Richard Holbrooke (the new US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan) and Sherard Cowper-Coles (his British counterpart) did not have South Asia to themselves for long. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier today appointed Ambassador Bernd Mützelburg as his Special Representative for – you guessed it – Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On top of that, there’s also EU Special Representative to Afghanistan, Italian diplomat Etorre Sequi, and the UN Special Representative Kai Eide.

Hopefully this will lead to more international cooperation – or perhaps just a great spread in Envoy Magazine (possibly with Holbrooke behind the wheels of a GMC Envoy XL…)

The US’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM) has made a promising start: its strategic advice to the Ugandan army for its recent offensive against the Lord’s Resistance Army not only failed to defeat the rebels, but resulted in the deaths of over 900 civilians.

AFRICOM – “the culmination of a ten-year thought process within the Department of Defense” – was set up, according to its website, to “help African nations, the African Union and the regional economic communities succeed.” A laudable goal – no doubt drawing on the US army’s great success in helping communities in Iraq and Afghanistan to thrive. “The designers of U.S. Africa Command,” they say, “clearly understood the relationships between security, development, diplomacy and prosperity in Africa.”

All good stuff.  So what does AFRICOM choose as one of its first missions? A military operation against a guerrilla army that has eluded the Ugandan government for decades and has a long history of murdering innocent civilians in reprisal attacks. The US contributed intelligence (yes, really), advice and $1m in fuel.

When the operation failed, of course, and the rebels scattered, they punished local communities. Strangely, despite its claim to understand the links between development and security, and to “incorporate humanitarian organisations” in its activities, AFRICOM didn’t think to advise its Ugandan and Congolese partners, or UN peacekeepers, to protect civilians. Medecins Sans Frontieres says UN peacekeepers in Congo did nothing to protect people, while the UN says it doesn’t have the resources to do so. As Richard noted last week, some communities were able to defend themselves, though without any help from AFRICOM or its partners. But many couldn’t.

A UN official said the operation was as effective as throwing a rock at a hive of bees. Given that civilians’ security is a crucial prerequisite to their development, which in turn is crucial for both stemming the flow of recruits to the LRA and increasing communities’ resilience against it, it would appear AFRICOM’s leaders would benefit from going back to school and having a closer look at those links between development and security, rather than just throwing force at the problem.

One of the biggest risks for the global economy right now is Ukraine. The country’s currency is rapidly depreciating, which is causing serious trouble for the foreign banks who own a majority of the financial sector.

The foreign banks, led by names like Raiffeisen, Unicredit and BNP Paribas, have piled into Ukraine ever since the Orange Revolution in 2006, on the bet that Ukraine would move ever closer to the EU, and eventually accede.

Instead, the government has been riven with in-fighting ever since that revolution, and really the country has barely had a government for the last three years.

Banks are starting to collapse – this week, the ninth biggest bank, Nadra Bank, was nationalised. If the currency depreciates further and corporates and consumers default on their debt, big European banks could take a major hit.

Raiffeisen, for example, has several billion euros invested in Ukraine, where it owns the second biggest bank. Unicredit owns the fourth biggest bank, and BNP Paribas owns the fifth. OTP, Hungary’s biggest bank, also owns a top ten bank there. Russian banks also have alot invested there.

If Ukraine goes under, it could lead to one of the big Austrian banks, such as Raiffeisen or Bank Austria (owned by Unicredit) going under as well, which would be disastrous for eastern Europe, where Raiffeisen and Unicredit own large chunks of countries’ banking sectors.

That’s why the Austrian finance minister, Josef Proll, has been urging the EU to support Ukraine with more emergency funds, to supplement the $16bn the country received from the IMF.

The IMF has frozen that money at the moment, because Ukraine’s PM, Yulia Timoshenko, has refused to cut government spending. Her finance minister resigned because of this last week.

Timoshenko now appears to be trying to get a bail-out from Russia as well, and is probably trying to play EU and the West off against each other to get money.

So Sri Lanka has now rejected Gordon Brown’s appointment of Des Browne as a special envoy to the island. President Mahinda Rajapaksa said the appointment was “unhelpful” and was made without consulting his government. A foreign ministry statement said the appointment was tantamount to an “intrusion of Sri Lanka’s internal affairs”.

No 10 have played this down, saying that they were still speaking to the Sri Lankan government about Browne’s exact role. But from Colombo Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama warned of “major repercussions” for relations with Britain over the nomination and said “there is no further discussion with London on the matter.”

Before this incident, the appointment of a Sri Lanka envoy only seemed poorly through-out. Now it looks downright humiliating for the Prime Minister who clearly wanted to make up for sacking his Scottish colleague.

