by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | North America
When I saw the headline of James Carville’s FT article today – “Time to halt America’s political hara-kiri” – my heart sank. Surely, I thought, not another sanctimonious counterblast from Team Clinton moralising about Samantha Power having the temerity to call their queen a ‘monster’.
Silly me. Duh – this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, after all: the man who met Paula Jones’ claims of sexual harassement by Bill Clinton with the succint epithet, “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find”.
So it should not surprise us that he’s appalled that Samantha Power had to resign. Rather like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Wag the Dog (“This is nothing! During the filming of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ three of the horsemen died two weeks before the ending of principle photography. This is nothing, this is nothing…”), Carville’s seen far worse than this before:
I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.
Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.
Near the end of that campaign, George H.W.Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.
It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.
So for heaven’s sake, he concludes: “Ms Power, come back to work. New York Times, get out of these candidates’ way and let them run for president. Everybody take a deep breath. And if somebody somewhere refers to their rival as a little pissant, do not sweat it. Nobody seems to even know what that is.”
by Alex Evans | Mar 7, 2008 | North America
As you pity Samantha Power for having to resign for calling Hillary a ‘monster’, the story of the week’s other Obama leak is still developing. As readers will recall, that leak was to do with a meeting last month between Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s senior economic adviser, and officials at the Canadian consulate in Chicago. As the FT reported earlier this week,
In a summary of the meeting, a Canadian diplomat wrote that Mr Goolsbee “acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign … He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,” said the memo, which was obtained by the Associated Press …
The Canadian embassy in Washington expressed regret for how the meeting had been interpreted. “There was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private,” it said.
At the time, my reaction was simply: how embarrassing for the Canadian embassy. But there’s a twist. Since then, media coverage has reported that the leak actually came from Ian Brodie – chief of staff to the [highly conservative] Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – after ABC News identified him as the source of briefing to reporters. As Jeet Heer remarks on Comment is Free,
In Canada, the whole story is emerging as a major political scandal. This sort of interference into another country’s elections is not just a huge diplomatic faux pas, but also a deep affront to democratic norms.
(more…)
by Richard Gowan | Mar 7, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Now that it looks likely that Kosovo is heading for some sort of de facto partition, there’s a sense of weary inevitability abroad. Of course this was coming, the argument goes, and it won’t be long before some other Balkan backwater is trying redraw its border – Tim Judah has a typically excellent summary of the possible hot-spots here. I suspect that one of the medium-term results of events in Kosovo will be that anyone who talks about minority rights and reconciliation is going encounter a frosty reception in foreign ministries for quite a while. “We spent a decade promoting ruddy ‘education for all’ in Kosovo,” will come the answer, “and what did we get? Bunch of beardies yelling obscenities at our troops, that’s what!”
I’m pretty skeptical about the vast majority of youth reconciliation initiatives, community-based peacebuilding and the like, and my skepticism is based on (admittedly limited) experience of minority rights work in the Balkans. But I have just come across evidence that suggests that, until the middle of last year, Kosovo was making genuine progress towards being a tolerant, multi-ethnic society. That has fallen apart in the last six months in the run-up secession – but leaves some hope that, once the current kerfuffle is over, a pluralistic Kosovo might function.
This evidence comes from one of the very few international projects in Kosovo that has always worked pretty well: the “Early Warning Report” series of quarterly opinion polls run by UNDP and USAID across the province. These correctly showed a massive loss of public faith in the UN administration prior to the (otherwise largely unforeseen) March 2004 riots that threw the internationals into confusion.
By contrast, the polling data from mid-2006 to mid-2007 – essentially the period that the West was pushing for a UN-mandated deal on Kosovo’s independence – suggested that both Kosovo Serbs and Albanians were starting to accept pluralism:
- By the second quarter of 2007, half of Kosovo Serbs surveyed said they’d be happy to work with Albanians – two thirds would be happy to live on the same street, and 80% would be happy to live in the same town.
- Kosovo Albanians were less keen on cohabitation, but only a fifth of them said that inter-ethnic relations could “never” be normal. Roughly half said that they’d be normal in the near or distant future – the same was true on the Serb side, although there was a tendency to say it’d be “distant”.
- So even if it wasn’t exactly an inter-ethnic love-in (quite literally as the one thing virtually no respondents of either background would contemplate was inter-marriage) at least there was a vague sense of moving in the right direction. And, crucially, most people didn’t think it was heading the wrong way. In the first half of 2005, still shaken by the previous year’s riots, up to 96% of Kosovo Serbs said they thought relations were “tense and not improving”. That fell to 10% by mid-2007 (the Albanian community seemed more relaxed on this score throughout, but then they had less to lose from things going haywire, or so it seemed at the time).
