Sweden took over the rotating EU presidency in July, and has already raised eyebrows by its decision to allow Twittering during meetings of senior eurocrats. Yet few state secrets will be revealed, judging by early posts. One reported that the “meeting went well although I think I was the one who enjoyed the cinnamon rolls the most.” Such behaviour is apparently standard in Sweden—one minister recently updated his Facebook profile during a dull cabinet meeting, only to receive a reply within minutes. “Shouldn’t you be paying more attention to the discussion,” said the message, which turned out to have been sent from the other side of the table, by Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt.

- From Prospect

…while President Obama aims to resolve the Harvard race-policing row by getting everyone to sit on curiously low chairs.

Over on his Middle East Blog , Marc Lynch asks whether the Iraq war will change how scholars study the Middle East. It’s a question he has been pondering for sometime since taking over as director of the Middle East Studies program at the Elliott School of International Affairs:

Graduate programs in political science and Middle East Studies have already begun to see a steady flow of applicants back from Iraq (including, among many others, my research assistant from last year). I expect that over the next decade, this will turn into a flood as smart, young veterans look to put their experiences into a broader perspective and to apply their hard-won granular knowledge to broader academic and policy problems.  (And not only military veterans — there are plenty of civilians, contractors, and NGO workers who have worked in Iraq as well.) Most will pursue MA degrees, while some percentage will decide to continue on to a PhD I think this an unequivocally good thing — and I wonder if people have given serious thought to how it might change the field of Middle East studies.

It’s a fascinating question and one that we in London should be thinking about -  identifying the young up-and-coming MA/PhD students and helping them find their way into think tanks, NGOs and government service.

It reminds me of a story I have been told by numerous military folk about a  young lance corporal on his Junior Command Course in Brecon. The story goes that a senior NCO was giving a lecture on counterinsurgency and spent much of his time describing the campaigns in Malaya, Oman and Northern Ireland. During the Q&A session the young lance corporal put his hand up and asked the senior NCO a question about Afghanistan and Iraq. The senior NCO couldn’t answer the question – his only experience, he said, was  in Northern Ireland, so he asked the assembled group who had had experience in Afghanistan and Iraq – almost everyone raised their hands… soon the senior NCO was listening to tactics learnt in the fields of Helmand and from the streets of Basra.

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Spotted in The Atlantic h/t Ryan G.

And others are joining in too… see RFE’s This Week on Facebook

For governments, managing risk is a pretty thankless task. Today, the House of Lords Science and Technology committee published its report on pandemic flu. Here’s the finding you won’t see widely reported:

We know from the evidence we received prior to the outbreak of swine flu that there has been a significant amount of work undertaken to ensure UK pandemic preparedness. According to Ms Merron, the WHO recognised the UK “as one of the best-prepared countries in the world”. Professor Lindsey Davies, National Director of Pandemic Influenza Preparedness at the DoH, told us that “No other country in the world has done more than we have to ensure that we protect the population and that we minimise the pandemic’s impact”-other countries are now coming to the United Kingdom for advice.

Instead, the spotlight will be firmly on where the government has got it wrong:

Guardian: “Committee concerned over delays, failures and preparedness for expected ‘second wave’ of virus in autumn.”

Telegraph: “Committee says Government has failed to offer reassurance that NHS services can deal with a “second wave” of swine flu.”

Sun: “NHS can’t cope with swine flu.”

Independent: “The spy who blew the whistle on his former colleagues is now living in a squat, dressing as a woman, and railing against the ‘Zionist empire’.” [Sorry - seem to have got my wires crossed here.]

Of course, none of these stories is a surprise. The Committee made sure the bad news got out over the weekend, leaking the bad bits to the BBC. Ministers have been on the defensive ever since.

Three reasons why this matters. First, it feeds cynicism about the public sector, helping convince ordinary punters that civil servants are such morons that they haven’t done anything useful to prepare for the pandemic.

Second, it creates a cartoonish view of the nature, and limitations, of any response to a serious pandemic. With an attack rate of 30%, our social, economic and health systems are certain to degrade to a degree (though hopefully, in a controlled way). Resilience relies on individuals, families, communities and networks of all kinds to pull together.  Expecting the government to ride around dolling out magic bullets is both a self-indulgent and ultimately self-defeating strategy.

The final point, though, is perhaps the most serious one. The Lords’ criticisms are aimed mostly at patchy implementation of a good strategy. But what if the strategy itself is faulty – not just the detail of its execution? That would be a much more serious matter.

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The BBC reports that the weekend’s violence in the city of Bauchi has spread to other parts of northern Nigeria, including the sleepy northeastern town of Maiduguri and Wudil, a town near Kano.  A BBC reporter counted over 100 bodies in Bauchi.

Blame has been placed on a militant Islamist group called Boko Haram, an organisation made up mostly of former university students who are opposed to the westernisation of education. Apparently (although nothing is clear), some of the group’s leaders were arrested, so their cadets took to the streets with guns to secure their release.