What could have happened? There are a number of options. Perhaps No 10 did not check the appointment with the Sri Lankan government. But if true, this seems negligible beyond belief. Perhaps the Foreign Office did check, but the Sri Lankans changed their minds, or did not communicate as forcefully as they should have that they did not want the appointment. That is what happened over Paddy Ashdown’s UN appointment in Kabul. The final option is that Des Browne, who was quite poorly treated by the PM, was about to blow, spilling the beans on Brown’s weaknesses. To stop this, the PM may have panicked, and offered Browne something that was not really his to offer.

Either way, the non-appointment does not put Brown in the best of lights.

Last month saw the launch of several new online initiatives by Labour, as it desperately tries to find a strategy to beat the Tories in the coming election.

John Prescott, who is apparently a star on Twitter (I find this hard to believe but that’s what they say), is writing a new blog, called www.gofourth.co.uk , so called because that’s where Labour will end up being placed in the next election, ha ha. Apparently Alaister Campbell is also involved in the website, somehow…

In the same month, Derek Draper, who briefly showed an interest in psychotherapy but now appears to be a full-time party apparatchik, launched a site called LabourList, which will try to be the same sort of ‘indepenent grass roots website’ as the influential www.conservativehome.com

The Tories have widely mocked these initiatives, saying the government just doesn’t get the net – it is de-centralised, off-message and spontaneous, and therefore completely different to the Alaister Campbell model of spinning and bullying the press corps. The fact that LabourList is run by Peter Mandelson’s former assistant is testament to how much Labour doesn’t get it, and how worn out the grass roots Left is in the UK (just read New Statesman if you’re in any doubt).

That much is said, with the accompaniment of a great gangsta beat, by Raplog, a blogger who’s declared aim is to ‘bring some hip hop panache to political blogging’:

From Bangadi, eastern Congo:

Rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army sent torture victims — including a man whose back was sliced with a machete — to warn the people of this Congolese town they would be next.  The town’s three policemen fled and there was no response from the military and U.N. peacekeepers to the increasingly panicked pleas for help. That’s when residents realized they were on their own.

“We were sending warnings and begging for help practically every day for two weeks. And nothing happened,” said community leader Nicolas Akoyo Efudha. “We finally understood that we were abandoned — in danger and without protection.”

So Akoyo called a town meeting and told everyone to bring whatever weapons they had: pre-World War II rifles, homemade shotguns, lances, swords, machetes, hunting knives, bows with sheaths of poisoned arrows.  The women came armed with kitchen knives and log-sized wooden pestles used to pound yams into flour.

Since then, the residents of Bangadi have successfully driven off two attacks by the Ugandan rebels, who have killed at least 900 people in this remote northeastern corner of Congo over the past seven weeks.  News of Bangadi’s success — and the lack of military protection — have spurred hundreds of villages to form self-defense groups, according to Avril Benoit, a spokeswoman for MSF.

Former Goldman Sachs economist Dambisa Moyo has just published a new book entitled Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa. There’s an outline of the argument in this op-ed in The Independent from 2 February, e.g.

I have long believed that far from being a catalyst, foreign aid has been the biggest single inhibitor of Africa’s growth. Among its shortcomings, aid is correlated with corruption, fosters dependency, and invariably instils bureaucracy that hinders the emergence of an essential entrepreneurial class. For Africa to grow in a sustained way, foreign aid will have to be dramatically reduced over time, forcing countries to adopt more transparent strategies to finance development.  What the credit crunch has effectively done is to instigate this process by default …

The development finance policy that has been the hallmark of consistent growth across the world has almost universally comprised a mix of four essential elements: Trade and commerce, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), microfinance, and access to international capital markets.

As such, despite negative headlines over China’s expanding role in Africa’s burgeoning economy, African governments should be minded to accelerate alliances with China and the rest of the rapidly emerging world. Rather than continue to spend millions of dollars each year attempting to gain greater access to Western trade markets, they should focus their attention on markets such as China, where, with 1.3bn people to feed and just seven per cent arable land, African produce is welcome.

And with roughly $4 trillion of foreign reserves, China is undoubtedly a better bet for much needed FDI in the foreseeable future than its Western competitors. Furthermore, the reserves profile of not just China but also the Middle East suggests a class of new investors with likely appetite to take on African risk via the bond markets.

As Moyo observes, the credit crunch is likely to have the effect of accelerating this debate, especially as publics in developed countries show lower enthusiasm for spending overseas as the full extent of spending cuts at home becomes evident in a couple of years’ time.

All this presents a major strategic challenge for the development community – where the orthodox narrative has arguably ossified in recent years, especially as no-one (donors, NGOs, developing country governments) has had much of an incentive to ask the really hard questions about aid.

The question now: will they all dig in for a defensive game, or is a serious process of strategic renewal finally in prospect?

