If you missed it, Channel 4 News ran an exclusive last night that seems to put Metropolitan Police accounts of the circumstances of Gareth Williams’s death at odds with those emerging in anonymous briefings from Vauxhall Cross. Channel 4 News’s website has this to say:

The police who found the corpse of MI6 employee Gareth Williams described his death as a “neat job”, suggesting professionals may have been involved rather than the more lurid speculation that his death was linked to a sex game, Channel 4 News learns.

The evidence obtained by Channel 4 News from the day the MI6 employee was found dead in his central London flat suggests that reports that he was secretly gay or owed bondage equipment are untrue. The evidence also suggests his mobile phone sim cards were not arranged in a “ritualistic” way and there were no numbers for male escort agencies on them.

This, Channel 4 News understands, is what the police know about the death of the MI6 code breaker, contrary to the speculation which has been in other reports which is apparently based on MI6 briefings.

Last night’s C4 News report below…

From the FT this morning, the following newsflash:

It is unfortunate for private equity boss Lyndon Lea that colourful details of his summer party leaked just as his Lion Capital buy-out firm is hitting the road to raise €2bn ($2.5bn) from strait-laced institutional investors.

Potential pension fund backers might have been surprised to read about the party at his Californian beach house last weekend, involving scantily clad Cirque de Soleil dancers and sushi served on the bodies of near-naked women.

One of the 200 guests was quoted in The New York Post as saying the evening’s entertainment featured a woman wearing tassels “sitting in a Victorian claw-foot bathtub with a muscular hunk, clad only in a thong, pouring milk over her”.

Eat your heart out, tabloids…

I’ve been looking into a curriculum subject introduced by New Labour in 2003, called Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). It began as a voluntary primary school subject, and in 2007 was also made a voluntary secondary school subject. Over 90% of primary schools and over 60% of secondary schools now teach it.

SEAL teaches five emotional competencies: self-awareness, managing feelings, motivation, empathy and social skills. It’s the biggest example of the new ‘politics of wellbeing’, and  of the new confidence governments have in managing their citizens’ emotional development.

What I’ve discovered, to my surprise, is that this new national subject was almost entirely based on one book – Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (EI).

Goleman, then a journalist at the New York Times, wrote EI in 1996. The book was a huge hit and spent a year and a half in the New York Times best-seller list. It captured the 1990s fascination with the emotions, the role they play, and how we can manage them.

Cut to Southampton, in 1997, and Peter Sharp, the local authority’s chief educational psychologist, read EI and was so “inspired” by it that he and Southampton’s chief schools inspector decided that “emotional literacy should be an equal priority with literacy and numeracy for all children in Southampton”. The book must have made quite an impression. (more…)

Sounds like the US is playing hardball at the IMF. The Economist’s Free Exchange blog takes up the tale:

When the IMF was formed, it was agreed that its executive board, which is its main decision-making body, would have 20 seats. Later, this was expanded to 24, but the expansion is technically an ad-hoc change which has to be reconfirmed by voting every couple of years. So far, it has always been renewed. But earlier this month, America simply did not vote on this year’s renewal, and because America has an effective veto (it has 16.74% of the votes in an institution that requires a super-majority of 85%), the renewal is hanging fire.

And no, the Treasury says, it wasn’t a mistake. So what gives? Well, if the US doesn’t renew the arrangement, then 24 seats have to go back down to 20. It’s time to play… international monetary musical chairs!

All this raises two intriguing questions. First, of course: who’ll be standing up when the music stops? Here’s a clue: Europe holds 9 of the current 24 seats. So, the Economist speculates, the likeliest outcome is that some of them will be merged: “for instance, there could be three euro area seats and two non-euro area seats (at the moment, there are 6 euro area countries with seats on the board, and 3 non-euro area Europeans (Britain, Denmark and Switzerland)”. So the likeliest losers? “Belgium, the Netherlands and their ilk”, who will be “furious” about being represented by (say) Germany what with the Euro crisis and all. 

And question number two: what’s the US up to? Here’s a clue:

America also gains subtly by taking the side of emerging economies. They might be less likely, for example, to make a big fuss about America’s effective veto at the fund. This is something some have been highlighting as a rule that needs to change—but perhaps now that America is using its veto to make emerging countries’ case, they might prefer to pipe down about what a terrible thing it is. Which would probably suit America just fine.

So, to sum up: the real action is happening between the US and the emerging economies while the hapless EU founders around outside the room, looking lame. It’s Copenhagen 2.0!

