The end of a colourful career, as former Guinea-Bissau navy chief Bubo Na Tchuto is caught trafficking drugs Mark Weston-

The Bijagós Islands, Guinea-Bissau

Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, who was arrested by US agents in a sting operation in international waters on Tuesday, has had an exciting career.

As head of Guinea-Bissau’s ill equipped navy in the middle of the last decade, he was widely thought to be a key player in facilitating the passage of cocaine from South America to Europe via his country’s Bijagós islands. Perfectly placed to oversee the traffic through the remote, forest-covered archipelago, he gained popularity among ordinary Guineans by being lavish with the rewards that came with his position.

Power, however, went to his head, and in 2008 Bubo was forced to flee the country in fear of his life after a coup he plotted to oust then-president Nino Vieira failed. He went to Gambia, but after two years there, and weary of exile, he took advantage of the assassination of Vieira to return to his homeland. Leaving Gambia in a dugout canoe, he made his way through the waterways and forests of northern Guinea-Bissau and, having evaded numerous checkpoints (one of which snagged me a few days later as checkpoint guards were belatedly put on high alert), walked into the United Nations building in the capital and demanded refugee status. The national government was outraged, but the UN was obliged by its constitution to grant him asylum, and Bubo remained under its protection until a group of renegade soldiers took him under their “protection” a few months later and made him a figurehead in their own coup attempt.

While all this was going on, Bubo had been labelled a “drug kingpin” by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (a well-named agency if ever there was one), but had shrugged off the threat this posed to his business activities by saying he didn’t have enough money to open a bank account in the US. In October 2010, much to the chagrin of European Union officials who had been trying to stamp out the drug trade, he was reinstated as navy chief (Bubo always denied involvement in the trade, challenging his accusers to provide proof). more »

Being wrong, wrong wrong about migration: David Goodhart in the Guardian Claire Melamed4

Migration is a notoriously divisive issue. Maybe David Goodhart, writing in the Guardian last week, should be commended for trying to say something new on the subject. But alas, his attempt to marry fairly standard right-wing anti-immigrant views with pro-welfare liberalism results in an article that is, to put it kindly, a little confused. Others have written well about the fact that he’s wrong on the evidence about the impact of immigration on the UK, and about how immigration policy is made. But he also makes some wild assertions about migration and development, which is what I know about, so let me start there.

First, he attributes some pretty extraordinary views to people like me who work in development and live in the UK. Apparently we think that UK policy should be just as much about people in Burundi as people in Birmingham (loving that alliteration, David). But, oh dear, he then tells us that in the UK, the apparent home of this hotbed of internationalist liberalism, we spend 25 times more every year on the NHS than on development aid. And, er, that most people see this as a ‘perfectly natural reflection of our layered obligations’ although ‘to a true universalist it must seem like a crime’. Spot the straw man. I have been working among these strange ‘universalist’ creatures for nearly 15 years now, and I have never met anyone, not one single person, who would argue to cut the NHS budget to spend more on overseas aid.

Tempting to say that there is no argument here since the people to whom the article is addressed do not exist, and the point of view he is rebutting is not one that anyone actually holds. Tempting to stop right there. But let’s plough on. more »

Social Covenants: The Missing Ingredient in State Building Efforts Seth Kaplan-

Political theorists have for the most part focused on the state when thinking about how to make countries work better for their populations. This has naturally led to a concern with state-society relations, how governments are chosen and run, and institutions. There is wide consensus that social contracts play the central role in state building.

This thinking has heavily influenced how the international community approaches fragile states, post-conflict situations, and transitions as well as development in general. As the OECD/DAC explained in Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations:

Fragility arises primarily from weaknesses in the dynamic political process through which citizens’ expectations of the state and state expectations of citizens are reconciled and brought into equilibrium with the state’s capacity to deliver services. Reaching equilibrium in this negotiation over the social contract is the critical if not sole determinant of resilience, and disequilibrium the determinant of fragility. [page 7]

This focus on the state shapes responses to crises in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, compelling the international community to prioritize the establishment of a transitional regime and fast track elections under the belief that this is the sole way to create legitimacy no matter the circumstances or the context.

