Four helicopters too many?

Posted on September 30, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe, Russia | Comments Off

Readers will know that I have an unhealthy interest in the supply of helicopters for peace operations.  There aren’t enough of them, and those that do exist aren’t always reliable - one crashed in Darfur yesterday, with four fatalities.  So you might have imagined that I’d welcome the news that the EU is about to get four Russian transport helicopters, complete with ground crews, for operations in Chad:

The EU force commander, General Patrick Nash, says talks about the Russian helicopters are “very advanced”. The operation - called Eufor Chad/CAR - has been hampered by a shortage of helicopters, needed to reach refugees scattered over a vast area of desert.

The Russian helicopters - expected to arrive in November - will boost by one-third the number available to the EU forces in Chad, Gen Nash said. “With 3,500 troops in an area of operations the size of France, you cannot have enough air assets,” he told a news conference on Monday.

That’s true, but there’s obviously a bigger question at stake here: should the EU be accepting Russian support in one peace operation just when it is deploying monitors for another in Georgia?  As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a risk that the EU guys watching South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be seen as stooges for the Russians.  Today’s IHT reports that the Russians are setting new limits on the EU observers even as they arrive.  This news from Chad may not help improve that picture.

Of course, it’s arguable that working with Russia in conflict areas outside its self-declared sphere of interest may be one way to stop it detaching from the international community altogether.  Before the Georgian war, French officials were musing on how involving Russia more closely in Western-led operations - including Afghanistan - might improve ties with the Kremlin.  Now European and American diplomats are on the look-out for signs that Russia wants to heal scars left by Georgia.  The agreement of a pretty anodyne resolution on Iran at the UN last week was duly welcomed as proof that Moscow doesn’t want to lose touch.

I don’t want to be a miserable bugger, but I’m not convinced that we have the optics right here.  Getting Russia to provide limited help in Chad, or say the right things without serious consequences on Iran, is smooth diplomacy.  But does it compensate for Russia’s behavior in Georgia?  And is the fact that Moscow has four helicopters out in the desert going to alter its geopolitical priorities?  The answer to those questions is, in essence, “ha ha no”.  Our excitement about getting Russian choppers to sustain our - still fumbling - mission in Chad makes us look weak.

I’m not saying that the international community should refuse all Russian help.  I believe that the UN, meant to promote collective security efforts among countries that don’t necessarily share common viewpoints, does have a significant interest in keeping Russia in the peacekeeping game.  But the EU is not just the UN for White Guys (as I’ve just shown for ECFR, the EU is gradually losing its power to shape the UN’s agenda).  It’s an alliance that will be taken seriously if it projects some power in its own interests.  If it’s going to mount serious military operations, it needs to show that it’s self-sufficient, and not reliant on potential and/or actual competitors. 

I hope the Russian helicopters are helpful in Chad, but they shouldn’t be there.

Headline writers vs. facts

Posted on September 30, 2008 | Mark Weston | More on Global economy, News | Comments Off

The BBC, which seems to be relishing the current financial crisis, reports on its website, under the headline ‘US failure hits Europe shares‘, that “European share indexes have been volatile in Tuesday trading” after the US Congress rejected its government’s rescue plan yesterday. Other headlines on the site tell us that ‘Shares slump after rescue bid fails’, and that ‘Asia stocks fall after US failure’.

Now I’m no expert on this, and clearly there is potential for great volatility over the next few days, but it seems to me from the articles appended to the scary headlines that many markets in the rest of the world outside the US have so far been quite robust in the wake of yesterday’s news. The UK’s FTSE, for example, was up 0.18% by midday today, France’s Cac was down just 0.2%, and Germany’s Dax by 0.9%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose by 0.8%, with just Japan’s Nikkei really struggling, down 4%. Even some banks, including Lloyds TSB and HSBC, have seen increases in their share prices. And all this despite Wall Street’s biggest ever one-day points fall yesterday.

