by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
Nick Butler – treasurer of the Fabian Society, chair of the Centre for European Reform’s advisory board, erstwhile chief of staff to BP’s former CEO John Browne – is a worried man. Europhile though he is, the omens look not good:
The European economy is just beginning to feel the impact of Chinese growth, which will add to the pressures already created by America’s powerful and accelerating lead in the development of innovation and intellectual property. In a world where both low and higher value added goods and services are traded through open competition based on price and quality, Europe’s comparative advantage is unclear. We are losing on both sides of the playing field.
The risk for Europe in the next ten years is not one of war or starvation, but of gradual and steady decline, with growing structural unemployment, rising public sector deficits, and an expanding gap between the sense of entitlement felt by ordinary people and the capacity of the European economy to meet those entitlements. The image which comes to mind is the gradual descent to shabbiness of a once beautiful country house whose needs have outstripped the means of its owners.
So in a new think piece for CER, he sets out five ideas for Europe’s future. One of them goes like this:
Given the magnitude of the challenge of climate change, Europe should lead the response, not just through rhetoric and support for environmentally dubious products such as biofuels, but through the development of the science, engineering and technology that will cut hydrocarbon consumption.
To underline its determination, the EU should establish a 100 per cent tax credit for all investment, personal and corporate, in all activity which reduces emissions. The credit should be enduring and would stimulate research, development and application. The businesses created would have the chance to be world leaders and contributors to the necessary global solutions. The cost would be minimal, because of the positive impact on employment and activity, and would be a worthwhile investment when set against the eventual costs of unconstrained global warming.
Know what? He’s exactly right. Europe is, as ever, full of talk and targets and short on radical implementing action – whether you’re looking at Afghanistan, the Lisbon agenda, climate change, connecting Europe with its citizens or whatever. And on climate change, as David Steven and I noted in Climate change: the state of the debate, the problem narrative still isn’t commensurate with the solution narrative.
If Europe really wants to be taken seriously on climate change, it needs to be thinking of actions on a different order of magnitude. David and I were talking just last weekend (at an event chaired by Nick Butler, oddly enough) about just this problem – and concluding that the kind of signal needed would be the abolition of corporation tax, to be replaced by a carbon tax. Just think what that would do to inward investment – and to the EU’s emissions.
by Alex Evans | Jan 22, 2008 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Dan Korski at ECFR has a new report out today entitled Afghanistan: Europe’s forgotten war (summary; press release; full report). The EU doesn’t come out of it very well: “EU countries have treated the common effort in Afghanistan like a pot-luck dinner where every guest is free to bring his own dish”, says Dan. Key points from the report:
Need for a ‘grand bargain’ – As part of a ‘grand bargain’, the EU should deploy more troops in Afghanistan, relax restrictions on their troops – the so-called ‘caveats’ – and reverse the decline in development aid. In exchange, the US should accept a shift from a strategy based on combat operations to one focused on overall political impact, and the protection of ordinary civilians across the country. It should also abandon its failed counter-narcotics strategy.
Political inclusion – The international coalition should include mid-ranking, moderate insurgents in the political process, and help President Hamid Karzai to eventually reach a political settlement with his opponents. Negotiations with the Taliban are now unavoidable and the current status quo untenable.
EU underperformance – So far, the majority of EU governments have only made a symbolic contribution to the military effort – with Austria, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland and Portugal at the bottom of the list. (As an example, Austria has contributed a mere 3 soldiers, Ireland only 7, while Luxembourg 9. This stands in contrast to the UK’s 7000 troops, Germany’s 3000 and The Netherlands’ 1500.)
New counter-narcotics strategy – The international coalition should design a new approach to counter-narcotics and abandon all earlier plans for aerial spraying, or schemes for buying up opium crops. Instead, they should make clear that traffickers and their protectors, not farmers, are the problem. The emphasis should be placed on arresting and prosecuting drug lords and their backers in government.
Local delivery – The international community should prioritise local governance and rule-of-law reforms. Assistance efforts need to be refocused around delivering clear benefits on the ground, through strengthening provincial administrations, and ensuring that the Afghan police contribute to, rather than undermine, the safety of civilians.
UN super envoy – The ‘grand bargain’ agenda would require leadership that cuts across military, political and development lines, as well as institutional boundaries. The new UN envoy should be a double-hatted leader, bearing responsibility for the leadership of both the UN and NATO. This super envoy should be endorsed by the European Union, and the set-up should be cemented through a new UN Security Council resolution.
Given Paddy Ashdown’s appointment last week as UN Envoy to Afghanistan, it’s doubtless worth reading the report in some detail: Dan was Ashdown’s head of political / military affairs in Bosnia.
