by Richard Gowan | Jan 6, 2009 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, South Asia
Bob Herbert of the New York Times:
Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.
The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm. Listen to this devastating assessment by Dexter Filkins of The Times:
“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.”
Think about putting your life on the line for that gang.
If Mr. Obama does send more troops to Afghanistan, he should go on television and tell the American people, in the clearest possible language, what he is trying to achieve. He should spell out the mission’s goals, and lay out an exit strategy.
He will owe that to the public because he will own the conflict at that point. It will be Barack Obama’s war.
by Alex Evans | Jan 3, 2009 | Conflict and security, Global Dashboard, South Asia, UK
With just over a couple of weeks to the inauguration, it’s finally sinking in: Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to imply some pretty fundamental changes to the global war on terror. Serious thinking on how to dismantle Guantanamo is well underway – as is discussion about which of America’s allies will be willing to welcome its detainees (Australia and Britain both profess reluctance; Portugal, on the other hand, looks well on course for a special relationship with the new Administration). A sea change on torture and rendition also appears to be a racing certainty.
In Iraq, too, massive changes are underway. As well as the rich symbolism of the sock and awe incident, there’s now also yesterday’s more tangible proof of how far things have moved on: the Iraqi government has assumed control of the Green Zone.
Now, pause to wonder: are these changes likely to have a significant impact on the capacity of radical Islamist groups to recruit and retain committed volunteers – whether in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia or wherever? After all, Guantanamo, torture, rendition and Iraq surely represented four of the principal sources of the sense of grievance so essential to effective radicalisation. Does that mean the outlook on counter-terrorism is finally brightening?
One possible reason why not, of course, has to do with Gaza. Olmert’s rationale for Israel’s attacks is not hard to discern – Hamas ended its ceasefire, there’s an election in February, he wanted to rebuild Israel’s credibility after the 2006 debacle in Lebanon, there was only a brief window of opportunity before Obama’s inauguration. But even so, the fact that Israel’s attacks have so far killed 436 Palestinians (compared to 172 dead in Mumbai) will clearly fuel a sense of outrage among many – including this blogger – and will provide a powerful recruiting sergeant for Islamist groups everywhere.
But another answer to the question of sources of grievance after Bush can be found by taking a stroll down my local high street, in a part of East London that has one of the highest proportions of Muslims in the capital.
Today, the activist posters you see on lamposts and on the walls of the shops selling mobile phone skins and international calling cards have one key message: end the undeclared war on Pakistan. If you visit Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website, meanwhile, you find that just beneath the coverage of Gaza from the last fortnight, it’s Pakistan that’s the focus of attention and grievance – a point made even clearer by this youtube video of theirs from the start of December.
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uI47aQVLoq0]
You might think it odd that Islamist opinion in the UK should be focusing on a relatively small number of drone attacks in Pakistan when a major troop surge is about to take place over the border in Afghanistan. But think again, and you realise that of course it makes eminent sense for Hizb ut-Tahrir to focus on the grievance of most direct relevance to Britain’s large diaspora community – and to weave political Islamism into long-standing fears about Pakistan’s territorial integrity.
Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House represents a welcome turning point on many components of the ‘war on terror’. But the evolving situation in Pakistan (on which Obama is hawkish, remember) may well represent another – especially here in the UK. If Obama steps up US attacks on Pakistan’s border areas, then many British Muslims will doubtless listen to what Gordon Brown has to say about it with keen interest…
by Alex Evans | Dec 30, 2008 | Off topic
Here’s what we enjoyed reading this year:
David Steven – Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-First Century is a long book written by a big brain. It offers penetrating insights into the vicious and virtuous cycles of globalization, the changing role of the state, and the alliances we need to preserve some kind of international order. Display prominently in your office, even if you don’t get round to reading the thing.
Daniel Korski – My holiday book is Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. Powell was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and responsible for pushing through Blair’s Northern Ireland agenda. The book details the time spent working behind the scenes of the Northern Ireland peace process. At a time when the West is being encouraged to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Powell’s’ account of the steps taken to build confidence and trust among all the parties, while moving towards the main aim, is both topical and instructive.
