by Charlie Edwards | Feb 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Excellent comment piece in today’s FT on how the Pentagon needs to plan for climate change. According to the authors there are five key areas in which effective military planning can be undermined by uncertainty over when and how the major carbon-emitting countries combat climate change.
First, climate change poses a threat to fragile states that lack the capacity to adapt to environmental shifts. The Pentagon needs to know if the military will be called upon to operate more often in countries that have collapsed or are on the brink of doing so. The risk of a regional conflagration sparked by global warming is particularly severe in east Africa and south Asia. How urgently should the Pentagon begin planning for such contingencies?
Second, the US military needs to know how significantly to expand its capacity to act as a first responder in times of natural disaster. Climate change will increase the frequency of large-scale disasters over the next three decades. But the scope of this threat will vary depending on what action is taken to minimise emissions. Although some of the emergencies created or exacerbated by climate change may be managed by the UN, the US military has an unrivalled capacity to act as a first responder in these situations.
Recall the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck a little more than three years ago: only the US could or would so rapidly have deployed and sustained the 15,000 troops, two dozen ships and 100 aircraft needed for the mission. But if the US military anticipates being called upon more often to respond to such disasters then it needs clarity about how soon it should invest more resources into planning such missions.
Third, the US military will have to conduct traditional missions in increasingly adverse weather conditions. Planners must decide how soon to invest in equipment that works better in storms, floods and other hostile climates.
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by Charlie Edwards | Feb 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Paddy Ashdown is in trenchant mood in today’s FT.
With fighting in Afghanistan now entering its seventh year, no agreed international strategy, public support on both sides of the Atlantic crumbling, Nato in disarray and widening insecurity in Afghanistan, defeat is now a real possibility. The consequences for both Afghanistan and its allies would be appalling: global terrorism would have won back its old haven and created a new one over the border in a mortally weakened Pakistan; our domestic security threat would be gravely increased and a new instability would be added to the world’s most unstable region.
But then neither is continuing as we are. So what should we do?
Some say more troops should be sent and they are certainly needed. Some say those Nato members who are not sharing the burden of the fighting should do so – and they should. Some say we need more aid – and we do. We are putting into Afghanistan one 25th the troops and one 50th of the aid per head of population that we put into Kosovo and Bosnia.
Increasing resources in Afghanistan is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient. Even if we were to provide what was necessary, and even if everyone pulled their weight, we would still find it very difficult to turn the tide, which is now running increasingly strongly against us.
Adding troops is key to this problem. But as James Travers’ argued in his regular national affairs column yesterday:
Adding 1,000 NATO troops and more air support won’t fix what’s wrong with this attempted rescue of a failing state. As Manley found and studies warn, unco-ordinated strategies countering the insurgency, corruption and the booming opium business aren’t working and demand hurried reconsideration.
And what about increasing resources? Clearly this is crucial – but let’s be realistic. The U.S. has spent the same amount on aid and development in Afghanistan over the past five years as the military burns through in Iraq every three weeks. And resources follow priorities.
So finally it begs the question: do we need a strategy? According to Ashdown:
What we lack above all is a strategy that all (including, crucially, the Afghan government and the international military) can buy into. We know well enough what the objective is – to help President Hamid Karzai’s government to govern so that we can hand over the tasks we are doing, including the fighting, to them.
And based on a strategy, we need to develop a plan – but as Ashdown notes, we haven’t agreed a single person to head up the fractured international effort, with the authority to bash international heads together and provide the support the government of Afghanistan needs to begin winning again. So what would Ashdown do?
Firstly, we (the international community) have to concentrate fiercely on the necessary and not be distracted by the merely desirable. To have too many priorities is to have none.
The first is security.
Our second priority should be governance.
The third priority, linking these two, is strengthening the rule of law, from the judiciary, to the police, to the security structures, to the penal code.
I think governments might suggest that this is what they are already doing in Afghanistan. The problem they would point to is coordinating their efforts . But I think there is also something to be said about how they go about developing and implementing policy; and here I think we need to take a very different approach. I call it Connecting the Dots – and I think it’s what we desperately need to do with complex problems such as Afghanistan’s future.
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.”
