It also cites the probability of extreme weather impacts as ‘very likely’ – at 90% or greater – thereby tackling some of the uncertainty faced by security planners.

 

Regions must brace for weather extremes: UN climate panel

By Marlowe Hood (AFP)

PARIS — Southern Europe will be gripped by fierce heatwaves, drought in North Africa will be more common, and small island states face ruinous storm surges from rising seas, according to a report by UN climate scientists.

The assessment is the most comprehensive probe yet by the 194-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) into the impact of climate change on extreme weather events.

A 20-page draft “summary for policymakers” obtained by AFP says in essence that global warming will create weather on steroids.

It also notes that these amped-up events — cyclones, heat waves, diluvian rains, drought — will hit the world unevenly.

Subject to modification, the draft summary will be examined by governments at a six-day IPCC meeting starting on Monday in the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

In the worst scenario, human settlement in some areas could be wiped out, the report warns.

“If disasters occur more frequently and/or with greater magnitude, some local areas will become increasingly marginal as places to live or in which to maintain livelihoods,” it says.

“In such cases migration becomes permanent and could introduce new pressures in areas of relocation. For locations such as atolls, in some cases it is possible that many residents will have to relocate.”

Three years in the making, the underlying 800-page report synthesises thousands of recent, peer-reviewed scientific studies.

The authors expresses high confidence in some findings but stresses uncertainty in others, mainly due to lack of data.

They also emphasise that the vulnerability of human settlements depends as much or more on exposure, preparedness and the capacity to respond as it does on the raw power of Nature’s violent outburts.

Average global temperatures have risen by nearly 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, with forecasts for future warming ranging between an additional 1.0 C to 5.0 C (1.8-9.0 F) by 2100.

But these worldwide figures mask strong regional differences.

Among the findings:

— Western Europe is at risk from more frequent heat waves, in particular along the Mediterranean rim.

Record-busting temperatures in 2003 responsible for some 70,000 excess deaths across Europe may become closer to average summer peaks by as early as mid-century, the report suggests.

— The eastern and southern United States and the Caribbean will probably face hurricanes amplified by heavier rainfall and increased wind speeds.

Greater population density in exposed areas, rising property values and inadequate infrastructure will boost vulnerability, the draft warns. Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, is seen by some scientists as an example of just such an confluence.

— For small island states, the top threat is incursion from rising seas, which not only erodes shorelines but poisons aquifers and destroys farmland as well.

Already measurable, these impacts are “very likely” — a 90-percent or greater probability — to become worse over time, even intolerable, the report concludes.

“In some cases, there may be a need to consider permanent evacuation,” it says.

— Climate models hold out the prospect of more droughts for West Africa, raising the spectre of famine in regions where daily life is already a hand-to-mouth experience for millions.

Factor in the biggest population boom of any continent over the next half-century and the danger of food “insecurity” in Africa becomes even greater, it cautions.

— In South Asia and Southeast Asia, computer models see a doubling in the frequency of devastating rainstorms. In East Asia, exceptional heatwaves will become hotter, and less exceptional.

By mid-century, temperature peaks in East Asia will be around 2.0 C (3.6 F) more than today, and by 2100 some 4.0 C (7.2 F), even under scenarios that see some efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The IPCC co-won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize after publishing a landmark “assessment report” that sparked worldwide awareness about climate change and its impacts. That document made only a brief reference to extreme weather events, leaving a gap that the panel hopes to fill with the new report.

The draft summary for policymakers will be reviewed, line-by-line, during a joint meeting of the IPCC’s Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, and Working Group II, which examines impacts. It is set to be released on Friday.

Article Source: AFP

Image Source: NASA

The current surge in United States military forces in Afghanistan part of a strategy designed to bring the war to an end from a position of strength. The great strains within the US military mean that the deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan can be sustained only if forces can be withdrawn from Iraq at the scheduled rate: that is, all combat-forces out by August 2010 and the remaining (approximately 50,000) personnel by the end of 2011. The dynamics of violence in Iraq present a serious challenge to this strategy.

Washington is thus engaged in a delicate balancing-act: managing disengagement from Iraq while ensuring that the United States will retain a significant military presence in the country well beyond 2011 in order to exercise a maximum degree of influence. 

A new label

The US forces remaining in Iraq after the substantial withdrawal of August 2010 – which follows the evacuation of troops from Iraqi cities at the end of June 2009 – are intended to perform a variety of roles. Some may be engaged in training Iraqi forces; others in guarding the huge embassy-complex in Baghdad; and still more in what will be described as support-roles at Balad and other air-bases that have acquired a distinct air of permanency. In addition to these core military contingents, there will be many US security-contractors, themselves mostly ex-military. 

What will happen in the sixteen months between August 201o and December 2011 is pivotal. It is probable that at some point the remaining 50,000 American troops in Iraq will be designated “non-combat” – a wordplay that barely conceals the establishment by the US army of a new type of unit known as an “advise-and-assist” brigade (AAB). A new report explains their role:

“These brigades are to have traditional strike capabilities, as well as advisory roles, the ability to augment local forces with ‘combat enablers’ and command and control (C2) tools to support its own manoeuvre units and indigenous units” (see Daniel Wasserbly, “US forces analyse future role of advise-and-assist brigades in Iraq”, Jane’s International Defence Review, January 2010).

In effect, army units are both taking on new roles but retaining their existing and full combat-capabilities. It follows that their phased withdrawal will depend very much on the extent to which Iraq becomes a more peaceful state in which the interests of the United States and other western interests are secured.

An evolving strategy

The pattern of insurgent activity in Iraq suggests that this outcome is uncertain. In the course of 2009, the levels of violence across Iraq tended to stabilise after an initial decline. Around 5,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, and it was the first time since 2006 that there was no significant slump during the period (see “Civilian deaths from violence in 2009”, Iraq Body Count, 31 December 2009). 

There were, moreover, significant changes in the types of violence. The first few months of the year were dominated by major suicide-bombing attacks on mosques or crowded markets in Shi’a areas. The intention was most likely to provoke sectarian antagonism and then encourage fearful members of the Sunni minority to see the insurgents as their defenders, leading in turn to a violent destabilisation of the government in the run-up to the Iraqi elections on 7 March 2010.

In the second half of 2009, paramilitary groups began to target large government ministries in suicide-attacks. These naturally were located in high-security zones, but the assailants found ways of penetrating the cordons; in a series of attacks in August, October and December, five sets of government offices and ministries were hit and scores of civil servants killed (see “Iraq: the path of war”, 18 December 2009).

These attacks in particular caused deep unease among the American and allied agencies, not least because of the levels of security that had to be breached (see Roger Hardy, “Violence returns to Iraq”, BBC News, 8 December 2009). By the end of 2009, there were serious concerns as to whether the Iraqi security forces were capable even of protecting government buildings, and deep suspicions that the insurgents had access to inside information.

The operations extended beyond Baghdad, and they included frontal-assaults on Iraqi security forces. In Anbar’s provincial capital of Ramadi, for example, two suicide-bomb attacks in early January 2010 in a part of the city regarded as safe killed twenty-four people (mostly police-officers) and wounded around sixty, including the provincial governor Qassim Mohammed.

Even this surge left the overall degree of violence in Iraq much lower than it had been in 2007.  In this respect, a further shift in the focus of activity in the past ten days is notable: namely, towards hitting “symbolic” targets and a return to the mass killing of Shi’a civilians.

The biggest coordinated actions in several months were launched on 25 January 2010, when in the space of nine minutes coordinated blasts targeted three major hotels frequented by foreign visitors (and western journalists). Again despite high security, bombs were detonated close to the Ishtar Sheraton, the Babylon and the Hamra hotels, killing thirty-six people and wounding seventy-one (see Anthony Shadid & John Leland, “Baghdad Blasts Shatter Sense of Security in Capital”, New York Times, 26 January 2010). On the following day it was the turn of the Iraqi interior-ministry’s forensics offices, where at least seventeen people were killed and many more wounded.