Also: the debate between UK Ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles and author Rory Stewart in the current edition of Prospect is well worth a look. (Sadly it’s not available online unless you’re a subscriber, or willing to cough up for the article.) I assumed when I began reading it that it would all be rather consensual as Prospect debates go. Uh-uh…
by Alex Evans | Jan 16, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Barney Rubin’s friend Naser Shahalemi was in the Serena Hotel in Kabul when suicide bombers shot their way in and blew themselves up:
I look through the glass outside and see a Corolla turn and wrap to the front of the Serena Door and then the driver jumps outs and throws himself on the ground. The Corolla hits the wall of the front glass doors.Then I just hear hundreds of bullets shooting, I hit the ground because the bullets at this point sound extremely close to me. I start crawling through the Chai Khana on my knees and I get back to the second lounge in the slip door…
I turn on the afterburners and start cutting up the hall following a trail of blood leading to the basement. Everyone is running as fast as possible. I lost my cousin Arif in this mess. I get down two flights of steps in the secure basement of the Serena where I see Arif. We greet each other, and I check to see he isn’t injured. I asked him are you OK, he is fine, we quickly move to the deeper portion of the basement … We get in the cafeteria and more Afghan politicians are amongst us, with Europeans and foreigners. Karzai”s oldest brother is also trapped with us and he is pacing frantically as we are unaware of what is going on in the lobby. We can hear shots and we can hear booms, but the remaining security personnel is posted at the doors and is ready to shoot at will.
More people come to the basement, as the terrorists have infiltrated the gym and spa area. They have shot dead the spa manager, Zina a very pleasant Filipino Girl who was just doing her job working in Afghanistan to support herself and family abroad. The Terrorists move into the gym and shot an American dead in the face on the treadmill.
As someone else notes in the Comments section, “everyone’s in shock, Serena felt like the one place you could relax”. So what does it all mean for the international community’s presence in Kabul? Barney’s own analysis is pretty bleak, but also extremely insightful – go read.
Whatever happens next, this is a major decision point for everyone concerned in Afghanistan. Such operations will continue. Even if the vast majority do not succeed, the result will be a mix of the following:
1. Many if not most of the civilian foreign expatriates currently involved in the delivery of aid or other activities in Afghanistan will leave.
2. Most of the rest will be concentrated into a Forbidden City like the Green Zone in Baghdad. The U.S. Embassy is already such a compound, and the area around it in Wazir Akbar Khan is already so fortified that it might not take much more to turn that and the adjacent areas of Shahr-i Naw (palace, main ministries, UN offices, embassies) into such a zone.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jan 15, 2008 | Conflict and security
The NY Times has this sorry tale:
Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army. This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”
Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it. “Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”
Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”
In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him. “Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried. “I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.
Thing is, this kind of story has been amply predicted by 4GW theorists like Bill Lind and John Robb. Here, for instance, is Lind – writing over a year ago – on the ‘boomerang effect‘:
When a state involves itself in 4GW over there, it lays a basis for 4GW at home. That is true even if it wins over there, and all the more true if it loses, as states usually do. The toxic fallout from America’s 4GW defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan will be far greater than most people expect, and it will fall most heavily on America’s police.
And as Lind explains in the same article, highly trained servicemen suffering from post-traumatic stress are the least of the police’s worries. What about those with a grudge against the government that sent them to war?
One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.
I know this thought – not to speak of the reality when it happens – will be shocking to some readers. To anyone who really understands Fourth Generation war, it should not be. Fourth Generation war does not merely work on the will of a state’s political leaders, as some theorists have said. It does something far more powerful. It pulls an opposing state apart at the moral level.
The Bush administration, as usual, has it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the “terrorists” we are fighting in Iraq will come here if we pull out there. Rather, American involvement in 4GW in Iraq will create “terrorism” here from among the people we have sent to fight the war there. Well educated in the ways of successful insurgency, they will come home embittered by a lost war, by friends dead and crippled for life to no purpose. Thanks to America’s de-industrialization, they will return to no jobs, or lousy “service” jobs at minimum wage. Angry, frustrated and futureless, some of them will find new identities and loyalties in gangs and criminal enterprises, where they can put their new talents to work.
It will, of course, be only a small minority of returning troops who will go this route. But something else they will have learned from the Iraqi insurgents, along with how to make and deploy IEDs, is that it takes very few people to create and sustain an insurgency.
by Alex Evans | Jan 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, South Asia
Charlie Edwards at Demos points us towards news from the BBC:
The authorities in Pakistan have deployed paramilitary troops to guard wheat supplies around the country amid fears of a massive shortfall. The government has blamed hoarders and smugglers for the problem. Wheat is a staple food in Pakistan and shortages have led to large scale rioting in the past.
Flour shortfalls initially pushed up market prices. Later flour ran out on the open market when officials fixed prices and warned against violations. Now Pakistan’s national disaster management authority has deployed thousands of paramilitary troops at wheat stores.
Other BBC coverage notes that last week Afghanistan appealed for international help to combat a wheat shortage, while Bangladesh has warned it faces a crisis over rice supplies.
Here (again) is a link to my briefing note from December on international implications of rising food prices. Food prices will be one of this year’s standout issues. Donors and multilateral agencies are not looking well prepared…
