by Charlie Edwards | Mar 5, 2008 | South Asia
The International Narcotics Control Board has published its report on narcotics in Afghanistan. The increase in opium cultivation which is taking place in the south of the country (Afghanistan is estimated to supply more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium) the effects of the drug trade: an increase in organised crime, corruption and drug dependence (which is severe in Iran and has led to a major HIV epidemic in the NE of the country) and the impact on Iran, Pakistan and the central Asian republics all make for an increasingly familiar story and one that will come as no surprise to GD readers. The facts are still worth thinking about.
- Iran, the chief transit country for drugs from Afghanistan, now has the highest rate of opiate abuse in the world.
- More than half of inmates in Iran’s prisons have been convicted for drug-related offences, and seizures of opium, morphine and heroin have risen rapidly.
- Pakistan, through which an estimated 35 per cent of Afghanistan’s opiates are smuggled, faces growing problems, with seizures in 2006, the last year for which figures were available, rising 46 per cent.
- An estimated 21 per cent of Afghanistan’s heroin and morphine transit via central Asia, the report says, leading to large increases in seizures in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
- Drug trafficking and abuse in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which have long borders with Turkey and Russia, will deteriorate further
- Drug abuse in Iraq appears to have risen dramatically and while opiate use in western and central Europe has remained stable or declined, it has increased in Russia and eastern Europe.
- The rise of cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan, including in some areas that have been declared poppy-free.
Aside from these devastating facts and the sense of powerlessness that comes with them the annual report is a timely reminder that Afghanistan’s drug addiction is a primary indicator for how well the Karzai Government, NATO and all the other international organisations are managing the stabilisation and reconstruction of the country.
The INCB report also clearly demonstrates the negative influences the drugs trade is having across a broad spectrum of issues. My concern, however, is that our conventional approach to countering narcotics in Afghanistan, a so-called wicked issue, remains hamstrung by a set of assumptions that is actually making it more not less difficult to manage. The Narcotics problem is only one node in a complex system. All of which reminds me of a saying from the gritty, realistic and addictive American TV series The Wire – ‘ follow the drugs, all you find are drug users and drug dealers, but if you follow the money, you don’t know what you’ll find’.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 25, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of its inhospitable climate and remoteness. The average winter temperature on Svalbard is around minus 14C. The vault is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, doors armoured with steel plate and a home guard of free-roaming polar bears.
As the world’s first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet’s main food crops and has been designed as a latter-day Noah’s Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.
The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway’s Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the “perfect place” for seed storage.
The vault is made up of three large, airtight, refrigerated cold-storage chambers which are housed in a long trident-shaped tunnel bored through a layer of permafrost in to a mountain of sandstone and limestone on the archipelago.
Scientists involved in the project point out that some of the world’s biodiversity had already been lost as a result of war or natural disaster with gene vaults disappearing in Iraq and Afghanistan following the conflicts there and while seed banks in the Philippines and Honduras have been wiped out from natural disasters. The vault is the world’s last line of defence against extinction.
‘Every nation has been invited by the Norwegian government to place its seeds in this vault. It’s the last line of defence against extinction for all the crops we have, and the most long-lasting, most futuristic and most positive contribution to humanity being made by the international community today.’
Each country’s seeds will be stored inside heat-sealed, four-ply aluminium envelopes originally designed for use by the military, placed inside sealed boxes, stored on metal shelving and secured inside an air-locked chamber. Each packet will hold one representative crop sample, and about 500 seeds depending on their size. They will remain the property of the country that donated them. This last part is very important as according to researchers at the World Vegetable Centre (I kid you not) in Taiwan, up to 27 “orphan” crops with a value of US$100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries. Orphan crops like cowpea and groundnut are not minor or insignificant crops but are crucial to regional food security.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 22, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Our chum Daniel Korski has been good enough to cite my recent Dashboard post on Kosovo in a new article on the Guardian website. It’s a typically tough piece from him and you should read it. But as well as learning about the Balkans, you should take a moment to scroll through the comments left by other readers – a greater accumulation of bile it would be hard to find. Unless, that is, you take a look at comments on an earlier Korski op-ed on Kosovo.
Combined, the two pieces have garnered 87 comments. The vast majority take issue with Daniel’s thesis that Kosovo should be independent and the EU is right to back it. Like this:
I wonder how many people here would fall for the crap produced by characters like author of this column. Have you not realised, pal, that all your bullshit trying to twist illegal land grab (in the form of neo-colonisation via proxies and military bases) in a strategic position in Europe into something “noble” and “unique” is not swallowed so easily anymore. You are just a bunch of cynical criminals and murderers. Any wonder, then, that you support the biggest narco-mafia in Europe, and their newly found “state”? Well done there, but you are now exposed as liers, criminals and moral scum.
One can only presume that the collective “you” in this case must refer to the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Korski’s current domicile, where I also have an affiliation. And, hey, I am quite a cynical person of variable morality, though I’m not in fact a murderer. (On a serious note, a quick glance at the ECFR site shows that the staff there have differing views on Kosovo, and it’s worth checking out this particularly thoughtful piece by Ulrike Guerot).