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 7, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
Gary Anderson from George Washington University has a good piece in the Washington Post. Al-Qaeda is losing. As he argues:
The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaeda is making a comeback from its rout in Afghanistan. Many point to its success in killing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and to its support of Islamic insurgents there as evidence. Not so. Al-Qaeda is waning. Its decline has less to do with our success than with the institutional limitations of the al-Qaeda organization. Simply stated, to know al-Qaeda closely is not to love it.
Everyplace where al-Qaeda has gained some measure of control over a civilian population, it has quickly worn out its welcome. This happened in Kabul and in Anbar province in western Iraq. It may well happen in Pakistan as a reaction to the killing of Bhutto.
No one likes to be brutalized and dominated by foreigners. The weakness of al-Qaeda is that everywhere it goes its people are strangers. This is no way to build a worldwide caliphate.
Why, then, are we supposedly losing the information war in the Muslim world, and why has there not been more of an outcry among Muslims over this slaughter of innocents? A big part of the reason is that we spend too much time wanting to be liked rather than turning Muslim anger on our enemies.
We preach some values that are viewed as alien and threatening to the traditional order of things. Our popular culture is seen as decadent at best and downright threatening at worst in traditional cultures. Our message isn’t selling. We can’t change what we are, nor would we want to. No matter how much the government may disapprove, the government’s official propaganda will be overwhelmed by the deluge, both positive and negative, from the popular media. We need to accept this fact and move on, rather than waste more millions on strategic communications “charm campaigns.”
What we can do is to expose our Islamic extremist enemies for what they are. The people of Afghanistan and Anbar found this out the hard way and threw the rascals out. But when al-Qaeda kills scores of innocents, we report it as a statistic without context. We may see weeping relatives and bloodstained bodies from a distance, on video or in photographs, but they are depersonalized, and people quickly become desensitized to anonymous images. Ironically, Stalin was right: One death is a tragedy; millions are a statistic. We need to help Muslims understand how these people really treat other Muslims.
The original Islamic movement spread its doctrine by a combination of military action and compassion. Charity was a key tenet. This is largely why Hamas and Hezbollah gain a degree of popular support in the areas they control. That ingredient is missing in the al-Qaeda/Taliban approach to the world. To them, winning hearts and minds means, “Agree with us or else.” That is largely the reason that the U.S. government dropped its early “for us or against us” approach. It has taken us some time, but we seem to be recovering from that approach.
by Alex Evans | Feb 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Economics and development
A while since we’ve heard from William Lind, who’s cheerfully posting away on DNI’s snazzy new blog. On sparkling form, he’s currently offering an explanation as to why winning counter-insurgency campaigns is like crossing the English Channel:
For centuries, Continental wars that included Great Britain tended to follow a pattern. The British would send an army to the Continent; it would be defeated by the French or Germans; the British would withdraw to their island; and their triumphant European enemy would draw up a superior force on the French or Dutch Channel coast. There was little doubt about the outcome, should that army land in Britain. But it could never get across the English Channel.
A recent conversation over dinner with a Marine lieutenant colonel, formerly a battalion commander in Iraq, helped clarify the nature of our “crossing the Channel” challenge in Fourth Generation war. With a combination of good counter-insurgency tactics (tactics that de-escalate confrontations), a strategy of protecting the population and some luck in the form of blunders by our 4GW opponents, we may be able to restore some degree of order in places where the state has disintegrated. We may further be able to take advantage of the restoration of order to get things working again on the local level: open the schools, turn the power back on, create some jobs, see local commerce revive.
What we do not know how to do, either in theory or in practice, is move from these local achievements to seeing the re-creation of a state. Yet in 4GW, that is crossing the Channel, because unless we can do that we cannot win the war.
But if you’re hoping for the answer, then disappointment sadly awaits.
The problem of crossing the Channel in 4GW is actually more difficult than it was for those French and German armies encamped on the Channel coast, hoping. They knew perfectly well how to cross the English Channel: in boats. They just could not do it in the face of the Royal Navy. As one admiral told the British cabinet during the French invasion scare of 1805, “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.”
We have the boats and we have the superior fleet, in the form of complete material supremacy over our 4GW opponents. What we do not have is an understanding of how to employ that superiority to regenerate a state out of statelessness. Until theory can give us such an understanding – and it may find the problem insoluble – we, like yet another attempt to invade England, the Spanish Armada, will sail in expectation of a miracle.
