by Daniel Korski | Aug 18, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, South Asia
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is resigning, thus opening a new chapter in this country’s history as the governing parties, PPP and PML-N, are bound to go at each other’s jugulars once the celebrations end.
But there is little time for festivities. The government has not been able to assume control over the military and intelligence apparatus or engage an increasingly capable alliance of Pakistani militant groups and al Qaeda, which looks set to control much of western Pakistan. Pakistan’s turmoil has pinched the country’s economy, and stoked inflation. In addition, relations with India have taken a turn for the worse.
The governing parties should be helped to re-draft the constitution to give way to a new, ceremonial President (like in India). But what is really needed is a new coalition agreement, which commits the government to deal with the economic meltdown, intelligence reforms, the emergence of a Pakistani Taliban and Pakistan-India links.
To bring the military on board to such an agenda, a revision is needed of US military assistance with the implicit promise of more and better-targeted assistance as a reward for a deal. A new U.S administration should use the threat of a suspension of military assistance if the Pakistani military balks at the necessary changes. Before the “nuclear option” of a legislative ban on assistance – which Barack Obama has supported in the past – a new administration could direct an audit of U.S military assistance.
While Europe can only play a limited role in moving the Pakistani military, it can play much bigger part in dealing with the Pakistani government. Over on the Spectator’s website, I offer suggestions for what shape this can take and the leverage the West has:
As a carrot for a new deal – which should include a balanced counter-insurgency strategy, regional peace initiatives and intelligence reforms – the Prime Minister could offer to host high-profile donor’s conference, which could lay the foundation for a UN-led assistance programme to be overseen by an assistance envoy. Perhaps this could be a job for Paddy Ashdown, who was lined up for the UN job in Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai changed his mind.
No peace in Pakistan is possible without a regional peace process and Gordon Brown should persuade George W. Bush to appoint a Presidential Envoy – a regional version of Zalmay Khalilzad’s previous Afghan role – and for the EU to do the same. These two “tandem envoys” could then begin the long trek towards regional stability, helping to prepare the ground for a new strategy from a new U.S administration.
However much it spends, the U.S will get little for its aid dollars given its reputation in the region. Therefore, any international, UN-led assistance programme needs to be kicked-off by the Europeans.
by Charlie Edwards | Aug 3, 2008 | UK
I can’t be the only one scratching my head at the Conservative Party’s summer holiday reading list. It’s week 2 of silly season, I grant you, and journalists will take pretty much anything on offer, but this just smacks of column filling (that said perhaps some of the larger tomes will act as wind breakers and/or sun shades on the beach).
According to the Sunday Times the reading list was chosen by Keith Simpson, a shadow foreign affairs spokesman and a former lecturer at Cranfield and Sandhurst. This is clearly reflected in his choice of reading material as 24 of the 38 books are on military history, geography, and terrorism. Nudge, the book currently feted by all three political parties looks like a definite afterthought.
What I find so puzzling is the choice of books on offer. I really can’t believe Cameron will be leafing through Empires of the Sea or Five Days in London on his hols.
There are no decent books on China (the more recent by Will Hutton, Charles Grant and Mark Leonard). What about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; Diplomacy by Henry Kissenger, or Thomas Rick’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005? The list of good books is endless – this list is meaningless.
MPs have approximately 11 weeks off, so here’s how they might spend their summer holiday (according to Keith Simpson):
(more…)
by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, South Asia
My recent extended growl about the parlous state of peacekeeping has been cited as evidence in a fascinating online debate among Indian security analysts on whether their army should stay committed to UN operations. This debate is significant because (i) India is consistently among the top three contributors to UN forces, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh; (ii) it is even more important in terms of hard-to-find assets like helicopters; (iii) it is suffering a run of negative publicity about how badly some of its troops behave (the fact that a lot of this snark comes from the BBC irks some in the debate, who detect post-colonial prurience).