Diaspora and exile groups may play an important, but sometimes also controversial, role in conflicts and political unrest in their countries of origin. Often their engagement is benign and comes in the form of remittances. But many diaspora communities also lobby decision-makers and parliamentarians in the new country of residence or collect money among co-nationals in order to support ‘the struggle’ at home.

Think of the Irish in the US, sending money to the IRA for decades. Or the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and the influence of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora. Or even the role of the Pakistani community in Europe.

This is by no means a new phenomenon. Yet, the growing number of intra-state conflicts, the enhanced possibilities for transnational communication, mobilization and action as well as the upsurge in domestic and international security concerns after 9/11, have focused attention on diasporas. Or at least should have.

For despite their role, most peace-building interventions — whether UN, NATO or EU led – spend little time engaging with diaspora communities. There is more and more writing, but it is hard to see governments taking this issue seriously, except as a domestic political issue (i.e MPs placating diaspora constituents by tabling EDMs).

In a time of dwindling resources, and assuming that unilateral or coalition interventions are less likely in the future, it may become important to engage these diaspora communities in a systematic way.

How can the British government engage the Pakistani community to ensure support for democratic forces in Pakistan? Should the Foreign Office consider, as a rule, having a Diaspora Desk Officer in its Afghan Group, or Iraq Unit? Should funds be set aside by DfiD for funding diaspora-led programmes?

Such programme may not be the most effective in, say, building schools but they may have an important function in challenging the role of organizations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political and civic wing of the outlawed terrorist group Laskhar-e-Taiba, which is benefitting from the Pakistani government’s inaction in many of the IDP camps in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

With decreasing resources, but constant if not increasing security demands, finding new ways of addressing conflict (prevention, management and resolution) will be key. Re-thinking how to engage with diasporas may be part of this.

Tom Friedman has a radical new approach in mind to saving the US economy:

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

Via Chris Blattman.

Major league economic crisis trumps minor league terrorists:

Sounding more like an economist than the war-fighting Navy commander he once was, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told a Senate panel Thursday that if the crisis lasts more than two years, it could cause some nations’ governments to collapse.

And a number of allies the United States depends on might no longer be able to afford to meet their own defense and humanitarian obligations, he said.

Blair said already the financial meltdown, which started in the United States and quickly infected other countries, has eroded confidence in American economic leadership and belief in free markets.

“Time is probably our greatest threat. The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee, as Congress prepares to vote Friday on a $789 billion stimulus package.

Blair’s 49-page statement opened with a detailed description of the economic crisis. It was a marked departure from threat briefings of years past, which focused first on traditional threats and battlefields like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” he said in a written statement for the committee.

One reason for the new ranking is progress made in the last year against al-Qaida. A year ago, al-Qaida was said to have reconstituted its operations in the lawless tribal area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But that has changed.

“Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on al-Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan and the continued decline of al-Qaida’s most prominent regional affiliate in Iraq, al-Qaida today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago,” he said.

Four top al-Qaida operatives were killed over the last year — partially a result of newly aggressive rules of engagement for U.S. forces on the Pakistan border. The organization has had to promote junior players figured “considerably less skilled and respected” to fill those slots, he said.

Somewhat incredibly, this is the lead story on cnn.com this Thursday afternoon:

The shotgun blast rips into the stray dog’s midsection, sending it tumbling over and over. Agonizing yelps echo through the streets as it tries to reach and bite at the gaping wound. Minutes later, the dog is dead.

A few miles away, a puppy eats a piece of poisoned meat. Its body starts to twitch and spasm as the toxins kick in. It dies within 15 minutes.

The two strays were among the thousands that roam the streets of Baghdad. Authorities have been killing them since November, trying to prevent the spread of disease and attacks on residents.

The Baghdad dog-culling program comprises two vets, a council official and a police officer armed with a shotgun. The vets distribute bits of meat poisoned with strychnine. If the poison doesn’t kill the dogs, the police officer steps in with the shotgun.

“I do have mercy for all animals,” veterinarian Khalil Abdullah said. “But we can’t vaccinate the wild animals in the street, and we don’t have the means or ability to bring them all to the hospital.”

Does this really count as the most important story in the world right now?  And if it does, how is it improved by the pulp novel prose?  And if it somehow does benefit from this sort of trash, is this the best you can do?

The mongrel was blown apart like a Republican Guard tank hit by a Tomahawk missile fired from a U.S. submarine thousands of miles away. Khalil looked around for one last hit. Some little punk of a beagle-terrier cross cowered on the sidewalk. Khalil raised his piece. “It’s time to go walkies, big boy”, he snarled.

OK, I made that up. But it’s about the same quality of journalism, or maybe a bit better. Shame on you CNN. Even if you have a cute puppy photo: