by Richard Gowan | Apr 6, 2010 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Off topic
An unfortunate glitch in a story from the UN News Center*:
Mr. Ban will begin his official visit [to Central Asia] in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, where he will tour the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia (UNRCCA) and the National Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, according to information released by his spokesperson today.
UNRCCA, which is headed by Miroslav Jenca, was launched at the end of 2007 with the aim of helping the five governments in the region to increase their capacities to peacefully prevent dialogue, facilitate dialogue and respond to cross-border threats and challenges such as terrorism, drug trafficking and environmental degradation.
Well, it’s better than forcefully preventing dialogue I suppose…
* If the UN clears this up, you can find the original story reprinted here.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: Very shortly after Ban left Kyrgyzstan on his Central Asian tour, the country descended into chaos. Today, the opposition seems to have taken control of the security services, although the President has yet to resign. Two questions arise. First, did the UN Secretary-General consider rushing back to help mediate the situation? He had, after all said he sensed tension “in the air” while he was there. Second, is it conceivable that his visit stimulated an up-tick in violence that might otherwise have been avoided? Colum Lynch has a nice take on Ban’s visit here, arguing he was just unlucky.
by Mark Weston | Apr 3, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security
Back in January, I posted the text below (I subsequently took it down for re-posting at a later date because of a bizarre and unnerving incident that happened to me in Dakar):
“The airstrip on the island of Bubaque in Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagos archipelago is, appropriately, a white line cut out of the bush, a narrow sandy strip hemmed in on both sides by thick forest. Only small planes can land there, but small planes can carry large quantities of cocaine.
The Guinean government claims that the drug trade through the islands (which South American dealers have adopted as a transit point on the way to the lucrative European market) has abated in recent months. The country’s leaders are reluctant to forfeit European Union aid, so they are keen to show that they are fighting this new scourge.
I spent ten days on Bubaque over the Christmas period and heard a dozen or so planes in the night. More may have arrived while I was asleep. Given that the airstrip sees no commercial traffic, with the islands’ few visitors and provisions being shipped in on pirogues and the weekly ferry from Bissau, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the planes were from Latin America.
Nor are there signs in the capital, Bissau, of any let-up. The city is in the midst of a minor building boom, as smart new villas spring up, with gardens, fences and security guards – all funded, according to locals, by drug money.
But even if it does show resolve, the government’s capacity is limited. Only around twenty of the eighty Bijagos islands are inhabited, so they are extremely difficult to police (more so when your navy has no ships and your air force no planes). And the resourceful South Americans are putting in contingency plans to pre-empt EU and government pressure. Two of them, I was told, recently scoped out a hitherto unused island, posing as tourists and asking villagers if there was an airstrip (there isn’t) or a forest clearing (there is) where they can land small jets or helicopters. But even landing areas are not essential – the traffickers can also drop the drugs into the sea for collection.
In the islands, few are willing to discuss the drug trade – many believe Colombian or Venezuelan drug lords killed their president, Nino Vieira, last year after he failed to pay them for a consignment of cocaine, so they are understandably fearful. But the return to the country of Admiral Bubo has put the cat among the pigeons and sent tremors through the highest levels of government.
Before he fled into exile after a failed attempt to topple Vieira, Admiral Bubo was head of the Guinean navy. This position gave him privileged access to the narco-traffickers, who use boats as well as planes to transport cocaine across the Atlantic. Admiral Bubo therefore knows many things, which is why the government was so keen for the UN to hand him over, which it agreed to do last week. He knows the extent of Nino’s involvement in the trade (some believe the president carried cocaine to Europe himself, taking advantage of his immunity from customs searches). He knows who killed Nino, and whether senior members of the new government are involved in drug trafficking.
But Bubo is playing a dangerous game. Guinea-Bissau has no prisons, so he will either be freed or “disappeared”. It is almost certain that he profited from the drug boom himself, so if the government doesn’t protect him he will be at the mercy of rival navy or army factions and of the Latin Americans. How Bubo is dealt with will be a test case of the government’s seriousness in combating the trade.”
Last Thursday, the Admiral Bubo story took a new twist. Bubo was taken into the protection of a group of soldiers headed by a General Antonio Indjai, who at the same time arrested the Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes, and forty army officers including the army chief, who had opposed Bubo’s release. As Indjai took control of the armed forces, Bubo announced that Gomes is “a criminal who must be judged.”
When news of the PM’s arrest broke, hundreds of Guineans took to the streets to demand his release. The plotters relented, placing him under house arrest instead.