But many of these countries have deeply-entrenched problems that a focus on the state cannot solve. Different religious, ethnic, and clan groups do not work together well, and see any competition for power as a zero sum game for exclusive control of the state. Government is weakly institutionalized, and unable to act as an independent, equitable arbitrator between different interests. Judges and officials are beholden to personal relationships, power politics, or money (and sometimes all three). In such places, winners of elections rarely see it as their duty to serve all their people, and often define their rights as whatever they can get away with—negating whatever social contract the process was supposed to establish. more »

Annan on Syria: “we left it too late” to invade Richard Gowan1

Now why would David Miliband be leaving for New York? Alex Evans4

Honestly, the Westminster village can be so up itself in its sheer self-referentiality. More or less every piece I’ve read today on why David Miliband might have taken the job running the International Rescue Committee in New York has taken it as a given that his motivation must of course be rooted in Westminster factors, above all the “permanent pantomime” of his relationship with his brother Ed.

No doubt that will have been a factor, but it’s still astonishing that so little of today’s coverage stops to think about how Miliband’s decision might also have been influenced by a calculation about the politics of New York rather than Westminster.

Consider:

• Since 2007, the senior UN post that has been informally regarded as ‘belonging’ to Britain is that of… why, Under Secretary General (USG) for Humanitarian Affairs. (The current postholder is my former boss Valerie Amos; before her it was career FCO diplomat John Holmes.) When Ban Ki-moon and his team finish their term, in 2016, David Miliband will have impeccable credentials on emergency relief and foreign policy and management of international organisations.
• Britain also has a pretty strong claim to an alternative, more senior USG post - or even to an additional one. Until recently, Britain had two USG posts (the other being the low profile but important role of running Safety and Security). Prior to 2005, Britain had a 12 year track record of filling the crucial post of USG for Political Affairs - the UN’s equivalent of Foreign Secretary (so another post that Miliband would be obviously qualified to fill). And for a little while, we fielded the post of Deputy Secretary-General too, in the form of Mark Malloch Brown. Who knows what Britain might end up with in 2016 if the government decided to make a strong push. And on that note…
• …when these jobs come up again in 2016, there’s a substantial chance that the government taking the decision on who to nominate for which post will led by one… Ed Miliband. Even if the Conservatives were still in power after the next election, the widespread respect for David Miliband on all sides of the Commons and in the Foreign Office (including William Hague himself) would still give him a strong shot at nomination.

Obviously the domestic political context will have been a factor in his decision. But David Miliband is far too experienced a foreign policy operator not to be competely aware of all the points above. And remember that he’ll still be only be 51 when Ban Ki-moon’s administration wraps up…

10 things we missed or got wrong 5 years ago at the height of the credit crunch and food/fuel spike Alex Evans-

This summer will mark five years since 2008, the year of both the first flush of the global financial crisis, and of the peak of the combined food and fuel spike.

As David Steven and I have observed in various papers, the last decade was bookended by shocks – 9/11 at one end, and these two at the other. And while the resource spike and the credit crunch lacked the visual vividness of September 11, they were arguably just as significant in the way that they shook assumptions about the stability or direction of globalisation.

But it’s also intesting to look back now at that strange year, and reflect on how many of the initial fears, hopes and assumptions about the twin crises have been proved wrong with the benefit of five years’ hindsight – as well as various shifts that have taken place since 2008 that no-one foresaw at the time. Here are ten things that lots of us (well, I, anyway) got wrong or missed altogether back in 2008 – adapted from a futures presentation I gave to Oxfam last week.

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On inequality, let’s do the Palma (because the Gini is so last century) Andy Sumner-

There’s one measure of inequality that gets all the attention – the Gini index.

The Gini was developed in the early 1900s – in fact about 100 years ago – by Italian Statistician, Corrado Gini (see pic).

A century later it may be time for a rethink on measuring inequality.

Why?

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Is Britain the organised crime capital of Europe? Charlie Edwards-

Last summer Philip Stephens, the FT’s chief political commentator,  wrote the following

The High Court is witnessing an expensive legal battle between Oleg Deripaska and Michael Cherney. The two made fortunes in the wild west privatisation scramble after the fall of the Soviet Union. We have heard lurid tales of organised crime and extortion. Mr Cherney says Mr Deripaska owes him hundreds of millions of dollars. An estimated 60 per cent-plus of the case load of the High Court’s commercial division now comes from Russia and eastern Europe.

His point, and one made by many others in Westminster and Whitehall, is that ‘the capital is a constant reminder of how unequally the bounty of globalisation has been shared’. As London became the financial hub of the world so too did the city attract those from the shadows of globalisation. And boy, did they come… by the Home Office’s reckoning there are 38,000 individuals (across 6,000 groups) involved in organised crime that impacts on the UK.