Richard Gowan – David Milne’s America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War is a brilliant portrait of a largely forgotten figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow – who rose to national security adviser under LBJ – was one of the most feted economists of his era, dominating thinking about economic development in a way that Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier can still only dream of. But on entering government he went berserk, demanding more and more war against North Vietnam and filtering out all the evidence that it wasn’t working. His story, told with great concision by a rising academic star, is a powerful cautionary tale about how theorists can go horribly astray when given a sniff of power – and how people who understand economics are usually particularly ill-suited to understand violence. It wasn’t quite the best book of the year, though. That was Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, May 2008), a spell-binding and utterly unexpected tale of how the pioneer of aerial archaeology in inter-war Britain succumbed to Communism. But this a blog for wonks not archaeologists.
Julian Evans – Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (published at the end of 2007, but the paperback came out this year so hopefully it qualifies). Taylor is a great historian of ideas, in the mould of Isaiah Berlin, building vast ideas-maps stretching centuries. In this book, he excavates the roots of secularism, and asks how it has changed our experience of the world. He’s particularly interesting on the move in the 16th and 17 centuries from an animist to a scientific world view, and the parallel shift in human identity from a porous self besieged by spirits to a buffered, isolated self that is cut off from nature and nature spirits, with a measure of autonomy from the natural world, but at the cost of loneliness and separation.
Mark Weston – I am currently writing my first book, so thoughts when reading are automatically dominated by the question of whether I could have written that. The book I most wish I’d written is Exterminate All The Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist. A coruscating but poetically written critique of colonialism in Africa, it convincingly traces a link from European abuse of Africans to 20th century genocides, and also makes understandable Africa’s continued failure to recover from this “monstrous intrusion.”
As for me, I’ve got three books of the year. First is Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power, which offers an incisive and hopeful vision of where the international development might be going next. The concern for effective states that’s been a growing theme in development thinking since 2005 is very much front and centre, but coupled with emphasis on the importance of citizens getting organised – politics is as important as institutions, in other words – and long term trends, above all scarcity issues. Second, Amanda Ripley’s brilliant The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes and Why, which is much the best discussion of individual level resilience I’ve seen to date.
And finally, a book from 1998 rather than 2008, but one which has lost none of its relevance in the intervening decade (and deserves a new edition in 2009): LT Evans’s masterly Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth. My first reaction on finding it wasn’t exactly upbeat, I’ll admit: I had already decided to call my Chatham House food pamphlet (out next month) ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion’, so to encounter an almost eponymous book by an almost eponymous author seemed like a misfortune. But as I perused this erudite, readable and fantastically helpful tome, I realised that finding it was in fact one of my biggest strokes of luck in the project. If you’re interested in how we’ll feed a growing population at the same time as confronting the challenges of the 21st century, then this is the one must-read.
[Charlie Edwards has done his own top 10, such is the rate at which he devours tomes: you can find it here.]
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 29, 2008 | Global Dashboard, Global system
- Mexico: The world’s leading narco state will, unnoticed, dissolve into total chaos destabilising the surrounding region.
- Middle East: February elections in Israel will see Binyamin Netanyahu being voted in while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be voted out in Iranian elections in June.
- Asia: H5N1 will return with a vengeance.
- Bosnia: A growing culture clash between conservative Islam and the country’s avowed secularism will result in an increase in violence in the country.
- Africa: Robert Mugabe will be assassinated.
- UK: There will be no election in 2009.
- Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will abandon further attempts to join the European Union and instead turn East and focus on regional diplomacy.
- Iraq: Elections will be relatively peaceful in much of the country.
- Somalia: The US or France will be drawn into a short, intense ground war in the South West of the country.
- Afghanistan: In May Britain will increase the number of troops in the country. In October a European deal with the Obama administration will see France, Germany and Italy do the same.
* I will happily blog when these predictions are proven wrong.
