by Alex Evans | May 5, 2007 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
A new survey undertaken by the US Defense Department’s Mental Health Advisory Team, which interviewed over 1,700 soldiers and marines deployed in Iraq between August and October last year, has some alarming findings. According to the Washington Post,
More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.
In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the Army report stated.
About 10 percent of the 1,767 troops in the official survey — conducted in Iraq last fall — reported that they had mistreated civilians in Iraq, such as kicking them or needlessly damaging their possessions.
by Alex Evans | May 3, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
If you haven’t already made the acquaitance of Michael Totten, then you should. Totten is an itinerant blogger who seems to wander around the Middle East on a semi-permanent basis, chatting to people and making YouTube videos. He’s financed in this fascinating endeavour by a small army of readers who donate through PayPal.
The results of his travels are often gripping, as in a recent post when he’s interviewing the police chief in Kirkuk in his office just as a suspect is brought in for questioning (a friend riding on a motorbike that the suspect was driving decided to start shooting into a crowd of people). Totten reaches for his video camera and starts taping on the spot…
P.S. Charlie Edwards, who runs Demos’s security program, has a story about a friend who was responsible for policing in Basra shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Early on in his tour, the Coalition Provisional Authority contracted out police training to private contractors, of whom he was one. In order to prove that they were being effective, they were told to define a range of Key Performance Indicators.
The British agonized over the complexities of policing and attempted to come up with a rough guide as to how they were doing. Meanwhile American contractors responded immediately: the police station should still have
all the chairs it was issued with; all the tables, all the guns, and all the padlocks; and no bullet holes in the external walls.
Which, when you stop to think about it, are actually pretty robust as indicators go…
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
(more…)
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Wired.com has a piece today saying that:
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
And they have a copy of the new rules, too. So much for muddy boots in the information battlespace (see David’s previous post) and the argument – proposed by winner of the US Army Information Operations Proponent (USIOP) essay-writing competition, Elizabeth Robbins – that:
Military blogs written by those in muddy boots… are a combat multiplier in the information domain… Commanders at every level must boldly accept risk in order to support the rewards and warfighting advantage that soldier-authors bring to the information battlespace.
by Elizabeth Sellwood | Apr 27, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with the Financial Times this week, was invited to reflect on the dilemmas of promoting democracy in the Middle East. Would the Bush administration continue to push for democratic elections, Rice was asked, even though it was now having to deal with elected militias in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine? Rice was unequivocal: every time, she said, she would choose “elections and democracy, even if it brings to power people that we don’t like.” She has been consistent on this point: in September 2005, Rice was asked about Hamas’s participation in the forthcoming Palestinian elections. She argued then that while “you cannot have an armed option within the democratic process”, it was also important to recognise that the Palestinian political process was “in transition”: “we have to give the Palestinians some room for the evolution of their political process”.
Since Hamas won, the US has taken a number of measures to influence the Palestinian political situation and to change the government’s policies. The US and its partners in the Quartet issued a statement that in the Quartet’s view, “all members of a future Palestinian government must be committed to non-violence, recogition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map.” US officials immediately ceased contact with all Palestinian government officials, and terminated funding to all PA government-administered projects. The US Treasury imposed restrictions on private banks dealing with the PA. At the same time, funding and support to the office of President Mahmoud Abbas, to the security services that report to him, and to his Fatah party, continued or increased. (more…)
