by Richard Gowan | Jul 31, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America
Something for all our resilence+networks+technology-loving readers from Gothamist, a proper blog for normal people (well, New Yorkers, anyway):
NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters yesterday that in a “relatively short period of time” people will be able to send “video and text straight to 911 to increase the flow of information.” Kelly didn’t go into details about how the technology would work, but he did say that “generally speaking, it’s helpful when people record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation.”
The commissioner’s statement would seem to include recent “events” like the now-infamous cop-on-cyclist bodyslam video…
In case you missed it:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ]
Well, it would be nice to stop that sort of thing. But beware:
One wonders whether Kelly’s encouragement of witness videotaping will filter down to the rank and file – it’s fairly common for police to order people to stop taking photos or video of them, which is legal as long as it doesn’t interfere with police business.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 31, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
So, farewell then the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), born after the two countries ended a massive war in 2000 and gently put down by a sorrowful Security Council on Wednesday. It won’t really be missed, as it wasn’t one of the coolest missions out there. It was one of the last old school, peacekeeping-equals-troops-stuck-between-two-states-that-had-a-big-war operations left in Africa, an anomaly in the age of peacebuilding-as-changing-the-DNA-of-the-country.
And closing it down was the only option, as the Eritreans had cut off its fuel supplies through their territory last December, forcing a troop withdrawal this February. The remarkable thing about UNMEE is that it stayed in place so long, as the Eritreans began to bugger about with it in December 2005 and never really let up. Their excuse was that Ethiopia has refused to comply with international rulings on the delineation of the border with the UN was meant to monitor, so why bother?
Eritrea had a point. But its behavior towards UNMEE has been an important part of the trend towards greater resistance to UN missions that I blogged about earlier in July. One UN staffer responded to my post, which argued that Darfur is now a textbook for anti-UN spoilers, by pointing out that “the Eritreans provided the Sudanese with a wonderful case study in how to ‘red team’ a UN mission through de facto withdrawal of consent by removing critical mission enablers [that’d be the helicopters, etc.] and not honoring Status of Forces Agreements”.
So Eritrea has earned its place in the roster of UN failures (a sign that the UN will probably be back there sooner or later, as in the DR Congo, Central African Republic and maybe Somalia). The Eritreans are trying to be reassuring that this doesn’t mean war with Ethiopia straight away, but given that they managed to pick a fight with tiny Djibouti recently, I wouldn’t get too relaxed. Last month, I suggested in an op-ed for ECFR that the way out of this impasse is to enlarge the context by several orders of magnitude, addressing East Africa’ problems en bloc:
There is a need for an international drive for a regional security conference that could hammer out a credible framework for resolving border disputes, guaranteeing peace agreements and rehabilitating rebel groups. The African Union and UN should take a political lead. The U.S. (which sees East Africa as a front against terror) and China (which buys its raw materials) must join in. The EU could play a role in coordinating conditional financial support to back up the deal-making.
All rather grandiose, and observant readers may wonder how this proposal squares with my recent warning against “piling international institution on international institution in Africa”. My answer would be that such a conference, involving horizontal negotiations between African governments, may be the best Plan B when trying to impose security frameworks from New York stops working.
by Jules Evans | Jul 31, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
While I’m amused by Harriet Harman’s apparent interest in the top job, I’m amazed by David Miliband’s. I thought he was smart. It seems to me he can’t help but emerge a loser from the present situation.
If he doesn’t make an outright challenge for the leadership now, he will look like he has bottled it, twice, and will begin to look like the Michael Portillo of the Labour Party. If he does challenge Brown and lose, he will look like a loser. If he wins, he will most probably lose the election against Cameron, and will look like a loser. And, least likely scenario of all, if he wins the election against Cameron, he will still have to rule the country with a screwed up economy and a disgruntled electorate grown tired of Labour.
He should have let Brown lose, let the Tories win, let the Tories wallow in recession, let Labour re-group and himself assert his authority over the party in opposition, before coming back to beat the PR toff PM, who will very likely underperform when in power.