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 22, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Last year I argued that: a quadripartite parliamentary select committee on national security should be created – bringing together existing select committees that focus on UK national interests, security and defence policy. The good news is that this idea is currently being toyed with in Westminster and Whitehall. The bad news is that I’m not sure our politicians are really up to overseeing such a complex system and ensuring it is made accountable to the British public.
I’ve been trawling through the uncorrected evidence of a session on national security and resilience. The evidence session was undertaken by the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence. In the hot seats were Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth (then a Minister at the MoD), Admiral Lord West (Minister for Security and Counter-Terrorism), and a range of senior officials from Government departments. I don’t think I have ever read a more thoroughly depressing, lightweight, evidence session, which not only fails to ask the important questions but largely fails to hold Ministers and officials to account. Below are the more amusing questions and exchanges from the session.
No.1: Know your brief (Ministers)
Chairman: National Security Strategy, who owns it?
Mr Ainsworth: The lead department for national security in the United Kingdom is the Home Office.
Mr Jenkin: (HCDC): Does not the Home Office lead inevitably lead us to a rather narrow definition of what a National Security Strategy is, given that, for example, our foreign policy is crucial to our national security?
Lord West: If I could just clarify – the Home Office does not lead on the whole National Security Strategy. We are responsible for the counter-terrorist aspect of it and specific Home Office duties.
Mr Jenkin: That would explain why the NSS is a bit of a Christmas tree because there is no single minister responsible for creating coherence in the National Security Strategy?
No.2: Losing the war on terror.
Mr Holloway: You have got doctrines, plans, committees, initiatives, X, Y and Z and of course it all sounds absolutely marvellous, but the reality is that we are not winning the war on terror. Do you not think we could be doing rather more in terms of dealing with the drivers of radicalisation and be a little more sensitive in our foreign policy because it might actually make your job rather easier?
No.3: ‘Overarching title’ – what a great title!
Mr Jenkins: When I heard the term “overarching strategy” I thought that is a great title, a great term. Within that do we have different departments reporting, like stovepipes, up to the top, or have the departments changed their policy, and are they working closer with each other so there are departments working at every level? How has that approach changed the operation of the MoD; and has the MoD felt its role in working through the Home Office is somewhat restrained; or is it quite happy to do that; or would it like more contacts, please?
No.4: Mum’s the word
John Smith: Without giving away any secrets, can you say hand on heart that this new joined-up approach to the national security threats on our country has actually prevented or deterred actual threat of attack or security threats against us, since you have been taking this new approach?
No.5: The Government’s ‘dilusional’ talk
Mr Holloway: Admiral, I worry about this because I think some of this talk is possibly dilusional. If you talk about having a joined-up approach in Afghanistan, which I know a tiny bit about; I lose faith in everything else you are saying about what else is happening behind the scenes. As a military man you and, I guess, I, in my pathetic military career, were always told if you wanted to win an insurgency you did not need coordination forums, focus groups, secretariat, yet more self-licking lollipop process; we were told that you had to have unity of command and unity of purpose. Do we have either in the UK at the moment on this – unity of command and unity of purpose?
No.6: Where is this coordinator?
Mr Jenkin: We have mentioned Robert Hannigan a few times and he is this coordinator. Why is he not here answering for the government on this?
No.7: Red teaming for beginners
Mr Holloway: Do you have groups of people who sit around working up potential scenarios of things that terrorists might do, areas that are vulnerable?
No.8: Spot the question
Mr Jenkin: My question follows on from this which is that we all know from the polling evidence that the public does not really like being stirred up about this subject. It makes politicians get accused of trying to frighten the public for some sort of political reasons and it is regarded with great suspicion. Is there a danger that, because we all want to avoid doing that, we are actually not giving this the profile in government that it really deserves and that we do not want to have a national security minister in the Cabinet because that would add to the anxiety of people and raise people’s suspicions more, but have we actually not got to face it and have we also not got to recognise that the public need to be made aware of these dangers because, the more aware the public is of these dangers and risks, the more alive they are to those risks and in fact the safer we will be?
