While everyone else is amusing themselves speculating about Obama’s picks for his Cabinet, here in New York everyone’s focused on a different question: what it all means for senior posts in multilateral agencies.

Start with the one thing we know for sure (as of yesterday): Kemal Dervis is leaving his post at the helm of the UN Development Programme, citing personal and family reasons.  By and large most people think this really is why he’s leaving (his family is based in DC, so an NY-based job probably isn’t much fun). But at the same time, it also hasn’t escaped notice that Dervis might also be well placed to win another senior multilateral post, should one open up. He’s an intellectual heavyweight, not least on global governance reform (at a time when the G20′s evolving role makes that especially topical) – and he has impeccable economic credentials too.

So is another multilateral post likely to open up? With Strauss Kahn now clearly out of the woods at the IMF, speculation is revolving around two posts in particular: UN Deputy Secretary-General, and World Bank President.

The DSG post is currently held by Asha-Rose Migiro of Tanzania, the third holder of the post since it was instituted in 1997.  Theoretically the DSG is supposed to have a key role in bringing coherence to the UN’s development activities, but in practice the current postholder is generally regarded as having underwhelmed.  With everyone wondering just how robust Obama’s commitment to multilateralism will prove to be in office, some are speculating that this would be a good moment for Ban Ki-moon to shake up his top team – and with Migiro’s post soon due up for renewal anyway, a new face in the DSG’s office might be just the ticket.

Bob Zoellick, meanwhile, has been terrific for the World Bank.  He’s been outstanding on the food price crisis (not least thanks to his alliance with WFP head Josette Sheeran, another former State Dept minister under Condi Rice), incredibly thoughtful on multilateral reform and he has brought calm to the institution after all of the Wolfowitz shock therapy.  So why might he leave? 

In a nutshell, because of the new Administration.  To be sure, Zoellick is greatly respected by Republicans and Democrats alike; and there’s no precedent that a World Bank President (to date, always an American, though this convention may be crumbling) must leave when an Administration of a different political stripe arrives.  But another precedent, one that may worry Zoellick, is that a World Bank President in such a situation can find himself eclipsed to some degree by the arrival of a new and powerful US Executive Director on the Board.  There’s no sign of any whispering campaign against Zoellick – but he may decide that it’s a good time to move on anyway.

Kemal Dervis would be a credible candidate for either of these positions, of course – so who knows, perhaps some of this analysis features in his thinking.  But there’s another angle to the story too: the UK dimension.  From a British perspective, the departure of the UNDP Administrator and potentially of the DSG as well must have people at the Foreign Office and DFID thinking hard. 

Historically, the UK has always had two USG posts at the UN.  Until Mark Malloch Brown moved over to the SG’s office (first as chief of staff, and then as DSG), the two Brit posts were at the top jobs at UNDP and at the UN Department of Political Affairs.  But when Mark became DSG, muttering about British over-representation started to be heard – and so the Foreign Office allowed an American to become head of DPA when Kieran Prendergast retired.

Today, the UK is more modestly represented.  It still has two USGs, yes – John Holmes at OCHA and David Veness at Safety and Security.  But these posts are rather more junior than DSG or DPA – and in any case, David Veness is leaving.  (He resigned over the bombing of UN offices in Algeria – a deeply honourable action, taken simply on the basis that it happened on his watch, when in fact there’s universal agreement in the UN that Veness has been a truly outstanding head of security, who has delivered a quantum leap in the quality of UN security around the world.  Ban Ki-moon was crazy to accept Veness’s resignation, but there it is.)

So with a vacancy open at UNDP, and another potentially opening up in the DSG’s office, the question in London must be wheter this is a chance to make up lost ground.  Lists of senior Brits with international development experience are doubtless being compiled even now…

Here is what happens when you arrive for a meeting at the United Nations (where David and I currently find ourselves). 

Once you’re through security, you go to a reception desk in the large hall of the General Assembly building. 

If you are naive enough to present yourself to one of the people behind the desk and ask for the person whom you’re due to meet, a rude awakening awaits. 

Instead, you are pointed towards a small bank of telephones further along the desk, where you must phone the person you’re meeting yourself and announce your own arrival. 

