by Daniel Korski | Apr 30, 2008 | Conflict and security, South Asia
Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, just finished a trip to Afghanistan, which probably happened at the same time as Taliban gunmen failed to kill Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a slew of international officials.
Despite Prince William’s safe return and President Karzai’s lucky escape, it should be clear to anyone that things are not going particularly well for NATO’s Afghan mission.
All is not lost, but it could be unless there is a change of strategy. What should such a change entail?
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by Charlie Edwards | Apr 30, 2008 | Conflict and security
Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks around the world last year … more than double the number in any of the past 25 years … More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983 … [S]ince 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs. Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.
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by David Steven | Apr 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence
Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, perhaps we can save the planet from us, and us from ourselves.
It’s an interesting argument – part true, and part wishful thinking (as Michael of course recognises). In the face of a threat, people either round up a posse and drive it out of town, or they abandon Main Street to the bad guys and cower in shuttered houses. There’s a knife edge, in other words, between atomisation and collective action.
We can see this happening at the moment, where the food crisis is (mostly) driving countries towards a narrower view of their self interest – as they block exports and build up reserves, even if this is leading to a less effective collective outcome. The UN, meanwhile, is trying to round up the posse…
This is classic Prisoner’s Dilemma territory – where players make a rational decision to compete, even though co-operation would make more sense in the grand scheme of things. They treat a non-zero-sum game like a zero-sum one.
An iterated prisoner’s dilemma (where the game is repeated with the same players), however, has a different logic. Robert Axelrod:
What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choice of players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current situation.
This ‘shadow of the future’ argument reminds me of the controversy over the use of discount rates in the Stern review. Stern’s critics argued strongly for a higher discount rate – they wanted to shrink the shadow of the future. As John Quigley explains:
Nordhaus and Boyer propose an even higher rate of 3 per cent, which is tantamount to saying that the future (certainly anyone more than two generations away from us) can go to hell for all we care, since the welfare of our great-grandchildren has about a tenth of the weight we accord the current generation. Not surprisingly, this translates into a ‘do-nothing now’ approach to global warming.
In his talk, Mainelli identified four types of glue that can hold together a collaborative response: knowledge (or shared awareness, as Alex and I refer to it); markets (mechanisms for pricing risk and rewarding response); standards (which frame choices); and policies (which regulate them).
But the stickiness of the glue is determined by how much of the future we mix in. Given narrow horizons, there’s little chance that a communal response to a risk can emerge. This quote, from the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, captures the challenge well:
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely recognised by society. As such the seriousness of organised crime relative to terrorism, for example, was consistently underplayed.
There was also much concern about the serious organised crime agency (SOCA) – not about its role per se but rather more seriously where the organisation had disappeared to. Almost overnight Stephen Lander (ex DGSS and now Chair of SOCA) had drawn a blanket of secrecy around the organisation, but not before he had announced that serious criminals had roughly a 5% chance of being caught.
So it was interesting to read Sean O’Neill in The Times today asking the question – are we ignoring organised crime? He makes an unhelpful but nevertheless interesting comparison – more than 700 people are killed by heroin in Britain every year while terrorism in Britain, by contrast, killed no one, nor the year before and has not claimed a life since July 7, 2005. But as O’Neill suggests
Yet it is terrorism that Gordon Brown says we must fear above all else. There are, he and his ministers and security officials keep telling us, 30 active plots against Britain – although keen observers might note that the number never seems to change no matter how many conspiracies are foiled.
It took 9/11 to force Britain to take the Islamist terrorist threat seriously. Since then the counter-terrorism agencies have turned Britain into a hostile environment for terrorists. Organised crime, however, doesn’t do spectaculars. The men behind it are interested in profits, not propaganda and, as a result, their reach into our society is much more insidious and unchecked than that of terrorism.
The mismatch between the resources devoted to fighting organised crime compared with those directed towards counter-terrorism is unnerving. Government says that there are millions of pounds in police budgets that should be devoted to dealing with organised crime. In truth, only a handful of British police forces know how to tackle it.
But surely it is a good thing to keep your head down and get on with the job? Well not if you need to justify your organisation’s role to Ministers and senior officials in the system… something that all Whitehall departments understand they must do if they are to secure funding.
So what has been the result of so much secrecy? (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
I admit I have never heard this but will now shameless use it… in answer to a question about what impact an individual can really have on climate change:
If you think you’re too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito
