by David Steven | Jul 30, 2007 | Conflict and security
According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | Conflict and security
Rachel Morarjee has a good feature in the FT today with gloomy news on Afghanistan. Especially alarming, she writes, is the decision by donor agencies to channel aid towards provinces with more instability, or higher opium cultivation rates – predominantly in the south of the country. Moral hazard? You bet:
This approach overlooks the massive development needs in comparatively stable areas and [according to Anja de Beer, head of the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief] “creates perverse incentives – for provinces to create insecurity to attract resources”.
This unbalanced distribution has had observable effects on the aid effort. There were more attacks on aid agencies in the north and west than in the south during the first quarter of this year, the majority of them criminal, according to statistics from the Afghanistan NGO Security Organisation. Only 12 per cent of the attacks on aid agencies nationwide occurred in the south, where 40 per cent of the incidents linked with the insurgency took place.
by Alex Evans | May 8, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
When Gordon Brown takes over as PM, there will be no shortage of clouds on the international horizon. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will vie for his attention, of course. But he will also need to push for a breakthrough on the slow burning drivers of instability.
Climate change, resource depletion, fragile states, global economic imbalances, infectious diseases: it’s easy to write a shopping list of the risks for which the world has little insurance. One day, a number of these threats will combine in a ‘perfect storm’. The modern world’s vulnerability to shocks will then be cruelly exposed.
Protecting its citizens from risk is core business for any government. Brown has already signalled that he wants to lead a renewed effort to tackle the major sources of global uncertainty. To succeed it will be critical for him to know he can rely on Britain’s foreign policy apparatus.
There’s just one problem. He can’t.
We’ve just published a paper on this, formatted as a note to Gordon Brown, plus a shorter article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
(more…)
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Wired.com has a piece today saying that:
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
And they have a copy of the new rules, too. So much for muddy boots in the information battlespace (see David’s previous post) and the argument – proposed by winner of the US Army Information Operations Proponent (USIOP) essay-writing competition, Elizabeth Robbins – that:
Military blogs written by those in muddy boots… are a combat multiplier in the information domain… Commanders at every level must boldly accept risk in order to support the rewards and warfighting advantage that soldier-authors bring to the information battlespace.
