by Charlie Edwards | Feb 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Excellent comment piece in today’s FT on how the Pentagon needs to plan for climate change. According to the authors there are five key areas in which effective military planning can be undermined by uncertainty over when and how the major carbon-emitting countries combat climate change.
First, climate change poses a threat to fragile states that lack the capacity to adapt to environmental shifts. The Pentagon needs to know if the military will be called upon to operate more often in countries that have collapsed or are on the brink of doing so. The risk of a regional conflagration sparked by global warming is particularly severe in east Africa and south Asia. How urgently should the Pentagon begin planning for such contingencies?
Second, the US military needs to know how significantly to expand its capacity to act as a first responder in times of natural disaster. Climate change will increase the frequency of large-scale disasters over the next three decades. But the scope of this threat will vary depending on what action is taken to minimise emissions. Although some of the emergencies created or exacerbated by climate change may be managed by the UN, the US military has an unrivalled capacity to act as a first responder in these situations.
Recall the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck a little more than three years ago: only the US could or would so rapidly have deployed and sustained the 15,000 troops, two dozen ships and 100 aircraft needed for the mission. But if the US military anticipates being called upon more often to respond to such disasters then it needs clarity about how soon it should invest more resources into planning such missions.
Third, the US military will have to conduct traditional missions in increasingly adverse weather conditions. Planners must decide how soon to invest in equipment that works better in storms, floods and other hostile climates.
(more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Paddy Ashdown is in trenchant mood in today’s FT.
With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, Nato in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility. The consequences for both Afghanistan and its allies would be appalling: global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan; our domestic security threat would be gravely increased and a new instability would be added to the world’s most unstable region.
But then neither is continuing as we are. So what should we do?
Some say more troops should be sent and they are certainly needed. Some say those Nato members who are not sharing the burden of the fighting should do so – and they should. Some say we need more aid – and we do. We are putting into Afghanistan one 25th the troops and one 50th of the aid per head of population that we put into Kosovo and Bosnia.
Increasing resources in Afghanistan is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient. Even if we were to provide what was necessary, and even if everyone pulled their weight, we would still find it very difficult to turn the tide, which is now running increasingly strongly against us.
Adding troops is key to this problem. But as James Travers’ argued in his regular national affairs column yesterday:
Adding 1,000 NATO troops and more air support won’t fix what’s wrong with this attempted rescue of a failing state. As Manley found and studies warn, unco-ordinated strategies countering the insurgency, corruption and the booming opium business aren’t working and demand hurried reconsideration.
And what about increasing resources? Clearly this is crucial – but let’s be realistic. The U.S. has spent the same amount on aid and development in Afghanistan over the past five years as the military burns through in Iraq every three weeks. And resources follow priorities.
So finally it begs the question: do we need a strategy? According to Ashdown:
What we lack above all is a strategy that all (including, crucially, the Afghan government and the international military) can buy into. We know well enough what the objective is – to help President Hamid Karzai’s government to govern so that we can hand over the tasks we are doing, including the fighting, to them.
And based on a strategy, we need to develop a plan – but as Ashdown notes, we haven’t agreed a single person to head up the fractured international effort, with the authority to bash international heads together and provide the support the government of Afghanistan needs to begin winning again. So what would Ashdown do?
Firstly, we (the international community) have to concentrate fiercely on the necessary and not be distracted by the merely desirable. To have too many priorities is to have none.
The first is security.
Our second priority should be governance.
The third priority, linking these two, is strengthening the rule of law, from the judiciary, to the police, to the security structures, to the penal code.
I think governments might suggest that this is what they are already doing in Afghanistan. The problem they would point to is coordinating their efforts . But I think there is also something to be said about how they go about developing and implementing policy; and here I think we need to take a very different approach. I call it Connecting the Dots – and I think it’s what we desperately need to do with complex problems such as Afghanistan’s future.
by David Steven | Feb 11, 2008 | South Asia
On Saturday, I wrote about the black mood that’s gripping Pakistan, with many here asking whether the country faces a descent into chaos.
So, how serious is the threat?
Very, if you believe the 2007 Failed States Index, which places Pakistan twelfth, only a couple of points behind its neighbour, Afghanistan. The country was 36th in 2005.
Pakistan’s decline is unsurprising. It sits on the modern world’s key geopolitical, religious and ethnic fault lines. Any country that borders Afghanistan, India, China and Iran is in for a hard time. Add in disastrous domestic politics and a dose of counter-productive international meddling and you’re left with a toxic brew.
But three less obvious drivers have caught my eye during a visit here. Each of these ‘hidden drivers’ (I use the term loosely) suggests ongoing trouble for the country, even if its geopolitical problems begin to ease.
First, there’s the country’s rotten demography – or more accurately the interaction between its demographics and rotten policy. Last week, I met Durre Nayab, a demographer at Pakistan’s Institute of Development Economics whose work draws heavily on the research of my sometime co-author, the economist David Bloom.
Bloom’s work (summarised here) demonstrates the demographic dividend countries can collect while they have young populations. This dividend, he has shown, accounts for around a third of the East Asian economic miracle. But it is only on offer if countries can educate their workers, employ them productively, and give them opportunities to save. At present, Pakistan does none of these things.
Durre Nayab:
The demographic dividend is inherently transitory in nature. Due to lack of prior planning, Pakistan has wasted the first 15 years of the opportunity demography has offered it…Time is running out to put appropriate policies in place, the absence of which may result in large-scale unemployment, [and] immense pressure on health and education systems.
In short, a socio-economic crisis may take place making the demographic dividend more of a demographic threat.
