The Land Registry is looking for a special kind of candidate:
Senior Problem Manager: Responsible for managing all problems recorded in the Problem Management System. Leading the Problem Management team to minimise and, where possible, proactively prevent adverse effects on the business of all problems caused by errors…
Well, the UN may be down in the dumps about Darfur and the EU might be losing its bottle on Chad, but those NATO guys down in Kosovo don’t do fear, even if things are looking edgy.
NATO’s commander in Kosovo brushed aside security threats, saying the 16,000-strong NATO-led force known as KFOR was ready to respond.
“KFOR is everywhere and is ready to face any kind of threat at any time, coming from anywhere,” French Lt. Gen. Xavier Bout de Marnhac told reporters after a brief ceremony at the military base.
I’m assuming that it must have required a good deal of scenario-planning to ascertain that KFOR has indeed reached this state of omnipotent perfection. That, or someone in KFOR HQ has been listening to a bit too much Janet Jackson.
Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before – a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” – but not usually when the eyes of the world are watching how the nation responds to Kurdish unrest.
Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the power to override Supreme Court decisions – if it did, the pragmatic Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an would quickly throw the case out. Banning the DTP, which the Supreme Court claims is “based on blood and takes orders from the terrorist organisation of the PKK,” would be self-defeating. The party has been weakened by the rise of Tayyip’s AKP, which swept the board among Kurds in the 2007 general election, relegating the DTP to a bit part even in its traditional strongholds of Diyarbakir and Bingol. Silencing it now, Erdo?an knows, can only fan Kurdish resentment:
“Everyone should be able to freely express themselves through constitutional and legitimate means in a democratic environment,” he argued this week. “The climate of freedoms is an enemy of violence and terrorism…So let’s maintain pluralistic democracy and strengthen the climate of freedoms in order to secure the ultimate result in the struggle against terrorism…All experience shows there is no other way out.”
The latter is a reference to Turkey’s failure to snuff out earlier Kurdish rebellions using force. OK, the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 calmed things down for a while, but most of the underlying causes of his people’s frustration remained. It was only a matter of time before some of them regrouped, and the recent troubles show the battle for hearts and minds, as the Prime Minister acknowledges, is far from won. “Let’s look together,” he urges, “for ways of winning over the people instead of alienating them.” Sadly, his plea is likely to fall on deaf ears.
Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army – ‘Human Terrain Teams’. Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic and tribal landscape.
Wired explains that “the idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works”. The Army has set aside $41 million with which to deploy 150 “social scientists, software geeks and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year”. Six such teams are already on the ground.
However, some anthropologists are up in arms about their academic brethren using their skills to help the US Army:
The executive board of the American Anthropology Association, or AAA, recently blasted the HTT program as immoral. Because anthropologists in the effort could help in “identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations,” the board wrote, information derived from the program “would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed.”
But on the other hand, Wired continues, some of the early results look impressive:
A “preliminary assessment” of the first HTT, obtained by Wired News, shows the potential impact these social-science groups can make. In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.
“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.'”
At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. The religious leader was so moved by the gesture, he recorded radio ads denouncing the Taliban.
Let’s be honest, we’ve heard enough ‘we’ve found the counter-insurgency grail!’ stories over the last few years to warrant a cautious approach to claims like these. Still, as Wired makes clear, the HTTs are already proving to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the culture of a fundamentally backward – some would say essentially medieval – people: colonels in the US Army. Two HTT members found that their first task was to draft a memo complaining about the colonel in charge of their team:
…a military man, not a social scientist – who [they] said had a distinct “disinterest in the Iraqi population, society and culture. He often uses the terms ‘Arab,’ ‘Iraqi,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Sunni,’ or ‘Shia’ interchangeably…. At times, he has even made comments such as ‘when in doubt, kill ’em all.’
The excellent Kevin Drum finds himself bewildered by the large gulf between his reaction to financial news and that of Wall Street:
I will never understand Wall Street. Here’s the latest:
Fed Official’s Remarks Send Stocks Soaring
Stocks soared on Wall Street today after a top Federal Reserve official appeared to open the door for additional interest rate cuts….In his speech this morning, delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, [Fed vice chairman Donald] Kohn pledged that the Fed “will act as needed” to address the volatility of the current economic situation.
“Uncertainties about the economic outlook are unusually high right now,” he said. “In my view, these uncertainties require flexible and pragmatic policy making.”
Now see, if it were me I’d be running for the hills at this news. Sure, Kohn was signalling that the Fed might cut interest rates, but he was only doing that because he thinks there’s a danger that the economy might be tanking. So here’s the difference:
Kevin: Economy tanking = bad. An interest rate cut is nice, but it doesn’t nearly make up for a bad economy. I’m going to go hide in a cave.
Wall Street: Interest rate cut = good. Who cares if the economy is souring? Let’s party!
Yes, sure, lower interest rates make stocks a relatively better investment than bonds, and that’s good news for Wall Street. But the effect is small, and the stimulative effect of an interest rate reduction is both small and far in the future. A declining economy, by contrast, is bad news right now, and the vice chairman of the Fed just warned us that he was afraid the economy might indeed be declining.
And the market goes up 300 points. I don’t get it.