Regular (or obsessive) readers will be familiar with my exasperation at the EU’s inability to rationalize its presence in the G20, G8 and similar loose-knit multilateral forums – this would be much easier to achieve than, for example, altering the EU presence in the Security Council. During the economic crisis, EU members have gone the other way, with numerous European leaders trying to squash into the G20. So hurrah for Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso, who have managed to work out a mechanism to streamline their respective roles in these forums:
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU Council chief Herman Van Rompuy have decided who will speak on which subject when they both represent the union at international meetings such as the G20. “The two presidents have decided that the EU delegation will be composed of both presidents in one single delegation. That’s quite normal, as their roles are complementary,” a spokeswoman for the European Commission said during a press briefing on Thursday (18 March).
One of the novelties introduced by the EU’s new treaty is that the permanent president of the EU Council, former Belgian premier Herman Van Rompuy, also represents the bloc abroad in foreign policy and security matters. But in other areas, such as climate change, President Barroso will speak on behalf of the 27-member club. In areas where the two overlap, for instance energy, which is both a security and a commission policy area, they will decide on a case-by-case basis who will take the floor.
There’ll surely be tiffs on these “case-by-case” divisions of labor (and where does Catherine Ashton fit into this picture?) but this is a common sense approach. And common sense hasn’t been the leitmotif of Europe’s attitude to the G20 so far…
Still, the news could have come at a better time. The very idea that Europe can speak with a single voice on global economic governance has been shaken up by the growing controversy over how to bail out Greece. A key theme in recent G20 meetings has been how to reform the IMF – but now European capitals are fighting over whether the IMF should help Greece. The G20’s ability to coordinate the big economies is also in doubt. This week, the NYT reported on China’s attitude to one G20 pledge:
Last September, President Obama, President Hu Jintao of China and other leaders of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing countries agreed in Pittsburgh that all the G-20 countries would begin sharing their economic plans by November. The goal was to coordinate their exits from stimulus programs and prevent the world from lurching from recession straight into inflation.
The G-20 leaders agreed that the I.M.F. would act as intermediary.
But two people familiar with China’s response said that the Chinese government missed the November deadline and then submitted a vague document containing mostly historical data. These people said that China feared giving ammunition to critics of its currency policies at the monetary fund and beyond. Both people asked for anonymity because of China’s attitudes about its economic policies.
If this sort of thing continues, G20 discussions are going to lose the air of panicked collegiality of 2009, and get a whole lot nastier. It’ll help if the EU has a clear, single line on such controversies… That’s a bit of a pipe dream, given the Greek controversy, but kudos to Van Rompuy and Barroso for a small step in the right direction.
March 19, 2010 at 7:39 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system | Comment
As a service to readers in Washington DC – if we have any – I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at a public event at Brookings on UN and NATO reform on Wednesday 24 March at 2pm. I’m in more exalted company than I deserve:
So, come and see me be entirely overshadowed – you can register here.
March 19, 2010 at 4:24 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, North America | Comment
Yesterday, Ban Ki-moon announced the formation of a Senior Advisory Group for the Review of International Civilian Capacities (which will hopefully not be known as SAGRICC). “Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!” But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent police, justice experts and other civilian specalists to deploy to post-conflict countries. Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.
The new advisory group (involving former UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guéhenno and my boss, Bruce Jones) will oversee a review “to improve the international response in the aftermath of conflict by strengthening the availability, deployment and appropriateness of civilian capacities for peacebuilding.” My colleague Rahul Chandran is leading the team conducting this review. I think they’re the right team for the job.
I also think that this would be a good moment for the EU to learn a lesson from the UN. As Daniel and I pointed out in a tough paper for ECFR last year (with a foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno…) the EU’s own civilian peacekeeping efforts have big problems. EU missions suffer from staff short-falls almost as bad as the UN’s. In part, that’s because demand (for UN and EU ops alike) outstrips supply – which also creates technical headaches, as we pointed out in Internationale Politik:
Since the European Council sent a police mission to Bosnia in 2003, the European Union has deployed fifteen civilian operations worldwide—compared to just six military operations. These have ranged from small police reform missions in Congo to a 3,000-strong mission in Kosovo, launched in 2008, that handles not only policing issues but judicial reform, war crimes investigations, and customs.