No, there is not a directory of staff phone numbers (duh). But let us assume that you display adaptability and have your contact’s number stored in your phone.  What next?

In due course, someone will arrive from Upstairs to escort you. 

Finding each other is no easy task.  A number of people are waiting for meetings (this being the main reception hall for the whole UN); in addition, there are people waiting for guided tours, people using the free internet terminals, people buying special UN commemorative stamps and people looking at the nice exhibition organised by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

But let us assume that you manage to find each other.  Together, you now move around to a new window on the reception desk.

Here, your escort will fill out a form with their details. 

The person behind the desk takes your ID and scrutinises it carefully.  He or she then fills in some more details on the form. 

Your escort is handed a chit.

You and your escort then move another metre or so around the reception desk (for it is circular) to another window. Two uniformed security officers await you. 

Your escort hands over the chit. 

The first security officer warily examines the chit that their colleague (standing approximately half a metre to their left) has just issued.

Should it prove satisfactory, he or she will then fill out another chit (one assumes that there may be a degree of overlap in the respective content of the forms).

The second chit is then handed to the second security officer, who scrutinises it warily. Should it prove satisfactory, you are then awarded a special prize given to the UN’s most persistent guests: a Visitor’s Pass.

You are now back where you started before you were pointed to the phones.

Elegant, no?

One of the presumed parts of Obama’s Afghan strategy will be to look at ways of coopting the country’s various tribes, much like General David Petraeus did it in Iraq. The idea has sparked off a torrent of criticism in the foreign policy community.

One of the smartest young Democratic things, Brookings security expert Vanda Felbab-Brown, wrote to Obama that his administration should cultivate Afghan tribal leaders, but it would be a mistake to expect them to play a military role in the counterinsurgency. Michael Williams, the US-born British academic spoke for many when he called the idea “a very high-risk strategy that cuts directly against counter-insurgency theory and will most likely be seen in hindsight as a serious mistake.”

Those with longer memories talk about the failure of the Red Army to work with the Afghan tribes. The Russians spent large sums of money arming and supporting tribes in their own “Vietnamization” strategy. So much money was, in fact, spent that Kandahar in the south of the country, saw an in-flux of clothes from Pakistan and shoes from France, were the norm. For a short period it worked.  The defection of one commander, Esmat Muslim, to the Afghan government’s side was said to be a blow for the mujahedeen, who suddenly found all their routes to Pakistan had been compromised. But once the Soviets left the in-fighting began. Even Esmat Muslim was not able to manage all the problems in Kandahar.

Those who reject any comparison between Iraq and Afghanistan, like author  Alex Strick van Linschoten highlight key differences in the two countries. The Taliban movement, even if it contains foreign fighters, has deep roots in Afghan society. Many Taliban commanders grew up through the 1980s jihad against the Soviets. In this, the Taliban are different than Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who were run by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and seen by many tribesmen as foreigners.

A key factor in Iraq was also the cruelty of Al Qaeda, which proved too much for the Anbari tribesmen. Though the Taliban have displayed similar cruelty -– for example in the recent Maiwand atrocities where many Laghmani civilians were killed –- but the Afghan government has not been able to spread information about such acts. The final problem in transferring solutions from Iraq to Afghanistan is the nature of the Taliban’s recent success. Since 2005, the Taliban has bandied together with a strong network of drug barons, while forcing many tribesmen to be supportive or, at the very least, remain passive towards the insurgency. Reaching out to these groups is unlikely to succeed, it is claimed, as they benefit from the status quo and the U.S cannot offer a better, long-term alternative.

But in Rageh Omar’s latest documentary for Al Jazeera — Pakistan’s War: On The Frontline – another side emerges. In Bajaur province – where Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, is believed to be hiding – the documentary shows how the Pakistani army has managed to do exactly what the U.S is now contemplating. In their fight against the Pakistani Taliban the army has armed a particular tribe, which is now charged with keeping the peace in a number of cities. So far, it has proven successful and is being emulated in other places.

Yesterday, Omar was careful not to say the strategy could necessarily work elsewhere. But he was emphatic that it seemed to work in Bajaur; and that he knew of several examples where tribesmen had asked to be armed or had risen up against the Pakistani Taliban spontaneously.

