by Daniel Korski | Jun 11, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
Do interventions work? With the vicissitudes of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions and conflict returning to the Balkans, it is hard to answer in the positive. But the always well-read Nick Grono of ICG alerted me yesterday to this fascinating report – Human Security Brief 2007.
Against current wisdoms, it says that conflict in Africa has dropped dramatically:
Between 1999 and 2006 (the most recent year for which we have complete data), sub-Saharan Africa’s security landscape was transformed. The number of armed conflicts being fought in the region fell by more than half. The number of people being killed dropped even more steeply—by 2006 the annual battle-death toll was just 2 percent of that of 1999.
It goes on to say that while in 2002 there were 26 non-state conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, this number has dropped by more than half across the region, and their death tolls had fallen by some 70 percent.
Why is this happening? Because of international intervention:
Research suggests that the drivers of this remarkable decline in armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are to be found not in long-term structural change, but in the post-Cold War surge of policy initiatives designed to stop wars (“peacemaking”) or prevent them from starting again (“postconflict peacebuilding”).
So despite the poor coordination, underpowered missions, occasionally illegal activities of UN soldiers, the lack of political will to push through large-scale peace-deals etc. etc. intervention actually works.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 9, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
The tragic deaths of three paratroopers on patrol in Helmand on Sunday brings the number of British military casualties in Afghanistan to 100. A steady stream of Ministers and MPs have gone on air to praise the soldier’s courage and reiterate the reasons for why we are in Afghanistan. Rupert Everett, the actor, chose an altogether different approach. Publicising his documentary he risked the wrath of British servicemen and women by labelling them “wimps” in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph:
“The whole point of being in the Army is going to war and getting yourself blown up. They are always whining about the dangers of being killed. They are such wimps now. It’s pathetic, all this whining.”
Everett has since apologised for his remark.
by Daniel Korski | Jun 9, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Simon Jenkins has a good piece in the Sunday Times about the decreasing willingness to contemplate humanitarian intervention. The humanitarian creed, he says:
can no longer override considerations of state sovereignty and the natural caution of diplomats and generals.
While opposing every intervention known to man, Jenkins goes on to lament:
This noble cause has vanished in the wind. Almost before it is put to the test it is gone. The failure to intervene in Darfur and the deference shown to the dictators of Burma and Zimbabwe indicate a pendulum swinging fast in the other direction.
It is not hard to see why the negativity. The West has failed to intervene in Burma and ships are now being forced to return after waiting in vain. The EU military mission in Chad was originally conceived by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as a repeat of the U.S safe zone created in the Kurdish areas in Iraq. But instead of a mandate to go into Sudan, it has had to sit on the Chadian side of the border. Problems, of course, plague missions in Iraq and Afghanistan while Kosovo refuses to solve itself.
But Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argued against this pessimism in the Washington Post last year.
America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change.
The duo behind the League of Democracies, remind readers that the U.S has intervened between 1989 and 2001 with significant military force on eight occasions — once every 18 months. This interventionism, they go on, has been bipartisan — four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. The implication: interventionism is here to stay. It is as much a part of international politics as state sovereignty.
I have to say I agree with Daalder and Kagan. The West is only temporarily numbed by recent failures, as well as being logistically constrained because of troop overstretch. True, in Europe few governments seem willing to spend the necessary funds on the required military and civilian capability. True, the U.S electorate is in a particularly sour mood, to the extent that more Europeans now support democracy-promotion than Americans.
But this will pass. And once a new U.S president begins a draw-down in Iraq – a policy I expect from both Senators McCain and Obama – and surge in Afghanistan – again something to expect form both – the balance of sentiment will be re-calibrated in favour of intervention.
However, we need a re-definition of interventionism, a Chicago speech for the new post-Iraq millennium. And David Milliband is the man to give it, in my view.
by David Steven | Jun 7, 2008 | Conflict and security, South Asia
We all know the theory behind counter-insurgency – cultural sensitivity, force as a last resort, the patient exertion of influence etc – but the reality is often very different as this first-person account from Afghanistan shows.
Canadian columnist, Rosie Dimanno found herself stuck behind an American convoy that was blocking a road into Kabul. She was asked to help an ambulance that desperately needed to pass:
Hands in the air, dangling my media credentials from my fingers, I forced one foot in front of the other. Clearly the troops should be able to see I was Western, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, not hiding a weapon or a suicide vest.
Fifty metres away, the air gunner in the rear vehicle lowered his machine gun at me threateningly.
“Don’t shoot!” I croaked. “Just let the ambulance pass!”
The doors opened and two soldiers got out, clearly angry.
“You!” he hollered, pointing at me. “Get back where you were.”
Then, stomping up to my Afghan colleague, the senior soldier got right in his face. “We’ve got a problem here,” he spat out. “And you are creating an even bigger problem. Now go back to your car or we will have one REALLY REALLY BIG PROBLEM.”
I felt the Afghan’s humiliation and saw red.
“Don’t you f—-g talk to him like that. And don’t you f—-g talk to me like that. This is his country. Not yours, not mine.”
The second soldier, a younger fellow who looked intensely embarrassed, whispered to me: “I’m sorry ma’am. It’s just been a long day.”
Back in the car, her driver – a NATO fan – is bitter:
This is why Afghans have come to hate Americans. Afghanistan is not our country any more. They are our bosses. They treat us sometimes as if we are trespassing on our own land.
As Dimanno reflects:
I suspect some more enemies were made on this afternoon, adding incrementally to the hostility that is rapidly replacing the warm welcome that most Afghans had originally given their “liberators.”
The Americans did not have to be so aggressive. They did not have to treat Afghan men like boys.
by Mark Weston | Jun 5, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Among the most popular policy responses to recent rises in food prices are export bans. Cambodia has banned rice exports, for example. Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran have refused to export wheat to hungry neighbours like Afghanistan. And Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries that has been hardest hit by the price rises, has banned cereal exports to neighbouring Ghana.
Such measures have been widely criticised, but they are not new. I recently came across FJ Pedler’s ‘Economic Geography of West Africa’, published by Longmans in 1955. Among many other interesting topics, he writes about the maize shortages of 1947. He notes the wildly fluctuating price of guinea-corn in the Zaria region of Nigeria, which rose from £8 per ton in 1946 to £38 per ton a year later. “These price movements,” he says, “are an indication that too little food is produced to meet the needs of the people throughout the year.” Traders take advantage of this, buying up food at harvest time to sell it later when prices rise (a bit like today’s commodities traders, who have been stocking up on food): “They are often blamed for high prices and scarcity [plus ça change…], but their action is the result of shortage, not the cause of it.”
As in today’s crisis, Mr Pedler reports that governments “often get frightened by the high prices and shortages…and prohibit the movement of food from one place to another.” Like Burkina Faso today, West African governments in the 1950s banned the export of guinea-corn from one state to another – in this case, from Katsina Province into Zaria Province. It didn’t help then either, and Pedler explains why the approach is flawed:
It is difficult to defend these bans on economic grounds. If they are effective, they prevent food from moving to the place where people will pay most for it. This must drive prices even higher in the needy area: while in the producing area an artificially low price is maintained, so that there is less economic incentive for farmers to increase their production.
Little has been learnt, it seems, in the intervening half-century. However, as Mr Pedler observed back then, the bans are easily evaded; “their principal effect is to add to the cost of transport by making it necessary for traders to avoid control posts or bribe the guards.” Good news for the corrupt, then, but bad news for the hungry.
