by Alex Evans | Mar 7, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
As regular readers will be aware, my fellow Global Dashboard columnist Richard Gowan is never happier than when Europe is burnishing its peacebuilding credentials, whether on Iraq, Chad or elsewhere. So we can all share in Richard’s joy when he learns that the Council of Europe has appointed former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to lead a mission to rescue Armenia from its current instability. Prescott, it will be recalled, has in the past proved his mettle on conflict management in Kovosa and the Balklands, so we’re expecting great things.
Gowan replies: Alex is correct to guess at my excitement at this new twist. I don’t know a huge amount about Armenia, but it seems to be a land of medieval vendettas, casual violence and incomprehensible oaths. So sending Mr Prescott is an act of genius.
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 5, 2008 | South Asia
The International Narcotics Control Board has published its report on narcotics in Afghanistan. The increase in opium cultivation which is taking place in the south of the country (Afghanistan is estimated to supply more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium) the effects of the drug trade: an increase in organised crime, corruption and drug dependence (which is severe in Iran and has led to a major HIV epidemic in the NE of the country) and the impact on Iran, Pakistan and the central Asian republics all make for an increasingly familiar story and one that will come as no surprise to GD readers. The facts are still worth thinking about.
- Iran, the chief transit country for drugs from Afghanistan, now has the highest rate of opiate abuse in the world.
- More than half of inmates in Iran’s prisons have been convicted for drug-related offences, and seizures of opium, morphine and heroin have risen rapidly.
- Pakistan, through which an estimated 35 per cent of Afghanistan’s opiates are smuggled, faces growing problems, with seizures in 2006, the last year for which figures were available, rising 46 per cent.
- An estimated 21 per cent of Afghanistan’s heroin and morphine transit via central Asia, the report says, leading to large increases in seizures in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
- Drug trafficking and abuse in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which have long borders with Turkey and Russia, will deteriorate further
- Drug abuse in Iraq appears to have risen dramatically and while opiate use in western and central Europe has remained stable or declined, it has increased in Russia and eastern Europe.
- The rise of cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan, including in some areas that have been declared poppy-free.
Aside from these devastating facts and the sense of powerlessness that comes with them the annual report is a timely reminder that Afghanistan’s drug addiction is a primary indicator for how well the Karzai Government, NATO and all the other international organisations are managing the stabilisation and reconstruction of the country.
The INCB report also clearly demonstrates the negative influences the drugs trade is having across a broad spectrum of issues. My concern, however, is that our conventional approach to countering narcotics in Afghanistan, a so-called wicked issue, remains hamstrung by a set of assumptions that is actually making it more not less difficult to manage. The Narcotics problem is only one node in a complex system. All of which reminds me of a saying from the gritty, realistic and addictive American TV series The Wire – ‘ follow the drugs, all you find are drug users and drug dealers, but if you follow the money, you don’t know what you’ll find’.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 4, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Last week, I noted that the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq’s reconstruction. I’ve now read the text in full. It’s a detailed set of proposals, built on a strong case that most current European funding to Iraq might as well go down a drain, and it gets 60% of the way to a strategic alternative. Here’s a summary:
- The EU should move from supporting reconstruction to governance: the bulk of European money earmarked for Iraq is currently committed to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI), which is jointly managed by the World Bank and UN. The MEPs think this is poorly managed, isn’t transparent and (sin of sins) doesn’t give the EU “visibility”. They skip over the fact that many EU members have basically ignored the fund – France has donated a whopping $31,800 to it since 2003 – but they’re probably on the money overall. Except, as they point out, nobody’s quite sure where the money is. The alternative is to shift towards “projects focussed on technical assistance and capacity-building in the fields of rule of law, financial management, democratic governance and human rights.”
- Link the money to missions: although the MEPs may not like the way IRFFI’s been managed, they’re happy for a lot of governance work to be run through UN agencies. But they also seem to like the idea of getting EU personnel to assist in police reform and “large-scale disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration”. They support greater European involvement in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq – the US currently has 25 PRTs around the country, although they focus on infrastructure rather than all that governance jazz. In addition, the British and Italians lead one each already, but this is one area on which the MEPs are coy about what to do. More European personnel in U.S.-led units? Stand-alone Euro-PRTs?
- Fly the flag: what the MEPs really seem to want is that elusive “visibility” though. EU members that don’t have diplomatic missions in Baghdad should set them up. Security allowing, current European offices in provincial cities like Erbil should raise their profile, and so forth.
It’s this flying the flag dimension that worries me a bit. I like the idea of targeting money on governance, and there’s a case for deploying smallish EU missions to handle issues like police reform. To date, the only EU-flagged mission “to” Iraq is a justice reform program largely based in, erm, Brussels organizing training courses and (ah the romance) work experience for Iraqis in Europe. Slightly closer-range support should be an option – although the MEPs have doubts, and argue that the EU should look at how to use Private Security Companies to deliver missions.
But wherever the personnel are found, “visibility” is not a strategy. And here the MEPs mix realism (for the time being, it’s the U.S. that provides the strategic framework for EU engagement) with optimism (over time, the UN should take on that role). They rightly note that the UN has adopted a greater role in Iraq in recent months, and they urge the EU to support its efforts to promote political reconciliation. But they avoid the question of what happens after the U.S. elections, and how the EU’s members should react to the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal – or, if McCain wins, a whole lot more counter-insurgency.
So I give the report an A+ for its basic instinct (the EU can’t desert Iraq); an A for its overall logic (the EU needs to use its money better); and a B+ for its tactical proposals (reduced from a B++ due to over-use of “visibility”). But the pupil doesn’t really want to study strategy, so I can’t really offer a mark for that.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 28, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
This is now nearly a day late, but I can’t resist juxtaposing two stories from Tuesday’s New York Times – stories which oddly enough, the NYT ran entirely separately. Put them together though, and you may find the magic equation for who will win in November. Story #1 concerned John McCain’s cheerful admission to journalists that “he needed to convince the American people that the troop escalation in Iraq was working and that American casualties there would continue to decline. If he did not, he said, “I lose” the election.”
Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made clear that he believed his prospects in November would rest in large measure on the way the situation in Iraq played out.
“If I may, I’d like to retract ‘I’ll lose,’ ” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me.”
Mr. McCain said he believed opinion was shifting to his point of view, referring to a recent USA Today poll that, he said, showed that “now the majority of Americans believe the surge is succeeding.”
Fair enough. Now here’s story #2: the Pentagon has projected that U.S. troop levels in Iraq will still be at 140,000 in July – that’s 8,000 more than the pre-surge figure. And, judging by comments from the Joint Chiefs’ Head of Operations, the numbers may stay nice and high:
General Ham stressed that his projected number of 140,000 was subject to change depending on security conditions, but it was the first time the Pentagon had publicly estimated the total.
Asked if the total would be below 132,000 by the time President Bush leaves office next January, General Ham said, “It would be premature to say that.”
In other words, the military strategy in Iraq is likely to favor Mr McCain all the way through to November. No surprise, then, that he and Barack Obama have spent the last day trading insults on Iraq. But please don’t take my welcome for the European parliament’s new report on securing Iraq to be an indirect McCain endorsement – the Dashboard remains studiously neutral.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 27, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Hurrah for the European Parliament. Not a phrase you hear very often, even from this blog’s resident Europhile (me), but those MEPs get it right now and again. They can even be quite bold. A while back I argued on this blog and the ECFR website that the EU needs to get its act together on Iraq and fast, not least because it will be one of the first items on he agenda for discussion with the next U.S. administration. Canvassing colleagues for ideas on what that act might look like was, however, a rather depressing business: the consensus position was “not very much, just look at the Afghan mess.”
But the MEPs – or at least their foreign affairs committee – are made of sterner stuff. In spite the problems created by the Turkish incursion in northern Iraq, they’ve come out with a remarkably expansive proposal for increasing European commitments on the ground:
The European Union has failed to improve the situation in Iraq despite committing more than €800 million (US$1.2 billion) to reconstruction efforts since 2003, a European Parliament report said Wednesday.
The report by the assembly’s foreign affairs committee called for the EU to expand its presence in the country, operate on the ground in the Kurdish region, among others, and boost its operations in Basra and Erbil.
“Europe can do much more and much better, namely by … considerably expanding its presence on the ground and by finding more creative ways to use its resources,” said the report, which will now be discussed by the 785-member EU assembly.
Hear, hear. I’m going to have to take a closer look at this document and report back on the specifics, but at least it’s a challenge to the lack of good thinking on Iraq in the EU right now. Two qualifications, though. Substantively, the EU should be careful about highlighting support to Kurdistan too much – a lot of Iraqi Arab leaders have noted what’s happened in Kosovo, and fear that “EU engagement with Kurds = a promise of secession”. The Turks wouldn’t like that either.
And politically, one has to be honest: MEPs can come up with big ideas like this, but their national counterparts and governments are unlikely to take the same risks. After all, London is bracing itself for more backward-looking recriminations on the war as new documents are released. We still seem to be stuck in 2002/3…