That doesn’t look like meltdown, or even volatility, to my untrained eye, and it would be nice to see the BBC’s headlines and commentary matching the facts it presents in its own articles. On last night’s Ten O’Clock News the Beeb criticised George’s Bush’s alarmist comments about panic in the markets. Would that the organisation practised what it preached…

Update at 14:49: The offending headline, though not the text, has now been removed from the BBC website and replaced with George’s Bush’s latest warning of the dire consequences that will follow rejection of his plan. Why he or the BBC think any sane person would listen to his advice in all this remains a mystery, but at least the latter has toned down its own scaremongering slightly.

Good riddance

Posted on September 30, 2008 | Mark Weston | More on Africa, Development | Comments Off

Some rare good news in difficult times, as South Africa’s Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is sacked. She it was who promoted beetroot, garlic and lemon as cures for AIDS, describing the antiretroviral drugs that have saved millions of lives as dangerous and harmful. South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign reckons 300,000 deaths would have been averted if Tshabalala-Msimang and her equally dangerous former boss Thabo Mbeki had never been allowed near the health ministry. The probable next president, Jacob Zuma, believes having a shower after sex can stop you getting infected, but the country’s AIDS activists are thankful for any good news they can get, and have been throwing parties to celebrate.

More than China’s Milk is Tainted

Posted on September 30, 2008 | Leo Horn | More on Asia, Development, News | Comments Off

As a long-time resident of Beijing, concern about food and product-safety is almost a chronic neurosis. Over the past year alone, health scares have ranged from carcinogenic textiles and toothpastes, to the sale of rancid pork from dug up pig carcasses, to hormone and pesticide-laden fruits and veggies and most recently, melamine-laced milk.

This latest episode of the tainted milk has caused particular outrage because of the life-threatening impact on a large number of toddlers (53,000 affected on the latest count). What appeared at first to be a company-specific incident quickly spread to engulf the entire industry, implicating an ever wider web of co-conspirators including the very people whose job it was to police the corporate malefactors.

The story that is unfolding tells of unbridled greed, political wrangling and high-level cover-up. It has thrown up searching questions about China’s own brand of über-capitalism, characterised by weak regulatory oversight, compromised public institutions and entrenched collusion between businesses, the media and government officials in the brazen pursuit of profit.
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What’s the Chinese for “Bothered?”

Posted on September 29, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Asia, Cooperation and coherence, Development | Comments Off

A headline from the BBC:

Tories refuse to give China aid

Vulnerable to attack

Posted on September 26, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on News, Terrorism, UK politics, US politics | Comments Off

The Hollowmen are back with a close-to-the-bone episode on terrorism. This is 27 minutes and 46 seconds of brilliance, there never has been a more important time to talk about terrorism after all. Witness a shaky Merv being sat down and told they have a major national security problem - they are under attack - from who he enquires - from terrorists? No! From the opposition and they’re out to get the PM.

Watch the episode here

As you watch this episode bear in mind the Australian Government will be publishing a national security strategy in the coming weeks. Let’s hope it reduces the myriad of inefficiencies.

Best quote: “You sack so much as one sniffer dog and the headline will be: PM soft on terror.” Genius.

A Ha, me hearties!

Posted on September 26, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Maps, News | Comments Off

I know what you’re thinking. What are pirates going to do with 30 Russian T72 tanks? Not much probably but the rest of the cargo, a mixture of RPGs and the Zu-23 anti-aircraft guns will soon find their way into Somalia’s arms markets. The situation off the cost of Somalia is getting progressively worse. And while we will post more on piracy in the near future here’s a map outlining some of most recent attacks.

This passage from The Times gives you a sense of the scale and nature of the problem

Earlier this week the Danish navy freed 10 pirates it had captured at sea, saying they had insufficient evidence to prosecute them. But at the same time French officials have filed preliminary charges of hijacking and kidnapping against six suspected pirates captured earlier this month. Commandos snatched the six in a daring raid to free a French couple seized as they sailed their yacht along the Somali coast towards the Suez Canal. They are currently awaiting trial in a French prison. Six naval vessels are currently patrolling the waters around the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean as part of an international task force to tackle piracy. However commercial shipping companies have criticised the mission for failing to make a difference.