Over the weekend, Richard blogged about the Iranians’ scary new bomber drones, and their uncanny resemblance to Thunderbird 2. Alas for the Iranians, the project has been set back by some bad news:

A few weeks ago, according to official and private reports, the Iranian air force shot down three drones near the southwestern city of Bushehr, where a Russian-supplied nuclear reactor has just started up. When the Revolutionary Guards inspected the debris, they expected to find proof of high-altitude spying. Instead, the Guards had to report to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that the air force had blasted Iran’s own unmanned aircraft out of the sky.

Apparently, according to official Iranian press accounts, the Iranian military had created a special unit to deploy the drones—some for surveillance and others, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged on Sunday, to carry bombs—but hadn’t informed the air force.

GD readers will doubtless share a particular appreciation for the fact that in the middle of the world’s most unstable neighbourhood, with Israel straining at the leash to let loose its F16s, the Iranians’ nemesis emerged to be… their own lack of policy coherence.

This is my 300th post on Global Dashboard.  My first, posted on 15 November 2007, was about how peacekeeping was in a troubled state, with senior UN officials warning of “failure” in Darfur.  And here we are almost three years later and I’ve recently been blogging away about, er, the possibility of a peacekeeping failure in Darfur…

This could be  proof that, while things are bad out there, peacekeeping has proved more resilient than doom-sayers like me predicted.  Yes, there was a near-catastrophe in the Congo in 2008, but it was averted.  Yes, the Darfur mission exists in state of permanent crisis, but it’s still there.  And there have been successes (like the UN’s ability to hold it together in Haiti after the earthquake) and the great rickety mechanism of UN operations somehow grinds on, with 100,000 personnel worldwide.

Perhaps I’m just congenitally alarmist.  When I penned an article about “Peacekeeping in Crisis” two years ago, some blue-helmetists argued that peacekeeping always seems to be in crisis.  And yet… if you advocate the “muddling through” view of UN ops, you have to contend with stories like this from today’s Guardian:

200 women and four baby boys were gang-raped by Rwandan and Congolese rebels in a brazen attack near a UN peacekeepers’ base, aid workers have reported. Victims described four days of sexual violence that was unusually vicious even by the standards of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, notorious for the use of rape as a weapon of war.  The impunity of the assault is likely to refocus attention on the effectiveness of the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping mission, which has been strongly criticised by human rights groups.

There have been efforts to sort out UN ops in the last couple of years – and, sitting in NYC, I’ve been able to make a few direct contributions – stories like this keep coming back to haunt us.  Earlier this year, I began to despair and focus on the tragic nature of the UN’s efforts in places like Darfur.  But, if it’s acceptable to talk about the end of humanitarian interventionism these days, I’m not ready to give up on it quite yet.

If we’re going to stick with program, we need to work out a much stronger strategic – and, indeed, humanitarian – logic for why we’re doing so.  I’ve had a few ideas about this recently, but need to think them through a bit more… I’ll be away from the blog for a week or so now, but when I come back I’ll try and lay these ideas out more clearly.

Afterthought: while I’m sure readers are very excited at the thought of more posts on peace ops, I should note that my most-read post of the 300 to date was “How UN Consultants Get Laid”.  Sadly, I have no exciting new insights to offer on this.

Are emerging great powers like Old Etonians or street-fighters?  Or, to be a bit more literal, should we expect great powers to emerge out of privileged, prosperous backgrounds with lots of resources and few natural enemies?  Or will they punch their way out of tough, highly conflictual regions?  If you look at the first decades twentieth century, the U.S. obviously benefited from having a benign neighborhood, while Germany’s rise was complicated by the ring of unfriendly powers around it.

Looking at the world today, strategists get very excited by the potential for Sino-Indian rivalry to constrain one or both of those powers.  (Brazil is, by contrast, the Old Etonian amongst the BRICs, with no serious long-term rivals in its region.)  Over on his blog “Polaris”, Dhruva Jaishankar highlights how this worries Indian policy-makers:

One of the few points of consensus at a conference on India I helped organise in February was that India would find it difficult to escape its region unless it were able to establish peaceful relations with (and stability within) the countries in its immediate neighbourhood, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The feeling was that India would be tethered by disputes with these smaller states, and adversely affected by the instability spilling over from them. This would, in turn, compromise India’s great power ambitions. A similar logic underlies Pakistan’s longstanding policy of attempting to destabilise India through asymmetric and unconventional means.

