by Alex Evans | Aug 26, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Middle East and North Africa
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Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or GMEI (by way of a reminder, here’s what Brookings had to say about it then). At the time, there was heavy criticism – not only of of the GMEI’s optimistic hopes about democratisation, but also its dubious geographical assumptions: could Iran and Afghanistan really be lumped together with all the Arab countries?
But here’s the thing. If the idea of a Greater Middle East was clumsy, there’s still a case for coming up with some new geographical categories to reflect changed political realities in the region. In particular, it’s surprising that we still have no one category that draws together Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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by Alex Evans | Aug 15, 2007 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa
My CIC colleague Barney Rubin has an excellent post this morning comparing the recent New York Times and Wall Street Journal [subscribers only, annoyingly] op-eds on Afghanistan, which have sharply divergent perspectives: broadly speaking, half empty and half full respectively. (See also Barney’s mostly approving discussion yesterday of the NYT article.)
But, Barney argues, the half empty / half full metaphor misses the point. The problem with it, he implies, is that the kind of change needed is a transformation that either does or does not take place, and which is therefore not well captured by an incremental ‘steps in the right direction’ image like that of a half full or empty glass.
“We are in Afghanistan to achieve some vital objectives. If we fail to achieve them, no one will give us an ‘A’ for effort.”
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by Alex Evans | Jul 9, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, North America
Two great pieces on intelligence in the Washington Post over the weekend. RJ Hillhouse is worried that the US’s national security is being outsourced:
Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon …
As the Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations in the fight against terrorism — Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan — is made up of industrial contractors, or “green badgers,” in CIA parlance.
Meanwhile, Amy Zegart is furious with America’s “clueless intelligence system”. She argues that books like Bob Woodward’s that discuss the “personal drama” of decisionmaking are beside the point: “The human story is irrelevant. Those who want to learn what went wrong and how to fix it need to understand something far less intriguing: bureaucracy — the organizational weaknesses that cause smart people to make dumb decisions.” She continues:
Public government documents reveal that the CIA and the FBI missed 23 potential opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 attacks. In each case, failure stemmed from the same causes: 1. agency cultures that led officials to resist new ideas, technologies and missions; 2. promotion incentives that rewarded all the wrong things; and 3. structural weaknesses that hampered the CIA and the FBI and prevented all 15 U.S intelligence agencies from working as a unified team.
And here’s the key point. Engrave it in stone and hang it on your wall:
“Meaningful reform will take years, requiring bottom-up cultural transformation as well as top-down policy changes.”
by David Steven | Jun 26, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
In his closing key note speech at Chatham House, Malik Amin Aslam Khan, Pakistan’s environment minister, argued that ‘we are fast running out of time for remedial action’ on the ‘indisputable’ threat from climate change.
While the science becomes clearer, the economic warnings unmistakable, the physical reality unambiguous and world opinion strongly in support, the politics on the issue, unfortunately, lags indecisively behind.
All the above influences seem to be strong drivers for shifting political paradigm but they are still not enough to untangle the complex web of global politics caught up in the UN system in unending discussions on the post-Kyoto climate regime.
He welcomed recent agreement of a 2009 deadline for reaching an agreement and the IPCC signal of the need for a $100/ton price of carbon.
But, he wondered, will a future agreement provide developing countries with a fair deal.
“The time may be right to give serious political thought to the principle of ‘equal per capita entitlements’,” he argued. “The basic ethical foundations belying this approach – every human being should be entitled to equal emission rights – has a very strong defining power which is likely to shape long term global principles.”
by David Steven | Jun 26, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
At Chatham House, this morning, DFID’s chief economist, Tony Venables gave a somewhat elusive presentation on what developing countries want from climate change policy.
Taking it as a given that climate change will hit the poorest hardest, Venables argued that carbon trading between countries increases both efficiency and equity. Emissions are reduced in the most cost effective fashion, while income is distributed from rich to poor countries.
But all this depends on how property rights are allocated within the carbon markets. What DFID is surely thinking about, but not willing to talk about publicly, is what a fair share of future carbon emissions for poor countries would be.
Maybe Pakistan’s environment minister will have something to say about this later this afternoon…