“This is an international problem and needs an international solution. It will take more than the six or seven ships we have in 2.4m square miles of sea.”

Meanwhile, the Canadian navy has said that it will continue to escort emergency shipments of food into Mogadishu. Its frigate, HMCS Ville de Quebec, was due to return to the Mediterranean tomorrow but will spend another month ensuring that desperately needed supplies can reach Somalia. The World Food Programme of the United Nations had given warning that its deliveries would cease if an escort could not be found.

The Politics of British Defence

Posted on September 26, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on Communication, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK politics | Comments Off

Menzies Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats is the latest member of the establishment to call for a review of British defence policy. Following in the footsteps of  the Conservative’s Forsyth Commission the Campbell Review says very little we don’t know already, offering up the same concerns over the military convenant, describing the armed forces as “overstretched” and the defence budget as being in crisis. The review still made the news - criticism of the military fills column inches, and it didn’t matter that pretty much everything Sir Menzies said on the Today programme had been said before either by the Conserviatve Party or by Anthony Forster and Tim Edmunds last year. But will this latest review have any effect? There are reasons to be both optmistic and pessimistic.

First, political consensus is now firmly in favour of a review at some point in the future. Campbell was wrong to suggest that the Strategic Defence Review did not predict the costs of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that wasn’t the point of the review - the aim of the review was to codify what had already happened in the 1990s - hence why we are in the mess we are in now.

Second, there is a worrying lack of capacity in Westminster and Whitehall to think innovately about defence policy. The Government have been pretty poor in thinking strategically about the future of defence, while the MoD (considering it is supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been woeful - and much of the responsibility for this lies with Ministers and senior officials.

Third, we must challenge the assumption that the MoD has the capacity to think creatively and strategically about the future. It doesn’t. The best work is being done in the FCO, HSC and PMSU. The new post of Director of Strategy at the MoD is timely and very welcome - capacity will need to be built up internally.

Fourth, we need to challenge the false choice made by political parties that ‘the armed forces should either do less and differently, or increase in the defence budget.’ If you start the process by thinking about institutiuons or budgets you will not achieve transformation but are most likely to make short term decisons which have negative consequences down the line (anyone got a spare pound for the carriers?).

Fifth, communications, or the almost complete lack of it. There are a handful of individuals in Main Building, and the military who get this, they are the exception. MoD communications, as we have made reference to before, are weak, utterly reactive, and often fail to get the message across clearly and coherently. There is a limit to how many times you can appear on Top Gear!

Above all Menzies Campbell’s review calls for a public debate on the future of defence. It’s unlikely to happen unless political parties admit they don’t have the answers and start listening and the MoD opens up and starts communicating to Whitehall and the rest of the UK about what defence is for in the 21st century.

Letterman declares war on McCain

Posted on September 26, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on US politics | 1 Comment

David Letterman not happy about McCain cancelling an appearance on the Late Show. Blimey. Watch the whole thing, or fast forward to 6:35 for the killer…

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What Gordon didn’t say about Africa (but Gowan did)

Posted on September 25, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Development, Europe, UK politics | Comments Off

Gordon Brown is getting a good write-up for his speech to the UN on Africa and development.  It’s short, sharp and effective.  Here’s the essential extract:

In the museum in Rwanda, which commemorates the thousands killed as the world looked on and looked the other way, there is a picture of a young boy who was tortured to death and the plaque reads:

Name: David
Age: 10
Favourite Sport: Football
Enjoyed making people laugh
Dream of becoming a doctor
Last words: the United Nations will come for us.

But we never did. Even as he died, that child believed the best of us. In reality, our promises meant to him nothing at all.