But Dhruva can think of quite a few big powers that came out of tough neighborhoods:

Exhibit A. Europe. For much of modern history, the only powers capable of global reach were located in Europe: Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England, France, and subsequently Germany and Italy. The close proximity of these states to one another, and the presence of strong second-tier states in their immediate vicinities, meant that at no time were the fates of these countries secure at home. This did not stop any of them from seeking conquests and projecting power on multiple continents.

Exhibit B. Japan. The rise of Japan in the late 19th century after the Meiji Restoration coincided with unstable politics at home and in the region. Nine years into the new era, the Japanese ruling oligarchy had to crush the Satsuma Rebellion in the south. Japan went on to fight wars against China and Russia, and annexed Korea and Formosa (Taiwan). In the midst of almost continuous regional conflict, Japan was accorded all the trappings of a great power, including seats at the League of Nations and the Washington Naval Conference.

Exhibit C. China. The growth of China is a remarkable story, but once again it has come despite—not because—of its political relationships with its neighbours. Certainly, China has not had a significant conflict since 1979 and it has settled many of its land boundary disputes. However, it continues to have uneasy relations with almost all its neighbours, including a sizeable dispute with its largest regional competitor, India. It also has one of the most unstable states in the world—North Korea—immediately bordering it. And the military presence of the world’s preeminent power in its region severely limits its actions. None of this has stopped China’s rise.

As Dhruva recognizes, this doesn’t mean that India – or indeed China – can ignore bad stuff on its borders.  But it’s an interesting reminder that, while Western strategists worry about the erosion of the liberal order, today’s rising powers may be able to tolerate a pretty high degree of disorder as they assert themselves…

In the 1950s, British naval strategists briefly adopted the notion of “broken-backed” warfare, by which they meant fighting on after an atomic strike on the UK.  The charm of this idea – if you were making a case for spending on the Royal Navy – was that ships at sea would be the only military tools left to the UK after a nuclear exchange.

This concept didn’t appeal to anyone likely to be on land during World War III, and it collapsed under the weight of its horrible silliness.  I bring it up for the sake of a cheap pun, because today (you see where this going) the Royal Navy isn’t contending with broken-backed warfare but the “Brokeback Coalition” and its proposed defence cuts.

It’s unclear whether the Navy or the Air Force will suffer most from the cuts – the Army will suffer too, but is protected by the need to slog on in Afghanistan.  This seems to be Fleet Week in the defence debate, with RUSI publishing an article arguing that Britain can’t leave the sea lanes to “pirates, terrorists and opportunist governments”:

Article authors Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham and professor Gwyn Prins argue that with over 90 per cent of the UK’s trade carried by sea, the country must ensure the navy has the ‘presence’ to protect shipping routes. “Real world tasks urgently require significantly more surface combatants, of lower cost and capability,” write Blackham and Prins. “Use of the sea demands presence along the sea routes. Presence is the prerequisite for the silent deterrent messages that naval force alone can articulate.

“…Presence demands numbers. The ability to mass and to surge a force demands numbers. Numbers are also essential for replaceability. If you cannot afford to lose a ship you cannot afford to use it. Presence is the indispensable prerequisite for deterrence.”

The article warns that at the current rate of decline the Royal Navy fleet will have only nineteen frigates in ten years’ time and that many of them will be at the “effective end of their useful lives”. By that time, Prins and Blackham argue, the fleet will be “inadequate for the most fundamental, enduring and vital tasks”. The article calls for at least ten new cheaper and lower capability oceangoing frigates to preserve the “silent deterrent” of a “lower-intensity daily constabulary” force patrolling the major sea routes.

The full article is a curious piece of work, combining some pretty detailed technical and statistical stuff about ships (I assume that’s mainly from the Admiral) with sweeping statements on issues like the fading of the UN and the failures of the EU (I guess that’s mainly from Gwyn, who waxes lyrical on such topics a good deal).

Ultimately this mix of broad and detailed analysis does not convince. The authors seem to be arguing for a strategy that might best be described as “21st Century Francis Drake”. The UK needs a cheap-ish fleet of latter-day privateers that can pop up off the Spanish Main or Far Tortuga as and when a pinnace, like a flutter’d bird, comes flying from far away warning “Terrorist ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty-three!” (If this means nothing to you, brush up on your Tennyson, you chump.)