Admiral Bubo, as I suggested in January, was likely to have been implicated in the cocaine trade. Vincent Foucher, a researcher with the Bordeaux-based Centre d’etudes d’Afrique Noire, claimed in this weekend’s Libération newspaper that Carlos Gomes had been trying to sideline General Indjai because of the latter’s involvement in drug trafficking. The alliance between the admiral and the general is not surprising, therefore.
But what of the Prime Minister himself? Vincent Fourcher believes he is taking a strong hand against the narco-traffickers. Bubo, who knows exactly who is involved, argues the opposite. While in Guinea-Bissau myself in December and January, I heard many conflicting opinions over whether or not Gomes was abetting the traffickers – some even believe he had Nino Vieira killed in the turf war for control of the trade.
Whatever the truth, it seems that battle lines are being drawn, with Bubo and Indjai on one side, Gomes on the other. Where the country’s president, Malam Bacai Sanha, stands is not yet clear, and nor, perhaps most crucially for the future of Guinea-Bissau, is the allegiance of the Latin American drug cartels…
by Richard Gowan | Apr 2, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Global system, South Asia
Eighteen months ago, I wrote a post for GD asking whether India was about to pull its troops out of UN missions. This was inspired by two very good Indian blogs: Nitin Pai’s Acorn and the anonymously-authored Pragmatic Euphony. Both have been arguing for India to cut back its UN commitments to near zero, on the grounds that (i) there is no clear strategic logic for these deployments; (ii) India has urgent military priorities closer to home, like Afghanistan; and (iii) Indian UN contigents have been hit by a series of accusations of misbehavior.
Back in mid-2008, this seemed like an interesting but theoretical argument. India’s commitment to UN operations looked solid. But after the 2008 Congo crisis – when Indian units were criticized for avoiding combat – New Delhi made clear diplomatic warnings that its patience with UN ops was limited. Western diplomats in New York treat Indian sensitivities with extreme care, lest Delhi pull its forces out of blue helmet missions. If that happened, the UN would be faced with a massive shortfall of infantry, helicopters, etc.
This is one of the big political stories around peacekeeping (perhaps the biggest) now. But readers of reports on UN ops would hardly know about it, as it gets very little coverage. By contrast, there’s lots of analysis of China’s role in peacekeeping, as I note in a new article out this week:
Are Chinese peacekeepers more interesting than Indian ones? Many Western security analysts seem to think so. China has just over 2,000 soldiers and police serving in United Nations operations. India has nearly 9,000. Yet while there is a steady flow of American and European think-tank reports with titles like China’s Expanding Role in Peacekeeping—mostly praising it—little is written about India’s far larger contribution.
New Delhi’s policy-makers should pause to ask why. Over the last decade, Indian forces have been on the frontline in many of the UN’s hardest missions, from Sierra Leone to the Congo. In the same period, China has gone from hardly engaging in peacekeeping at all to deploying engineers, medics and policemen—a useful but still limited offering.
Having spent a happy hour under the protection of Chinese policemen in Haiti, this author has no complaints—but it’s clear that China is getting a lot of kudos at little cost.
I should emphasize that I’m not against analyzing Chinese peacekeeping, let alone Chinese peacekeepers (and I thoroughly recommend these papers by ICG and SIPRI on the topic). But I think that Western and Indian strategists alike need to devote more time and energy to thinking through India’s role:
India should take a leaf from China’s great power playbook. It should not service UN missions for their own sake. Nor should it tie its involvement to limited rewards like senior posts in UN missions—such things are nice to have, but aren’t the currency of great power politics. Instead, India should use its investment in the UN as the basis to stake its leadership as a driver of new thinking about peacekeeping in a multipolar world.
Check out the full article for my arguments about how India can take this role – and how it might be an important step towards deploying a robust UN force in Afghanistan to replace NATO, as and when the Alliance finally gives up there.
Observant readers will note that the piece appears in Pragati, a journal on Indian strategic affairs edited by Nitin Pai, who has no problem platforming authors he cordially disagrees with. I hope that he’ll blog an equally cordial riposte to my argument, and that we can then have a knock-down, drag-out online debate about it – and that Pragmatic Euphony (who recently emphasized the need to release Indian helicopters from UN missions as priority) will join in too. For while we disagree rather fundamentally on this question, we agree that it’s an important issue for India and UN alike.
by Michael Harvey | Apr 1, 2010 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
– With Moscow still smouldering in the wake of the metro bombings, Sam Greene assesses how the Kremlin might respond, suggesting that recourse to further authoritarianism is unlikely to prove productive. The Economist, meanwhile, highlights the need for greater awareness across Russia of the fragile situation in the north Caucasus and notes the lack of a measured political discourse in response to the attacks.