The hotel incidents aroused most international comment, but the interior-ministry attack caused the greatest domestic worry, especially from civil servants (see Anthony Shadid, “Latest Bombings Add New Layer of Anxiety and Suspicion in Baghdad”, New York Times, 27 January 2010). Indeed, the fact that a great escalation of security since August 2009 has had little apparent effect is creating pervasive fear among government officials (see Khalid al-Ansary & Hadeel Kamil, “Civil Servants Fear More Attacks”, Institute for War and Peace Reporting – Iraq Crisis Report 320, 21 January 2010).

The spate of attacks on government targets has been accompanied by the targeting of Shi’a citizens – in this case, pilgrims taking part in the major religious festival centred on Karbala, 80 kilometres southwest of Baghdad. On 1 February, a female suicide-bomber killed more than forty people among a large crowd of pilgrims; and on 3 February there were three more attacks, including a huge car-bomb in Karbala itself which killed twenty-three people and injured scores more.

A stressed project

This combination of events and trends indicates that powerful paramilitary groups in Iraq (including al-Qaida) retain their ability to organise, plan and coordinate a deadly campaign. Their success in targeting some of the most heavily protected districts of Baghdad and other cities is a sign of a rooted influence among some sections of the Sunni population. Washington’s military and political analysts are deeply concerned that the campaign reflects a reorganisation of the insurgency that could further weaken official Iraqi security forces at the very time that US troops prepare to reduce their own role and depart the scene.

The worry from the Pentagon’s perspective is that the forthcoming “advise-and-assist” brigades may have to do much more than these bland terms suggest: namely, remain in Iraq in large numbers and even engage in direct combat-operations against insurgents. That, in turn, implies that further stresses will be felt throughout the US military just as the surge in Afghanistan reaches its peak later in 2010. 

Most Americans and citizens of other western countries may think that the Iraq war is more or less over, and that whatever remains of the conflict has nothing to do with Afghanistan. It seems probable that both beliefs are wrong. The implications for the United States, and other foreign powers waging the Afghanistan war, are serious.

Do recent crises in food, finance, fuel and climate – and the way that people are responding to them – present us with an opportunity to rethink or ‘reimagine’ what international development means and how it needs to change?

A new initiative of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex brings together 34 research projects exploring crises and responses to crises. The initiative aims to identify new thoughts and ideas on international development from across the globe and to bring them together to build a new consensus on the conduct and performance of international development in the 21st century.

The Reimagining Development initiative will focus on the following questions:

What is the evidence of the impacts of the multiple crises (financial, energy, food, confidence) on lives and livelihoods?

What is the evidence that significant shifts in values, relationships, ideas, methods, and behaviors are taking place?

What are some alternatives to the status gap that a particular place/space proposes in terms of ideas, values, relationships, methods, behaviors and knowledge?

Based on accumulated knowledge in the place/space what specifically has to change (or not) to support any alternatives emerging? And what are the best strategies and tactics for effecting change?

More information on the initiative is available here.

A new report from the World Economic Forum highlights the increasing importance of marginalisation as a security issue over the coming decades. The seventh edition of the WEF’s Global Risks report describes what they see as the ‘seeds of dystopia’ threatening both social and political stability across the world.

The report describes dystopia as “the opposite of a utopia, describes a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” The reality is that after years of unequal growth and a growing divide between elites and non-elites both between and within countries, this description has become a reality for the majority of the world’s population. It would seem that the neoliberal economic consensus which has dominated the WEF’s own discussions for years has finally caught up with the long-term consequences of a global free market unable to effectively price externalities be they social, environmental or even strategic.

The report’s analysis of the interconnections between a number of risks reveals “a constellation of fiscal, demographic and societal risks signalling a dystopian future for much of humanity.”

Yet this is not just a problem for the developing world which the West can view from afar. The report warns that the states that could make up this dystopian future could be “developed economies where citizens lament the loss of social entitlements, emerging economies that fail to provide opportunities for their young population or to redress rising inequalities, or least-developed economies where wealth and social gains are declining.”

The report is part of a growing awareness of the linkages between seemingly unrelated events and flashpoints such as the Arab Awakening, the “Occupy” movements worldwide and civil unrest in countries from Thailand to Chile, to Israel to India. The link according to a report is a common and “growing frustration among citizens with the political and economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by greater technological connectivity.” The importance of this is that what appear to be simply isolated national problems may in fact be the symptoms of a much larger global trend (or more accurately a series of interlinking trends). This means that ad-hoc national approaches are insufficient for genuinely addressing the challenges of a marginalised majority world, as the WEF report puts it, “A macro and longer-term interpretation of these events highlights the need to improve the management of global economic and demographic transformations that stand to increasingly define global social trends in the decade to come.”

Perhaps the most worrying finding of the report is that “As the world grows increasingly complex and interdependent, the capacity to manage the systems that underpin our prosperity and safety is diminishing.” As the tagline of this website says, we need global responses to global threats. 

The full report can be read here. 

 

Image source: ectopic (ibandera). 

 

In a speech to Future Maritime Operations Conference at the Royal United Service Institute, London, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change examines the security implications of climate change:

“We cannot be 100% sure that our enemies will attack our country; but we do not hesitate to prepare for the eventuality. The same principle applies to climate change, which a report published by the Ministry of Defence has identified as one of the four critical issues that will affect everyone on the planet over the next 30 years.

Around the world, a military consensus is emerging. Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’. It will make unstable states more unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely. And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change.”

Read the full speech here: DECC

Image source: DECCgovuk

As the global population soars toward nine billion by 2045, this corner of Africa shows what’s at stake in the decades ahead. The Rift is rich in rainfall, deep lakes, volcanic soil, and biodiversity. It is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth. A desperate competition for land and resources—and between people and wildlife—has erupted here with unspeakable violence. How can the conflict be stopped? Will there be any room left for the wild?

The mwami remembers when he was a king of sorts. His judgment was sovereign, his power unassailable. Since 1954 he, like his father and grandfather before him, has been the head of the Bashali chiefdom in the Masisi District, an undulating pastoral region in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Though his name is Sylvestre Bashali Mokoto, the other chiefs address him as simply doyen—seniormost. For much of his adult life, the mwami received newcomers to his district. They brought him livestock or other gifts. He in turn parceled out land as he saw fit.

Today the chief sits on a dirty couch in a squalid hovel in Goma, a Congolese city several hours south of Masisi. His domain is now the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for more than a decade yet has largely eluded the world’s attention. Eastern Congo has been overtaken by thousands of Tutsi and Hutu and Hunde fighting over what they claim is their lawful property, by militias aiming to acquire land by force, by cattlemen searching for less cluttered pastures, by hordes of refugees from all over this fertile and dangerously overpopulated region of East Africa seeking somewhere, anywhere, to eke out a living. Some years ago a member of a rebel army seized the mwami’s 200-acre estate, forcing him, humiliated and fearing for his safety, to retreat to this shack in Goma.

The city is a hornet’s nest. As recently as two decades ago Goma’s population was perhaps 50,000. Now it is at least 20 times that number. Armed males in uniform stalk its raggedy, unlit streets with no one to answer to. Streaming out of the outlying forests and into the city market is a 24/7 procession of people ferrying immense sacks of charcoal on bicycles or wooden, scooter-like chukudus. North of the city limits seethes Nyiragongo volcano, which last erupted in 2002, when its lava roared through town and wiped out Goma’s commercial district. At the city’s southern edge lies the silver cauldron of Lake Kivu—so choked with carbon dioxide and methane that some scientists predict a gas eruption in the lake could one day kill everyone in and around Goma.

The mwami, like so many far less privileged people, has run out of options. His stare is one of regal aloofness. Yet despite his cuff links and trimmed gray beard, he is not a chief here in Goma. He is only Sylvestre Mokoto, a man swept into the hornet’s nest, with no land left for him to parcel out. As his guest, a journalist from the West, I have brought no gifts, only demeaning questions. “Yes, of course my power has been affected greatly,” the mwami snaps at me. “When others back up their claims with guns, there is nothing I can do.”