But back to the Guardian readers. They don’t all just hate Korski. Some hate the Serbs too. While I’ve been typing, the moderator has removed this comment by a Mr. (or Ms.) BugHunter:
Sorry, I just can’t work up any sympathy for the Serbs. Once again they show they aren’t ready to join the civilized world. The best thing for the region would be to turn Belgrade into a glass pavement.”
Well, that deserved to go. Though I’m not sure why it gets nixed while well-known South East Europe expert DancingSlag is allowed to get away with rank Islamophobia:
What about the historically important Christian sites in southern Kosovo? There are aged monks and nuns with no way of protecting themselves. We know what the Taliban did to the religiously significant Buddha statues in Afghanistan, so I suppose here comes some more cultural vandalism to witness.
I know that I shouldn’t be bothered by the sort of people who spend their days sticking this stuff on the web – and there are a few decent contributions amid the general pig-swill. But the sheer awfulness of this stuff reminded me of Alex’s recent post on George Packer’s despair at the standard of “informed” debate on Iraq in America:
What Packer describes is how participatory media can produce incoherence: chaos, disorder, cacophony, where the very idea of any objective truth is lost amidst the blizzard of commentary, opinion and white noise.
That now goes for Kosovo talk in the UK too.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 19, 2008 | UK
I was planning to write a more comprehensive analysis of RUSI’s journal article yesterday. I didn’t, which was fortunate, because Michael White has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian on why the military feels misunderstood while The Times leads with why Britain’s security must be a narrowly defined priority (which I will post separately about). All three pieces echo a set of assumptions that are out of date and unless interrogated risk sending UK HMG back to the early 1990s.
In order to understand the view of the traditionalists in the ‘defence community’ you have to go back to the beginning of the week and listen to the Radio 4 interview with Gwyn Prins. At one point Prins suggests the UK is at war with a peace time mentality.
I first heard this phrase at Wilton Park a year or so ago, more recently at Defence Academy and last week at the Rag. It is, I think, becoming the mantra of the traditional school within the defence community and is borne out of their view of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the community sees the world through the lens of global terrorism, instability in the Middle East and other latent threats (Russia being the prime example).
In this context the reason for why the military feels misunderstood is not as simple as Brown spending more on security than defence as White suggests but a reflection of how isolated the defence community have become in the current debate about national security and resilience.
It is Browne who lacks the necessary overarching narrative that would act as a strategic anchor for MoD during this period of uncertainty. Devoid of such a narrative (let alone a strategy) the three services have resorted to damaging campaigns (invariably about procurement) with each other, played out in the harsh light of the media, as illustrated by Michael White:
Hence this Thursday’s ministerial search to cut the Astute nuclear subs and Type 45 destroyer programmes, to sell some Eurofighters (ordered but irrelevant) to the Saudis. The army’s new multi-purpose vehicle is probably safe from a Navy-RAF pincer movement. So are those two carriers: Rosyth dockyard is in the PM’s constituency. But defence contractors may be told to “sort it out yourselves”.
There are a number of different strands to the current debate on national security and defence but 3 are important in the context of the RUSI/ White/Times articles.
The first strand has to do with the role of UK defence in the current security environment. Here the debate rarely moves beyond the dual dichotomies of latent threats and poles of power (i.e. uncertainty of Russia) and the perennial debate over defence spending. The point here is that these debates are usually separate discussions and lack a necessary strategic anchor to bring them together. The result is that debates over defence end up being dominated by equipment rather than UK priorities.
The second emerging strand is about the focus and level of risk. Past debate has focused solely on the threat from terrorism. Since last December however there has been a concerted effort by departments and think tanks in the UK and across the Atlantic to place terrorism in context within a spectrum of risks (see Alex’s post on McConnell for instance). In doing so what is clear is that while most agree terrorism remains a threat to the UK it has become increasingly apparent that it is not the only risk.
This is disconcerting for the defence community which traditionally thinks in terms of one big threat. It is why, for the last couple of years, the question whispered along the corridors of Main Building been what is our role today?
This latter point is why many commentators felt what RUSI served up at the beginning of the week was well past its sell by date. By arguing that the UK is now in a time of remission between the frontal attack of 9/11, and its eventual successor the RUSI article was creating the image of a threat that they claimed would deliver an even greater psychological blow . It didn’t help that they were unable to support this with substantial evidence and to make matters even more confusing the authors conceded later on that we know much less about what threatens us.
The final strand concerns the present debate over counter-terrorism legislation which, at its most simplistic, pitches the security camp against the liberty camp. The new Counter-Terrorism Bill is the current focus of dispute with the former camp claiming (wrongly as it turns out) that only they understand there is a threat from terrorism and if everyone else knew what they did the legislation would be accepted without complaint. The liberty group meanwhile has chosen to use the ‘42 days’ as a stick to prod the apathetic public and NGO community into standing up against such draconian laws citing the last three pieces of CT legislation as examples of how disproportionate the government has been in the face of the terrorist threat.
Given that both Tony Blair and Tony McNulty have admitted that the ‘rules haven’t changed’ when it comes to fighting terrorism and that they got some things wrong it was therefore a mite confusing to read that RUSI thought the UK was a ‘soft touch’.
It is these three strands of debate that explain why the RUSI piece makes sense to the traditionalists in the defence community but to everyone else looks like a reckless piece of polemic based on spurious and an unconvincing analysis.