The Union’s ability to deploy so many missions—even sending personnel as far away as Aceh, Indonesia—was one of the great successes of Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief from 1999 to 2009. Working with a relatively small group of officials, Solana used personal diplomacy and sheer persistence to get each mission on the ground.
The EU’s bureaucratic systems have often struggled to keep up. Financing has been a particular headache: when the first personnel arrived in Aceh, they had to use their personal credit cards to fund the mission start-up. European officials also admit that they have been lucky. Although EU civilian personnel have come under attack in the Balkans and Afghanistan, they have yet to suffer any fatalities. Had a European mission suffered significant casualties—as the United Nations suffered in Iraq in 2003 and in Haiti —EU governments might have recoiled from approving missions at such a high rate.
So I’d argue that the EU should match the UN’s review with a formal self-analysis of its civilian operations (in fairness, the Swedish EU presidency made some progress in this direction by asking member-states to review their national civilian capacities).
Actually, I’d go further. Ten years ago, the UN published the highly influential Brahimi Report – an in-depth study of all aspects of peacekeeping. Succeeding reform initiatives, including this new review, all build on this extremely strong basis. The EU doesn’t have any equivalent ur-text for its operations. The Union should put together a team of wise persons to start drafting one, the sooner the better.
March 18, 2010 at 4:49 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia | Comment
The Economist’s David Rennie asked a disturbing question last week: if Obama’s America can’t make soft power work, what hope does Europe have? His thesis is that Obama has followed just the sort of multilateral, engagement-before-confrontation type of strategy that the EU advocates, and been rebuffed by Iran, Israel, China, etc. Meanwhile, Baroness Ashton and her fellow EU-builders still hanker after soft power…
But here is the question that I am starting to turn over in my mind.If our big bet in Europe is that speaking with one voice will make our norms-based, soft power approach work, what lessons should we draw when Mr Obama’s outstretched hand of friendship is smacked away? Because even in a perfect, parallel universe, in which the EU magically falls in line behind Catherine Ashton and the new EU diplomatic service, we will struggle to become one half as united as the American government is. Our 27 countries will always find it hard to match America when it comes to identifying and defending our interests. And though there can of course be differences in the messages sent out by the White House, the State Department, Congress and so on, in general America speaks with one voice to the outside world, in a way that the EU can barely hope to match.
And yet all that speaking with one voice, in defence of agreed, common interests, does not seem to shield the Obama administration from snubs.
This is an eloquent version of a problem that wonks who worry about multilateralism and transatlantic relations have been aware of for some time. The EU did a huge amount to sustain multilateral institutions during the Bush years, and benefited from playing good cop to Washington’s bad cop. Now Washington wants to be a good cop too, and European leaders feel vulnerable. If Obama’s strategy fails it won’t just discredit him, but the EU’s international approach since 2001 (or earlier).
Rennie quotes a European official who claims the problem isn’t the strategy, but the execution: the Americans are guilty of “incompetent multilateralism”. The implication is that, if only the U.S. applied its power with a little more European finesse, Obama would be in a better place right now. I’m not so sure.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that the EU is guilty of incompetent multilateralism too. In a report Franziska Brantner and I wrote for ECFR in 2008, we showed that European officials at the UN spent vast amounts of time in coordination meetings (over 1,000 a year!) but that the EU was losing more and more votes in New York and Geneva.
And as I recently pointed out in a paper for FRIDE, European leaders have fumbled diplomacy around the rise of the G20. They were taken aback by the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for the G20, and their reactions varied wildly. Britain embraced the G20 enthusiastically, while Germany came round to it fatalistically, but Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi tried to push a G14 that would have preserved a greater role for Europe. Meanwhile, middling European powers like Spain and the Netherlands forced their way into the G20, reducing its efficiency and credibility.