The reign of the mwamis is finished in this corner of East Africa. The region has become a staging ground for violence of mind-reeling proportions over the past few decades: the murder and abduction of tens of thousands in northern Uganda, the massacre of more than a million in the genocides of Rwanda and Burundi, followed by two wars in eastern Congo, the last of which, known as the Great African war because so many neighboring countries were involved, is estimated to have killed more than five million people, largely through disease and starvation—the deadliest war since World War II. Armed conflicts that started in one country have seeped across borders and turned into proxy wars, with the region’s governments each backing various rebel groups, a numbing jumble of acronymed militias—the LRA, FDLR, CNDP, RCD, AFDL, MLC, the list goes on—vying for power and resources in one of the richest landscapes in all of Africa.

The horrific violence that has occurred in this place—and continues in lawless eastern Congo despite a 2009 peace accord—is impossible to understand in simple terms. But there is no doubt that geography has played a role. Erase the borders of Uganda, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania and you see what unites these disparate political entities: a landscape shaped by the violent forces of shifting plate tectonics. The East African Rift System bisects the horn of Africa—the Nubian plate to the west moving away from the Somalian plate to the east—before forking down either side of Uganda.

The western rift includes the Virunga and Rwenzori mountain ranges and several of Africa’s Great Lakes, where the deep rift has filled with water. Called the Albertine Rift (after Lake Albert), this 920-mile-long geologic crease of highland forests, snowcapped mountains, savannas, chain of lakes, and wetlands is the most fecund and biodiverse region on the African continent, the home of gorillas, okapis, lions, hippos, and elephants, dozens of rare bird and fish species, not to mention a bounty of minerals ranging from gold and tin to the key microchip component known as coltan. In the 19th century European explorers like David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke came here searching for the source of the Nile. They gazed in awe at the profusion of lush vegetation and vast bodies of water, according to the scholar Jean-Pierre Chrétien: “In the heart of black Africa, the Great Lakes literally dazzled the whites.”

The paradox of the Albertine Rift is that its very richness has led to scarcity. People crowded into this area because of its fertile volcanic soil, its plentiful rainfall, its biodiversity, and its high altitude, which made it inhospitable to mosquitoes and tsetse flies and the diseases they carry. As the population soared, more and more forest was cut down to increase farm and grazing land. Even in the 19th century the paradise that visitors beheld was already racked with a central preoccupation: Is there enough for everyone?

Today that question hangs over every square inch of the Albertine Rift, where the fertility rate is among the highest in the world, and where violence has erupted between humans and against animals—in a horror show of landgrabs, spastic waves of refugees, mass rapes, and plundered national parks, the last places on Earth where wildlife struggles to survive undisturbed by humans. For the impoverished residents of the region, overcrowding has spawned an anxiety so primal and omnipresent that one hears the same plea over and over again:

We want land!

The suspected lion killer sits near the shore of Lake George and plays a vigorous board game known as omweso with one of his fellow cattlemen. He looks up, introduces himself as Eirfazi Wanama, and says he cannot tell me his age or the number of his children. “We Africans don’t count our offspring,” he declares, “because you muzungu don’t want us to produce so many children.” Muzungu is slang for whites in this part of the world. Wanama offers a wry smile and says, “You don’t have to beat about the bush. Some lions were killed here, and the rangers came in the middle of the night and arrested me.”

In late May 2010 two rangers in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park saw vultures hovering over a field in the park about a mile from Wanama’s village of Hamukungu and discovered the dead bodies of five poisoned lions. Nearby were two cow carcasses that had been laced with a bluish pesticide called carbofuran. Early intelligence pointed to Wanama; another suspect fled the area. “They held me for a day,” Wanama says. “They have released me from their investigation. I am not running away.”

Hamukungu is located within the boundaries of the park, whose predominant tourist attraction is its population of lions, which has dwindled by about 40 percent in less than a decade. “The number of villagers has increased,” says Wilson Kagoro, the park’s community conservation warden, “as has the number of cattle. And this has created a big conflict between them and us. They sneak into the park late at night to let their cattle graze. When this happens, the lions feast on the cows.” Given that parkland grazing is illegal, the aggrieved pastoralists are left with no legal recourse. But that does not mean that they are without countermeasures. “We are surviving on God’s mercy,” Wanama says when I ask how so many people manage to survive on so little land. “The creation of this national park has made us so poor! People have to live on the land!” It’s a common complaint in the overcrowded villages that ring the region’s networks of parks and reserves.

Queen Elizabeth Park was established in 1952 with the growing recognition that this region had the highest biomass of large mammals of anyplace on Earth, according to Andrew Plumptre, director of the Albertine Rift Programme of the Wildlife Conservation Society. But social and political upheaval made it difficult to protect the wildlife. Over the decades poachers and desperate villagers raided the parks and decimated the populations of elephants, hippos, and lions. By 1980 the number of elephants had dropped from 3,000 to 150 in Queen Elizabeth.

Virunga National Park in eastern Congo—Africa’s oldest, founded in 1925—is among the most imperiled, with many people already settled inside its boundaries. The countryside, once teeming with charismatic megafauna, is eerily vacant. The park’s tourist lodges are gutted. Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, much of the park has been closed to tourists.

The park is a war zone. Rodrigue Mugaruka is the warden of Virunga’s central sector, Rwindi. He is a former child soldier who participated in the 1997 overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator of the DRC (then called Zaire). In eastern Congo the vacuum created by Mobutu’s exit led to fierce competition among proxy armies and various militias for its gold, charcoal, tin, and coltan. Now Mugaruka is doing battle with militias—called Mai-Mai fighters—who control illegal fishing and charcoal production in many of the villages that have cropped up inside the park on the western shore of Lake Edward. He recently regained control of his sector from thousands of Congolese soldiers stationed there to fight off the militias. Since the government rarely paid the soldiers, they resorted to killing the wildlife for food.

Mugaruka’s efforts to enforce park regulations do not sit well with the tens of thousands of Congolese who have fled areas of conflict and taken up residence in the villages. In the fishing hamlet of Vitshumbi the warden orders park rangers to chop up, douse in kerosene, and set fire to several unlicensed fishing boats, illegal nets, and bags of charcoal, while the villagers look on bitterly. In a fishing boat dented from gunfire he ferries us to Lulimbi village, from which we drive to the Ishasha River bordering Uganda, where 96 percent of the park’s hippo population has been slaughtered since 1976 and sold for bush meat by militias. Later we head to the park’s Mount Tshiaberimu subsector, where an armed patrol provides round-the-clock protection to 15 eastern lowland gorillas from militias and from villagers who have been encouraged by politicians to claim parkland.

Rodrigue Mugaruka knows that he’s a marked man. The Mai-Mai—and the Congolese businessmen who fund them—have made him a target. “Their objective is to chase us out of the park for good,” says the warden. “When we seize a boat and a net, the businessmen tell the Mai-Mai, ‘Before we put another net in the water, you must go kill a ranger.’ Three of mine have been killed in the lake. If you consider the whole area, more than 20 rangers have been killed.”

Last January, Mugaruka’s men were ambushed with a rocket-propelled grenade by militia fighters along a road that goes through the center of the park. Three rangers and five Congolese soldiers were killed. Government officials soon received a petition signed by 100,000 villagers demanding that Virunga National Park be reduced in size by nearly 90 percent. The petitioners gave the government three months to release the land, which they claimed belonged to them. After that, warned the petition, the villagers would all grow crops in the park—and defend their activities with arms.

“We want land!”

The speaker gives his name as Charles, a 24-year-old sitting on a freshly cut log in a forest, a machete in his hand. He does not belong here, in Uganda’s Kagombe Forest Reserve. Then again, maybe he does. No less than a presidential order has stopped the evictions of those who’ve encroached on forest reserves and wetlands. Charles says a government minister recently visited the Kagombe inhabitants. “He told us we can stay,” he says, grinning. The minister’s cronies have an election coming up, and the best way to placate voters is to promise them land.

