by Daniel Korski | Jul 25, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, South Asia
Thomas Schweich, previously the Bush administration’s Afghan drugs “czar” has made a big splash in the New York Times by claiming that President Hamid Karzai supports the drugs trade and that aerial eradication of the crop is the only way ahead:
An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban were preventing the implementation of an effective counterdrug program. And the rest of us could not turn them around.
Juicy stuff, no doubt. But Schweich has been challenged before, including by Barnett Rubin, a well-known Afghan expert.
Schweich’s argument seems to hinge on a central proposition: that insurgency, not poverty drives opium cultivation. But as a CN expert David Mansfield argues, this assertion is based on “the finding that households in these [poppy-growing] provinces reported higher average annual incomes ($3,316 for poppy-growing and $2,480 for others) to UNODC surveyors than those in the north ($2,690 for poppy-growing and $1,851 for others) or centre ($1,897 for poppy-growing and $1,487 for others).” He has further criticized the UN’s lack of reporting of sample size and statistical significance – both of which are necessary to determine the accuracy of the conclusion that poverty is not a factor.
In others word, the basis to argue that poverty does not drive opium-cultivation is weak. The link between opium and insurgency is also not as direct as Schweich imagines.
True, opium cultivation and insurgent violence are correlated geographically, and opium now provides the insurgents with a portion of their revenues. True, this portion may have increased as NATO pursues a decapitation strategy, trying to kill high-level insurgents. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and the other insurgent groups have many sources of revenue; and while a correlation exists between instability and opium cultivation, the causality derives from insecurity, not the other way around.
Why is is not possible to conduct aerial spraying then, as Schweich suggests? Simple. Afghan farmers do not use chemicals, so aerial eradication will likely be blamed as the cause of disease, premature deaths or crop destruction, which is a regular but unrelated occurrence in Afghanistan, as in any developing country. The Afghan government, already mistrusted, would suffer from any backlash.
For what to do, read this post.
by Alex Evans | Jul 24, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
Last year, while she was still working as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chair of international security at West Point – and shortly before she went to the State Department as deputy head of policy planning – Kori Schake wrote a pamphlet for the Center for European Reform entitled The US Elections and Europe: The coming crisis of high expectations.
In it, she argued that in order to avoid such a crisis, and to capitalise on the change of leadership in the US,
Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic need to adjust their sights. Any changes that the new American president introduces on issues that matter to Europe – Iran or climate change – will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Europeans and Americans will need to find a way to talk about Iraq in terms that resonate with both sides and do not belittle the continuing US involvement. The US feels alone in bearing the burden of Iraq, and Americans tend to gloss over the political price their European allies paid for supporting the war.
Europeans will also need to find ways of reminding the US of their comparative value as allies. Americans are likely to enter into one of their periodic fits of searching for better allies than the Europeans.
As Europe waits breathlessly for Obama’s set-piece speech in Berlin, this sounds like sage advice (particularly given the gentle dressing down that the Germans can apparently expect on troop commitments in Afghanistan). But there’s another reason to read Kori’s pamphlet, too: she’s now one of the key foreign policy advisers to John McCain.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 21, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
The fact that I think UN (and quite a lot of non-UN) peacekeeping is in crisis will not come as news to regular readers. Indeed, a rapid search of my contributions to this blog over the last seven or eight months reveals that I’m not just the Boy who Cried Wolf about the future of UN ops, but the Boy who cried “Wolf! W-w-wolf!! Really Big Wolf!! Actually, it might be a Bear…”. And so on ad nauseam.
