by Alex Evans | Feb 26, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoZeZprXnDg]
A propos of David’s recent posts on lax security surrounding Barack Obama, American voters can at least take heart from new research from Harvard University, which finds that the effect of assassination attempts in democracies – either successful or not – is negligible. In autocracies, on the other hand, they can have a decisive effect. Michael Moynihan in The American has the details:
In “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” Olken and Jones looked at the effects of political assassination, using a strict empirical methodology that takes into account economic conditions at the time of the killing and what Olken calls a “novel data set” of assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, between 1875 and 2004.
Olken and Jones discovered that a country was “more likely to see democratization following the assassination of an autocratic leader,” but found no substantial “effect following assassinations—or assassination attempts—on democratic leaders.” They concluded that “on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.” The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”
by David Steven | Feb 23, 2008 | Conflict and security
The New Scientist has an interesting interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy. Rejali identifies a competitive dynamic which, he believes, can drive torture through a law enforcement system:
Usually the top authorizes it and the bottom delivers. Then it’s a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority.
One reason is competition between interrogators. When policemen track down information, they cooperate. In torture it’s different. The guy who breaks the prisoner gets the reward. If you were the guy softening him up, would you hand him over for the next guy to get all the glory?
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 David Steven | Feb 10, 2008 | Conflict and security
In his recent speech to the Fabian Society (covered by my co-editor Alex Evans here), British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband spoke of the need for a new fusion between the social democratic and radical liberal traditions. Power is shifting away from governments and towards people, he argued: a dynamic that is disrupting the traditional certainties of international relations.
True enough – and a process that seems to be just beginning. But will the decline in state power lead to greater stability or instability? How should governments adjust to a changing role? And what kind of foreign policy would they be best advised to pursue?
Miliband roots his argument back to the enlightenment – another period when a radical new balance was forged between the individual and the collective:
At the beginning of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine called on his fellow colonists to forge a new society where power was dispersed among the citizens. “Let the crown … be demolished,” he urged, “and scattered among the people whose right it is.”
Today Paine’s world is coming into view. Around the world there is what I call a ‘civilian surge’. Born of the death of deference in the North and West, the collapse of communism in the East, the spread of democracy in the South. Everywhere it is the rise of the better educated – and if not better educated, better informed citizen – who knows, in real time, about how other people, often far away, live their lives; who is more distrustful of traditional sources of authority; who is yearning for greater freedom and power; who is more able through technology to produce and distribute information, more able to hold power to account.
Now David Miliband, in this speech at least, focuses mostly on the beneficial consequences of growing numbers of people becoming “actors rather than spectators in life’s dramas.” But, as he no doubt knows, an equally compelling story can be told about the flipside of this phenomenon, where the collapse of authority leads to chaos (Paine, after all, was as enthusiastic about the French Revolution as he was about the American one). “Globalization is quickly layering new skill sets on ancient mind-sets,” writes counterterrorism expert, John Robb. The result is a massive shift in the types of risk we face.
Warriors, in our current context of global guerrillas, are not merely lazy and monosyllabic primitives…They are wired, educated, and globally mobile. They build complex supply chains, benefit from global money flows, travel globally, innovate with technology, and attack shrewdly. In a nutshell, they are modern. Despite this apparent modernity and an eager willingness to adopt technology, however, their value sets are completely different from those we find acceptable in the West…
Guerrilla entrepreneurs…are the central actors in this move towards sustainable non-state entities. They provide innovation in warfare, leverage sources of moral cohesion to grow the group through fictive kinship, find new sources of income through integration with trans-national criminality, and much more.
Robb is not primarily concerned with the ‘spectacular’ one-off attack (though he does worry about a future where one man can ‘declare war on the world and win’). Instead, he focuses on the ability of guerrilla groups to degrade the complex and fragile systems on which the modern world relies.
Today’s threat is based on sustainable disruption – ongoing, easy, low-tech attacks that are nearly impossible to defend against. These attacks have the potential to ‘hollow out’ the state by preventing the delivery of critical services or a denial of income and/or investment.
So then, there are two types of ‘civilian surge’. Miliband’s: a liberation of the energies and enthusiasm of billions of global citizens. And Robb’s: what happens when a malignant network sets out to probe and exploit points of weakness in the body in which it lives. But both these visions agree on one point – that the role of the state is inevitably going to change. The important question is whether it redefines itself through choice, or because forces beyond its control batter it into retreat.
Clearly, for those of us who favour order over disorder, the former option is preferable. But that means asking hard questions about what government is for. What functions should it try to perform internationally? And how and where is it most likely to succeed? This is especially important at a time when governments are being asked to take on new responsibilities (acting as midwife for a low carbon economy, for example). It is imperative that we focus on distinguishing state actions that are important and productive, from those that are subsidiary, ineffective, counter-productive, or a combination of all three.
Alex and I believe that the concept of resilience provides an important, and perhaps unparalleled, lens through which we can explore this challenge. Those who seek to create disorder are searching with great determination for those points where a small exertion of force is rewarded by a disproportionate disruption. Their main objective is to cause complex systems to break down. Moreover, sometimes a similar effect is being achieved by the internal contradictions of the system itself. Inequality and poverty lead to great stress, and favour social breakdown. Climate change is a particularly pernicious form of negative feedback, where prosperity creates and fosters the conditions for future social and economic failure. The quest for resilience is a search for an antidote to these destabilising forces. It forces us to consider what will lead to greater health for the system as a whole.