Charles and a few other pioneering young villagers moved into the forest in 2006. “We’d been living on our grandparents’ property, but there were too many people on the land already,” he says. “We heard people talk about how there was free land this way.” A migrant group, the Bakiga, had already begun to settle in Kagombe, and when the National Forestry Authority tried to evict them, Uganda’s President Yoweri Muse­veni—himself facing reelection—issued the executive order forbidding evictions. Thereupon a few local politicians urged the native Banyoro people, who include Charles and his friends, to grab some forestland as well, lest all of Kagombe wind up inhabited by nonlocals.

Charles and his friends each claimed about seven acres of timberland and began slashing away. They built grass-thatched huts, feed-storage sheds, a road, and a church. They planted corn, bananas, cassava, and Irish potatoes. Then they sent for their wives and began to have more children. Today Charles is one of about 3,000 inhabitants of the forest reserve and has no desire to leave. “We’re very well off here,” he says.

The forest, meanwhile, sometimes looks like a smoky wasteland, as people use fire to clear the forest for crops. The damage goes beyond the aesthetic: Kagombe serves as one of a series of connective forests that make up a wildlife corridor for chimps and other animals. As Sarah Prinsloo of the Wildlife Conservation Society observes, “The health of the wildlife population in these parks is dependent on corridors like Kagombe.” The habitat destruction has contributed to a plunging animal population throughout the region. In Kagombe itself most wildlife has been hunted out.

The forestry authority’s sector manager, Patrick Kakeeto, contemplates the devastation with a despairing smile. “They’re cutting all of this down,” he says. “And we can’t touch them. For us, it’s a kind of psychoprofessional torture.”

How did this land of plenty descend into a perilous free-for-all? Dig deep into its history and it turns out the Albertine Rift has been shaped by mistaken ideas about its ethnic identities. The archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that by as early as A.D. 500 various peoples had migrated into the region and forged a heterogeneous society that spoke similar Bantu languages and supported itself with both farming and herding. In the 15th century centralized kingdoms such as Bunyoro and Rwanda arose, along with exclusive classes of pastoralists, who distinguished themselves from farmers by their dress and a diet of milk, meat, and blood. Over time these pastoralists became distinct from the rest of the population, and their influence grew.

By the time European explorer John Hanning Speke arrived in the late 19th century, he was astonished by the highly organized kingdoms he encountered, complete with courts and diplomats. He assumed the elite pastoralists, known as Hima or Tutsi, were a superior race of Nilotic people (from what is now Ethiopia) who had invaded the Great Lakes and subjugated what he regarded as the lowly indigenous Bantu farmers, such as Iru or Hutu. “The states of the Great Lakes challenged derogatory racial beliefs about African intellect and ability,” says archaeologist Andrew Reid. The idea of a Nilotic invasion was a way to explain away the existence of sophisticated kingdoms in the heart of Africa. The only problem: It wasn’t true.

That didn’t stop the Tutsi and other elites from embracing the story of their exotic origins to better differentiate themselves from the majority Hutu. And after East Africa was divided between European powers in the late 19th century, the Germans and then the Belgians were only too happy to co-opt what appeared to be the natural social hierarchy and give preference to what they believed to be the superior minority of Tutsi.

Despite the oft-cited physical differences between the two groups—the Tutsi are supposed to be taller, lighter skinned, and thinner lipped than the Hutu—it was so difficult to tell the two apart that by 1933 the Belgians had resorted to issuing identity cards: The 15 percent who owned cattle or had certain physical features were defined as Tutsi, and the rest were Hutu. (Members of one family sometimes ended up in different groups.) These identity cards, officially codifying a caste system that separated one people into two, would be used during the Rwanda genocide to single out who would live and who would be murdered. By the time the colonizers granted the countries independence in the early 1960s, ethnic hostilities between Tutsi and Hutu had already led to waves of killings and retaliatory murders. Today tensions between these two groups continue to play out in the Congo.

But clearly the Rwanda genocide was the result of more than Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred. The latter years of the 20th century had brought a sobering recognition that there was in fact not enough for everyone in the Albertine Rift—and with that, catastrophe. An alarming rise in population coincided with a slump in coffee and tea prices in the 1980s, leading to great deprivation; poverty led to an even greater strain on the land. Although it’s true that a country like the Netherlands had a population density as high as Rwanda did at this time, it also benefited from mechanized, high-yield agriculture. Rwanda’s dependence on traditional subsistence farming meant that the only way to grow more food was to move onto ever more marginal land.

By the mid-1980s every acre of arable land outside the parks was being farmed. Sons were inheriting increasingly smaller plots of land, if any at all. Soils were depleted. Tensions were high. Belgian economists Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau conducted a study of land disputes in one region in Rwanda before the genocide and found that more and more households were struggling to feed themselves on little land. Interviewing residents after the genocide, the researchers found it was not uncommon to hear Rwandans argue that “war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” Thomas Malthus, the famed English economist who posited that population growth would outstrip the planet’s ability to sustain it unless kept in check by starvation, disease, or war, couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

André and Platteau do not suggest that the genocide was an inevitable outcome of population pressures, since the killings were clearly instigated by the decisions of power-hungry politicians. But several scholars, including French historian Gérard Prunier, are convinced that a scarcity of land set the stage for the mass killing. In short, the genocide gave landless Hutu the cover they needed to initiate class warfare. “At least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants … was the feeling that there were too many people on too little land,” Prunier observed in The Rwanda Crisis, “and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be more for the survivors.”

The eastern Congo village of Shasha has become a grim crossroads between major destinations in North Kivu for armed groups seeking land, minerals, and revenge. Mines holding eastern Congo’s abundant tin, coltan, and gold are almost exclusively under the control of these roving bands—Hutu and Tutsi paramilitaries, Mai-Mai militias, army soldiers—each descending on Shasha in a macabre rotation, one after another, month after month, in a wave of mayhem.

A woman named Faida weeps quietly as she recalls what happened to her a year ago. She is petite, with fatigued eyes and a voice just above a whisper. In her hands is a letter from her husband, demanding that she leave their house because he feared she might have contracted HIV from the men who raped her.

On that fateful day Faida was on the same road she always took after working in the peanut fields. She would walk an hour and a half to the market at Minova with the peanuts on her back, then return home with firewood. Faida was 32 and of the Hunde ethnic group, married with six children, and for 16 years this had been her routine. She believed no one would attack a woman in broad daylight.

The three men were rebel Hutu. She tried to run, but the load on her back was heavy. The men told her to choose between life and death. Then they dragged her into a cattle field. She lost consciousness.

Today she and her children live with neighbors, and she cannot work. Her husband took another wife. The physical damage done is extensive. “I’m really suffering,” she says. “Please help me with medicine, I beg you.”

Shasha’s population is about 10,000, twice what it was in 1994, and its story is, writ small, that of eastern Congo. A Hunde stronghold since antiquity, Shasha saw an influx of Hutu in the 1930s, when the Belgian occupiers brought them in to work their plantations. Later, in the wake of the 1994 genocide, thousands more Hutu came as refugees. Land disputes became overheated and were frequently resolved at the point of a gun. The area’s vast mineral wealth only made things worse. Scarcity and abundance exist here side by side, fueling grievances as well as greed, both spiraling into inexplicable violence against innocents.

Goma women’s advocate Marie Gorette estimates that more than 800 females in the village have been raped. They ranged in age, she says, from nine months to 80. One afternoon we sit in a hut while women enter one by one to tell their stories. Odette is strong shouldered and wears a blue print dress. It happened to her just ten days ago. Her 12-year-old son found her unconscious in the cassava fields where she had been working. Justine looks much younger than 28 and has lively eyes. The Congolese Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda (under house arrest in Rwanda since 2009) sent CNDP troops into Shasha in 2008. Justine was far from the only one—many of her relatives and neighbors were raped as well. Another woman, 42, tells how Congolese Tutsi rebels barged into her house four years ago, took all the family’s money, and raped her. “It’s a secret,” she says, and I sadly realize she’s told me her story only because she thinks I can help her.