So far, both the strategy of working with the tribes -– and the backlash against the idea –- seemed to be based on speculation and hunches rather than the kind of hard empirical research the question merits. Before any steps are taken let us hope the Obama administration commissions research on the tribes, and comparative experiences. For this is exactly the kind of complex policy dilemma that requires an evidence-based approach rather than the gut-based policy-making of the Bush administration or the arm-chair soldiering so beloved by left and right alike in Washington, DC.

So, Benazir Bhutto’s daughter has released a rap video lamenting the loss of her mother just over a year ago:

Now, I’ll admit I didn’t expect that. But those arbiters of taste at Vanity Fair know what this means. It means they can diss Puff Daddy (a.k.a Sean “Diddy”… you know the rest):

As tributes go, Bhutto’s video is superior to “I’ll Be Missing You,” Puffy and Evans’s musical memorial to the Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered on March 9, 1997. For one thing, Puffy’s big budget (and bigger ego) lured him off-topic, and there are too many shots of him riding his tricked-out motorcycle and spinning in the rain.

Bhutto’s video, while amateurish, is filled with inspiring montages of her mother campaigning shortly before her death and of the masses mourning her.

The songs are different too. Puffy’s shameless sample of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” may have won him a Grammy, but it was also the first sign of his impending ubiquity. It’s all about him missing his dead friend. Bhutto keeps the focus on her late mother…

Which, evidently, would be too much effort for the VF guys. That’s 2009 off to a tasteful start.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times:

Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.

The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm. Listen to this devastating assessment by Dexter Filkins of The Times:

“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.”

Think about putting your life on the line for that gang.

If Mr. Obama does send more troops to Afghanistan, he should go on television and tell the American people, in the clearest possible language, what he is trying to achieve. He should spell out the mission’s goals, and lay out an exit strategy.

He will owe that to the public because he will own the conflict at that point. It will be Barack Obama’s war.

James Meek’s meditation in G2 yesterday on how the credit crunch was born was a tour de force, both fresh and considered.  Definitely worth a look if you missed it. 

“Nowadays,” wrote Saul Bellow in his novel Humboldt’s Gift, “the categories are grasped by those who belong to them.” It’s not just that we see the economic crisis rearing up out of the sea in the distance, like a slow-motion tsunami from which, despite its creeping speed, we cannot escape. What makes the situation peculiar is that the crisis that threatens us also seems to be us; we are simultaneously menaced by the wave, and exist as elements of the wave. After all, that is what an economic crisis is: the sum of all the individual actions of billions of people around the world, deciding whether to lend or hoard, borrow or save, sell or buy, move or stay, hire or fire, study or look for work, be pessimistic or optimistic.

It’s like those mysterious polls of “consumer confidence” in which pundits set so much store. How confident am I about the future? Well, I’m confident if everybody else is confident. I’ll tell the survey how confident I am when I see what that confidence survey says.

As the US responds to Somali piracy the only way it knows how – through force - Johann Hari in the Independent reveals that it is not just illegal foreign fishing vessels (which steal $300m worth of fish every year) that have aggravated Somalis and encouraged them to resort to piracy. Europeans have also been dumping nuclear waste in the sea off the Somali coast:

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

The UN envoy to Somalia told Hari, “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” According to Hari, “Much of the waste can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply…This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them.”

The buccaneers are popular with local people. 70 per cent of Somalis interviewed by a local news site “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.” The case against pirates has never been as black and white as the world’s great powers like to paint it. Hari tells the story of one of their number who was captured by an earlier superpower in the 4th century BC:

He was brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”

Full size version here.  H/t Jeremiah Owyang, via Tom Watson.

Retired Navy Admiral and former commander of U.S. Pacific forces, Dennis C Blair, has reportedly been chosen as Barack Obama’s next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the country’s senior intelligence job.

Blair, a 6th generation, Oxford-educated naval officer, occupies a number of teaching posts and once served as the first associate director of CIA for military support. He also ran the federally-funded Institute for Defense Analysis before being forced out after a conflict of interest dispute.

But it is his role as the Deputy Director of the Project on National Security Reform, a bi-partisan, Congressionally-funded reform initiative, that may say most about how, if confirmed, Blair intends to manage the U.S intelligence community. For despite the misgiving of some like Bob Baer, the former CIA analyst, Blair is both a manager and a reformer.