Then add the second hidden driver – the growing impact of scarcity on the Pakistani working and middle classes.
Pakistan’s newspapers, at the moment, are full of complaints about rocketing food and energy prices. The price of flour has more than doubled in recent times, a situation the government is trying (and failing) to control. Electricity is also in short supply, due to a failure to build new power stations in line with rising demand. A World Bank report published a few days sums up the situation.
Pakistan is one of the most water stressed countries in the world, and water resources are depleting rapidly. With its water infrastructure in poor condition… Pakistan has to invest around Rs60 billion (US$1 billion) per year in reservoirs and related infrastructure over the next five years. In the energy sector, the country will face severe power shortages of around 6,000 megawatts by 2010. Similarly, inefficiencies in the transport sector cost the economy between 4-5 percent of GDP each year.
The report is extremely pessimistic about Pakistan’s ability to correct these deficits.
Three factors are causing this problem. First, there are global factors in play, as my colleague Alex Evans has extensively documented. Energy prices are high; food and oil prices are now linked; and water scarcity is certain to increase. Climate change adds another layer of threat, both globally and within Pakistan (recent electricity shortages have been partly been down to a lack of water for hydropower).
Second, there is the Pakistan government’s total failure to develop infrastructure. More people, rising living standards, and falling prices for energy-hungry appliances have all increased demand for energy, but rulers have failed to respond to clear warnings of trouble ahead. Instead, the government is engaged in what will surely prove to be a futile attempt to keep prices low through subsidies and controls. The country is already struggling to pay its fuel bills, with the government budgeting for an oil price at less than 70 dollars per barrel, and suffering as it heads ever higher.
And finally, there is the impact of unrest, instability and out-and-out sabotage. John Robb highlights the potential damage that this type of tax can do to a fragile economy in his book, Brave New War (drawing on this analysis by James Harrigan and Philippe Martin). “Singular terrorist events (black swans), such as 9/11, do not affect city viability,” Robb writes. “The costs of a singular event dissipate quickly. In contrast, frequent attacks (even small ones) on a specific city can create a terrorism tax of a level necessary to shift to a [lower] equilibrium.” In other words, the city will be out of kilter – literally not worth living in – until it shrinks.
This effect may be underway in Pakistan’s urban centres, and possibly in the country as a whole, as insurgent attacks combine with political instability and sheer unrest to erode the country’s infrastructure. According to the Daily Times:
Violence has grown in the cities most hit by load-shedding and outages. Karachi and Hyderabad are the two cases in point. After the assassination of Ms Bhutto on December 27, there was anger and fury which vented itself on public property. Not all of the protesters were the workers of the PPP. Some were common criminals looting banks, but a large number were ordinary citizens habituated to violence through Karachi’s most cruel period of power outage in the summer of 2007.
And finally, a third hidden driver: the worrying role being played by the Pakistan army, once a source of national stability and pride. It is no secret that the army has hollowed out many, if not all, of the country’s political institutions, but less well understood is its growing economic dominance, a phenomenon excellently explored in Ayesha Siddiqa ground-breaking recent book, Military Inc – Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (allegedly banned in Pakistan, but I found a copy on sale in a Lahore hotel).
The army, Siddiqa reports, controls bakeries and banks, fertilizer plants and television channels, shopping malls and motorway toll booths. It is also a massive land owner, co-opting state land and acquiring private land, sometimes by coercion. And of course, it can use its political and military might to protect its investments, while using its wealth to gain permanent autonomy from civilian control.
The growth of the military’s economic empire… was parallel to the increase in the organization’s political power and influence in national decision-making. As the military consolidated itself into a class, it gained greater confidence to exploit national resources and acquire greater opportunities, which benefited it as an institution and also filled the pockets of the senior generals…
The crystallization of these economic interests is a major determinant to the future of democracy in the country.
So you have an army that is engaged in banditry…hordes of alienated young people…an economy that is vulnerable to scarcity and disruption… in a country that is already prey to many other stresses. It’s a sobering outlook. For a couple of years, I suppose, the country can continue to muddle through. But corrective action is now desperately needed.
After all, you never know which straw is the last one until you hear the camel’s back snap.
by Alex Evans | Feb 11, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia
James Kirchik, writing in the New Republic, discusses the “admittedly bizarre rumor circulating at the United Nations and the State Department, where many are speculating that Khalilzad–currently America’s ambassador to the United Nations and the highest-ranking Muslim to serve in the Bush administration–is contemplating a run for Karzai’s job”. Kirchik continues:
…Khalilzad himself has done little to quiet the speculation, offering only vague, quasi-denials in person and through his spokespeople. Asked about the rumor while speaking at Columbia University earlier this month, Khalilzad first joked, “I didn’t come here to collect contributions for my campaign. I know how poor students are.” He then added, “I can say categorically that I am not a candidate for the presidency of Afghanistan.”
Lest you think that sounds like a categorical denial: “as a U.N. diplomat stressed to me, he only said he was not currently running, rather than saying he would never run”. Sounding like the fevered speculations of a media machine looking for a story? Perhaps so, but
A former State Department official told me that Khalilzad should have immediately deflated the rumor himself, and that his recent comments on the matter are still too equivocal. “When you’re the U.S. ambassador, confirmed by the U.S. Senate, representing the U.S. government, one should not tolerate rumors that you’re interested in running a foreign government,” this person told me. “It can easily be put to rest with an unequivocal, firm ‘I have no intention of seeking the office,’ ” says Bruce Riedel, a friend of Khalilzad who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and second Bush administrations. “Why does this [rumor] keep surfacing?”