With India’s economy growing fast, the payments it receives from the UN in return for its troops are increasingly irrelevant. So might there come a moment when India decides that blue helmet deployments no longer befit its status and interests as a great power? Yes, and the sooner the better, according to two hawkish strategists in the Indian Express in early July. Edited highlights:
More Indian troops have died in the line of their UN duties than from any other country. According to the Indian Embassy in the US, “India has risked the lives of its soldiers in peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations, not for any strategic gain, but in the service of an ideal. India’s ideal was, and remains, strengthening the world body, and international peace and security.” That the Indian government should take pride in risking the lives of Indian soldiers in the “service of an ideal” is appalling. It now serves little more than bureaucratic interests.
In order to give the issue the attention it demands, India should immediately suspend all further UN deployments. This should be followed by a graduated withdrawal of all Indian troops operating under the UN flag. There might be a case for a small, token presence, in carefully chosen theatres. It is time for India to stop seeing foreign troop deployments as “risking lives in the service of an ideal.” Rather, they should be seen as being tightly coupled with vital foreign policy objectives, like for instance, securing India’s construction crews in Afghanistan. As India’s economic interests expand globally, it is likely that the need for such deployments will increase.
You can follow the debate sparked by these comments over at Pragmatic Euphony, a blog devoted to India’s national interest. Fears of new violence ahead in the eastern Congo suggest that Indian peacekeepers may be in the headlines again this summer, as this is one of the theatres in which they are squarely on the frontline. A rapid drawdown of Indian forces isn’t imminent – New Delhi has good reasons to look responsible after (i) it took flak for helping kill off Doha (whatever the merits!) and (ii) the IAEA signed off on the US-India nuclear deal this week.
But these online stirrings may be the start of something bigger. India could well lose faith in the relevance of peacekeeping – recent violence in Kashmir and reports that Pakistan was implicated in July’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul are reminders that it has urgent problems on its doorstep to tend to. New Delhi is also deeply skeptical about all the current talk about the Responsibility to Protect (as it demonstrated during the Burmese cyclone crisis) and is liable to demand an ever-greater say in UN strategy-making if it is to stay involved. That raises the tricky question of when if ever India will get a permanent Security Council seat…
If India cut back on its peacekeepers it would be incredibly difficult to sustain big peace operations in places like the Congo. This is often obscured by (i) a lazy assumption that the South Asians will be peacekeepers forever out of habit; (ii) a focus on the views of African troop suppliers, especially in Darfur; and (iii) possibly excessive excitement about the prospect of other countries getting involved, like China. China’s peacekeeping commitments are still less than a quarter of India’s.
I’ve got yet another academic analysis of the dynamics of UN ops out, in a book on “Strategies for Peace” (don’t be put off by the lime-green cover). I wrote it ages ago, but it highlights the South Asian contribution and how UN missions rely on a global compact between three categories of state: “those in which large-scale peace operations are deployed (mainly in Africa); those which supply the bulk of peacekeeping forces (most notably in South Asia and Africa); and those that provide most of the funding for peace operations (the United States, EU members and Japan).” Lose the Indians, and that compact starts to unravel.
Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) this new article isn’t online. But it concludes along the lines of a shorter think-piece I published last year about developing a new strategic consensus that all those involved in UN ops can buy into if they are to keep on keeping on… a consensus, I infer from the Indian online debate, that should be couched in interests not ideals.
UPDATE: check out Pragmatic Euphony’s interesting riposte to this post here.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
In January, I enjoyed 15 seconds of fame commenting on the shortage of helicopters for peace operations in The Economist (I’d already raised the issue on this blog and for ECFR). I found myself in touch with Thomas Withington, an aviation journalist researching the problem. He was kind enought to quote me back in May, but it was evident that he knew a lot more about the technicalities than I did. Now he’s published a first-class study of which countries have what helicopters, and who might send them to Darfur. The IHT takes up the story:
The report said military powers like the U.S., Britain and France are tied down in wars and other peacekeeping operations. But it singled out the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania, Spain, Ukraine and India, saying they have suitable aircraft needed for the mission.
A UN official in Darfur told AP the mission has only 27 transport helicopters, all commercially leased. UN documents say the mission needs 18 medium-lift military helicopters and the force has sought to get six attack helicopters. But the UN official said it has none and an offer from Ethiopia of five combat helicopters was still being discussed.