But if Rennie is right, this doesn’t really matter because multilateralism may be doomed anyway. The rising powers are more concerned with their hard power and immediate interests. As I noted on Global Dashboard last month, there are growing signals that the 21st Century is going to be an era of old school power politics, not a new era of cooperation on transnational threats. Nonetheless, my suspicion is that the rising powers have a continuing interest in sustaining the international system – and that the US can learn how to use its leverage in this system over time.
The EU will have a harder time responding to the net decline in its influence, for precisely the reasons Rennie identifies. The irony is that, while the U.S. can still revert to Plan B (for Bush) and project hard power – as the Obama administration has done in Pakistan and is starting to do vis-a-vis Iran – the EU has little choice but to stick with the soft power option. Its efforts at hardness (Afghanistan, er, Chad…) highlight its lack of room for maneuver. So the EU is trapped in a pessimist’s paradox: it can’t be sure that multilateralism will work out, but it has to keep working on the assumption (or faith, or bet) that it might.
That doesn’t mean that the EU has no leverage. If it gets its act together, it can use its remaining leverage more effectively than it does today. Ironically, the difficulties facing both Barack Obama and Catherine Ashton may stimulate serious thinking in Brussels on that score. I live in hope (and America).
March 15, 2010 at 4:35 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, North America | Comment
I’m rather fond of David Miliband’s blogging and twittering. But his initial tweet in response to the news of Michael Foot’s death hit the wrong note:
Michael Foot led a remarkable life. I remember meeting him on the Tube in the 80s; for a famous speaker he really listened.
Erm… This is doubtless an unfortunate mash-up of well-intentioned thoughts. The Foreign Secretary’s next tweet – about Foot’s hatred for apartheid – was back on the mark. But it’s always a good idea not to insert oneself into tributes to others…
March 3, 2010 at 11:30 pm | More on Off topic, UK | Comments Off
We at GD like to fret about examples of badly joined-up global governance wherever we can find them. Climate change, security, trade… and now religion. The latest English-language edition of Internationale Politik (which happens to contain a small rant by GD’s Korski and Gowan on crisis management) includes an enjoyable piece about how the Pope isn’t using his global leverage. But at least, author Otto Kallscheuer points out, the pontiff formerly known as Ratzinger has global reach…
Even in today’s modern age, there is a strong argument to be made for the Holy See’s active presence in the international arena. Now that the power of the papacy has long since been reduced to a “minuscule and, as it were, symbolic temporal sovereignty,” as Pope Paul VI put it in 1965, the power politics in which earlier popes actively participated for centuries have been replaced by the papacy playing a metapolitical role. Such a presence in the emerging international public sphere could contribute to mediating religious conflicts—not only because the Vatican, in contrast to nation states, is an institution well suited to deal with the demands of globalization, but also because it possesses professional routines and knowledgeable actors trained in normative politics.
One question that must first be answered is whether there are international institutions of transnational “religious policy” other than the Catholic Church. In fact, there is nothing of the sort, in Christianity or in any other world religion. In the 1970s and 1980s, at the high point of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the peace movement in Western Europe, the Protestant World Council of Churches was able to raise hopes around the world of a “Christian” means of overcoming conflicts. But even in these years, no theological understanding emerged between the Christian West and East—between more liberal Protestantism and the traditional spirituality of Greek, Russian, and Serbian Orthodoxy. In the face of the explosive worldwide growth of Pentecostalism outside the historical established churches, the Ecumenical Council remains rather powerless, outside of the mainline historical churches or denomination.
And outside of Christianity? Is the Dalai Lama a sort of “pope for Buddhists?” As doubtful as an analogy between the many forms of Buddhism and the Christian churches may be, the combined political and religious role of the Tibetan leader creates a parallel to the 19th century Catholic political crisis, when the pope was simultaneously the sovereign of the papal state in middle-Italy and the spiritual head of a world religion. So far, however, the fourteenth Dalai Lama has not clearly decoupled the spiritual authority of the reborn Buddha from his political role as the exiled leader of a nation and culture fighting for autonomy. Should this separation of religious authority and civil power actually occur, the Dalai Lama or his successor in exile could perhaps become the apostle of a global Buddhism.
