Saturday’s Map: Ocean Currents
From a special report in The Economist:
“The undeclared war on Pakistan”
With just over a couple of weeks to the inauguration, it’s finally sinking in: Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to imply some pretty fundamental changes to the global war on terror. Serious thinking on how to dismantle Guantanamo is well underway – as is discussion about which of America’s allies will be willing to welcome its detainees (Australia and Britain both profess reluctance; Portugal, on the other hand, looks well on course for a special relationship with the new Administration). A sea change on torture and rendition also appears to be a racing certainty.
In Iraq, too, massive changes are underway. As well as the rich symbolism of the sock and awe incident, there’s now also yesterday’s more tangible proof of how far things have moved on: the Iraqi government has assumed control of the Green Zone.
Now, pause to wonder: are these changes likely to have a significant impact on the capacity of radical Islamist groups to recruit and retain committed volunteers – whether in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia or wherever? After all, Guantanamo, torture, rendition and Iraq surely represented four of the principal sources of the sense of grievance so essential to effective radicalisation. Does that mean the outlook on counter-terrorism is finally brightening?
One possible reason why not, of course, has to do with Gaza. Olmert’s rationale for Israel’s attacks is not hard to discern – Hamas ended its ceasefire, there’s an election in February, he wanted to rebuild Israel’s credibility after the 2006 debacle in Lebanon, there was only a brief window of opportunity before Obama’s inauguration. But even so, the fact that Israel’s attacks have so far killed 436 Palestinians (compared to 172 dead in Mumbai) will clearly fuel a sense of outrage among many – including this blogger – and will provide a powerful recruiting sergeant for Islamist groups everywhere.
But another answer to the question of sources of grievance after Bush can be found by taking a stroll down my local high street, in a part of East London that has one of the highest proportions of Muslims in the capital.
Today, the activist posters you see on lamposts and on the walls of the shops selling mobile phone skins and international calling cards have one key message: end the undeclared war on Pakistan. If you visit Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website, meanwhile, you find that just beneath the coverage of Gaza from the last fortnight, it’s Pakistan that’s the focus of attention and grievance – a point made even clearer by this youtube video of theirs from the start of December.
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uI47aQVLoq0]
You might think it odd that Islamist opinion in the UK should be focusing on a relatively small number of drone attacks in Pakistan when a major troop surge is about to take place over the border in Afghanistan. But think again, and you realise that of course it makes eminent sense for Hizb ut-Tahrir to focus on the grievance of most direct relevance to Britain’s large diaspora community – and to weave political Islamism into long-standing fears about Pakistan’s territorial integrity.
Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House represents a welcome turning point on many components of the ‘war on terror’. But the evolving situation in Pakistan (on which Obama is hawkish, remember) may well represent another – especially here in the UK. If Obama steps up US attacks on Pakistan’s border areas, then many British Muslims will doubtless listen to what Gordon Brown has to say about it with keen interest…
Predictions for 2009: we count our chickens before they’re hatched. Literally.
Charlie has got some debate going with his ten predictions for 2009, and I’m not going to try to rival it. But after a year of following food prices unusually closely, I’ve decided to go where even Alex Evans has not gone before in an effort to tell the future: the official US Poultry Outlook Report – December 2008. And no, this isn’t about avian flu. It’s about how the global downturn is going to create a rift between increasingly internationalist turkey farmers and isolationist, America-first chicken and egg producers. Feathers will fly!
Let’s start with chickens (to the initiated, “broilers”). For the first nine months of last year, production was growing strongly. But as food prices slumped over the last few months, so did the number of “chick placements” – which I assume is code for “fattening the little critters up in a big shed until they can’t walk”:
Over the last 5 weeks (8 November to 6 December, 2008), the number of chicks placed for growout averaged 7.4 per cent lower than for the same period in 2007. With uncertainties about the domestic and world economies, the trend of year-over-year declines in chick placement is expected to continue well into 2009. With smaller chick placements forecast, the estimates of broiler meat production have been adjusted downward in fourth-quarter 2008 and in the first three quarters of 2009.
Who are we going to blame for this? Foreigners. Unless they like brown meat:
All the uncertainties in the global economy have combined to sharply reduce the demand for broiler exports . . . but declining exports may be slightly mitigated by lower prices for leg quarters, the primary export.
So expect the chicken farming lobby to turn inwards. Their disinterest in foreign affairs will only be compounded by increasing imbalances in the egg market:
Shipments of all shell eggs and egg products in October totaled 17.9 million dozen, down 13 per cent from the previous year. Much of the decline is due to lower shipments to Mexico and Hong Kong.
But it’s all very different on the turkey front. There’s a glut of the damn things – more and more are being put into cold storage – and production is expected to slow as a result. With supply higher than demand, the U.S. needs to offload large quantities of its national bird. Fortunately, there are proven markets available:
Turkey exports remained very strong in October, totaling 71.8 million pounds, up 36 per cent from the previous year. Much of the increase in October’s turkey exports was due to higher shipments to the largest markets — exports to Mexico, Canada, and the combined China/Hong Kong markets were all up considerably from the previous year.
So that’s good news… but wait a minute! Not only is China propping up the U.S. economy by buying vast quantities of American bonds, but now we discover that it will start underwriting the turkey industry? What if Beijing stopped buying? Even Mexico slapped a temporary ban on birds from some U.S. plants just before Christmas on health grounds. And last Tuesday Russia demonstrated its resurgent nationalism by slashing its total poultry import quota from the U.S. by 1.25 million metric tons to 952,000 metric tons. So here’s my first big question for 2009: can the U.S. poultry industry adapt to a multi-polar world?
Next week: a post in which I explain the new world order by tracking trends in the price of tea-leaves.