Today, facing famine, we promised we, the United Nations of the world, will come to help, but the hungry are dying while we wait. Facing poverty, we promise that we will come to help, but poor are dying while we wait. Facing betrayal of the Millennium Development Goals, we say again we will come, but many continue to die while we wait. And I believe our greatest enemy is not war or inequality or any single ideology or a financial crisis; it is too much indifference. Indifference in the face of sole-destroying poverty, indifference in the face of catastrophic threats to our planet.

A powerful point. But you can’t just wish away “war or inequality or any single ideology or a financial crisis”. As I’ve argued here before, differences over how to handle conflict and ideological tensions are increasingly complicating Europe’s relations with Africa. Brown’s focus today was development, but what about issues like Darfur (that’d be in the war file), the ICC indictment of Bashir and Zimbabwe (revealing deep ideological tensions)? The PM didn’t mention these - wisely - but they are fouling up the West’s relations with Africa pretty badly. And they aren’t about indifference, but real political differences over who governs Africa and how.

This is a theme that I discuss in a guest post over on the iR2P blog, where I argue that a Euro-African alliance that flourished around issues like the Responsibility to Protect a few years ago is withering.  We can’t just keep on blaming ourselves for indifference towards Africa, although we have to remain wary of it.  We need to explore the real political obstacles to continued Western engagement there.

Suspended animation

Posted on September 24, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on US politics | Comments Off

Steve Benen made me laugh with his take on McCain’s decision to ’suspend’ his campaign and seek a postponement of Friday’s debate:

I’ve never even heard of a presidential candidate acting in such a reckless, compulsive, and ultimately haphazard fashion. McCain just decided to “suspend” campaign activities? This rivals picking Sarah Palin for the ticket on the list of desperation moves.

McCain spoke at some length yesterday about the nature of the economic crisis, and what he’d like to see happen. But at the time, it apparently never occurred to him to get actually get involved in the process. That is, until today.

The Republican nomination has apparently gone to some kind of man-child who believes stunts and gimmicks are the way to the White House. It is nothing short of breathtaking to see someone so manifestly unserious seek the highest office in the land.

See also his later post speculating on why McCain may have taken the decision…

Alaskan and Afghan naming customs compared

Posted on September 24, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Off topic, Public diplomacy, US politics | Comments Off

In New York, Sarah Palin found something to talk about with Hamid Karzai:

While being photographed, they could be overheard discussing the Afghan leader’s son, who was born in January 2007. “What’s his name?” Palin asked.

“Mirwais,” Karzai said. “Mirwais, which means the light of the house.”

“Oh, nice,” said Palin, who was seen patting her heart and smiling.

There you go: a statesperson speaks. But I am disappointed that Palin did not build on this diplomatic opening by describing how she named her own five kids.  A name-by-name analysis is here, but let’s go straight to Number 5:

Trig Paxson Van Palin is the couple’s youngest child and second son. According to the governor’s spokesperson Sharon Leighow in a statement made shortly after the baby’s birth, Trig is Norse and means “true” and “brave victory.” Paxson is a region in Alaska the couple favors. Van is a nod to the rock group Van Halen; before Trig’s birth, his mother had joked about naming her son Van Palin after the band.

I’d like to see Karzai top that.  But if Palin told him that she wants to see victory in Afghanistan, he may have thought she just meant bringing Trig along for a trip.

Sarkozy’s financial summit proposal

Posted on September 24, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Cooperation and coherence, Europe, Global economy, Influence, Leadership | Comments Off

Over at the UN in New York, where it’s the annual jamboree that is the General Assembly, Nicolas Sarkozy has been calling on world leaders to hold a summit later this year on building a “regulated capitalism”.  Four thoughts:

1) if this summit were to go ahead, it would mark the continuation of a trend towards head of state / government level summits on specific issues (as opposed to gatherings that cover a whole range of foreign policy issues, like the G8 or the Security Council). Earlier this year heads of government turned out in force for the FAO food summit; last year, Ban Ki-moon got a good turn out for his high level event on climate change at the UN.