During my time in Washington, DC, I spent a little time with Blair, who struck me as a reformer with deep insights into how both soldiers and spies work and think. See this clip where he argues that the U.S government needs to work on the basis of “integrated, agile, collaborative, inter-agency teams” rather than the departmental stove-pipes currently in existence. Not the sound of a status-quo thinker.

Being reform-minded, however, will only go so far. Blair will need to will reform, demand reform, and pursue reform. For most intelligence-watchers believe that the Bush administration’s post 9/11 intelligence reforms were hurried and have created as many problems as they have solved. The current spy chief, Admiral Mike McConnell has done what he could to improve the situation, launching a 100-day initiative when he took over from John Negroponte, to improve “integration and collaboration” across the many intelligence agencies. Meanwhile Robert Gates has scaled down the Pentagon’s footprint on intelligence.

Yet most people believe the situation needs to improve further if the U.S is to get more for the $43 billion it spends annually on intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become a large bureaucratic contraption with hundreds of personnel camped out in a Washington airbase. Many staff are unclear about their roles vis-à-vis their CIA colleagues.

The DNI himself, though he briefs the president daily, has only limited authority over the 16 agencies in the intelligence community as the reform legislation did not give the spy chief the kind of budgetary muscle needed to lead the intelligence community. In spite of the efforts of Gates and McConnell the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office remain under Pentagon’s command. 

Then there is the question of domestic intelligence. Many believe the U.S should create a domestic intelligence agency like Britain’s Security Service. But how to do so and avoid adding complexity to the intelligence system, slowing down rather than promoting information flows among the existing agencies, while respecting civil liberties? And who would run such an agency – the DNI, the Homeland Security Secretary, the FBI, the CIA?

Finally, there is a need to look again at Congress’ role. Oversight has deteriorated amid battles between different committees. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Intelligence Oversight Board have also atrophied in the last eight years while the Bush administration failed to create a Civil Liberties Board, despite being mandated to do so by Congress.

Blair seems well-placed to lead a reform process without allowing it to descend into something like the Church Committee hearings, which investigated intelligence-gathering by the CIA and FBI after the Watergate affair, but ended up encouraging many of the intelligence community’s bad traits. No doubt his confirmation process will drag up the conflict-of-interest case that forced him out of his last government-funded job, as well as his controversial role in opening diplomatic ties with Suharto’s Indonesia.

But the real question is: how ambitious will Obama be in leading changes in Congress; and reforms in the Executive Branch to ensure a well-functioning intelligence apparatus that can deal with foreign and domestic threats, produce politically-neutral assessments, work with other government departments and guarantee civil liberties. Obama’s choice of Blair shows the President Elect wants to reform, but also wants to keep the intelligence community on board.

From a special report in The Economist:

(more…)

With just over a couple of weeks to the inauguration, it’s finally sinking in: Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to imply some pretty fundamental changes to the global war on terror. Serious thinking on how to dismantle Guantanamo is well underway - as is discussion about which of America’s allies will be willing to welcome its detainees (Australia and Britain both profess reluctance; Portugal, on the other hand, looks well on course for a special relationship with the new Administration).  A sea change on torture and rendition also appears to be a racing certainty.

In Iraq, too, massive changes are underway.  As well as the rich symbolism of the sock and awe incident, there’s now also yesterday’s more tangible proof of how far things have moved on: the Iraqi government has assumed control of the Green Zone. 

Now, pause to wonder: are these changes likely to have a significant impact on the capacity of radical Islamist groups to recruit and retain committed volunteers – whether in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia or wherever?  After all, Guantanamo, torture, rendition and Iraq surely represented four of the principal sources of the sense of grievance so essential to effective radicalisation.  Does that mean the outlook on counter-terrorism is finally brightening?

One possible reason why not, of course, has to do with Gaza.  Olmert’s rationale for Israel’s attacks is not hard to discern – Hamas ended its ceasefire, there’s an election in February, he wanted to rebuild Israel’s credibility after the 2006 debacle in Lebanon, there was only a brief window of opportunity before Obama’s inauguration.  But even so, the fact that Israel’s attacks have so far killed 436 Palestinians (compared to 172 dead in Mumbai) will clearly fuel a sense of outrage among many – including this blogger – and will provide a powerful recruiting sergeant for Islamist groups everywhere.