No institution comparable to the papacy—a universal monarchy with purely spiritual authority but indirect political power—is found in the Islamic world, aside from the Ismailite Shia, an extreme minority of the “party of Ali,” whose world leader is the Aga Khan. The message of Islam, like the Gospel, is geared universally toward expansion, mission, and globalization. But a billion Muslims have no international form of organization that would offer a starting point to relativize their local conflicts and rationalize their political defeats and identity crises.
Come on non-Catholics, get your multilateral cooperation act together.
March 2, 2010 at 8:12 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system | Comments Off
The fifth edition of the Center on International Cooperation’s Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is out today. Is it any good? Let’s ask an expert:
Few bestselling books read as well as this annual gem; few text books have even half as much useful and well-presented information on a crucial subject; few publications hold a candle to the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations.
—MICHAEL O’HANLON
Director of Research and Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Ooh yeah, peacekeeping fans, this one’s a keeper! Buy it here.
February 25, 2010 at 8:35 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence | Comments Off
I have a new paper out, published by FRIDE in Madrid, on the Obama administration’s approach to multilateralism. It points out that – contrary to our pleas for joined-up thinking on what international institutions should look like – the U.S. has pushed reform in a pretty ad hoc fashion:
Senior figures in the new administration had advocated a wide array of potentially incompatible options: their ideas included a stronger UN, a “global NATO”, a concert of democracies and “network diplomacy” transcending specific international institutions. The President had written of the need to boost the United Nations, but he had also praised NATO and the EU as important allies.
The administration could not continue without a hierarchy of institutional priorities for too long. It needed to find a framework for coordinating the international response to the still-boiling financial crisis – and there was a shared sense among administration members that this must fully involve emerging economic powers like China and India. In this context, one mechanism stood out as the focus for American policy: the Group of Twenty (G20).
The G20 already had momentum. President Bush had convened its first heads-of-government summit to discuss the financial crisis in November 2008. Gordon Brown was preparing a sequel for London in April 2009. British officials grumbled that the new administration was initially ill-prepared for this, but Obama was a dominant (if deliberately not too dominant) figure at the London talks.
Although the US announced that it would host the next G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September, this success did not convince all administration officials that the forum should be their priority. Some had been irritated by the long-winded bickering of other participants, or viewed it as a crisis mechanism that would lose steam.
Nonetheless, there was a growing recognition that serious alternatives were in short supply. The administration was unimpressed by Italy’s preparations for the July 2009 meeting of the G8. Susan Rice was making significant diplomatic headway at the UN, but its flaws as a decision-making forum remained clear.
There were enthusiasts in the administration for at least mooting reforms to the Security Council and the dysfunctional UN Human Rights Council, but these options were put on hold (although US officials at least indicated a new level of openness to discussing Security Council reform seriously). Promoting the G20 took priority. The US showed its hand in September, announcing immediately prior to the Pittsburgh summit that the G20 would act as the “premier” forum for economic discussions, displacing the G8.
To summarize: the new administration came into office, looked at what was lying about, and picked up the institution that looked most useful. Bad news for the multilat-nerds, but not that surprising. While writing this paper, I read Mary Elise Sarotte’s brilliant 1989, which probes the decisions around the reordering of Europe at the Cold War’s end. Sarotte points out that there were lots of ideas for rebuilding multilateral cooperation in Europe – Gorbachev was pushing a “common European home” embracing East and West. Yet the U.S. and West Germany went for what she calls the “prefabricated” option of sticking with NATO and the EC. There were lots of reasons for this, but one was NATO was just there already (Sara Batmanglich and I recently wrote a book chapter on how this logic continued in Europe in the 1990s).
I’m not saying that we should give up thinking bold ideas for reforming multilateralism (I’m waiting for David to respond to this post, after our jolly debate on realism…) or just hoping for a bit of policy coherence someday. But I think that there’s lots of interesting work to be done looking at the dynamics of “prefabricated multilateralism”. Or should that be its absence of dynamism?
February 25, 2010 at 2:24 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, North America | 1 Comment
The New Yorker has a long profile of Paul Krugman that’s worth a look. The passage that has stuck with me is not really about Krugman but one of his friends…
Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.