Alongside these trends there was evidence that both Serbs and Albanians were growing more trusting of NATO and the UN. Had Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians come to some sort of compromise on independence, it might have all gone rather smoothly. Even if the Security Council had ruled that Kosovo was independent in mid-2007 over Belgrade’s objections, these figures suggest there was a viable base for a tolerant (or at least tolerable) settlement inside Kosovo.
There would still have been trouble in the Serb-majority north – the figures were far less promising there than among those Serbs living in enclaves in the rest of the province. Perhaps partition was inevitable. That’s what a lot of UN officials were predicting. But they also noted that, among the enclave Serbs, pragmatic entrepreneurs were getting bored of their dogmatically anti-Albanian politicians.
But the final tumble towards independence through the latter half of last year reversed the positive trends. By the third quarter of 2007 (the last period we have results for) fewer than 30% of Kosovo Serbs said they’d work or even live near Albanian. Nearly two-thirds said relations would never be normal. A similar number said relations were tense and worsening – faith in NATO/UN collapsed.
Albanian opinion shifted less dramatically, although the trends were generally mildly negative. Unsurprisingly, the realisation that Kosovo was headed for a unilateral declaration of independence was a real shock to inter-ethnic relations. But, before one returns to cliches about ancient ethnic hatreds, it’s worth underlining this basic fact: an inter-ethnic modus vivendi was emerging in Kosovo before independence got messy. If the Albanians are clever, and Belgrade isn’t too stupid in the months ahead, it may be possible to salvage parts of that.
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 3, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
It’s all gone a bit quiet on the Kosovo front. The violence of week one has given way to… not very much. When the most exciting piece of news is that Serbia has “retaken” a massive 30 miles of railroad in the north of the province, it’s hard to panic. That’s not to underestimate the symbolism of railways in the Balkans: I recall a tedious train ride through Bosnia in 2003, during which we changed engine and crew when we crossed the internal boundary between the Serb and Bosniak regions, and again on entering Croatia. As pretty much the only passengers were my brother and I, this seemed a tad pointless, but was doubtless a point of great pride…
But back to Kosovo. Should we be relieved that it looks like a soft landing? Yes, up to a point. But it’s probably also a sign that the Kosovo Serbs (and Belgrade) have got what they were after: a de facto partition of the province. Last week, the EU insisted that it would not accept any formal split between the Serb-majority north and Albanian-majority south. But at the same time, EU personnel in the north were ordered out, and Belgrade has been moving its people in.
NATO is still up there, but as I suggested last week, the Serbs can essentially get round it by avoiding any major violence that would justify a sustained military response. A modus vivendi could emerge by which NATO patrols the area, but its guys don’t bother to get out of their vehicles – the Serbs will tolerate this, as they know that other NATO troops are protecting Orthodox sites in the south.
That would probably suit a lot of Western governments just fine. The most important piece of news for Kosovo today isn’t about Kosovo at all, but Iran: Russia signed up to the new sanctions resolution, signalling that this unpleasantness over the Balkans isn’t going to turn it into a universal spoiler in the Security Council. Given the strains within the EU about what Kosovo could mean for “effective multilateralism”, newly-elected President Medvedev will be able to rack up some easy wins by looking constructive at the UN on other matters. Western diplomats had already noticed that Russia made a point of looking for ways to be helpful on non-Kosovo issues after hopes of a negotiated settlement finally died in December. Moscow has cleverly linked its opposition to Kosovar independence to its desire to see Cyprus reunified, which happens to be an EU priority too.
So all sides now have something to gain out of playing down Kosovo as a problem for a while (and as The Economist has noted, a period out of the news would help the new sort-of state attract investment too). There will need to be some technical compromise on how to handle a transfer of policing and civilian tasks from the UN to EU – in an interesting new paper for ECFR on Mr. Medvedev, Andrew Wilson suggests that the EU should lean on the new man in the Kremlin to accept the transfer (tacitly or otherwise) as a sign of his goodwill. If he can detach this operational question from the broader politics of Kosovar independence, he might just do that. One way or another, it’ll probably be possible to find a viable fudge.
And in the longer term, expect to see the soft partition of Kosovo grow harder and – somewhere down the road – the international community wondering if it might not be such a bad idea to put it on a more formal footing. The idea might even come from the Kosovo Albanians, if it won them wider recognition. Scenarios of this sort have been doing the rounds in Pristina for a year or more, after all.