This is all well and good, and I accept the argument for a naval presence. But, like it or not, Britain’s ability to provide “daily constabulary” on the seas is, and has long been, dependent on America’s willingness to provide the SWAT Teams, i.e. aircraft carriers, etc.  And this is not 100% guaranteed.  This point is brought home in an article by Seth Cropsey in the current American Interest, which I strongly recommend:

The size of a fleet is by no means a perfect metric for a nation’s naval strength; numbers do not equal power, reach or technological capability. But numbers are a good enough measure of where a fleet conforms in rough shape to national tasks and expectations. And for the United States, the numbers aren’t adding up. In the year following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. combat fleet numbered 466 ships. By 2001, it had shrunk to 316. The decline continued throughout George W. Bush’s two terms to the current level of 285 ships. Since February 2006 the Navy has consistently maintained that it needs at least 313 ships to perform the missions assigned to it.

You can read this in two ways: (i) “Oh God the Yanks are deserting us, let’s buy every frigate we can!”; or (ii) “If the U.S. is drawing back from its global role, then extra British boats won’t matter, unless there’s an alternative strategic framework to plug into”. I’m with (ii), and (as I’ve noted before) I’m drawn to the ideas of James Rogers, whose views on EU naval cooperation are best described as “21st Century Tirpitz”…

(more…)

Back in March of this year, I spent a couple of weeks in the far north of Burkina Faso. I slept under the stars on the edge of the Sahara, was offered a live goat at Dori’s spectacular weekly livestock market, and discussed the upcoming hunger season with nomadic Fulani herders. I also spent money (although not on the goat) and contributed a little to the local economy.

Today I could do none of these things. The whole northern half of this beautiful, welcoming country has been declared off limits by the British, American and French governments. Last month, the US evacuated dozens of its citizens from north-western Burkina. Last week, France withdrew twenty-five students from the city of Fada N’Gourma, near the Niger border, and sent them back to Europe. Across that border, in southern Niger, NGO workers helping to deal with that country’s hunger crisis (a crisis which my Fulani interlocutors had foreseen) have been recalled to the capital, Niamey, for unspecified ‘reasons of security.’

Were I to go back to northern Burkina and fall sick or have a traffic accident (statistically by far the greatest dangers to my person), my insurance would not cover the costs of recovery. Were I to be kidnapped by elements linked to Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), which the European governments see as the greatest threat to my safety, nobody would pay my ransom and, like the tragic Briton Edwin Dyer last year, I might well be murdered.

My first reaction to this expansion of the already large map of forbidden West African territories was one of anger. So far, two of the dozens captured by Al Qaeda have died. Edwin Dyer was executed because his government refuses to negotiate with terrorists, and earlier this month the 78-year-old French humanitarian worker Michel Germaneau, whose own government normally has no such qualms, either met the same fate or died of natural causes (it is not yet clear). When I compare this figure to the annual number of deaths in car crashes on the M25, on which the Foreign Office is happy for me to drive, or stabbings in London, which I can freely visit, it seems a disproportionate response to tell all foreign visitors that they must avoid northern Burkina and most of Niger, thereby impeding the famine relief effort, hobbling the fledgling tourist industry, and deterring any foreigner thinking of doing business there.

But on reflection, I wondered whether I would be brave enough to revisit the region myself (as I plan to do next year). In March I did not feel in any danger, but if the intelligence the Europeans and Americans claim to have received is correct and AQIM is actively hunting for foreigners to kidnap, would it not be foolhardy to ignore the warnings? In my two weeks, after all, I did not see a single other white face: it would not have been difficult for a desperate local wanting to earn a fast buck to find me and sell me on to the extremists. Perhaps I was lucky not to be snatched myself, although it did not feel that way and no local people seemed concerned that there was any threat. (more…)

News here that David Cameron has approved the establishment of a ‘behavioural insight’ unit, led by policy advisor David Halpern, to find ways to implement the ideas of behavioural psychologist Richard Thaler, who is also apparently working with the unit.

Thaler is, together with Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge, a study of humans’ poor and often irrational decision-making processes (such as preferring books with easy-to-remember one-word titles) and how governments can manipulate or ‘nudge’ these processes towards more enlightened choices.

Putting a picture of a fly on a urinal, for example, nudges people to pee more in the urinal, and less on the floor. Creating bins that make a funny noise when you drop things into them encourages people to put more rubbish into them. And so on!

There are other, more far-reaching ways you can use behavioural psychology to affect public decision-making. For example, if you present a policy decision to citizens, you could either offer them a box to tick to sign up to it, or a box to tick if they want to opt out of it. Making people tick a box to opt out makes us more likely to opt in.