This could act as a metaphor for all sorts of current debates, and academia’s contribution to them, but I leave you to fill in the blanks…
February 24, 2010 at 8:45 pm | More on Africa, Influence and networks | Comments Off
I don’t like cell phones. Never have, never will. Reading this, I like them even less:
You’re not supposed to send dirty jokes by mobile phone in China, but don’t worry: service providers have some other great, inspiring content that has the government’s enthusiastic support.
Today’s Economic Daily includes a short article on “red snippets” (红段子) the positive, uplifting text messages that are now being rolled out on a national scale after a successful five-year trial in Guangdong and a few other places.
These messages have a dual purpose: taking the place of the dirty jokes and mocking attacks on the establishment that are the focus of the latest mobile content clean-up campaign is only one half of their role. Officials from the government and major industry players are also talking about using positive SMS to build up “the spirit of Chinese culture for an Internet age,” a sort of soft power against the encroachment of vulgar American pop culture.
Xie Zhenhua, the China Mobile Communications Association official who is the public face of the project, says they’re the modern equivalent of Tang poetry or the Three Character Classic. One example cited by most articles was forwarded more than 150,000 times the year it was created: “China’s rise and the people’s prosperity: we work hand in hand toward that glorious day.”
I just thought that being a new superpower would be more, you know, fun.
February 14, 2010 at 7:35 pm | More on East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, Off topic | Comments Off
I’ve just returned from the UAE, where the Center on International Cooperation, NYU’s Abu Dhabi Institute and Brookings organized a conference on “Emerging Powers, Global Security and the Middle East”. Discussions ranged pretty far and wide but (unsurprisingly) kept coming back to whether or not the U.S. and China are trapped in a cycle of confrontations, and how this will affect the Iran issue this year. Julian Borger of the Guardian was there, and gives an excellent summary of this strand of debate:
The conference was under Chatham House rules, but broadly speaking: the Chinese were furious about the Taiwan arms sale, arguing it had come at a time when relations between the island and mainland China were at their best for years. They warned that Chinese nationalism was slowly awakening and should not be provoked. The current political turmoil in Iran actually serves to harden China’s resistance to sanctions, because it makes them appear more like interference in another country’s affairs – anathema to Beijing.
Others hit back at a rising nation they saw as seeking more global power than responsibility. The westerners urged China to play more of a broader role in the Middle East, beyond its immediate energy needs. India is angry at what it sees as China’s increased assertiveness along their common border. The Gulf Arabs accused China of allowing Iran to get away with its nuclear manoeuvring. Interestingly enough, it was clear at a public function put on as part of the conference, that “ordinary” Arabs, outside the government and think-tanks, were more sympathetic to Tehran’s case.
More broadly, I was struck by the fact that most participants – not only from the US and China, but also from India – were hung up on “old” hard security issues. There was a rough agreement that the Copenhagen climate talks were a mess, but that it should be possible to start making some real progress on climate again soon – although not through the UN framework. By contrast, almost everyone was extremely downbeat about the odds for alleviating classic inter-state competition (be it over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border or the Gulf). A number of participants highlighted the need for great power cooperation to handle failing states, but this was overshadowed by talk of big power rivalry – an excellent panel on Afghanistan concluded that the odds for real Sino-US-Indian cooperation there are low.
Given conversations like these, we need to take a long hard look at how we think we advance international cooperation. Good multilateralists like the authors of this blog are very good at saying “transnational threats require transnational responses” and assume that new threats like climate change and pandemic disease can be used to persuade governments to think beyond classic inter-state rivalries. David, Alex and Bruce Jones make a compelling version of this case in their recent paper on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization:
In his 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, Hans Morgenthau exhorted his readers to “assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power.” This assumption, he argued, allowed all foreign policy decisions to be placed on a single “intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.” While this focus on national interest and the primacy of nation-states had explanatory power in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is outmoded in the post-Cold War context.