With that in mind 2013 is the year the Government must act. The Home Secretary gets this. Home Officials talk about a new found determination to tackle organised crime. There are plenty of reasons why. Following the sucess of the Olympics, there is a quiet confidence among officials that while terroism remains a real and present  danger, assurance levels have never been higher. It means the Home Office can address a portfolio of risks – rather than focus solely on a single threat to the UK.

The following is from a piece I wrote for the RUSI website:

EUROPOL, a European Union Agency run by a Briton and heavily reliant on British intelligence, has published its annual Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (SOCTA). The assessment highlights the scale of the threat from organised crime to individuals, communities and businesses across Europe. Of particular concern to EUROPOL are ‘facilitated illegal immigration, trafficking in human beings, synthetic drugs and poly-drug trafficking, Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) fraud, the production and distribution of counterfeited goods, cybercrime and money laundering.’ These crimes, in EUROPOL’s view, require concerted action by EU member states – not least by the British Government.

You can read the rest of the article here

Can Obama bend it like Bono? Andy Sumner-

What do Obama and Bono have in common?

Both have proposed that the world should seek to end extreme poverty over the next twenty years or so.

Obama said so in his annual state of the union address (here) and Bono said the same (here) in an interesting and nuanced TED talk in Los Angeles.

Are they mad or deluded? Actually, no. Under certain conditions it is feasible (and the numbers by various economic growth and inequality scenarios are here).

The idea of an end to extreme poverty is part of a broader discussion on the next generation of UN global poverty goals. There’s plenty on the subject on Global Dashboard from Claire, David and Alex and others.

The current set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), will expire in 2015 (here’s a brief history).

The MDGs aimed to halve income poverty and hunger and to reduce other forms of poverty so the big question for the UN and others is what sort of global goals are after 2015? (assuming you think global goals are good which not all do).

To answer that question we need first to know a bit about progress towards the current – 2015 – goals.

Charles Kenny and I crunched the numbers back in 2011 and concluded, in short, that the goals had contributed in notably more aid for the poorest countries and faster progress on poverty reduction in some areas – notably heath related, MDGs, 4 and 6.

Of course, quite a lot of the progress would have happened even if there hadn’t been any global goals. It seems unlikely, for example, that the MDGs had much to do with China’s and India’s and other emerging economies’ incredible economic take-off.

Still, the first MDG, to cut in half the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, has probably been met (see World Bank analysis here), though some have their doubts (see here).

So, what might be feasible in terms of poverty reduction in the next, say 15-20 years?

One idea that has evolved is that the MDGs were about halving global poverty and reducing other aspects of poverty so the post-MDGs should be about ‘finishing the job’ – meaning ‘getting to zero poverty’, to echo a World Economic Forum report on the matter.

Here we conclude too that it is entirely feasible to get close to ending extreme poverty – as measured by the World Bank at $1.25 per person per day – by around 2030 or so – but under certain conditions which I’ll come to in a moment.

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No booze, no drugs, no fun: the UN today Richard Gowan-

This is your last drink for tonight, understand?

This was the week the UN stopped being fun.  To start with, the US is trying to stop diplomats turning up at budget debates drunk:

The U.S. ambassador for management and reform at the United Nations, Joseph Torsella, scolded his U.N. colleagues today for excessive drinking during delicate budget negotiations.

The unusual censure reflected lingering American frustration with its counterparts’ conduct in budget negotiations in December, which one U.N.-based diplomat compared to a circus.

“There has always been a good and responsible tradition of a bit of alcohol improving a negotiation, but we’re not talking about a delegate having a nip at the bar,” said the diplomat who recalled one G-77 diplomat fell sick from too much alcohol.

As the United States sought to rally support for a proposal to freeze U.N. staff pay in December, it found that key negotiating partners, particularly delegates from the Group of 77 developing countries, were not showing up for meetings. When they did arrive, they had often been drinking.

“As for the conduct of negotiations, we make the modest proposal that the negotiation rooms should in future be an inebriation-free zone,” Torsella said in a meeting of the U.N. membership’s budget committee, known as the Fifth Committee. “While my government is truly grateful for the strategic opportunities presented by some recent practices, lets save the champagne for toasting the successful end of the session, and do some credit to the Fifth Committee’s reputation in the process.”

Meanwhile UN officials have been going after weed…

A United Nations-based drug agency urged the United States government on Tuesday to challenge the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in Colorado and Washington, saying the state laws violate international drug treaties.

The International Narcotics Control Board made its appeal in an annual drug report. It called on Washington, D.C., to act to “ensure full compliance with the international drug control treaties on its entire territory.”

