by Alex Evans | Jan 7, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
This year’s G8 summit is brought to you by Japan, who as David Pilling reports have decided to hold the event in a uniquely Japanese-sounding venue: the Windsor Hotel on Hokkaido.
As with the Germany G8 at Heiligendamm last year, Japan plans to put climate change front and centre – an issue on which, Pilling reports, “Japan likes to feel it has strong leadership credentials”.
Japan has among the world’s most advanced energy-saving technology and lent its name to the Kyoto Protocol, a breakthrough agreement, albeit a flawed one. That gives it the moral authority, officials say, to act as a bridge between the far-flung positions of the US, Europe, China and India.
But, he goes on, that strategy is not without challenges:
Japanese officials admit that their “bridging” strategy is fraught with difficulties. At home, the government is handcuffed by the intransigent attitude of business, which insists on voluntary cuts rather than mandatory targets reinforced by a carbon tax. Partly as a result, Japan is far from achieving its Kyoto targets and is likely to make up much of the difference by buying emission rights.
The debate is also moving very quickly, say officials. The growing scientific and political consensus on the urgency of tackling global warming could rapidly make Tokyo’s emphasis on technology and voluntary national targets out of date. Some Japanese officials say that, by July, serious discussion may well have shifted to the cap-and-trade mechanisms favoured by Europe.
International development, too, figures heavily among Japanese priorities. Fletcher Tembo has a good discussion of this on the Overseas Development Institute’s blog, where he observes that while the midpoint for the Millennium Development Goals has just passed, levels of aid to developing countries still haven’t increased significantly – at least, not after debt relief (supposed in theory to be additional to aid) and aid to Afghanistan and Iraq have been taken off the balance sheet.
But in practice, there’s every chance that events will buffet the Japanese agenda – especially if oil prices continue their upward march and the solvency crunch continues to worsen. Meantime, the elephant in the room continues to be: how substantive a discussion of climate and energy is it actually possible to have without China and India as full participants (rather than guests invited for canapes)? Quite a challenge for Yasuo Fukuda, the new PM – Japan’s third in a year…
PS. As preparations for the summit (to be held from 7 – 9 July) get going in earnest, the best website to watch will – as ever – be that of the G8 Information Centre at the University of Toronto. Meanwhile, here’s the official Japanese website too, where the ‘What’s New’ section today helpfully informs us that the domain name has been renewed for 2008. Lucky, that.
by Richard Gowan | Dec 3, 2007 | Conflict and security
Having previously suggested that the academic community should explore the semantics of the Italian Defense Minister’s description of Afghanistan as “stable in its instability”, I would also like to suggest they follow up on John Negroponte’s verdict on the Surge:
“It’s one thing to have brought the violence under some semblance of control,” Mr. Negroponte said during a news conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone here, after meeting Iraqi officials in Baghdad and seven other provinces in Iraq’s north, south and west. “But it’s another matter now to follow up with the necessary reconstruction and stabilization projects that will safeguard regions and protect them from this type of violence.”
There has to be an IR specialist out there ready to work up a piece entitled “From a Semblance of Control to Stable Instability: A New Framework for Peacebuilding”. I look forward to it. In the meantime, those seeking some respite from the grim news from Darfur, the Congo and Chad may at least get a hollow laugh from the all-time winners of the Worst Revolutionary Acronym Award, Chad’s United Front for Change (FUC):
The FUC posed a grave danger to the government of President Idriss Deby in April 2006 when they launched an attack on Ndjamena that was stopped only after French army stationed there intervened, according to many sources. Deby later made Nour defence minister on the condition that he integrate his FUC fighters into the army.
by Alex Evans | Nov 29, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army – ‘Human Terrain Teams’. Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic and tribal landscape.
Wired explains that “the idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works”. The Army has set aside $41 million with which to deploy 150 “social scientists, software geeks and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year”. Six such teams are already on the ground.
However, some anthropologists are up in arms about their academic brethren using their skills to help the US Army:
The executive board of the American Anthropology Association, or AAA, recently blasted the HTT program as immoral. Because anthropologists in the effort could help in “identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations,” the board wrote, information derived from the program “would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed.”
But on the other hand, Wired continues, some of the early results look impressive:
A “preliminary assessment” of the first HTT, obtained by Wired News, shows the potential impact these social-science groups can make. In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.
“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.'”
At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. The religious leader was so moved by the gesture, he recorded radio ads denouncing the Taliban.
Let’s be honest, we’ve heard enough ‘we’ve found the counter-insurgency grail!’ stories over the last few years to warrant a cautious approach to claims like these. Still, as Wired makes clear, the HTTs are already proving to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the culture of a fundamentally backward – some would say essentially medieval – people: colonels in the US Army. Two HTT members found that their first task was to draft a memo complaining about the colonel in charge of their team:
…a military man, not a social scientist – who [they] said had a distinct “disinterest in the Iraqi population, society and culture. He often uses the terms ‘Arab,’ ‘Iraqi,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Sunni,’ or ‘Shia’ interchangeably…. At times, he has even made comments such as ‘when in doubt, kill ’em all.’
by Richard Gowan | Nov 25, 2007 | Conflict and security
Time for an update on the peacekeeping shortage, which gets a lot of well-deserved attention in the current edition of The Economist. Oh that this could have been the last word on the matter – but things have got substantially worse since the magazine was being put to bed in the middle of last week. It looks worryingly like the UN is going to dragged deeper into all-out war in the eastern Congo, where it only narrowly avoided a breakdown earlier this year. Meanwhile, the EU may be about to flunk badly on Chad.