Now, David, Alex and Bruce know me well enough to know that I’m unlikely to agree with this. And, yep, I think it’s fallacious. They argue that today’s statesmen are constrained by so many transnational factors (capital flows, etc.) and threats (H1N1, etc.) that a state-centric approach falls apart. And so it should in theory. But in practice, today’s statesmen seem extraordinarily adept at sticking with “national interest”-based thinking – and many are having to struggle with rising nationalist and populist forces at home. Territorial disputes still get people awfully worked up. Military-industrial complexes still follow their own logic. And politicians assume, not wrongly, that there are more votes in these issues than in swine flu.
Oddly, it’s possible to believe all that and still share Alex and David’s concerns about transnational threats. Actually, they terrify me. And we need to completely retool how we respond to them (again, when it comes to the threat-by-threat specifics, I concur with my GD colleagues on what needs doing). But I’m increasingly convinced that we can only construct our responses to those threats on a traditional, balance of power foundation – which means prioritizing hard security talks, and basing deals on transnational threats on agreements on the global division of influence.
Goddamit, I feel like John Bolton this morning.
February 13, 2010 at 3:48 pm | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Key Posts, Middle East and North Africa | 8 Comments
“Meandering” is an excellent new-ish blog on peacekeeping and its discontents by Ed Rees, who works for the Peace Dividend Trust. Ed recently asked readers with UN experience to contribute anonymously to a “working list of what host communities ‘pick up’ from peacekeepers” (with the important qualification that “STDs don’t count”). Here’s a sample of the answers he’s got so far:
• A taste for double standards
• Disrespect for rule of law & due process
• Poor morals
• Poor discipline
• A poor work ethic
• A ID card fetish
• A propensity towards meaningless platitudes – ie “this is the year of development”
• A lack of accountability
• A Big Car fetish
• Having a driver to ferry one to important meetings in one’s Big Car
• Obsession with titles and status
• Posters announcing important initaitives that are adorned with many logos
• Long lunches
• Organograms
• The inability to fire people, rather selecting a move them up option
• Making “decisions by committee”, resulting in no decision
• An understanding that money derives not from labor but from being at the right place at the right time
• Keen understanding of the micro-gradations in classiness cocktail party venues
• Precise knowledge of per diem rates for international organizations
This one will run and run…
February 12, 2010 at 1:51 pm | More on Conflict and security, Economics and development, Off topic | Comments Off
The big problem with catching Osama bin Laden is that everyone has forgotten what he looks like. That, or he’s hiding in an ungoverned quarter of Pakistan. One of those two. Just in case it’s #1, the FBI has put out new photos of what the world’s most wanted man might look like today. Here’s the FBI’s best shot of our man pre-9/11:
And here he is as he might be today… perhaps living on your street, caring for your children, or maybe just hiding out in some ungoverned corner of Pakistan:
Whoa! I mean… who’d have believed it? Look at the guy. It’s almost impossible to think it could be the same person. For a start, he has got rid of the blanket over his shoulder. And everyone (MI6, CIA) thought that the Bin-man wouldn’t go anywhere – like, for example, a well-guarded cave in an ungoverned quarter of Pakistan – without his beloved safety blanket. He’s like Linus in Peanuts: no blanket, no identity.
And the turban!!! Where’s the cheeky bit of extra cloth flapping about? Gone. Is there nothing this man won’t do to hide his whereabouts? He’s even started wearing (look closely) a brown shirt with a silver floral pattern! Lucky the FBI put that photo out. Without it, hell, anyone could have stumbled upon a well-guarded cave somewhere in, ooh, the Afghan-Pakistan border area, and met this blanket-free, small-turbaned, crap-shirted dude and thought “hey, isn’t that… no, my bad, that’s definitely not OBL. No resemblance. Sorry about that fine sir, I’ll be on my way…”.
January 15, 2010 at 5:22 am | More on Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America, Off topic | 2 Comments
Yesterday – not long before news of the awful earthquake in Haiti - there was a rumpus in Brussels over whether the European Commissioner-designate for humanitarian aid (Bulgaria’s Rumiana Jeleva) has been fully honest about her business relationships. There’s a chance that MEPs may try to claim Jeleva’s scalp as the price of voting in the new Commission. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of her case, but events in Port-au-Prince have rammed home the need for properly-coordinated humanitarian response mechanisms – and shown that the EU has a lot more to do on this front.
