by Daniel Korski | Dec 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global Dashboard, North America, UK
As President Elect Obama and his new foreign policy team contemplate how to deal with the growing number of security challenges that will confront them on Inauguration Day, a bi-partisan group of experts has tabled a series of thought-provoking ideas for how to reform the U.S government.
The report from the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) shows the U.S national security establishment at its finest – willing to think far into the future, push creative ideas and suggest the reorganization of vast swathes of government. (Full disclosure: I served pro bono as an adviser to the team). It stands in sharp contrast to Gordon Brown’s timid reforms, outlined a few months ago in the now-forgotten National Security Strategy. In fact, the report is veritable smorgasbord of ideas that any up-and-coming Tory security specialist should pick from.
The first recommendation, which a Conservative Party ought to consider when they take office – and legislate to repeat with every new Parliament — a National Security Review, which should prioritize objectives, establish risk management criteria, specify roles and responsibilities for priority missions, assess required capabilities, and identify capability gaps. This would go well beyond both the traditional Defence Reviews, as it would take in all of governments, and leave the National Security Strategy to elaborate on strategy and policies rather than being the hotchpotch of policies and reform proposals that it currently is.
To implement this, the U.S report suggests National Security Planning Guidance, to be issued annually, in order to provide guidance to departments based on the results of the National Security Review. This, too, would make sense in Britain where the National Security Strategy has not been able to force any change in the way departments operate because it never moved into specific requirements.
In Britain, such a document would have to be tied to the Budget and preferably the Comprehensive Spending Review. But with a National Security Planning Guidance, the Treasury and other Departments will be able to draft multi-year resource plans for each department and ensure consistency with the National Security Review. Perhaps a part of a future Comprehensive Spending Review would by a National Security Resource Document, which could contain which presents the government integrated, rolling six-year national security resource strategy proposals.
The report suggests that a Presidential Security Council replace the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council, thus removing an artificial divide. In many ways, the Brown government foresaw this development with the creation of a Cabinet Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development. But the establishment of a cross-government committee was not accompanied by reforms of the Cabinet Office and so did not create anything resembling the U.S set-up. In fact, the last couple of years have seen a well-reported hallowing out of the Cabinet Office.
Adapting from the U.S report, the Conservative Party should look at ways to adapt the idea of a Director for National Security, who would work to the National Security Adviser and manage the Whitehall decision-making process. This would allow the Prime Minister to appoint a political National Security Adviser –- like Pauline Neville-Jones -– but have a Civil Servant manage the bureaucratic work. The Cabinet Office would have to be considerably expanded with permanent staff covering key countries and issues. Decision-making would still have to lie with Ministers and Cabinet, but the fact that modern policy-making require a stronger center is recognized by everyone except the current officials in the Cabinet Office.
I would add the idea of having Prime Ministerial Regional Envoys or in the cases where Britain has a large-scale, multi-departmental commitment, like Afghanistan, Resident Ministers, such as Harold Macmillan’s role in Austria, Duff Coooper’s in Singapore and Oliver Lyttelton’s in Cairo during World War II. These individuals would have the clout to manage all departmental interests, have a direct link to Parliament (and so could keep the arguments for interventions alive) and ensure the necessary delegation of authority. Their constituency duties could be dealt with like the Speaker’s. Now that I’m thinking about the subject, I’d add the previously-floated ideas of upgrading the UK military representative in the U.S to a Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff akin to John Dill’s role during WW II.
To get the right kind of people supporting missions, the report recommends a National Security Professional Corps and a National Security Strategic Human Capital Plan to identify and secure the human capital capabilities necessary. Here too the Conservative Party should take note. Though there are Arabists in the Foreign Office and micros-finance specialists in DfiD, Britain does not really have a cadre of national security professionals. And why not? National security work is, after all, the most imrpotant kind of work and now cuts across all departments so it makes sense to create a career-path and incentives for people.
As changes cannot only happen in the Executive branch. The report therefore recommends the establishment of Select Committees on National Security in the Senate and House of Representatives. This, too, makes sense in Britain where the various Select Committees tread on each others toes, and fail to provide oversight of cross-department issues. A Lords/House Select Committee on National Security seems like a good idea.
The next election will not be fought on defence policy and few have been won on the strength of bureaucratic reforms. But the Tories will need to have serious ideas ready if they hope to change the country’s foreign and security policy. This U.S report shows how it can be done.
by Alex Evans | Dec 5, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Relatively little media coverage so far on the UN climate talks currently underway in Poznan – but that’s not to say that nothing interesting is happening there.