But there’s only value in getting heads engaged if a) their involvement is needed in order to join up the dots between different areas of ministerial or department responsibility within their goverments (e.g. cross-sectoral bargaining that involves energy, climate and trade all at once), or b) their political clout is needed to forge a deal.  I’m not sure that either of those conditions applies here - in which case, wouldn’t it make more sense to leave such a summit to finance ministers?

2) Sarkozy also said at a press conference yesterday that “we cannot wait any longer to turn the G8 into the G13 or G14, and to bring in China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil”.  Interesting to see this idea reviving; the scale of the current crisis (’perfect storm’ etc.) might appear to militate in favour.  But as ever, the big questions are less over who would be around the table and more about what it would do, how it would work and - above all - whether it would be any more effective than the G8 (which hasn’t achieved very much lately).  More on this in a paper I wrote on new global leaders’ forums a while back.

3) While Sarkozy knows he wants a summit, it’s also clear that - so far - he doesn’t have any specific proposals for multilateral action.  You can bet this will cause a frisson or two at Number 10, given that Gordon Brown does have a set of proposals for international financial reform, but so far lacks a coalition to push them.  There might be potential for France and the UK to team up quite effectively here, not least given that Sarkozy will have recognised that without at least one major financial centre involved front and centre, his idea’s dead in the water (n.b in that regard that Sarkozy mooted London as a possible venue for the summit, along with NYC, Paris and Brussels).

4) Whether Brown’s proposals are the right ones to deal with the current crisis is, of course, a separate question.  Looking at them again, the main impression is of the lack of specificity: calling for a “common approach to handling major global market disruptions”, a “clearer, more authoritative watchdog” or “common principles, shared analyses and information and collaborative management of crises” is all very well, but if there was ever a case of the devil being in the detail, this is it.  (As for his calls for a global early warning system for financial crisis - by all means, but is now really the time to be thinking about that?)

It’s good to see that someone’s asking the big questions about long term prevention and looking to facilitate a serious high level conversation about where we go from here, and the UK should certainly get involved and think seriously about offering to host.  But it’s way too soon to be thinking about shared operating systems or even shared platforms at this point: the key tasks now are a) to put out the immediate fire and then b) to build up shared awareness of what’s happened, why, and what we want to achieve as we consider a new financial architecture.

(For explanation of shared operating systems, platforms and awareness, see here.)

Stockwell photo

Posted on September 24, 2008 | Charlie Edwards | More on News | Comments Off

As reported elsewhere: Jurors have retraced the final steps of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, including visiting the Tube station where he was shot dead by police. Posters displayed along the platform include the following for ‘Righteous Kill’, a film starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Henry Kissinger keeps a photo of him meeting the Pope

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Richard Gowan | More on Off topic, US politics | Comments Off

In a new twist in our occasional series of the fashion and gadget choices of the powerful, we are pleased to note that Mr Kissinger gives pride of place to a picture of himself with John Paul II.  Look, right by his armchair:

Labour Conference keynotes in times of meltdown

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Leadership, UK politics | Comments Off

Listening to Gordon Brown’s speech today, Philip Stephens notes that “Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone”:

Though he set out the challenges Britain faces in a period of tumultuous global upheaval, Mr Brown did little to challenge his audience’s preconception that the present mess was all the fault of greedy capitalists.

Reading that brought to mind another Labour Conference speech in times of global upheaval: Tony Blair’s back in 2001.  Remember this?

This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

I re-read the whole thing this afternoon, and was struck by a) its brilliance, b) its insight, c) how it soars compared to Brown’s speech today and d) the extent to which - in retrospect, with all that’s happened since - it shines with an eerie messianic fervour.  It’s well worth another look: full text below the jump.

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A trillion dollar bailout?