Earlier this year, I tried to step back and define what this time of troubles consists of, beyond the flow of bad news from Chad, Congo, Darfur, Kosovo, etc., etc. The results of my musings were published today in that multi-million-selling glossy International Peacekeeping, under the subtle title “Peacekeeping in Crisis: 2006-08”. For those who don’t want to spend their summer beach-time ploughing through 7,000 words of this stuff, here’s my argument in three parts:
- Yes, this is a real crisis. There is a school that argues that the UN is just being whiny. It has managed to field 100,000 peacekeepers worldwide, far beyond its own predictions – and half its problems result from its own bureaucratic inflexibility, not real threats on the ground. This is wrong. The UN does have many internal flaws, but it is being asked to go to too many places at once, including places where peacekeeping stands no chance…
- …like Darfur. I argue, contrary to some optimists (including myself in an earlier, happier incarnation), that Darfur presents the UN with a systemic crisis. Sudan’s success in blocking the deployment of a serious UN force for two years (and counting) has shown that its pretty easy to bring the UN to a halt, if you have sufficient political will and few morals. I pick up on David and Alex’s concept of “intentional systems disruption”, which involves bringing down a complex system by exploiting its most vulnerable points – in the case of Darfur, those vulnerabilities have been (i) the UN’s political reliance on winning consent for its operations, which Sudan has denied and (ii) its shortage of specialized assets like helicopters. My hunch (shared by a lot of UN officials) is that Darfur is a textbook for how to block a UN operation that will be used elsewhere, weakening the whole system’s credibility…
- …and yep, we see the UN’s vulnerabilities being exploited from the Congo to Afghanistan. Getting all theoretical, I talk about a paradigmatic crisis for the UN: the idea of large-scale, multi-dimensional UN missions overseeing countries stumbling out of conflict may have run out of road. That’s not only because nasty governments know how disrupt UN ops, but because the UN model for building liberal, democratic and Western-oriented regimes doesn’t make so much sense in a world defined by a fit of Western self-doubt.
Does that mean it’s all over for the UN? No. But, as the article concludes in a slightly bathetic fashion, we have to adjust to an environment in which UN operations can only deliver limited goods: some stability, perhaps, and a limited amount of time to do political deals and maybe get to work on early economic recovery (for guidance on that part, check out the excellent new study by my colleagues at CIC). But not shiny and sustainable social democratic states.
by Alex Evans | Jul 21, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, North America
As David put it a while back: just what we need, another moron.
Asked by ABC’s Diane Sawyer Monday morning whether the “the situation in Afghanistan in precarious and urgent,” McCain responded:
“I think it’s serious. . . . It’s a serious situation, but there’s a lot of things we need to do. We have a lot of work to do and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border,” said McCain, R-Ariz., said on “Good Morning America.”
by Daniel Korski | Jul 18, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
A new draft study is about to be presented to the British Prime Minister, which will suggest ways to improve what’s now being called “civilian effects” i.e. what can be achieved in places like Iraq in support of the armed forces, but with non-military means.
Complaints from the military about the role of DfiD, especially in southern Afghanistan, have grown louder over the last few months. The Times’s Anthony Lloyd claimed soldiers in Musa Quala said of the Provincial Reconstruction Team:
They wouldn’t know how to pour p*** from a boot if the instructions were on the heel,” one soldier remarked. “That’s the PRT.”
The study will seek to deal with this kind of criticism. But it will be the umpteenth such study about how the UK “does conflict” if you include the capability reviews, the CRI study, DfiD’s work on conflict, various internal reviews etc. And while the PM has defied many in taking up the “stabilisation issue”, where he could have focused on more traditional development matters exclusively, change is not happening quickly enough.
The question being debated in No. 10 now, as part of the study, is whether to create a civilian reserve corps like the U.S ; or to use the chance to steel David Cameron’s idea of a JFK-style Peace Corps for kids. Part of the problem is that since the PM announced the establishment of a force of 1,000 civilians including police, members of the emergency services and judges – ready to be deployed to conflict zones around the world – as part of his National Security Strategy, nothing much has happened.
Both the Reserve and the Youth Corps are needed, but mixing the two concepts is a seriously bad, bad idea. Instead, the PM should be bold and go for three things:
- The Youth Corps
- A U.S-style Civilian Reserve
- Back a European Civilian Reserve into which the UK could plug
The latter would encourage other European allies to build their capabilities. If there is over-lap between the three, great. But if not, don’t force it. It would take away from each one.
