by Richard Gowan | Mar 20, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
For over a year, one of the biggest questions among officials in UN-land has been: will the Security Council make us go to Somalia? Back in November, I debuted on this blog by noting that Ban Ki-moon had announced that a mission was not “a realistic and viable option.” Well, the Council didn’t like that one bit, and told the Secretariat to get planning for that option right away. Sometimes an international organization can’t say no: this week, the Council gets to discuss a new report from the SG, which envisages an operation involving 27,000 troops plus police. That’d be a few thousand more than the UN is pushing (slowly) into Darfur.
Now, this isn’t a complete volte face: the report makes it clear that there’ll need to be a progress on a peace deal before any such force is possible. It also moots a smaller mission of 8,000. But now the numbers are out there, the media are naturally jumping on the 27,000 figure, and I fear the Council will follow…
All of which moves me to pick up something I really should have written about last week, had I not been sunning myself in Chile. That is, of course, the publication of the new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations by my colleagues at the Center on International Cooperation. The FT picked up the story under the reasonably accurate title “UN Attacked For Overloading Peacekeepers.” Here’s the gist:
The United Nations Security Council is criticised on Wednesday for authorising big peacekeeping missions around the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors are overtaking their ability to deliver. “Repeated warnings of overstretch did not forestall the authorisation of ambitious new mandates by the Security Council and regional organisations,” says the New York-based Center on International Co-operation in its annual report on global peace operations.
The criticism was made as the Security Council met to consider the latest report from Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, on Darfur, where deployment of a combined UN and African Union peace force, Unamid, is badly behind schedule as the result of lack of vital resources and delaying tactics by the Sudanese government. “The mission was a compromise from the start,” Sarjoh Bah, editor of the CIC report, told the Financial Times, “because Sudan resisted a UN-only force”.
The CIC report said some of the problems of international peacekeeping by both the UN and regional organisations stemmed from decisions to deploy forces in spite of the absence of peace agreements on the ground. “By year-end, peacekeeping was becoming a victim of its own success,” the report said. “The complexity of operations began to outstrip the ability of international organisations to keep peace.”
But I’m sure Somalia will be fine, just fine.
by Alex Evans | Mar 19, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo]
As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called “user-generated swiftboating“…
by Jules Evans | Mar 19, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks
The foreign banks active in Russia tend to have a far more informed and less cliched view of Russian politics than foreign policy analysts in Washington or London. They also tend to have better contacts with Kremlin sources than foreign diplomats, particularly the woeful British embassy in Moscow.
Banking analysts and strategists have been quick to recognize the ramifications of Putin’s handover of the presidency to Dmitri Medvedev. As Deutsche Bank’s Russian research team says in a report today:
If Putin was as keen to retain full political control over the foreseeable future as most of the Western press suggests, he would have opted for a third term in our view…Thus, in our view, Putin’s voluntary exit from the Kremlin puts a huge question mark on the consensus opinion that the political strategy is a retention of the status quo of the recent past.
So if we’re not going to see a continuance of the status quo, what will we see? Deutsche thinks probably a change in the personnel running the national champions. Out with the KGB, in with more private-sector individuals:
we believe that substantial – and welcome — shifts in the balance of power within the political establishment are highly likely in the coming months. Putin’s first priority in 2000 was to check the predatory behaviour of oligarchs and create incentives for them to use their efforts more productively. Similarly, it is quite likely that in his first 6-12 months as president, Medvedev will concentrate on tightening the leash on the burgeoning bureaucracy, which has shown increasingly abusive behaviour in recent years.
Medvedev’s mission is finally to modernise the public sector. In order to achieve that, he will most likely have to rely on the expertise and human capital of the private sector once again. Therefore, the key gauge to watch, politics-wise, is not simply the alignment of top ministers in the next government, but also the tendency of seasoned private sector professionals to take senior roles in policy-making and state-controlled corporations.
The real challenge for Medvedev and for Russia, in the coming years, is whether he can de-personalize Russian politics. Putin built up a political system where power was very much centred in his person, at the cost of just about every other institution – the press, the judiciary, the Duma, the party system, the NGO sector, the business sector, the regions. In essence, he made himself a Tsar again, albeit a Tsar prepared to relinquish power after eight years.