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Global economy, US politics | Comments Off

Via Steve Clemons, this excerpt from a speech by Leo Hindery - an Obama economic adviser and Chair of the New America Foundation’s Smart Globalisation Initiative - which is due to be delivered later today at a conference organised by NAF:

As we all know, the Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in troubled mortgages, which would raise the statutory limit on the national debt to $11.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion. This $700 billion is over and above the $85 billion already committed to AIG, the $29 billion related to Bear Stearns, and the very conservative $25 billion associated with the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The solutions being proposed are the most expensive combined bailout in the nation’s history and will sharply curtail the ability of the next president to push for tax cuts or new spending. And yet I believe they are not nearly enough, since they do not adequately cover the exposure associated with leveraged loans and, especially, the credit-default swaps market which has ballooned to a nearly unimaginable $45.5 trillion, from $900 billion in 2001.

This credit-default swaps market, which was developed by financiers who hired the best lobbyists they could to keep regulators away, is essentially nothing more than insurance on debt, but because there are now many more credit-default swaps outstanding than there are bonds for them to cover, it could potentially be a black hole of distress at least as large as the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Tens of trillions of dollars ago these swaps became nothing more than a way to gamble with almost no money down.

Alan Blinder suggested over the weekend that “the root cause of all of [our credit problems] is declining house prices”, and he is correct - but his observation ignores the fact that to this particular root ball were grafted a lot of other financial instruments which have together grown into one heck of a tree.

Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Richard Shelby of Alabama, and others, were more right than wrong when they said last week that more than likely “we’re talking about a trillion dollars.”

The rising cost of end of the world insurance

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Global economy, Resilience | 1 Comment

Donald Mackenzie in the LRB back in May:

Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.

I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.

Of course, the credit crisis has increased the risk of systemic economic failure. But the existence and rising price of the end-of-the-world trade indicate something beyond that. The crisis isn’t just about the bursting of the US housing bubble and dodgy sub-prime lending. Nor is it merely a reflection of the perennial cycle in which greed trumps fear to create a euphoric disregard of risk, only for fear to reassert itself as the risk becomes too great. What is revealed by the end-of-the-world trade is that the current crisis concerns the collapse of public fact.

Sarah Palin: ANWR is “God’s will”

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Religion in politics, US politics | Comments Off

Via Small Precautions, a vintage video of Sarah Palin in her natural element:

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Pirate utopias

Posted on September 22, 2008 | Alex Evans | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Networks, Resilience, Terrorism | Comments Off

Yet another ship was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia on Sunday, bringing the total of ships seized there to over 30 this year alone.  The current tally is that up to 200 seafarers are being held hostage for ransom.

The US Navy has said bluntly that it can’t guarantee security and that “shipping companies must take measures to defend their vessels and their crews”; shipowners, for their part, are urging EU governments to “recognise the seriousness of the situation and to urgently deploy more warships to the Gulf of Aden and to the seas off the coast of Somalia with the required rules of engagement to enable direct action to be taken against the pirates”.  But as US vice-admiral Bill Gortney notes, “this is a problem that starts ashore and requires an international solution. We made this clear at the outset — our efforts cannot guarantee safety in the region”.

In other words, failed states - right?  Well, perhaps not entirely.  After all, “failed” implies that some kind of effort was underway in the first place, whereas the reality is that for some at least, the absence of formal state control was always the design.  Peter Lamborn Wilson notes that:

The sea-rovers and Corsairs of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life.

Lamborn Wilson is the creator of the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones, which are more or less what they say on the tin: places where, at least for a while, a zone outside of state control is created.  Now while one permutation of TAZs sees them as bases for crime, terrorism and so forth, Lamborn - an anarchistically minded fellow - is as a rule positively enthusiastic about TAZs, as indeed are his libertarian followers (hence the popularity of the concept in rave culture, where free parties can be seen as TAZs).

But where the idea of TAZs really starts to get interesting is when you watch the counter-insurgency / 4GW crowd start to play with it. 

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