In theory, the Europeans are going to send 4,000 troops and 10 helicopters to Chad to operate alongside UN police. This would be the EU’s biggest mission in Africa to date – but I’ve found a lot of officials are pretty skeptical that it’ll work. The main problem is, by now grindingly familiar: nobody wants to risk any helicopters for the mission. And without helicopters, the troops will sit trapped in vulnerable bases, etc, etc.
After this shortage became clear at a pledging conference in Brussels last week, one EU diplomat was briefing that “cancelling the mission is an option.” The strain has started to show in public. Just before the meeting, Ireland’s defense minister Willie O’Dea was offering troops, but explaining that his helicopters can’t operate beyond the Emerald Isle. He did have ideas about who could, but they weren’t making him any friends:
Asked whether the Darfur spillover mission could proceed without these aircraft, O’Dea said: “In short – no.”
He specified Germany and Italy as two countries with “ample military resources, and so far they haven’t made any contribution to this particular mission.”
The German government declined to comment Tuesday. Last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said his country was willing to provide only “political support.”
The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed no troops would be sent to Chad and indicated no comment would be made in response to O’Dea. But the Italian Foreign Ministry pointed out Italy is the leading contributor to the U.N. force in Lebanon and has troops in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
And, the Ministry might have added, they are quite nervous enough about those deployments as it is. While O’Dea was calling for Rome to step forward, his Italian counterpart Arturo Parisi was trying to rank the problems on his agenda:
Arturo Parisi said potential change in Kosovo trumped short-term security concerns elsewhere, describing Afghanistan, for example, as “stable in its instability”.
“Kosovo is surely (the biggest concern). It is exposed to a change and therefore a possible stress,” Parisi told Reuters in an interview. “It is also the closest region (to Italy).”
And Lebanon? It’s “unsettled”. While “stable in its instability” is an interesting new category for peacekeeping academics to set about defining (it’s certainly a lot more revealing than “fragile states”) the overall message is crystal clear. Don’t expect the EU to play the peacekeeping (air) cavalry, especially in a second-order crisis like Chad.
So if the UN’s overstretched and the EU’s over-committed (or at least claims to be), who’s left? Optimists keep on pointing to China, which has gradually been increasing its UN commitments as part of its Africa strategy. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno was in Beijing last week to press for more contributions. But this weekend, one Darfuri rebel leader welcomed the first Chinese troops to deploy there with a call to quit Sudan immediately, on the grounds that Beijing is complicit with Khartoum. “I am not saying I will attack them. I will not say I will not attack them,” quotes the BBC.
It’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of despair.
by Richard Gowan | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security
There seems to be a small revolt in progress at the UN over the ever-growing demand for its peacekeepers. There are currently more than 100,000 of them around the world, a record, and UN-watchers have been muttering darkly about “overstretch” for a while. But now there’s a new mood of frankness among senior officials too. Last week, Ban Ki-moon declared that sending a UN force into Somalia is not “a realistic and viable option” right now. That will have irritated Washington, which badly wants to the UN to go in to take some pressure off its Ethiopian allies, bogged down in Mogadishu.
This week, it’s been the turn of Ban’s Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno to tell it like it is. Reviewing the lack of hi-tech assets like helicopters available for the UN force in Darfur, he told the press that the mission there “may become a failure.” Guehenno has been blunt about such issues in the past. But these two statements, coming so close together, may foreshadow a growing fight over high-risk missions like Darfur and Somalia between a cautious UN Secretariat and those governments (most obviously the US and UK) that strongly favor these deployments.
So it’s worth noting the disconnect between these short-term warnings from the UN and some of the big picture thinking on peacekeeping that Gordon Brown laid out in his Mansion House speech on Monday. As Alex Evans pointed out in his review of the speech on this blog, Brown had much to say about the need for a “a new framework” to handle fragile states and peace operations. And much of it was absolutely right in theory: “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys should make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”, for example. The problem is that you can’t make the theory work (or get onto reconstruction or development) if you don’t have the troops and helicopters you need to do stabilization.
In fairness, they know this in London. In a lecture on the EU as “Model Power Not Superpower” today, David Miliband had all the details on rotary wing aircraft:
EU countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only about 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven’t provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there.
Miliband went on to say that “increasing our capacity to put peacekeepers into the field – whether on UN, EU or NATO missions – is a crucial part of cooperation.” Again, this is absolutely right in principle. But even if the Europeans did have much greater capacity, would they be prepared to risk their assets and personnel in Somalia?
Er, no. Fewer than 2% of UN forces in Africa come from Europe. Give credit where it is due: the Norwegians and Swedes do want to send engineers to Darfur, and the EU is deploying (mainly French) soldiers to Chad alongside UN police. The UN will continue to have to bear the burden of new missions with troops from Africa and Asia. As that becomes ever more difficult and dangerous, the Secretariat may start to do what Bill Clinton told the UN to do after the last Somalia debacle in the 1990s: learn to say no.