Item 1 is that China and India have come out arguing that Obama’s proposed 2020 emissions reduction (namely, to get US emissions back to 1990 levels by that date – more details here) is insufficient. He Jiankun, a Chinese delegate, was quoted in Reuters as saying that “It’s more ambitious than President Bush but it is not enough to achieve the urgent, long-term goal of greenhouse gas reductions”.
Given that the IPCC says that stabilising at 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent (the maximum level on which we still have a better than even chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees C) probably requires developed countries to reduce their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, you can see where the Chinese and the Indians are coming from.
But as David pointed out when he and I were debating this a couple of weeks ago, the US’s emissions have gone through the roof under Bush: even the very modest target proposed by Obama is going to be a massive stretch for them. Expect this one to run and run.
Item 2: Brazil is reportedly sidling up to per capita convergence as the formula for sharing out a global emissions budget, at least if you believe this report in Business Green yesterday, which says:
Brazil reportedly put the finishing touches to proposals apparently based on the contraction and convergence principle that would see countries agree to per-capita emission reduction targets. Under the proposals, emission targets would be set on a per-head-of population basis, meaning that developing economies with low-carbon emissions per capita such as China would face less-demanding targets, while those countries with the highest level of emissions per person would have to deliver the deepest cuts.
Fascinating if true, but they don’t cite their source, so I’m regarding as tentative until I hear it from another source or two.
Item 3, meanwhile, is that in a workshop on “shared visions” for the future on Tuesday, China made some tentative steps towards setting out its stall on how it would want an emissions budget to be shared out. This is very interesting, as China’s the most important of the handful of developing countries for whom straight per capita convergence wouldn’t be advantageous – as its per capita emissions have (just in the last few months) gone over the global average per capita level, meaning that even immediate convergence at equal per capita shares to the atmosphere would leave them with no surplus permits to sell. What then is China proposing? The Worldwatch Institute wrote it up like this:
China, citing the equity language of Article 3, mentioned the need for eventual “global per-capita emissions convergence” – the idea that, at some point in the future, all countries in the world should have similar per-capita emissions as a matter of climate equity. But this concept did not pick up momentum, at least not in the workshop.
That had me sitting bolt upright in my chair and reaching for the phone to ask people in Poznan if it was really true. The answer back: not quite. In fact, what China seems to have been proposing is a system of per capita convergence in cumulative emissions – i.e. taking into account historical responsibility for past emissions, as well as current emissions – which would clearly be much more advantageous to it, given how much later China industrialised than (say) Britain (for whom historical responsibility based allocations of emissions permits would be rather, ahem, challenging).
But the real significance here is less the specific formula that China proposed (more details needed – if you were in the workshop, please drop me an email), and more the fact that China may now be starting to engage in a conversation about the formula that might be used to share out a global emissions budget. Up to now, discussion of stabilisation targets for greenhouse gas levels in the air has been off the table – in large part due to Chinese unwillingness to talk about how the emission budget implied would then be shared out. If that’s changing, then the future just got a little more hopeful.
by Mark Weston | Dec 3, 2008 | Africa, Economics and development
Manslaughter: The unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought (Oxford English Dictionary).
Some commentators think Thabo Mbeki’s decision not to provide antiretroviral drugs to South Africans suffering from AIDS (even while neighbouring Botswana and Namibia were using them to save thousands of lives) was genocidal. The policy, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard, caused over 365,000 premature deaths among adults and infants – about half the number who died in the Rwandan genocide, and many more than died in Bosnia.
Genocide is the “deliberate extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group.” Mbeki’s stubbornness mostly killed black South Africans (a racial group), but proving he deliberately exterminated them would be tough. Proving mass manslaughter, on the other hand, should be a slam dunk.
The Treatment Action Campaign dropped a 2003 manslaughter case that charged the health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang with “unlawfully and negligently [causing] the deaths of men and women and children.” Despite the fresh evidence of the death toll caused by Mbeki and his henchwoman, however, the new spirit of co-operation between activists and the government means old wounds are unlikely to be reopened. I asked one of those activists what the families of those who died unnecessarily would think about letting Mbeki and his health minister off the hook: “Most of those relatives,” she replied, “don’t think someone else is responsible. Because of stigma and discrimination, they mostly blame the person who died.”
by David Steven | Dec 3, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, North America
Christmas 2006 and Santa brings the American right an unexpected Christmas present – the invasion of (nasty, Islamic) Somalia by (nice, Christian) Ethiopia. Times were tough in Iraq, so the cheerleaders of military force were glad of the opportunity to get out their pom poms and strut their stuff for an army that really knew how to put the boot in.
Why, they asked over at National Review (bastion of US conservatism), is Ethiopia so successful at vanquishing Jihadi foes, when the US has so much trouble? Was it a more sophisticated approach to counter-insurgency? Greater understanding of cultural drivers? No – it was because they were prepared to fight like real men untramelled by the Geneva conventions.
Ethiopians are “not worried about whether they will be seen as “occupiers” or whether their “occupation” will be viewed as benevolent,” Cliff May reckoned. Neither are they:
Overly concerned about whether their tactics will win approval from the proverbial Arab Street – or the European Street or Turtle Bay. They are fighting a war; their intention is to defeat their enemies; everything else is secondary or tertiary.
James Robbins, meanwhile, was also in thrall to the Ethiopian’s use of of ‘maximum force’, dismissing those who warned this was a war that the Ethiopians would never win. John Miller, meanwhile, wanted Ethiopian troops airlifted in to kick some Iraqi ass, while Cliff May headlined a piece: “WHY EUROPEANS AND ARABS ARE ROOTING FOR THE ISLAMISTS IN SOMALIA.”
(Oh and don’t forget daffy old Kathryn Lopez who was all weak at the knees as she warned the world not to ‘mess with Ethiopia’.)
So how did it go then? Here’s today’s editorial from the FT:
Before Ethiopia invaded with Washington’s blessing, Somalia barely registered on the global jihadi radar. Two years later, the conflict is a significant mobilising force. Videos seeking recruits and financing for Islamist militias fighting the Ethiopian-backed transitional government have proliferated on jihadi web sites. Fighters from Zanzibar, the Comoros islands and as far away as Pakistan have been drawn to the insurgency. Ethiopia’s intervention has bolstered extremist elements that the US and other western powers hoped – against the advice of most experts at the time – that it would contain.
In recent months, hardline al-Shabaab militias have gained control over much of southern Somalia. By contrast, the transitional government that Ethiopia stepped in to install can claim influence over the town of Baidoa and only parts of the capital, where roadside bombs explode daily. Ethiopian troops are bogged down fighting an insurgency that gains strength from their presence, while the government they support shows no signs of becoming more effective. It is a familiar scenario for the US and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ethiopia however, has announced its decision to cut its losses and withdraw by the end of the year.
Nowadays of course, the Somalia is largely forgotten by the American right – all the posters of Ethiopian troops have been torn down from right-wing bedrooms. But they still think their foreign policy prescription was the right one – and that Bush has left the world a safer place….
by David Steven | Dec 2, 2008 | UK
It’s been very disturbing to discover today that I have a contraband government document in my possession. Given the recent furore over leaks, I am expecting to be arrested at any moment…
The Times broke the news today that, back in 2002, a ‘secret report‘ warned Ministers that much money would be wasted if the Olympic games came to the UK. I remember ‘Game Plan’ well and still have a copy on the shelves somewhere. It was sent to me through the post (!) when… I requested a copy.
Now, according to the Times, the report was only ‘selectively distributed‘ and its “findings are not widely known even in sport’s upper echelons.” I have never aspired even to sport’s very lowest echelons, so you can imagine my surprise to find I was included on such an exclusive circulation list.
According to Hugh Robertson, who is Shadow Sports Minister (the Shadow Minister for Sports, I should add, not the Minister for Shadow Sports), the report shows that we should have let the perfidious French host the Olympics instead of us:
By ruthlessly suppressing the report without addressing its conclusions, the Government has knowingly wasted huge amounts of public money that could have been used to improve sport in this country.
(I assume that this is a different Hugh Robertson to the one who claims that the Olympics would never have come to London without him, and who got all mardy when the taxpayer refused to pay for him to go to Beijing on a jolly on a vital study tour…)
But moving on… I think it is important that the government moves swiftly to complete its Stalinist removal of Game Plan from the pages of history. Maybe they should start by:
- Taking down the copy that is hiding in full view on the Cabinet Office website.
- Asking a few hundred other websites to take their copies down.
- Stopping answering questions about it in Parliament, especially in the presence of… Hugh Robertson.
Bonus – below, a picture of Hugh being steadied on hearing today’s v upsetting news…