– Francis Fukuyama talks to former US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, about China’s approach to the financial crisis. Daniel Drezner, meanwhile, reports on the discontent of leading G20 countries at Beijing’s apparent insouciance over implementing agreed economic reforms. Elsewhere, Patrick Messerlin charts the actions of the emerging G20 powers across economics, trade, and climate – suggesting that while much progress has been made, they still require leadership from OECD countries. Oxfam’s From Poverty to Power blog, meanwhile, offers a progress update on the financial transaction tax.
– Elsewhere, Der Spiegel interviews the man that headed Obama’s transition team, John Podesta, who offers his thoughts on the healthcare debate, the Washington political process, and Obama’s engagement with the rest of the world. The FT’s Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, meanwhile, assess the centralised nature of foreign policy decision-making in the Obama White House – highlighting the emphasis placed on improving the inter-agency process compared with the Bush years, but also the lack of a grand strategic thinker to which the President can regularly turn (à la Kissinger).
– Finally, Prospect Magazine has an interesting article on “seasteading” – described as involving “a future in which the high seas will be increasingly commandeered for unconventional purposes” (such as medical tourism, gambling, sanctuaries for minority groups etc.) – and the opportunity it may present for the creation of “micronations” populated by libertarian-minded groups.
by David Steven | Apr 1, 2010 | Global system
Opening Remarks at a Seminar on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization – Risk, Resilience and International Order (pdf of paper), Brookings Institution, 29 March 2010
The forerunner of this paper was commissioned by the UK Prime Minister in Spring 2008 and was presented at the Progressive Governance Summit in Watford on 5 April of that year.
At the table were a dozen or so heads of state, plus the heads of the WTO and IMF, and a few wildcards, most visibly Bill Clinton, who spent much of the summit in a rage about a mysterious figure he would only identify as ‘my wife’s opponent.’
Our section of the agenda was on building an international system that could withstand global risks, but its start was much delayed. Leaders wanted to get stuck into the nitty gritty of the most recent and pressing crisis – an economic one. Bear Stearns had just been bailed out and heads were clearly shocked by what this had revealed about global economic systems.
That day, the general view was that the acute phase of the crisis was now over. While the world had experienced unprecedented market turbulence, the situation was now under control and the focus should switch to rebuilding. As it turned out, of course, the tsunami of financial destruction was still building – with the worst impact months later, after Lehman’s was allowed to collapse in the Autumn.
Governments were forced to admit that they had little idea of how global economic systems worked – and still have only provisional thoughts about how to fix them. If the financial crisis has changed anything, it’s that it’s now acceptable to admit that too often, today, policymakers simply don’t know what to do. Our presentation to leaders was written from the belief that this crisis of confidence was not just confined to the economic sphere.
We have lived through an unexpectedly turbulent opening decade of the 21st century. The financial crisis shattered all assumptions about how economic risk is controlled, especially as it crosses the borders between organizations, countries, and categories (from the risk itself, to instruments derived from that risk).
We also witnessed 9/11 and the ill-considered and poorly-executed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed it – an event that took governments by surprise, and a reaction that was marred by moral, strategic and intelligence failures. 9/11 has, and will continue to have, far-reaching implications for the way the US and its allies think about security, while also significantly limiting their scope for action when confronted by new threats.
Finally (and least commented upon), we experienced a pronounced oil and food price spike – a harbinger of how difficult it will prove to cope with the world’s interrelated demographic, economic, and resources constraints. Again, it is clear that we lack understanding of the complex interplay between demand (driven by population numbers, wealth and, on occasion, speculation) and supply (driven by natural limits, investment patterns, and regulation) across a range of resources, each with interlinked patterns of usage and pricing.
Looking at these three events, we see a number of common threads which taken together define what we term the long crisis of globalization. These include:
- Scarcity, limits to the sustainable consumption of highly strategic commodities such as energy, land, water, food and ‘atmospheric space’ for emissions.
- Instability, the tendency for complex systems to experience unpredictable and unsettling shifts.
- And finally, the potential for the deliberate disruption of fragile global systems – whether by terrorists, rogue states, or the inventors of that other potent weapon, the CDO or collateralized debt obligation.
(more…)
