by David Steven | May 20, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
I’ve been at the Brookings Institution in Washington today for its conference on the transatlantic relationship.
In the chair, Daniel Benjamin, who runs Brookings’ Center on the United States and Europe, and who wrote The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Simon.
In The Next Attack, Benjamin and Simon argued that:
It is unlikely that even in his feverish reveries, Usama bin Laden could have imagined that America would stumble so badly and wound itself so grievously. By occupying Iraq, the United States has played into the hands of its opponents, affirming the story they have been telling to the Muslim world and adding to their aura as true warriors in defence of Islam…
There is, as has so often been said, a war of ideas going on, a battle for hearts and minds. Unfortunately, America has wound up on the wrong side.
Of course, this was pretty predictable. Every effective terror movement in history has been fuelled by the adverse reaction of its host society. The Bush administration has simply proved particularly obtuse and self-destructive- a fact for which Al Qaeda is appropriately grateful. In 2004, bin Laden mischievously quoted an unnamed British diplomat speaking at Chatham House (!) to support his assertion that ‘it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’ own goal’.
Benjamin and Simon’s policy prescription for the US can be summed simply as: stop scoring own goals. They call for a ‘deep and dramatic’ engagement with the Islamic world and point to Turkey’s relationship with the EU as a model. It has moved from military repression to relative liberalism, they suggest, albeit a liberalism that has an Islamic hue.
‘These changes, as well as the speed with which they have taken hold, are nothing short of remarkable,’ they write. ‘That they have happened at all is due to one thing: the prospect of membership in the European Union. The transformative potential this prospect has held has been clear to American policy makers for years, and, wisely, they have supported Turkey’s bid consistently and vocally.’
Of course, US support for Turkish accession to the EU is somewhat problematic. George Bush pushed this line in 2004 despite attempts from the French and others to warn him off. ‘Including Turkey in the E.U. would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the clash of civilizations as a passing myth in history,’ he said.
It’s hard for Europeans to be lectured on this issue by a man who believes that the US is in the midst of a Christian revival prompted by the ‘confrontation between good and evil’ (his words) that America finds itself in. Or from a guy who said this in 2001:
Oh, I know there’s some voices who want to wall us off from Mexico. They want to build a wall. I say to them, they want to condemn our neighbours to the south in poverty, and I refuse to accept that type of isolationist and protectionist attitude.
And then signed a bill to build a 700 mile fence along the Mexican border in 2006 – part of a desperate attempt to shore up his approval rating with the shrinking portion of Americans who represent his base.
But I digress. (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by Daniel Korski | Apr 30, 2008 | Conflict and security, South Asia
Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, just finished a trip to Afghanistan, which probably happened at the same time as Taliban gunmen failed to kill Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a slew of international officials.
Despite Prince William’s safe return and President Karzai’s lucky escape, it should be clear to anyone that things are not going particularly well for NATO’s Afghan mission.
All is not lost, but it could be unless there is a change of strategy. What should such a change entail?
(more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 30, 2008 | Conflict and security
Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks around the world last year … more than double the number in any of the past 25 years … More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983 … [S]ince 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs. Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.
(more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Apr 29, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely recognised by society. As such the seriousness of organised crime relative to terrorism, for example, was consistently underplayed.
There was also much concern about the serious organised crime agency (SOCA) – not about its role per se but rather more seriously where the organisation had disappeared to. Almost overnight Stephen Lander (ex DGSS and now Chair of SOCA) had drawn a blanket of secrecy around the organisation, but not before he had announced that serious criminals had roughly a 5% chance of being caught.
So it was interesting to read Sean O’Neill in The Times today asking the question – are we ignoring organised crime? He makes an unhelpful but nevertheless interesting comparison – more than 700 people are killed by heroin in Britain every year while terrorism in Britain, by contrast, killed no one, nor the year before and has not claimed a life since July 7, 2005. But as O’Neill suggests
Yet it is terrorism that Gordon Brown says we must fear above all else. There are, he and his ministers and security officials keep telling us, 30 active plots against Britain – although keen observers might note that the number never seems to change no matter how many conspiracies are foiled.
It took 9/11 to force Britain to take the Islamist terrorist threat seriously. Since then the counter-terrorism agencies have turned Britain into a hostile environment for terrorists. Organised crime, however, doesn’t do spectaculars. The men behind it are interested in profits, not propaganda and, as a result, their reach into our society is much more insidious and unchecked than that of terrorism.
The mismatch between the resources devoted to fighting organised crime compared with those directed towards counter-terrorism is unnerving. Government says that there are millions of pounds in police budgets that should be devoted to dealing with organised crime. In truth, only a handful of British police forces know how to tackle it.
But surely it is a good thing to keep your head down and get on with the job? Well not if you need to justify your organisation’s role to Ministers and senior officials in the system… something that all Whitehall departments understand they must do if they are to secure funding.
So what has been the result of so much secrecy? (more…)