Here’s how some of the Union’s leaders reacted to the news from Haiti:
Today, the Spanish Secretary of State for the EU, Diego López Garrido, stated, on behalf of the ministers for Europe that are taking part in the meeting in La Granja (Segovia), that they have been informed about ‘the horrific earthquake that has hit Haiti and that the EU has immediately mobilised to help the victims’.
‘All the EU’s institutions, especially those most involved with humanitarian affairs, such as ECHO, are working to provide an efficient response to this situation,’ he said during a press conference.
‘Spain,’ he went on, ‘as the Presidency of the EU Council, is in close contact with the High Representative, Catherine Ashton, and there will therefore be the most coordinated response possible to the tragedy in Haiti from the EU.’
The most coordinated response possible? The Spanish announced that an assessment team would be flying out of Brussels for Haiti on Wednesday afternoon. So there’s a single EU response here? Not according to the NY Times:
France said it would send three military transport planes, including one from nearby Fort de France, Martinique, with aid supplies, and that 100 troops based in the French West Indies would be sent to help, according to TF1, a French television network. Britain and Germany were sending governmental assessment teams, and Germany said it would make 1.5 million euros, or about $2.2 million, available for emergency assistance.
There were some doubts if the British would be able to make it out of snow-bound Gatwick. But we now have four European assessment teams (to say nothing of the U.S., UN, a Chinese rescue squad, etc.). Or 5… the Italians are on their way:
Following the earthquake that yesterday afternoon shook the Democratic Republic of Haiti, on Minister Frattini’s instructions the Directorate General for Development Cooperation (DGCS) went into immediate action.
Two financial contributions were earmarked for international agencies operating on the ground [500,000 euros for WFP and the same for the Red Cross/Crescent]. The DGCS will also be participating in a coordinated Italian mission made possible by a flight arranged by the Civil Defence Department scheduled to leave soon for Haiti.
I’m not an aid expert. It’s possible that we need as many assessment teams in Haiti as possible right now. The people getting on all these planes are brave and committed individuals. And I’m certainly pleased that European governments are signing up to throw money at the problem (assuming that they pay up, and it’s used properly, which can’t be guaranteed). But is this really the most coordinated EU response imaginable? Or just an ad hoc rush to do some good? Ms. Jeleva may or may not be the right person to take on these challenges. It’d be nice if someone did.
January 13, 2010 at 8:13 pm | More on Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean | 6 Comments
New York State’s constantly-on-the-ropes Governor David Paterson has just come up with an excellent plan to boost economic recovery:
Gov. Paterson is pushing to legalize ultimate fighting in New York, claiming the unrestrained mixed-martial arts events will make a quick buck for the state’s troubled economy. If he gets his wish, the cage fighting exhibitions, which have been banned in the area since 1997, could take place not only in upstate arenas but in Madison Square Garden.
The controversy over the Brazilian-inspired fighting championships began when John McCain called the blood sport “repugnant” thirteen years ago. The practice was banned in 36 states, including NY, and some reforms were adopted. The UFC introduced weight classes and gloves and made kicks to a downed opponent, hair pulling, fish-hooking, headbutting, and groin strikes illegal. The championship also dropped its “There Are No Rules!” tagline.
Now proponents claim that the PG-13 version of the ultimate fighting is appropriate and necessary. “A study done in 2008 by the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization estimated one event would generate $11.5 million in economic activity in New York City and $5.2 million in Buffalo. Ultimate Fighting Championship estimates there could be two or three events a year in New York,” according to the NY Daily News. Paterson is slated to propose the legalization in his January 19 budget announcement.
Seriously? Why stop there, Governor? If we were to boot the Mets out of their lovely new Citi Field ballpark and turn it over to Roman-style gladitorial combat – possibly involving live tigers mauling slaves - then (i) we wouldn’t have to put up with the Mets being rubbish any longer, and (ii) you’d raise way over $11.5 million.
January 11, 2010 at 7:25 pm | More on Economics and development, North America, Off topic | Comments Off
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