Why? Because we’re lazy, bored, distracted, inert and irrational creatures. We’re monkeys, so the government needs to present our choices in such a way as to make us pick the right banana.

Thaler and Sunstein call this sort of social manipulation ‘libertarian paternalism’. People are still free to choose how to live. But, knowing that homo dufus often makes bad decisions, governments and companies should structure the choices they prresent so they pick the more enlightened option.

There are two ripostes to this approach. (more…)

Iran has just revealed its first “bomber drone”:

While this is obviously rather annoying, I can’t help noticing the resemblance between this machine and Thunderbird 2 from the famous British sci-fi puppet series:

Even the fake blue-sky-with-clouds background is almost identical.

In the week the U.S. withdrew its last combat troops from Iraq (leaving a mere 50,000 who probably could do bit of fighting if required) here’s a small quiz.  Name the years that these Coalition of the Willing members pulled their personnel out of Iraq:

1. Honduras
2. Mongolia
3. Dominican Republic
4. Tonga
5. Iceland

You can find most of the answers over at Duck of Minerva, although you’ll have to check out this list at Wikipedia if you can’t quite recall when the Mongolians and Tongans shipped out…  As for Iceland, well they sent one guy and he left in 2007.

Look at this little fellow…

…and try telling me that he wouldn’t look better with this logo stuck to his furry flank:

What, you may ask, am I going on about?  Here we go: this week, the EU’s Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid – Kristalina Georgieva – was asked “why TV reports had shown aid being distributed in Pakistan in sacks carrying the US flag, but never the EU emblem”.  She attributed this to (i) EU modesty and (ii) pesky NGOs:

Europe had chosen to work very much with partner organisations present on the ground, as in Pakistan. But these organisations, such as the Red Cross or Save the Children, have their own brand to promote and are reluctant to use the EU’s to a certain extent.

Sometimes this is because it may seem like their work is being politicised, sometimes it is purely for safety reasons, and sometimes it is because they want to show off their own brand, which is understandable, the commissioner explained.

What is to be done?

“Raising the visibility of Europe and making sure that our flag shines when we are abroad helping people in need is something that I find incredibly important. Especially now, when we are still not through with the economic and financial crises and it is hard for people here, and we also have our own disasters at home,” she said.

Georgieva said she was telling humanitarian organisations that they should do more to help the EU to help them by flying the EU flag.

I have questions about this approach, which I’ll write about soon, but I was also struck by this snippet from the interview with Georgieva, who knows her stuff:

She explained that the main problem was ensuring that aid actually reaches people in need, and that in some places donkeys were a more precious means of transport than helicopters.

Surely this points to the difficulty in “branding” any humanitarian operation: the fact that getting aid through involves a great deal of improvisation.   It’s hard to wave the EU flag while bartering for donkeys.  Unless, that is, the EU wants to set up a Donkey Corps to airlift highly-trained pack-animals to future crises?  When one of them appeared on TV, everyone would know exactly whose ass they were staring at…

Biological note: yes, I know donkeys and asses are not identical.  The New Yorker had a great piece on mules and the military, now sadly for subscribers only.

Here’s a new RSA animation in which Matthew Taylor, former head of the Institute for Public Policy Research and now chief executive of the RSA, sets out what he wants the Royal Society to do. It’s a great animation and lively talk, and he’s clearly very interested in the politics of well-being, and in what moral and political insights we can draw from new research in psychology and neuroscience. But he may be over-hasty in the policy conclusions that he draws.

Taylor refers in the talk to “powerful new insights” from neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, particularly the idea, in the work of social and behavioural psychologists like John Bargh and Jonathan Haidt, that we are mainly automatic, irrational creatures, and we need to be aware of the limits of our rationality and free will, in order to become more self-aware and responsible people. (If you read the excellent www.edge.org, you’ll be familiar with a lot of this research.)

Taylor argues that this research provides a scientific ‘evidence base’ that takes us beyond individualism, and towards a more social and communitarian model of politics. In this, he is in the same camp as New Left thinkers like Richard Layard and Oliver James, who have tried to use insights from psychology to criticise neo-liberal individualism and justify a more social-communitarian model of society.

The main problem with this ‘natural communitarianism’ is that Taylor and the RSA are moving too rapidly from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, when in fact the same scientific research can be used to justify quite different policy approaches.

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