If Medvedev simply turns himself into a new Tsar, and keeps the other institutions of the country in a state of arrested development, he will not have taken Russia forward. But which politician ever consciously lets go of the powers of their office? As Yevgeny Yasin, head of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, put it: ‘Medvedev is a good boy. But he will face many temptations in office.’
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 19, 2008 | UK
So which political adviser and/or Whitehall official(s) have been talking with the FT’s resident ‘Rita Skeeter‘? In her notebook today she despairs of the British Prime Minister’s handling of the national security strategy:
Oh Gord! The new national security strategy that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is due to announce on Wednesday – it is all about potential disasters – has proved a bit of a disaster itself. Its genesis has been marked by delays indecisiveness at the top, a total lack of funds and some glorious Whitehall squabbling.
The strategy, which will detail all kinds of threats from terrorism to pandemics and floods, is nearly six months late. The first draft was ready last October, but parts of Whitehall were distinctly unhappy. I am told that one section on flooding was written by a senior military man who did not bother to consult the flood supremos in the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
(Better gossip is that they forgot to include Britain’s nuclear deterrent in one draft)
Sue continues:
When the shouts of protest died down, a new version was produced in February this year – after due consultation. This did not upset anyone. Indeed it was so anodyne that some officials felt positively embarrassed. Advisers in Number 10 cut its length drastically. Mr Brown started writing his speech about it, which seems to have led to a series of further changes to the strategy itself as new ideas came to him. “It’s Gordon’s temperament,” sighed one Whitehall insider. “Only he can sort things out but he concentrates on matters of the moment and drops everything else. The result is that things big and small don’t get sorted quickly.”
So what will be included?
Right from the start there seems to have been no clear guidance from Mr Brown as to what the strategy was meant to achieve. It is expected to include plans for a new US-style national security council on which will sit the great and the good from the military and the intelligence services, but the council will report to a new cabinet committee, chaired by Mr Brown, and the old Cobra arrangements for dealing with emergencies will remain in place. All rather confusing, but the hope is that the council will make it easier to bang heads together and stop departments fighting their own corners. Hard to see how, say insiders. “Governments have always had to choose between spending on flood defences, for example, and armaments,” says one senior figure, adding that unlike the US security council, whose job is to prioritise spending, there will be no serious extra money for contingency planning.
Not sure that is quite the point. But what about Whitehall’s reaction to the document?
Some fear the new strategy will bring even more centralisation of power with Number 10, cutting other departments out of the action. There is even concern that top intelligence officials could become part of the prime minister’s team instead of serving the government as a whole. On this the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the dangers of that should be all too apparent.
Looks like paranoia is setting into Whitehall.
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
There have been numerous column inches in the papers about Gordon Brown’s announcement today on the UK’s first national security strategy. While it seems likely that there will be something about creating a national security forum, it remains unclear about what this will actually be – and whether it will only focus on international terrorism. So what might be in it? Below is a taste of some of the things the PM might announce at the Despatch Box today:
– We are uncertain of the terrorist landscape with new forms of attack and global risks. From climate change to national security we should work together with the military and police. New threats demand new approaches. Threats to National Security include:
– Terrorism: We need to use all our resources, the police, military, intelligence plus use our diplomatic channels and conduct persuasive talks with unstable countries. There are plans to establish a new national security forum which involves security experts who will advise the government. Also JTAC- The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre – will be expanded as will regional counter terrorism units involving police and security services.
– Climate change: Risks to safety are not just from terrorism or organised crime. If there was a major global or environmental disaster, that would have an impact on citizens’ personal security. For example if a disaster hit Bangladesh then we would need to set up resources for the Bangladeshi community here. Fallout from such a disaster could result in unrest that could have repercussions here – including on the economy.
– Pandemics: It is expected there will be another pandemic – like like bird flu. This could result in loss of life and a ‘system shock’ on business and transport.
– Energy: What would happen if we faced energy supply interruptions? How secure are our supplies, and how would we cope with being ‘off-line’? We need to find more diverse resources – and this has many implications..
These are just a few ideas in haste – but they do give us a sense of the likely scope of the strategy. The media have their briefing at 0900, with the opposition parties later on. Brown will make his announcement at 1230.