Many military helicopters that could be used by the UNAMID mission in Darfur are sitting in hangars or being used in air shows, the report said. NATO nations “could provide as many as 104 suitable helicopters for the UNAMID force,” saying the alliance members best placed to provide the aircraft are the Czech Republic, Italy, Romania and Spain. In addition, it said, “Ukraine and India could together contribute 34 helicopters.”
There was no immediate comment from the governments of those nations. The report was endorsed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has repeatedly expressed frustration over the lack of attack and transport helicopters and other critical gear that he says is crucial for the Darfur peacekeeping mission. “Given the terrain and security situation in Darfur, it is critical that member states provide missing aviation assets,” Ban said in a statement released by his office.
The governments involved would doubtless argue that they are doing their best elsewhere: India is the UN’s #1 helicopter supplier, Ukraine has attack choppers in Liberia to deter any new trouble there, Spain has committed two planes to Chad, etc. I am increasingly inclined to think that, while I usually view the idea of “UN standing forces” as a miasma, there is a case for some sort of international helicopter pool for peace ops. That was where Thomas and I ended up in May:
The pool of aircraft “could be available to the UN, AU and others. They wouldn’t be UN owned but it might be possible to fund a standing pool of aircraft,” says Gowan. “The most convincing political basis we’ve seen for it is that it should be something largely focused on the region where the bulk of UN peacekeeping is concentrated, which is Africa, and that it should be something shared between the UN and the AU who would fund this pool for missions that were mandated by the UN or AU.”
A nice idea on paper. But not much comfort to the people of Darfur, I admit.
PS: Mark reminds me that, last November, Indian combat camels were mooted as an alternative to helicopters. I find no evidence of progress on this front.
by Alex Evans | Jul 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
No-one quite wants to pronounce the patient dead just yet (US Trade Representative Susan Schwab: “This is not the time to talk about collapse … the US commitments remain on the table”; unnamed EU source: “It’s clearly not a success. But no one will want to say that it’s the end of the round”) – but it’s hard to see much sign of life either, especially after all of Pascal Lamy’s talk of this being the final, final, final deadline.
It’s ironic that at a point when all the talk is of how high food prices are, the issue on which the talks foundered was a mechanism designed to protect developing countries from low food prices. ICTSD explains:
The ’special safeguard mechanism’ would allow developing countries to raise tariffs beyond bound levels, in principle to stall inflows of cheap imports that could displace farmers. The issue neatly splits the interests of import-sensitive developing countries and competitive farm exporters, including those in the developing world: the former want to have recourse to protection, the latter want predictable access to overseas markets.
One of the main sticking points has been whether, and by how much, countries should be allowed under the SSM to impose safeguard duties in excess of current (i.e., pre-Doha) tariff ceilings. The G-33 bloc of developing countries, which includes China, India, and Indonesia, insists that this may sometimes be necessary for safeguard duties to have the desired effect, i.e., protecting farmers.
Or there’s the pithier version from another unnamed official, this time in the IHT:
It risks becoming a totemic issue: subsistence farming versus commodity exports.
That is, in some ways, the long and the short of the issue that led to the talks’ collapse, though needless to say there were many other sticking points too – and it’s another illustration of how debates over agricultural trade are increasingly split into divergent schools of thought. For fans of liberalisation – like the US – the logic is straightforward. With food prices as high as they are, there’s never been a better time to get rid of import tariffs – so why the hell should China and India want to be able to raise them even higher than they were before Doha?
China’s approach, on the other hand, is rooted in concerns about resilience and security of supply in a period of volatility and turbulence: hence its desire to maximise access to imports while at the same time protecting its internal agricultural sector, in which smaller farmers predominate. (While smallholders are inevitably at risk from dumping, they can also be extremely productive in the right circumstances: IFAD cites the example of Vietnam, which has gone from being a food-deficit country to being the world’s second largest exporter of rice – largely thanks to development of the country’s smallholder sector.)
It looks like there will be no further talks until towards the middle of next year, after elections in the US and India – even then, things are likely to be tougher than now given rising protectionist sentiment around the world. Also worth noting that the collapse of the talks – and in particular the acrimony between the US and the two key emerging economies – doesn’t exactly augur well for progress in climate talks.
If you want the full play-by-play, Alan Beattie’s post-mortem is where to go, and ICTSD will have the full details up on their site tomorrow.
