by Alex Evans | Nov 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
This short piece from the Economist – styled as an email to Barack Obama – is worth a read:
Your promise to close Guantánamo is popular. Including a clear announcement on this in your inaugural will make for great headlines. But if you have to give a firm date for closure, kick the can at least a year down the road. Remember: W. wanted to close the place too, but disposing of the 260-odd (in every sense) inmates still incarcerated there won’t be easy.
A few dozen are small fish—not to mention innocents—who we could easily send home. But there are some whose governments don’t want them, and others (eg, those Chinese Uighurs) whom their governments might torture or execute. International law says you can’t repatriate them. We’ll ask friendly countries to take a few, but you will end up having to let most go free in the United States. Some might well return to the battlefield after all we’ve done to them. But as General Barry McCaffrey has said (we’ll keep the quote handy), it’s going to be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for 15 years.
Then there are those 80 or so really hard men. President Bush wanted to try them, and could never get the law right. So now you have to deal with them. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad has “confessed” he was the brains behind 9/11. God knows what the Pakistanis or the Agency did to him in prison. But we can’t just let him go, and we can’t just let him rot, so you have to give him and his accomplices their day in court. The first big question for you is: what kind of court? You don’t like Bush’s military commissions. But if you set up special security courts with special, meaning laxer, standards of procedure and evidence, they will be called kangaroo courts too. And if you opt for regular criminal trials or courts-martial you run the risk that they will throw out evidence extracted by waterboard. Dare you let a 9/11 mastermind walk free?
Worse yet, there’s a group the Agency is sure are dedicated terrorists but on whom we have nothing that can stand up in any sort of court. The human-rights purists say you must bite the bullet and set these unconvictables free in America. But if you follow their advice it won’t just be Republicans who will say you are putting the republic in danger. You’d theoretically have a let-out if you could let these guys go and keep them under surveillance. But the Feds claim they can’t guarantee fail-safe, indefinite 24-hour monitoring of a group this size. Can we afford to take that risk?
Safer would be to move them to the mainland, where they would be held under some kind of preventive detention devised by your legal team. We can call this “temporary”, but our base will bleat that you have closed Guantánamo only by creating a new prison where America continues to detain people convicted of no crime. And they’ll have a point. Over to you.
by David Steven | Nov 26, 2008 | South Asia, UK
That’s what the New York Times thinks:
As Western powers struggle with the huge scale of the measures needed to revive their economies, they have turned increasingly to China. Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share.
Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys to Beijing — bringing the faltering talks between China and the exiles to a standstill.
The exiles’ decision followed an announcement on Oct. 29 by David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, that after almost a century of recognizing Tibet as an autonomous entity, Britain had changed its mind. Mr. Miliband said that Britain had decided to recognize Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. He even apologized that Britain had not done so earlier.
I haven’t followed this story – so posted without comment. Do add yours if you have one though.
by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Global system, Off topic
Like the UN didn’t have enough problems already… After Darfur and Congo, the blue helmets have to take on Jack Bauer. The two-hour prequel to the new series of 24, aired in the U.S. last weekend, appears to have been scripted by John Bolton:
JACK Bauer sustains the usual bumps and bruises in the long-awaited two-hour “24” movie on Fox, but it’s the United Nations that really takes it on the chin.
The producers of “24” evidently have zero respect for the UN. To hammer the point home, their two-hour movie – “24: Redemption,” premiering Sunday, Nov. 23 – includes a representative of a UN “peace-keeping” force who just might be the most spineless, loathsome character ever created for this show.
First, this weasel refuses to believe urgent, eyewitness accounts that heavily armed rebels in the fictional African country of Sangala are sweeping the countryside kidnapping schoolboys and forcing them to become soldiers in the rebel army.
Then, when some of the rebels come rolling up to the rural school where Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) has been helping a former Special Forces colleague (Robert Carlyle) work with orphans, the UN guy (played by Sean Cameron Michael) declares that he’ll pacify the rebels simply by chatting with them.
After catching a glimpse of them, however, he immediately runs to join the children in an underground shelter, leaving Jack to fend off the rebel group all by himself. As if that wasn’t cowardly enough, he later decides to save his own skin by telling the rebels where Jack and the children are hiding.
The producers took pains to make the UN rep look as foolish as possible, even though the impotence of the UN is not even a major plot point in this movie, whose real purpose is to set up the seventh season of “24,” scheduled to start, at long last, in January.
I’d quite like to see a version of “24” accurately depicting the UN’s impotence: tremble as Jack Bauer attempts to get a code cable agreed by all parties, and fails. Thrill as there is a dispute over whether Mr. Bauer can take non-insured personnel in a UN 4×4. Gasp as he has holds a multi-stakeholder workshop with the World Bank and European Commission…
by Charlie Edwards | Nov 25, 2008 | Global Dashboard, Off topic
Do we need to call ‘time out’ on global risk analysis? The NIC report on global trends 2025 is one of a plethora of recent publications on global risks and security challenges from think tanks, Government departments, the defence community, NGOs, business, academia, and the media. Do we really need any more?
3 questions spring to mind:
1. Are we suffocating under the weight of all this analysis?
2. Should we consider having a period of consolidation and reflection?
3. Do we need a transformational shift from analysis to action?
How many times do we need to be told that:
- Since the end of the Cold War, the international landscape has been transformed.
- During the next 30 years, every aspect of human life will change at an unprecedented rate, throwing up new features, challenges and opportunities.
- The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
- The formidable acceleration of information exchanges, the increased trade in goods and as well as the rapid circulation of individuals, have transformed our economic, social and political environment
- New players—Brazil, Russia, India and China will bring new stakes and rules of the game to the international high table.
- Increase in global population will put pressure on resources—particularly land, energy, food, and water—raising the spectre of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
- There are a set of interconnected set of threats and risks, including international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics, and trans-national crime.
Surely it is time to complement existing analytical work with some ideas for action or even, as someone suggested earlier, divert our focus to analysing potential ‘solutions’ rather than identifying the same ‘problems’ time and again. Given the vast number of reports and papers in the system, surely now is the time to consider what improvements and upgrades can and need to be made to the global system in response to the myriad of issues the international community faces.
In order to do this we need to move away from the comfortable exercise of scene setting, describing the world around us and instead take a different approach. One simple way would be to look East and see what Indian & Chinese thinkers and academics are developing. Analysis obviously plays a crucial role in thinking through issues and in policy-making but the very process of analysis can be seductive; providing us with breathing space when we actually need to be pushing on and debilitating by creating ever greater complexity which can often lead to inaction.
In the words of the King:
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
by Alex Evans | Nov 25, 2008 | Articles and Publications, Speeches
Speech by Alex Evans at the Tomorrow Network (25 November 2008)
Download Speech