But another answer to the question of sources of grievance after Bush can be found by taking a stroll down my local high street, in a part of East London that has one of the highest proportions of Muslims in the capital.

Today, the activist posters you see on lamposts and on the walls of the shops selling mobile phone skins and international calling cards have one key message: end the undeclared war on Pakistan.  If you visit Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website, meanwhile, you find that just beneath the coverage of Gaza from the last fortnight, it’s Pakistan that’s the focus of attention and grievance – a point made even clearer by this youtube video of theirs from the start of December.

You might think it odd that Islamist opinion in the UK should be focusing on a relatively small number of drone attacks in Pakistan when a major troop surge is about to take place over the border in Afghanistan. But think again, and you realise that of course it makes eminent sense for Hizb ut-Tahrir to focus on the grievance of most direct relevance to Britain’s large diaspora community – and to weave political Islamism into long-standing fears about Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House represents a welcome turning point on many components of the ‘war on terror’.  But the evolving situation in Pakistan (on which Obama is hawkish, remember) may well represent another – especially here in the UK.  If Obama steps up US attacks on Pakistan’s border areas, then many British Muslims will doubtless listen to what Gordon Brown has to say about it with keen interest…

Charlie has got some debate going with his ten predictions for 2009, and I’m not going to try to rival it.  But after a year of following food prices unusually closely, I’ve decided to go where even Alex Evans has not gone before in an effort to tell the future: the official US Poultry Outlook Report – December 2008.  And no, this isn’t about avian flu.  It’s about how the global downturn is going to create a rift between increasingly internationalist turkey farmers and isolationist, America-first chicken and egg producers.  Feathers will fly!

Let’s start with chickens (to the initiated, “broilers”).  For the first nine months of last year, production was growing strongly.  But as food prices slumped over the last few months, so did the number of “chick placements” – which I assume is code for “fattening the little critters up in a big shed until they can’t walk”:

Over the last 5 weeks (8 November to 6 December, 2008), the number of chicks placed for growout averaged 7.4 per cent lower than for the same period in 2007. With uncertainties about the domestic and world economies, the trend of year-over-year declines in chick placement is expected to continue well into 2009. With smaller chick placements forecast, the estimates of broiler meat production have been adjusted downward in fourth-quarter 2008 and in the first three quarters of 2009.

Who are we going to blame for this? Foreigners. Unless they like brown meat:

All the uncertainties in the global economy have combined to sharply reduce the demand for broiler exports . . . but declining exports may be slightly mitigated by lower prices for leg quarters, the primary export.

So expect the chicken farming lobby to turn inwards. Their disinterest in foreign affairs will only be compounded by increasing imbalances in the egg market:

Shipments of all shell eggs and egg products in October totaled 17.9 million dozen, down 13 per cent from the previous year. Much of the decline is due to lower shipments to Mexico and Hong Kong.

But it’s all very different on the turkey front. There’s a glut of the damn things – more and more are being put into cold storage – and production is expected to slow  as a result. With supply higher than demand, the U.S. needs to offload large quantities of its national bird. Fortunately, there are proven markets available:

Turkey exports remained very strong in October, totaling 71.8 million pounds, up 36 per cent from the previous year. Much of the increase in October’s turkey exports was due to higher shipments to the largest markets — exports to Mexico, Canada, and the combined China/Hong Kong markets were all up considerably from the previous year.

So that’s good news… but wait a minute! Not only is China propping up the U.S. economy by buying vast quantities of American bonds, but now we discover that it will start underwriting the turkey industry? What if Beijing stopped buying? Even Mexico slapped a temporary ban on birds from some U.S. plants just before Christmas on health grounds.  And last Tuesday Russia demonstrated its resurgent nationalism by slashing its total poultry import quota from the U.S. by 1.25 million metric tons to 952,000 metric tons.  So here’s my first big question for 2009: can the U.S. poultry industry adapt to a multi-polar world?

Next week: a post in which I explain the new world order by tracking trends in the price of tea-leaves.