Instead, he’s let his lust for power and his vanity put him into a no-win situation. What was he thinking? Are politicians so irredeemably short-term that they can’t think more than a year ahead? Anyone more au fait with Westminster gossip, let me know!
by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global system, South Asia
Daniel’s a hundred per cent right to call for an end to some of the more stupid measures taken in Afghanistan in the name of counter-narcotics work. Take aerial spraying off the table? Absolutely. Avoid alienating farmers in order to avoid swelling the insurgents’ ranks? Sign me up.
But I think we need to go much further than this. Daniel argues that coalition forces in Afghanistan should focus on:
…arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these “narcotics entrepreneurs” are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change.
As he noted yesterday, the FT’s recent leader on this subject agrees with him, arguing that:
…while crop eradication and locking up bad guys may be an important part of addressing the crisis, they are not by themselves a solution. That can only come over years of a sustained and consistent strategy to develop a real market economy which would provide a better livelihood for farmers than the dangerous and volatile drugs business.
That will, it is true, require security and a role for the military. It will mean targeting the middlemen, smugglers and, yes, chemists who operate the infrastructure of the drugs business, hitting their finances and improving co-operation with Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Above all, it will mean that while the small poppy farmer escapes the attentions of the authorities, the big drug barons do not. That demands ending the de facto impunity enjoyed by some Afghans, a move that can be sanctioned by only the president.
I hate to be a sceptic, but, well, I’m a sceptic. Targeting the big drug lords, the middlemen and smugglers is certainly preferable to targeting small farmers from a development point of view. But it’s still pretty pointless. Just look at Colombia, where massive resources to the war on drugs have made negligible impact. True, interdiction efforts can influence the street price a bit – maybe even quite significantly, as in the aftermath of the destruction of the Medellin Cartel in 1989 – but the effects never seem to last much beyond a year. For all the hullabaloo about the war on drugs, the long term price trend for most illegal narcotics has been downwards.
What’s more, we all know that this emperor has no clothes. When I worked in the government, I used to ask the Afghanistan experts I came across what assessment had been made of what effect even a best case scenario on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan would have on the street price of heroin in the UK, or how we could be sure that production wouldn’t just be displaced to Turkmenistan instead. The answers I got back were never very encouraging.
None of this, of course, is to dispute the underlying point about just how corrosive organised crime is to the legitimacy and effectiveness of states (c.f. Mark’s recent post on Guinea-Bissau, or mine on Italy and Mexico). But the point is that if we want to halt that process of corrosion, the it’s not Helmand, or even Kabul, that’s the front line. The real front line is with our policy of Prohibition, and the fantastically profitable economic opportunities that it introduces.
The war on drugs will never, ever be won on the supply side. And until we figure that out and internalise it in our policies, the margins on illegal drugs will remain astronomical, the incentives for organised crime and insurgent movements will stay irresistible, and states will keep failing. After all, we can all see that Prohibiton in America created and sustained Al Capone. So which bit about sustaining his inheritors at the global level is it that we don’t get?
by Mark Weston | Jul 31, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa
I am delighted to report that, unlike the prescient Daniel, my prediction that Turkey’s governing AK Party was on its way out has proved almost totally wrong. I say almost totally because, although the constitutional court has bucked the trend and allowed the party to survive, it has punished AK by withdrawing millions of dollars of state funding, which one journalist believes “is as bad as banning a party.” The decision, moreover, was a very narrow one – 6 of the 11 judges voted for a ban, just one short of the 7 judges needed (so I wasn’t that far out, was I? Was I?).
Needless to say, the government is breathing a huge sigh of relief (clearly the loss of funding is not that big a blow), while the opposition is claiming that the heavy financial punishment shows the court believes AK is anti-secular. Hopefully, now, the government can get on with governing. Perhaps, too, an older assessment of mine, that Turkey is only now becoming a mature democracy that can act as a model for the rest of the Muslim world, has some chance of coming to pass.
