by Alex Evans | Dec 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos’s new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards. It’s an excellent pamphlet and anyone interested in how governments co-ordinate themselves to deal with complex risks should read it. Anyway, at the event, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Nick Clegg made a strong call for an end to the “politics of fear” (duly picked up the media), arguing that the public “will come to resent parties and governments who beat the drum of fear most loudly”. He said:
“In a climate of fear, decisions are taken as a short-term response rather than as part of long-term strategy. As more and more of these decisions are made, the overall approach becomes less – rather than more – coherent. And as government lurches from one decision to the next, it succeeds in neither protecting people nor empowering them”.
Well, amen to that. Instead, Clegg went on, we need a national security strategy “based in part on public engagement, involvement and action … putting power and confidence into people’s hands so they are equipped to tackle danger”. So, he said,
“If Britain is to be prepared for emergencies of all kinds, I believe we need to re-establish some form of Civil Defence organisation. And it must be community-based, community-led, and engage people. I want to explore how we can get people to learn skills to serve their community, and share the skills they have, so when emergencies happen – from flooding to a terrorist attack – it isn’t just a small, professional elite who step up, it’s everyone, with their own particular skills. I will set up a working group to look at how best to structure this sort of Community Resilience Force. And I want to use the principles of openness, engagement and individual action across the board, not just in terms of national security.”
Now, admittedly Clegg’s Community Resilience Force is thin on the detail. Well, fair enough; he’s in the closing straight of a leadership contest. But what’s appealing here is the idea of resilience as a bottom-up undertaking. Clegg seemed tacitly to admit that faced with a really serious system shock – a ‘Black Swan’ event – top-down co-ordination will quickly become overwhelmed: even a competent FEMA would have struggled to cope with Katrina, in other words. In such circumstances, a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse (c.f. The Upside of Down).
Or so I thought. But then came the questions. Having spent the weekend reading John Robb’s must-read book Brave New War, I stuck my hand up. Quoting Robb, I observed that insurgents in countries as disparate as Iraq and Nigeria were proving increasingly adept at identifying ‘systempunkt’ nodes: the critical hubs which, if attacked successfully, risk taking down the entire system through a cascading failure. There are plenty such points in our power, water, gas, food and financial systems – just look at today’s FT for a snapshot of how much trade into Britain relies on a couple of over-congested ports, Felixstowe and Southampton.
What would Clegg’s vision of participatory resilience look like in the context of that kind of shock, I wondered? Hmm, said Clegg. Well, community empowerment wouldn’t really be the point in that kind of context. That sort of context is more a matter for the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Right, I nodded, ignorant of the content of said Act but resolved to look it up at the earliest opportunity.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered this afternoon that not only does the CCA 2004 not appear to be based on participatory resilience, it is in fact the epitome, the quintessence, the very archetype of a top-down approach.
Once you’re past the (sensible) parts on emergency planning, you find that the part Clegg was referring to is about overhauling Emergency Powers in UK law. What it says, in essence, is that that in an “emergency” (that’s any event, not necessarily in Britain, which “threatens serious damage” to human welfare or the environment, or “war or terrorism that threatens serious damage to the security of the UK”), then the relevant Secretary of State – that’s any Cabinet member, not just the PM- can do anything.
Oh, you think I exaggerate? Here’s section 22 (1):
Emergency regulations may make any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.
Now, I may not be a politician, but I must admit that I’m struggling slightly to see any particular correlation between (a) this interesting approach to governance and (b) community-based resilience or decentralised, participatory citizenship. If I understand Nick Clegg’s position correctly, then, the executive summary goes something like this:
“Centralised bureaucracies perform badly in conditions of stress, while decentralised citizen-led systems are more robust – except if the conditions of stress are sufficiently stressful, in which case the exact opposite applies.”
Um… glad we got that straight.
by Richard Gowan | Dec 3, 2007 | Conflict and security
Having previously suggested that the academic community should explore the semantics of the Italian Defense Minister’s description of Afghanistan as “stable in its instability”, I would also like to suggest they follow up on John Negroponte’s verdict on the Surge:
“It’s one thing to have brought the violence under some semblance of control,” Mr. Negroponte said during a news conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone here, after meeting Iraqi officials in Baghdad and seven other provinces in Iraq’s north, south and west. “But it’s another matter now to follow up with the necessary reconstruction and stabilization projects that will safeguard regions and protect them from this type of violence.”
There has to be an IR specialist out there ready to work up a piece entitled “From a Semblance of Control to Stable Instability: A New Framework for Peacebuilding”. I look forward to it. In the meantime, those seeking some respite from the grim news from Darfur, the Congo and Chad may at least get a hollow laugh from the all-time winners of the Worst Revolutionary Acronym Award, Chad’s United Front for Change (FUC):
The FUC posed a grave danger to the government of President Idriss Deby in April 2006 when they launched an attack on Ndjamena that was stopped only after French army stationed there intervened, according to many sources. Deby later made Nour defence minister on the condition that he integrate his FUC fighters into the army.
by Richard Gowan | Dec 1, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
For much of this year, Washington analysts have been extremely worried about what to do about the vast numbers of refugees flowing out of Iraq (about 2 million so far, or 7% of the population, and that doesn’t include internally displaced persons – IDPs). Daniel Byman of Brookings, who has led the charge on this issue with Kenneth Pollack, describes taking care of the refugees as a rare issue on which “morality and strategy come together in the Middle East“. I think we can take the morality part for granted, and the strategic case looks clear too: the outflow of people seems bound to cause economic and political instability in the region.
