by Elizabeth Sellwood | May 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.
Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.
Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. (more…)
by Alex Evans | May 9, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
A gaggle of UN agencies have just published a report on biofuels, says the Guardian this morning (see also previous Global Dashboard posts on biofuels). Although the report presents a mixed picture of upsides and downsides, it’s clear about the food security risks:
Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications… The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources. At their worst, biofuel programmes can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.
Absolutely. Slightly confusing, then, to see UNEP head Achim Steiner saying the opposite, according to the FT last month:
The UN’s top environment official has backed a European Union plan to require the blending of plant-based biofuels into road fuels despite fears by environmentalists that this could lead to increased deforestation in south-east Asia and Brazil. Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme, said on Thursday that biofuels were needed to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | May 8, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
When Gordon Brown takes over as PM, there will be no shortage of clouds on the international horizon. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will vie for his attention, of course. But he will also need to push for a breakthrough on the slow burning drivers of instability.
Climate change, resource depletion, fragile states, global economic imbalances, infectious diseases: it’s easy to write a shopping list of the risks for which the world has little insurance. One day, a number of these threats will combine in a ‘perfect storm’. The modern world’s vulnerability to shocks will then be cruelly exposed.
Protecting its citizens from risk is core business for any government. Brown has already signalled that he wants to lead a renewed effort to tackle the major sources of global uncertainty. To succeed it will be critical for him to know he can rely on Britain’s foreign policy apparatus.
There’s just one problem. He can’t.
We’ve just published a paper on this, formatted as a note to Gordon Brown, plus a shorter article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.
by Alex Evans | May 5, 2007 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
A new survey undertaken by the US Defense Department’s Mental Health Advisory Team, which interviewed over 1,700 soldiers and marines deployed in Iraq between August and October last year, has some alarming findings. According to the Washington Post,
More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.
In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the Army report stated.
About 10 percent of the 1,767 troops in the official survey — conducted in Iraq last fall — reported that they had mistreated civilians in Iraq, such as kicking them or needlessly damaging their possessions.
by Alex Evans | May 4, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
The NY Times magazine published a piece last December [free log-on required] describing how web 2.0 applications are revolutionising information sharing in the US intelligence community. It’s a must-read. Here’s a taster:
In the fall of 2005, [two evangelists for better use of open source information in the intelligence community] joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened.
By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages… The usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist attack.
On which note, here’s an excerpt from an email being forwarded all over the place:
The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is pleased to invite you to the “DNI Open Source Conference 2007: Expanding the Horizons” to be held in Washington, DC, on Monday, 16 July and Tuesday, 17 July, 2007. The conference is free and open to the public.