Some 200,000 females in the Congo were raped between 1996 and 2008, and more than 8,000 in the eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu in 2009 alone. And despite international attention following a 2009 visit to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the rapes continue. Just as the “Hutu power” Rwandans sought to eradicate the Tutsi in 1994 by massacring women and children, Shasha’s invaders are human heat-seeking missiles aimed at the village’s women. “Because it’s the corridor, Shasha is the worst place in the region when it comes to mass rapes,” says Gorette. “They use rape as a weapon to destroy a generation.”

I am somewhere in Rwanda when my car breaks down. A man pulls over to where I’m hovering over the smoking engine and offers to drive me the remaining 70 or so miles to Kigali. “If this were the Congo, you would be in big trouble,” he says laughing.

The 41-year-old man’s name is Samuel, and though he is from the farming community of Rwamagana, his vocation is carpentry. By the region’s standards, Samuel’s family is small. “Only four children,” he says. “I think that’s the ideal size.” Schools cost Samuel about $650 per child each term. “But I think education is the solution. Otherwise people have no work. They just resort to having lots of children and stealing to survive.” The broad-faced man smiles and says, “I’m very optimistic about our country. The future is indeed bright.”

It is no small miracle that the country where the Albertine Rift’s anxieties and resentments metastasized into genocide would, less than two decades later, emerge as the region’s beacon of hope. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame drove out the Hutu leaders of the massacre and helped set up a Tutsi regime that has been in power ever since. While many credit Kagame with bringing stability and economic growth to this troubled region, several historians have come to view his regime as a repressive autocracy that favors the Tutsi minority. He’s come under harsh criticism for human rights abuses against dissidents and for using paramilitary groups to divert mineral riches from eastern Congo to Rwanda. Though Rwanda has largely stopped the direct plunder of resources that occurred during and after Congo’s last war, Kagame’s plans to build up his country undoubtedly depend on covertly exploiting Congo’s mineral wealth.

Still, there’s no denying the long list of successes Kagame has piled up in an incredibly impoverished place. Rwanda is now one of the safest and most stable countries in this part of Africa. The roads are paved, the landscape is tidy, and the government has launched an ambitious campaign to preserve what little forest is left in Rwanda. Government programs train poachers for alternative livelihoods. An event known as Kwita Izina has raised awareness of wildlife conservation with an annual ceremony to name every newborn mountain gorilla in Rwanda. A law passed this past June provides compensation for any livestock—or humans—hurt or killed by wildlife. And hundreds of thousands of acres owned by wealthy landowners in the country’s Eastern Province were shrewdly redistributed to citizens in 2008, before Kagame’s reelection—though the president and other influential cronies continue to own sprawling estates.

Unlike Uganda, where President Museveni has declared its high fertility rate a tool in building a productive workforce, Rwanda is tackling its high fertility rate with aggressive family planning. “When I look at the problem of Rwanda’s population, it starts with the high fertility rate among our poor women. And this impacts everything—the environment, the relationship between our people, and the country’s development in general,” says Jean-Damascène Ntawukuliryayo, the deputy speaker of parliament. “For all the visible progress Rwanda is making, if we don’t address this matter, then it will create a bottleneck, and our development will be unsustainable.”

Yet even if Rwanda’s fertility rate falls below replacement level, as it’s projected to do by 2050, its population will still triple beyond what it was before the 1994 genocide. Forty-three percent of Rwandans are under the age of 15; 30 percent are illiterate; 81 percent live in rural areas. To feed its burgeoning population and protect the wildlife still left in its parks, Rwanda will need to figure out how to produce much more food on much less land—a tall order in this part of the world. Even Kagame’s strongman government can do only so much so fast.

“The average family of six has little more than half an acre here,” says Pierre Rwanyindo Ruzirabwoba, director of Rwanda’s Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace. “And of course those children will have children. Where will they grow crops? That small piece of land has been overworked and is no longer fertile. I’m afraid another war could be around the corner.”

Another full-scale war in the heart of the Albertine Rift? It’s an awful thing to contemplate. Ruzirabwoba fretfully ponders the way out. High-yield farming techniques, of course. Better job opportunities in the city. And “a good relationship with our neighboring countries.”

Then he shrugs and says, “Perhaps some of our people can migrate to the Congo.”

This article originally appeared on National Geographic

The new British Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, has now announced the beginning of the long-awaited Strategic Defence Review and the indications are that the process will be completed before the end of 2010. Given Britain’s role in the European Union and NATO, and its close links with the United States, the outcome of the review will be watched with interest in many countries.

The incoming Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government believes that a Strategic Defence Review is urgently required for a number of reasons, including

• the inability of the UK Ministry of Defence to maintain current commitments and programmes on present-day funding levels;
• the high cost of existing and future programmes;
• the recent experience of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how far the methods that have been employed, have achieved their goals; and
• serious constraints on UK public spending that are likely to persist for up to a decade.

The new government has also set up a cross-departmental National Security Council that will further develop the trend to a national security strategy established by the Labour government. While this is a welcome move, it comes in the context of recent programme decisions made ahead of the review that, if not reversed, will direct the defence posture in such a narrow manner that a wider and much-needed reappraisal of Britain’s security will prove impossible. Instead, questions need to be asked about what is needed to limit conflict and create a more peaceful environment in an era of new global security challenges.

The two most significant programmes are:

• The aircraft carrier/F-35 strike aircraft programme
• Like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear system

These are very substantial in terms of costs, but their greater importance is in the manner in which they will dictate a particular role for the UK defence posture – what is in effect a scaled down version of the much larger US global power projection capability. Essentially, they will determine a role for Britain in international security which is out of date and more related to the Cold War, bearing little relation to the issues of global insecurity and conflict, which will be dominant in the next two to three decades. 

Britain’s National Security Strategy

In the last two years of the Labour government, some interesting attempts were made to inject some new thinking into UK defence policy. The first was the National Security Strategy of March 2008, and more recently, there was a Defence Green Paper published earlier this year. Following the Green Paper, the Conservative Party, then in opposition, published its own national security Green Paper, A Resilient Nation.

While the National Security Strategy of 2008 was published in an environment in which the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan were hugely prominent, it did seek to look well beyond the immediate circumstances:

“The Cold War threat has been replaced by a diverse but interconnected set of threats and risks, which affect the United Kingdom directly and also have the potential to undermine wider international stability. They include international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics and transnational crime. These and other threats and risks are driven by a diverse and interconnected set of underlying factors, including climate change, competition for energy, poverty and poor governance, demographic change and globalisation.” (NSS para 1.3)

This wider approach with its recognition of the underlying trends of climate change, marginalisation and energy insecurity, also comes through to a more limited extent in the recent Green Papers, albeit with more of an emphasis on national security in the Conservative contribution. It goes some way towards the analysis of global challenges, developed in recent years by Oxford Research Group and other organisations that see the need for a radical re-thinking of the approaches of countries such as Britain to international security (see Global Security After the War on Terror).

While ORG is not arguing against the maintenance of defence forces per se, it places much more emphasis on long-term conflict-prevention. It argues that the more substantive problems that will be faced in the coming decades, stem from a dangerous combination of severe environmental constraints, especially climate change and energy shortages, and an increasingly divided world community in which the benefits of globalised economic growth have been excessively concentrated in about one-fifth of the global population. In such circumstances there is the very strong risk of societal breakdown as well as desperate responses from within the majority of the world’s people who are marginalised and will be under increasing environmental constraints.

There is the further risk that the main emphasis for security policies will be on suppressing such actions and maintaining the status quo, rather than responding to the underlying drivers of insecurity. ORG has long argued that the much more appropriate response is to embark on a transition to low carbon economies to combat the fundamental problem of climate change, while developing a socio-economic system that acts to reverse the dangerous trend towards the marginalisation of the majority of the world’s people. It also argues the need to shift resources to the development of conflict resolution techniques to deal with radical disagreement.

What is significant about some of the thinking in the National Security Strategy and the two Green Papers is that the analysis of future dangers, implicit in an environmentally constrained and economically divided world, is present and the risks are acknowledged. What is not done, however, is to follow this through in terms of what it means for an integrated strategy, involving major aspects of economic and environmental policy. Moreover, the timing of two major military projects that are in the early yet crucial stages of their development means that unless decisions are reversed, the possibility of entering into a genuinely far-sighted strategic security review is greatly diminished, if not rendered impossible.

The first project is the planned replacement of the Trident nuclear force with a broadly similar system and the second is the building of two very large new aircraft carriers deployed with a maritime variant of the US-produced F-35 strike aircraft. The carriers will be the largest warships ever to see service with the Royal Navy and will give the UK a global strike capability that it has not had for close to forty years, harking back almost to the days of Empire.

The sheer scale of the two projects – the planned nuclear force replacement and the carrier procurement – will inevitably determine the UK defence posture. In essence, the UK’s ability to intervene in conflicts in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere will be much increased, and it will have a nuclear strike capability that could, in extreme circumstances, be available in support of operations in overseas theatres.

However, the cost of constructing and deploying such systems will be so high, especially at a time of financial stringency, that there will be relatively little left for other programmes. What is more, the whole tenor of the defence posture will be one of maintaining control in a fragile and uncertain world, rather than addressing the underlying trends likely to result in that fragility and uncertainty – a matter of keeping the lid on problems or “liddism” as it has been termed.

Trident

Britain’s current nuclear force comprises four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines, each capable of deploying with 16 missiles. While these are usually fitted with three independently-targetable warheads of about 100 kilotons of explosive power (8x the Hiroshima bomb), some are deployed with a much smaller single warhead for what has variably been called tactical or sub-strategic use. Neither term is now used, not least as they give the impression of a willingness to use nuclear weapons in less than extreme circumstances of national survival. – UK governments prefer to avoid acknowledging this aspect of the UK nuclear posture.

Britain maintains its nuclear force with at least one missile submarine at sea at any one time – what is termed “continuous at-sea deterrence” or CASD.

The Trident system is due for renewal by the 2020s and current plans involve a broadly like-for-like replacement. Given that the Aldermaston/Burghfield nuclear weapons development and production complex in Berkshire costs around £1 billion a year, and given the cost of the new submarines and the high cost of deploying them with numerous support facilities, the likely life-time cost of replacing Trident will approach £100 billion, much of it front-loaded to the next 10-15 years. The intention of the previous Labour government was to exclude the Trident replacement programme from a post-election Strategic Defence Review. That was also the intention of the Conservatives when in opposition and is likely to remain the case, in spite of some Liberal-Democrat concerns over the Trident replacement issue.

Given the commitment of significant world political figures, including President Obama, to the idea of moving towards a nuclear-free world, there are major steps that the British government could take to further progress in that direction. They include:

• Cutting the UK nuclear stockpile from the present size, estimated at 160 warheads, to under one hundred;
• Ending continuous at-sea deterrence and mothballing one of the four submarines; and
• Ruling out the hugely expensive like-for-like replacement of Trident and including the options of going for a much more limited nuclear system, or even considering phasing out nuclear weapons altogether.

Such moves do not in themselves involve the UK giving up its nuclear forces in the short term but they would signal a strong commitment to substantially lower nuclear forces while also leaving open the possibility of going further, should the international and domestic political environments allow. They would also make it easier to have a comprehensive security review which would not be possible if the nuclear question is excluded.

The Aircraft Carriers

The second major issue is the carrier programme. The two new carriers, the 65,000-tonne Queen Elizabeth-class ships, each nearly three times the size of the current Invincible-class ships, are large vessels capable of a range of uses, but the reality is that they are intended as force-projection warships equipped with an extremely expensive new strike aircraft. The combined total order for the carriers and the RAF is expected to be 130 planes at a cost per plane of £94 million, although this cost continues to rise. Along with escorts and support ships, maintaining and deploying the carriers will dominate naval capabilities for the lifetime of the ships.

The Lockheed F-35, in particular, is already a greatly troubled project with substantial cost overruns and long delays. In some ways, the problems facing this project are reminiscent of the Eurofighter project, a Cold War-era plane that should have been cancelled in the early 1990s but had built up too much momentum for politicians to take such a decision. Famously described in 1997 by a former defence minister, Alan Clark, as “essentially flawed and out of date”, he commented on its role in job creation thus: “we must find a less extravagant way of paying people to make buckets with holes in them”. Eurofighter survived – as the Typhoon – in smaller numbers than planned, and was eventually adapted at great cost, to fulfil some new roles. at great cost, to fulfil some new roles. It was, though, very much an example of a project overtaken by events. The US F-35 programme is also essentially a project of the 1990s.

The planned British purchase of F35 strike aircraft in combination with the carrier programme will be more of an imperial throwback than a real contribution to Britain’s security.

The entire UK carrier/F-35 programme should be cancelled. Replacements might include two much smaller sea control ships utilising the rapidly developing UCAV (drone) technologies, with a much scaled-down purchase of one of the F-35 alternatives currently available.

The real problem here is that a serious review of Britain’s security cannot be done if the future defence posture is already dictated by Trident replacement and the carrier/F-35 programme. The right option therefore is to scale down the existing Trident force, review its replacement and cancel the carrier/F-35 programme before much more money is wasted.

The Issue of Procurement

Perhaps the most serious financial issue facing the Ministry of Defence is the persistent failure to control the cost of individual programmes. Among current programmes that have hugely overrun their original estimates, the most extreme is the replacement of the Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft with the Nimrod MRA4. This was due to be deployed in 2003, was subject to innumerable delays and cost increases and will not now enter service until 2012. Only 9 aircraft will be procured instead of the original 21, largely because of the huge cost increases currently estimated at around £400 million per aircraft.

Because of many problems with the current MR2, including concerns over airworthiness, these planes were withdrawn from service two months ago, leaving the RAF to try to fill the gap with a mix of other aircraft and helicopters, none of them remotely comparable in the maritime role to the MR2. The MR2/MRA4 saga is one of many examples of delayed programmes and cost overruns that have plagued defence procurement for many years.

Successive governments have sought to bring costs and programmes under control but with very little success, mainly because of the nature of what was described by President Eisenhower, more than fifty years ago, as the military industrial complex. For Britain, one of the key issues is that the complex is essentially self-organising but not self-regulating. Very few companies operate in the advanced defence sector, and there is little competition as well as a pervasive climate of mutual interest. Thus, senior civil servants and senior military, especially those concerned with procurement, are frequently able to acquire lucrative consultancies not long after they retire, and independent oversight of large programmes is effectively absent. Successive defence select committees have had little impact and the National Audit Office concentrates on individual programmes and is liable to be constrained by issues of secrecy and restricted terms of reference.

Any serious defence/security review has to address the procurement issue, even though it will be singularly difficult to come up with any effective measure of oversight. At the same time, there are lessons to be learnt from the evolution of the Police Complaints Authority and, perhaps more significantly, the Financial Services Authority, especially as the latter has recently shown itself willing to take on major financial institutions.

A viable option would be to establish a Defence Procurement Authority, outside of the control of the Ministry of Defence, which would provide the continuing scrutiny of defence procurement as a whole which has been so singularly lacking in the past.

Conclusion

Britain is beginning to embrace the idea of looking at international security in a manner that goes beyond a traditional defence review, with the National Security Strategy, the Green Papers and the new National Security Council being evidence of this. In the face of current financial constraints and the carrier/Trident issue, though, there is every sign that the forthcoming defence review will be very limited in its remit, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.

Instead:

• The review should be inter-departmental and overseen at Cabinet Office level.
• It should address the issue of defence procurement.
• It should be wide-ranging and able to develop integrated policy on broadly-based global security issues, such as climate change, economic marginalisation and conflict-prevention.
• It will not be able to do this effectively, unless the carrier/F-35 programme is cancelled and replaced with a smaller and much more versatile option, and the Trident force and its replacement are substantially scaled down.
• Each constrains an effective and far-sighted review – together they make a genuine review well-nigh impossible.

 www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk

Exclusively written for sustainablesecurity.org

During a recent field trip to mid-monsoon Nepal, stories of floods affecting vulnerable communities across the country dominated the daily headlines. At the same time, international donors are pouring in funds in an attempt to help the vulnerable cope with the impacts of climate change we are already feeling. Last week, the Adaptation Fund, a fund set up by the UN to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change, became operational. But are these funds helping – or are they contributing to the problem?