But yesterday’s New York Times raises an alternative problem: what if the refugees and IDPs come back? The few that have are frequently finding their homes occupied, which is proving especially incendiary when the returnee and occupier come from different religious or ethnic communities. Now, this sort of problem is familiar from so many recent conflicts – the Balkans alone – you might think there was a plan for this.
Or not:
Col. Cheryl L. Smart, who tracks the data on displaced Iraqis for General Petraeus’s command, said that the American military had been “very vocal” with the Iraqi government about the need to establish a system to adjudicate claims about property rights and to avoid using Iraqi troops to carry out “forced evictions.”
Colonel Rapp [another Petraeus aide] voiced the hope that confrontations might be avoided by building new homes for returning Iraqis instead of forcing all of the squatters to leave. “It is probably going to be resolved with new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlement,” he said.
“Whether they will remix is probably a multiyear, decade kind of issue,” he added, referring to the possibility of sectarian reintegration.
“The immediate return of I.D.P.’s will create tensions in that system, and we are concerned about it,” he said, referring to the internally displaced people in Iraq.
This raises a short-term question: if the Surge has created a sufficient degree of stability for some IDPs and refugees to return home, will their return undermine that stability, making it a self-defeating exercise? Answer: depends how many do actually come back.
Which points to a bigger problem. Morality would suggest that one wants to see a high level of returns (as we did in Bosnia but not in Kosovo), but what’s preferable in strategic terms: a high level of returns creating instability inside Iraq, or a low level of returns that leaves the risk of instability among its neighbors high? Take your pick.
A nasty PS: as Byman has pointed out, the refugees are likely to adopt radical politics abroad. So guess which Iraqi politician has been appointed to come up with a plan on returns: yes, it’s Ahmed Chalabi, player of Iraqi exile politics par excellence. Ouch.
by Alex Evans | Dec 1, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
William Lind notes this week that the reason parts of Iraq have quietened down isn’t only because al-Qaeda have managed to alienate their own base through their tactics – “and for once we were wise enough not to get in the way of an enemy who was making a blunder” – but also because Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his militia to stand down. But, Lind continues, “…fighting the Americans is more likely to strengthen than weaken his hold on his own movement. So what gives?”
Lind notes that the New York Times has already suggested that the answer may be that Iran asked / told al-Sadr to do so. But, he continues,
If that is true, it bumps the same question up a level. Why are the Iranians asking their allies in Iraq to give us a break? I doubt it is out of charity, or fear, although elements within Iran that do not want a war with the United States seem to be gaining political strength.
Here’s a hypothesis. What if the Iranians had determined, rightly or wrongly (and I suspect rightly), that the Bush administration has already decided to attack Iran before the end of its term? Two actions would seem logical on their part. First, try to maneuver the Americans into the worst possible position on the moral level by denying them pretexts for an attack. Telling their allied Shiite militias in Iraq to cool it would be part of that, as would reducing the flow of Iranian arms to Iraqi insurgents and improving cooperation with the international community on the nuclear issue. We see evidence of the latter two actions as well as the first.
Second, they would tell their allies in Iraq to keep their powder dry. Back off for now, train, build up stocks of weapons and explosives and work out plans for what they will do as their part of the Iranian counter-attack. Counter-attack there will certainly be, on the ground against our forces in Iraq, in one form or another. In almost all possible counter-attack scenarios, it would be highly valuable to Iran if the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias could cut the Americans’ supply lines running up from Kuwait and slow down their movements so that they could not mass their widely dispersed forces. In John Boyd’s phrase, it would be a classic Cheng-Chi operation.
by Alex Evans | Nov 29, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army – ‘Human Terrain Teams’. Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic and tribal landscape.
Wired explains that “the idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works”. The Army has set aside $41 million with which to deploy 150 “social scientists, software geeks and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year”. Six such teams are already on the ground.
However, some anthropologists are up in arms about their academic brethren using their skills to help the US Army:
The executive board of the American Anthropology Association, or AAA, recently blasted the HTT program as immoral. Because anthropologists in the effort could help in “identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations,” the board wrote, information derived from the program “would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed.”
But on the other hand, Wired continues, some of the early results look impressive:
A “preliminary assessment” of the first HTT, obtained by Wired News, shows the potential impact these social-science groups can make. In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.
“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.'”
At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. The religious leader was so moved by the gesture, he recorded radio ads denouncing the Taliban.
Let’s be honest, we’ve heard enough ‘we’ve found the counter-insurgency grail!’ stories over the last few years to warrant a cautious approach to claims like these. Still, as Wired makes clear, the HTTs are already proving to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the culture of a fundamentally backward – some would say essentially medieval – people: colonels in the US Army. Two HTT members found that their first task was to draft a memo complaining about the colonel in charge of their team:
…a military man, not a social scientist – who [they] said had a distinct “disinterest in the Iraqi population, society and culture. He often uses the terms ‘Arab,’ ‘Iraqi,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Sunni,’ or ‘Shia’ interchangeably…. At times, he has even made comments such as ‘when in doubt, kill ’em all.’