In spite of the vast resources devoted to defence, development and diplomacy, we have, as yet, done little to counter this type of threat. Indeed, our systems appear to be becoming more fragile, not less.
Here in Pakistan, people are scared witless that they may now be living in a failing state. By way of response, their government manages the trick of simultaneously exerting too much and too little control (the paradox of weakness through strength). American foreign policy – the dominant international influence – has amplified Pakistan’s oscillations, rather than dampening them. The result could bring chaos to large parts of the world.
Under the seas, meanwhile, and as we have reported extensively on this blog, we have been given a graphic demonstration of how easy it is to bring the internet to its knees (think of this as the equivalent of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993). Our energy systems are in a similarly poor state, remaining at least as brittle as they were twenty five years ago when Amory Lovins pointed out that they were ‘easily shattered by accident or malice’.
The world’s growing urban centres are particularly vulnerable to disruption. New Orleans has shown how easily a modern city can disintegrate, while the 2003 European heat wave demonstrated how quickly people die when social system fail to respond to an ‘invisible’ threat. The developing world’s megacities struggle to deliver basic services in good times and verge on the ungovernable. In a crisis, they could rapidly degenerate into a Hobbesian horror.
The global war on terror, meanwhile, is a case study in a how a response to a threat can lead to a cascade of further calamities. “We wantonly inflicted [systems] disruption on ourselves,” John Robb writes.
A focus on resilience also provides a yardstick for addressing David Miliband’s question about the proper balance between the responsibilities of individual and state. Resilience comes from a distributed response, where each level of the system contributes to its survival. Long experience has shown us the perils of over-centralization, where the centre itself becomes a likely trigger of failure. This is why Hobbes’s Leviathan is no answer to the war of all against all. As Alex points out, the centre can never have sufficient information to ensure an adequate response. At a time of crisis, “a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse”.
But a full application of the concept of resilience should force us to focus more widely than simply on a direct response to threats. We need instead to think about the problem in three levels. First, we need to consider shared values, which are the most fundamental level at which people can make an investment in our global system. Next, the institutions or social structures in which those values are expressed and which should be designed to flex, rather than break, when under stress. Only then, should we look specifically at defending points of weakness, identifying the spots where a system is most vulnerable to a disruptive attack.
Delivering on this agenda would challenge every aspect of a government’s international and domestic capability, and demand that large parts of it should be re-wired. It’s a problem Alex and I have started to work on – I’ll try and explain some more of our thinking in a future post…
by David Steven | Feb 9, 2008 | South Asia
These are dark days for Pakistan.
Eighteen months ago, when I was first in Islamabad, Pakistanis could see a route that would take the country towards greater democracy and political stability. For sure, there were fears about rising extremism and anger about American influence, but the general mood was confident.
Pakistan would not follow Iran towards revolution; Afghanistan towards anarchy; or Iraq on the road to disintegration. Its society and institutions were more resilient than that. Progress might be messy and compromised, but things were unlikely to get worse.
But then on 9 March 2007 – less than a year ago – came the disastrous clash between General Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan’s Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Musharraf was stunned when Chaudhry refused his order to resign and by the protests that followed. His humiliation was complete when Chaudhry was reinstated to his role in July.
Overnight, the general was transformed from world leader to tragic figure. Not in the trivial sense that we should feel sorry for him, but with the original meaning of a man whose flaws had begun to trap and entangle him. Suddenly, the talk was no longer of his power and competence, but of his vanity and weakness. He had lost control of his own destiny. At any time, his supporters in the army and US administration might decide enough is enough, and abandon him to his fate.
But still the country had options. One was Nawaz Sharif, the man Musharraf ousted in his 1999 coup. When I was here in October, Nawaz tried to return to challenge a man he loathes and despises. But he got no further than the airport lounge, before being sent back into exile in one of his lavish overseas pads.
And then there was the deal with Benazir, Pakistan’s most famous daughter. Musharraf saw it as his get-out-of-jail card and the international community was falling over itself to be supportive. Whether or not they liked the proposed fudge, the Pakistanis I talked to understood it. They took comfort in the fact that they knew what was supposed to happen next.
But now they don’t, because of two further cataclysms.
On November 3rd, Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, moving against Chaudhry, the rest of the legal establishment, and the media. And finally, on December 27th, the assassination of Benazir, after a couple of months in which a squadron of suicide bombers had tracked her around the country.
Reportedly, Bhutto was resigned and fatalistic in the days before her death. Perhaps this explains her reckless decision to leave the safety of her bomb-proof car, sticking her head through an escape hatch to wave to supporters as the car inched away from a rally. Her attacker was standing only 2 metres away when he exploded the bomb, crushing her skull against the lip of the hatch.
It is hard to overestimate the shock that her death caused here in Pakistan or the mood of apprehension that has followed. People I have talked to describe is as the most traumatic day in Pakistan’s history, whether or not they were Benazir’s supporters. It marked the point where people began to give up hope and to consider the possibility that they do indeed live in a failing state.
“The crunch is coming,” a veteran political campaigner told me yesterday in Lahore.
“A good crunch or a bad crunch?” I asked.
“It could go either way,” he replied gloomily, “but it seems that we are staring into a black hole.”