With less than two months to go until the next global summit on climate change in Mexico, the issues for agreement are about reducing carbon emissions and – more importantly for poor countries – how much money the developed countries, who have the main responsibility for global warming, will put on the negotiating table to help people in poorer countries cope with the consequences. But these are not the only important issues.

One issue that is barely acknowledged is the heightened risk of political instability and conflict related to climate change. Factors linking climate change to an increased potential for instability and conflict include water scarcity, accelerated land degradation, decreased food production, and indeed the management of the climate funds themselves.

The risk will be greatest where governance is weak. Nobody will dispute that this is the case in Nepal. 

 ‘A Climate of Conflict’, a report by International Alert, estimates that just under three billion people live in 56 conflict-affected countries, where climate change could increase the risk of political instability. Nepal is one of the 56 at risk.

Climate policy makers, however, are largely silent on the matter. International Alert’s latest research finds that new funds, already coming into the country’s coffers with more still in the pipeline, could make the situation worse if they don’t take account of the complex linkages between environmental change, security and governance.

What should inform climate responses?
Responses to climate change have to respond to the political and social realities of fragile contexts such as Nepal or they will not work.

Climate change is not only a climate issue. Climate change will affect political stability, development, government, equity, trade and the national economy. And these issues all affect the ability of people and the governments to respond constructively to the challenges climate change generates. The problems are interlinked, so the responses must be too.

At a meeting of the South Asia Network on Security and Climate Change (SANSaC) co-hosted by International Alert and the EU on 3^rd September, SANSaC recommended that in post-conflict situations like Nepal, adaptation strategies should address the broader dimensions of community resilience.

 

Resilience is multi-dimensional.

Adaptation strategies should be defined not only by the nature of the natural hazard that is faced, but also on the basis of understanding the systems of governance and power. This must involve a deep understanding of the local context, and avoid pitting groups against each other. They must also address broader risks to resilience such as security. For example, a new Government of Nepal pilot project to address energy security and reduce deforestation through promotion of biogas plants is being rolled out in nine districts. The switch to biogas aims to curb deforestation for fuel wood thereby decreasing risks of soil erosion and landslides. But the pilot implementation was halted in three districts – Saptari, Udayapur and Siraha – due to the security situation in those places. Such decisions leave these communities doubly vulnerable: to the lack of sustainable energy sources, and to pre-existing insecurity.

 

Who are the ‘most vulnerable’?

Donors often speak about targeting the ‘poorest and most marginalised’ but base their programming on a generalised conception of who these people are. Speak to people in the villages and they’ll tell you. ‘A poor person is a poor person, regardless of whether he is Brahmin or Janjati. Ethnicity is a political construct. The local context is socially and culturally complex. It is social and cultural factors that determine economic activity – not ethnicity’ a local from Sunsari explained. ‘It’s not so simple that because you are a Brahmin you have all the resources and rights, and because you are a janjati you don’t’. Local organisations must understand the local reality and they must make central governments and international actors aware of this complex reality.

 

A further problem already giving rise to local community level grievances is a culture of dependence on funds. ‘Everyone’s happy to get funds from donors but when they run out of donor funding, they come back to local government’ stated a local municipality employee in Dhankuta. This dependence on donor assistance usurps local authorities’ roles and responsibilities and undermines the social contract between communities and local government. This relationship between government and the governed is already fraught and may not be able to take the strain of well intended but ill-advised interventions.

 

Likewise, peace and reconstruction efforts need to be climate-proofed by paying attention to the availability of resources for livelihoods such as agriculture or returning ex-combatants or people displaced by conflict. These could be under pressure because of climate change. For example, possible future plans to reintegrate ex-combatants from cantonments into villages where they may hope to make a living from agriculture could cause and face future problems. Farmers struggling with changing rainfall patterns and only getting one harvest per year rather than two are seeing their rice yields falling. The prospect arises of returned fighters becoming resentful unemployed farmers, and thus potential recruits, with their combat experience, in instability.

 

More broadly, direct access to large-scale adaptation funding combined with low capacity and high corruption within government will limit the ability to effective use it. It is highly likely that funds will be diverted into the hands and pockets of one faction or another in the political elite. With public awareness of these funds coming in, people’s expectations for support – for example compensation for flood victims – are rising, and where they are not met, we are likely to see an increase in protests and political instability. In Nepal’s Koshi basin, recent experience shows that community protests are easily hijacked by political and criminal gangs who promote violence for their own ends. Misuse of funds may thus be the primary factor exacerbating instability.

If responses to climate change take account of the broad dimensions of what makes people resilient – not just drought-resistant crops and embankments to protect them from floods – but also the interlinked factors of livelihoods options, good infrastructure, social inclusion and effective governance, there’s a good chance that responses to climate change could yield a double dividend: increasing resilience to both climate change and conflict.

 

Failure to take account of the linkages however could result in the billions of dollars of funding for adaptation actually becoming part of the problem.

 

Janani Vivekananda is a senior advisor on climate change and security at international peacebuilding organisation International Alert

Image Source: TheDreamSky

The structure of Libyan society under the Qadhafi regime, as well as during its demise and aftermath, was and remains peculiarly fragmented. The former dictator deliberately kept state institutions weak (in particular the army) in order to prevent the formation of an organised opposition and to create a cult of leadership centred on himself and his family. The consequence for the nature of the uprising was that rebel forces were fragmented, their control over the country was acquired piecemeal, and the internationally recognised National Transitional Council has had tenuous legitimacy outside its base in Benghazi and the east.

Now that the regime has fallen, the process of rebuilding should be underway; but Libya has many autonomous, disconnected and heavily armed militias, all of whom have independent claims on their country’s liberation as well as the fire power to back those claims. The following Crisis Group Report examines the tricky path that the authorities must navigate in order to successfully disarm, demobilise and reintegrate into society Libya’s rebel fighters, without plunging the country back into violence. Many of the young men who took up arms and joined the rebellion found in it a dignity long denied them by lack of economic and employment opportunities. So while the number of weapons in circulation must be dramatically reduced, the status that they bestow needs to be met by other means.

 

Executive Summary and Recommendations

As the recent upsurge of violence dramatically illustrates, the militias that were decisive in ousting Qadhafi’s regime are becoming a significant problem now that it is gone. Their number is a mystery: 100 according to some; three times that others say. Over 125,000 Libyans are said to be armed. The groups do not see themselves as serving a central authority; they have separate procedures to register members and weapons, arrest and detain suspects; they repeatedly have clashed. Rebuilding Libya requires addressing their fate, yet haste would be as perilous as apathy. The uprising was highly decentralised; although they recognise it, the local military and civilian councils are sceptical of the National Transitional Council (NTC), the largely self-appointed body leading the transition. They feel they need weapons to defend their interests and address their security fears.

A top-down disarmament and demobilisation effort by an executive lacking legitimacy would backfire. For now the NTC should work with local authorities and militias – and encourage them to work with each other – to agree on operational standards and pave the way for restructured police, military and civilian institutions. Qadhafi centralised power without building a central state. His successors must do the reverse.

A dual legacy burdens Libya’s new authorities. The first was bequeathed by Qadhafi in the form of a regime centred on himself and his family; that played neighbourhoods and groups against one another; failed to develop genuine national institutions; and deliberately kept the national army weak to prevent the emergence of would-be challengers. The second legacy stems from the way in which he was toppled: through the piecemeal and variegated liberation of different parts of the country. A large number of local forces and militias volunteered to take part in this fight. After Qadhafi’s fall, all could legitimately claim to have sacrificed blood and treasure for the cause, and all could consider themselves national liberators.

To much of the world, the NTC was the face of the uprising. It was formed early, spoke with authority and swiftly achieved broad international recognition. On the ground, the picture was different. The NTC was headquartered in the eastern city of Benghazi, a traditional base of anti-regime activity that provided army defectors a relatively secure area of operations, particularly after NATO’s involvement. The eastern rebellion was built around a strong kernel of experienced opposition and commanders who found friendly territory in which to defect at relatively low cost and personal risk. But it could only encourage western cities and towns to rise up, not adequately support them. At key times, army components that defected, stuck on the eastern frontlines, by and large became passive observers of what occurred in the rest of the country. In the eyes of many, the rebel army looked increasingly like an eastern, not a truly national force. As for the NTC, focused on obtaining vital international support, it never fully led the uprising, nor could it establish a substantial physical presence in much of the rest of the country.

In the west, rebels formed militias and military brigades that were essentially autonomous, self-armed and self-trained, benefiting in most instances from limited NTC and foreign government support. Some had a military background, but most were civilians – accountants, lawyers, students or labourers. When and where they prevailed, they assumed security and civilian responsibility under the authority of local military councils. As a result, most of the militias are geographically rooted, identified with specific neighbourhoods, towns and cities – such as Zintan and Misrata – rather than joined by ideology, tribal membership or ethnicity; they seldom possess a clear political agenda beyond securing their area.

The situation in Tripoli was different and uniquely dangerous. There, victory over Qadhafi forces reflected the combined efforts of local residents and various militias from across the country. The outcome was a series of parallel, at times uncoordinated chains of command. The presence of multiple militias has led to armed clashes as they overlap and compete for power.

The NTC’s desire to bring the militias under central control is wholly understandable; to build a stable Libya, it also is necessary. But obstacles are great. By now, they have developed vested interests they will be loath to relinquish. They also have become increasingly entrenched. Militias mimic the organisation of a regular military and enjoy parallel chains of command; they have separate weapons and vehicle registration procedures; supply identification cards; conduct investigations; issue warrants; arrest and detain suspects; and conduct security operations, sometimes at substantial cost to communities subject to discrimination and collective punishment.

They also have advantages that the NTC and the National Army lack, notably superior local knowledge and connections, relatively strong leaderships and revolutionary legitimacy. In contrast, the NTC has had to struggle with internal divisions, a credibility deficit and questions surrounding its effectiveness. It has had to deal with ministries still in the process of reorganisation and whose employees – most of them former regime holdovers – have yet to cast off the ingrained habit of referring any decision to the ministerial level.

But the heart of the matter is political. The security landscape’s fragmentation – and militias’ unwillingness to give up arms – reflects distrust and uncertainty regarding who has the legitimacy to lead during the transition. While the NTC and reconstituted National Army can point out they were among the first to rebel or defect and were crucial in obtaining international support, others see things differently. Some considered them too eastern-dominated and blamed them for playing a marginal role in liberating the west. Civilians who took up arms and who had been powerless or persecuted under Qadhafi resent ex-senior officials who defected from the army and members of the regime’s elite who shifted allegiances and now purport to rule. Although they are represented on the council, many Islamists consider the NTC overly secular and out of touch with ordinary Libyans. Above all else, militias – notably those in Tripoli, Zintan and Misrata – have their own narrative to justify their legitimacy: that they spearheaded the revolution in the west, did the most to free the capital or suffered most from Qadhafi’s repression.

Formation of a new cabinet was supposed to curb militia-on-militia violence as well as defiance of the National Army; it has done nothing of the kind. Instead, violence in the capital if anything has escalated, with armed clashes occurring almost nightly. Regional suspicion of the central authority remains high as does disagreement over which of the many new revolutionary groups and personalities ought to be entrusted with power.

The problem posed by militias is intimately related to deeper, longer-term structural issues: Qadhafi’s neglect of the army along with other institutions; regional friction and societal divisions (between regions, between Islamist-leaning and secularist-leaning camps, as well as between representatives of the old and new orders); the uprising’s geographically uneven and uncoordinated development; the surplus of weapons and deficit in trust; the absence of a strong, fully representative and effective executive authority; and widespread feeling among many armed fighters that the existing national army lacks both relevance and legitimacy.

Until a more legitimate governing body is formed – which likely means until elections are held – and until more credible national institutions are developed, notably in the areas of defence, policing and vital service delivery, Libyans are likely to be suspicious of the political process, while insisting on both retaining their weapons and preserving the current structure of irregular armed brigades. To try to force a different outcome would be to play with fire, and with poor odds.

But that does not mean nothing can be done. Some of the most worrying features of the security patchwork should be addressed cooperatively between the NTC and local military as well as civilian councils. At the top of the list should be developing and enforcing clear standards to prevent abuses of detainees or discrimination against entire communities, the uncontrolled possession, display or use especially of heavy weapons and inter-militia clashes. The NTC also should begin working on longer-term steps to demobilise the militias and reintegrate their fighters in coordination with local actors. This will require restructuring the police and military, but also providing economic opportunities for former fighters – vocational training, jobs as well as basic social services – which in turn will require meeting minimum expectations of good government. Even as it takes a relatively hands-off approach, the international community has much to offer in this respect – and Libyans appear eager for such help.

Ultimately, successfully dealing with the proliferation of militias will entail a delicate balancing act: central authorities must take action, but not at the expense of local counterparts; disarmament and demobilisation should proceed deliberately, but neither too quickly nor too abruptly; and international players should weigh the need not to overly interfere in Libya’s affairs against the obligation not to become overly complacent about its promising but still fragile future.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Transitional National Council (NTC):

1.  Strengthen the legitimacy of central authorities by ensuring greater transparency in decision-making and in identifying and selecting Council representatives and members of the executive.

2.  Ensure all decisions relating to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) are taken in close consultation with local military councils and militias, by appointing a credible personality to liaise and coordinate with such local bodies.

3.  Enhance opportunity for involvement by community and religious leaders in sponsoring and supporting DDR initiatives.

4.  Back local DDR initiatives financially in cooperation with local councils, including weapons registration, improvement of detention facilities and support for young fighters.

To the Revolutionary Brigades, Local Military Councils and Local Civilian Councils: 


5.  Seek to reintegrate armed rebels, notably the youngest among them, inter alia by identifying and registering those who wish to pursue careers in the police and military; offering alternative civilian employment; and sponsoring civic improvement initiatives with city funds.

6.  Disclose all sources of funding.

7.  Agree on and enforce codes of conduct and mechanisms for dispute resolution, especially where several militias operate in the same area.

To the NTC, Revolutionary Brigades, Local Military Councils and Local Civilian Councils:

8.  Agree on and enforce a common set of rules and behaviour for all armed fighters; implement a single procedure for weapons registrations; and ban the display of heavy weapons in town centres and the bearing of arms at checkpoints and key installations.

9.  Transfer as quickly as possible responsibility for detainees to central authority and, in the meantime, ensure respect for rule of law and international standards in arrest and detention procedures; release persons whose detention is not consistent with such practices; and bring to justice, speedily and in accordance with international law, those accused of criminal acts.

10.  Agree on a process for NTC inspection of arms depots, detention centres, border posts, checkpoints and other militia-controlled facilities.

11.  Implement initial steps toward DDR by:

    a) focusing at first on heavy weapons;

    b) through a joint effort by the government and local councils, providing support for young fighters in particular;

    c) establishing an NTC-funded mandatory training program covering rules of engagement and discipline for militia members who wish to pursue careers in the military or policing; and

    d) providing vocational training for militia fighters as well as necessary financial incentives.

12.  Establish and implement criteria for appointment to senior posts within the defence ministry and army on an inclusive basis.

13.  Create at both the central and local levels a non-par­ti­san, inclusive committee to review and refer candidates for recruitment into the police and national army.

14.  Institute an appeals procedure for rejected candidates.

To the UN Support Mission in Libya and other International Stakeholders, including Arab countries, the European Union and the U.S.:

15.  Offer the NTC assistance in, inter alia:

    a) undertaking quick assessments of security, DDR, and related needs;

    b) police training, including possibly establishment of a gendarmerie function;

    c) security force professionalisation, including specifically on human rights and civilian oversight; and

    d) border control.

Tripoli/Brussels

 

Article Source: Crisis Group. To read the full Report, click here

Image Source: United Nations