Most of northern Nigeria is under sharia law. On a trip there earlier this month for the Next Generation Nigeria project, I met sharia leaders in Kano, the north’s biggest city. They told me that resistance to western education had historic roots, as it was seen as an attempt by southern Christians, who had been educated by the British colonisers, to spread their religion to the Muslim north.

Only in recent years has this resistance weakened, and many parents are now very keen for their children to attend western schools. Trouble is, there aren’t enough places for the burgeoning numbers of children, so in many areas Islamic schools remain the only option. State governments are encouraging these schools to teach secular subjects like English and maths as well as Kuranic studies and Arabic.

The religious leaders I spoke to were generally fine with this, but it seems not all their peers are of the same opinion. Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram, has said western education is forbidden, and recruited students to advance his arguments. Given how bad Nigeria’s schools and universities are, and how slim graduates’ prospects of getting a decent job when they leave, the recruitment drive probably isn’t difficult.

If Yusuf’s campaign is successful, it will be a blow to northern Nigeria’s development prospects. Although Islamic schools may do a good job of inculcating values and morality, for the vast majority of their alumni what they teach is of no value at all to their careers.  I asked a sharia leader how Arabic and Kuranic studies help students find jobs, and he replied that they could work as teachers in such schools or as imams. This would be fine if everybody could become an imam or a teacher, I said, but then there wouldn’t be any congregation or students. He smiled patiently, and said that the rest would work in the fields or hawking in the street.  In the north, as in the country as a whole, too many leaders benefit from the status quo to concern themselves with progress.

Ah, here is a familiar scene.  Deserted streets, police barricades, stranded buses… the flotsam and jetsam of some mass upheaval, surely?  Nope.  It’s just the security precautions for one of President Obama’s trips to see friends in Chicago…

Next Thursday (July 30th), we’re holding Global Dashboard’s first ever summer drinks – 5.30 onwards in Central London.

If you’re interested in coming, email jane [at] riverpath.com with your name, job title and organisation (or something else that describes who you are/what you do). We’ll get back to you with further info.

The cheque’s just come through from World Politics Review for our feature on resilience (or download the pdf). We’re putting it behind the bar – so those who turn up early will get drinks on us…

In an obviously-rather-useful contribution to the ongoing controversy over what Lord Malloch-Brown told the Daily Telegraph about UK helicopters (or the lack of them) in Afghanistan, the Telegraph has published part of the original interview transcript:

Mary Riddell: “Are our troops under-resourced?”

Lord Malloch-Brown: “We definitely don’t have enough helicopters. To be honest, wherever you have these wars, whether in Afghanistan or Darfur, the world is operating without enough helicopters. With modern operations and insurgent strikes, what you need above all else is mobility.”

Mary Riddell: “And is it true that more soldiers have died, or will die, because of our lack of helicopters?”

Lord Malloch-Brown: “Yes and no. You have to see where the debate goes. Are there people who are dying who in other circumstances would be in helicopters? You cannot win these wars from the air. You have to get down among the people and have foot patrols.

“If there was one mistake from the early war in Iraq it was that you could win from the air and keep your soldiers completely safe.”

So, the choppers matter. But foot patrols matter more. That’s right, but maybe the opposition aren’t ready to run with a Petraeus-style “we need higher tolerance of casualties” line…

Oh Good Lord, what fresh lunacy is this?

22 July 2009 – United Nations peacekeepers are no strangers to working in some of the world’s most hazardous regions, and they are now helping out on a new battlefront: combating climate change.

“The care and protection of our environment is everybody’s concern,” said Lieutenant Colonel Um Bello, who heads the Alpha Company of the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL).

He is leading his troops in a new exercise: planting 1,000 trees in the country’s west this year, as part of the tree-planting campaign of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which seeks to plant 7 billion trees – or one for every person in the world – by the end of 2009.

“As a contingent, we have resolved to join efforts with the international community” and others to ensure that the war against climate change “is fought, won and our planet Earth is saved,” he said.

Well, it’s pretty quiet in Liberia these days, I suppose. Anywhere else the UN has troops twiddling their thumbs? Why, yes:

Blue helmets have already planted nearly 30,000 saplings in 11 peacekeeping missions worldwide, in countries including Timor-Leste, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Georgia and Lebanon.

That’d be the Congo that’s teetering on the edge of chaos while the UN mission is still 3,000 troops short? The Georgia from which the UN was just expelled? And the Lebanon where 14 peacekeepers were wounded this month in rioting after two Hezbollah arms dumps blew up? Any other trouble-spots requiring landscaping?

For its part, the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID, has embarked on a scheme to plant 1,000 seedlings at all of its compounds in the war-ravaged Sudanese region by December.

What are we planning here, to fight the janjaweed off with sticks? Sod the war on climate change and go on patrol, I say. Someone else can handle the tree stuff…

Groups such as the World Organization of the Scouts Movement, with 28 million members in 160 countries, committed to plant 65,000 trees as well.