Wealth inequality in America Alex Evans-

Tony Blair Saves Africa! Mark Weston-

When I was young, naive and ignorant both of humanity’s complexity and my own limitations, I believed I would one day save the world. Once I reached adulthood, I thought, the willpower and abilities I possessed would be sufficient to wipe out poverty and put an end to conflict.

Then I grew up. I slowly realised that the world was not for saving, much less by one individual, and least of all by me. As I studied history, I realised too that the only people who still believed they could save the world having reached adulthood were dictators or madmen, and that their efforts always ended in failure.

It turns out, however, that I grew cynical too soon, and that in reality it is possible for one man to save the world, or at least a large part of it. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, believes that he has singlehandedly rescued Africa from poverty and underdevelopment. In an article on the Guardian website which must be either a push for a Nobel Prize or a pitch for a job at the UN or World Bank, he argues that all of the recent socio-economic improvements that have taken place in Africa resulted from his own focus on increasing international aid (he has nothing to say about the many African countries that have yet to see any improvement).

The beginning of Africa’s salvation, Blair claims, came at the Gleneagles G8 summit which Britain hosted in 2005. His role in the summit was crucial for Africa. As he reports:

Summits with genuine, long-lasting outcomes are rare. But as we started planning for the Gleneagles G8 meeting in 2005, I saw that it could be one of these rare ones – a summit about changing the world…

I decided to put Africa at the top of the agenda for Gleneagles…And it worked. Today, the positive legacy of that summit is still being felt across Africa: aid was doubled and developing world debt dropped.

Now an increase in aid is not, of course, an end in itself. Large quantities of aid given to Africa over the decades have been squandered on entrenching corrupt elites or padding the overseas bank accounts of dictators, with little impact on the quality of life of ordinary Africans. Gleneagles, however, not only increased the quantity of aid; it apparently dramatically increased its effectiveness. Here is Blair again:

I want to answer the aid sceptics – those who think aid doesn’t work or is all swallowed up in corruption. Look at the facts. In Africa since 2005, the rate of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen by 18%. The proportion of people in Africa living in extreme poverty is down by nearly 10%.

It is undeniable that the latter two sentences are facts, but Blair offers no evidence that they have anything to do with an increase in aid. That they might have had more to do with increased investment in and trade with Africa by China, remittances and ideas sent from the diaspora, high commodity prices, or anything Africans living in Africa might have done is a possibility Blair is either unaware of or, because it does not fit with his messianic self-image, has no interest in highlighting. He even takes the credit for foreign investment. He writes:

Africa is among the fastest-growing regions in the world. The Gleneagles agreement can claim some credit for this; bilateral aid for trade to sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled between 2005 and 2011. Foreign direct investment in the continent has increased by 87% in the past 10 years.

Again, no evidence is presented linking aid to fast growth – it is merely hoped that the juxtaposition of the two things will convince the unwary reader. Even Blair’s buddy Bob Geldof doesn’t have the chutzpah to attribute China’s growing influence in the continent to Gleneagles, admitting in an otherwise tub-thumping piece today (in which he refers to Africans as ‘the people you kept alive all those 30 years ago’ and to Africa’s success as ‘Blair’s lasting legacy’) that trade was not discussed at the Scottish summit. Blair, though, is in no doubt. ‘The last decade of development progress was defined by aid,’ he announces.

Blair does admit that despite his efforts Africa is not yet a utopia, and that improvements can still be made. Fortunately, he has the answers for these too. ‘After leaving office,’ he writes, ‘I set up the Africa Governance Initiative to continue my work on that forgotten half.’ The forgotten half refers to ‘the ability of governments in developing countries to get things done.’ In Blair’s world aid alone, or at least the aid he generated, has rescued Africa – the region’s governments have had nothing to do with it and like their people, who have thrived only since he decided to help them, can do little without his assistance.

Blair has one final piece of evidence, in case we remain unpersuaded that he is Africa’s saviour. ‘The very fact that people are still talking about Gleneagles eight years on shows that we were right to be ambitious, to change the debate.’ he writes. We will have to take his word for it that Gleneagles remains the talk of the town, and the argument that noise proves success is at least no flimsier than some of his other contentions. It’s certainly strong enough for the image-conscious Blair, who concludes his article by proclaiming that ‘the journey from Gleneagles to long-lasting development in Africa is not over [there was, it seems, no journey before the summit]. But Africa is on the move and if we keep going on the whole Gleneagles agenda…the continent will be transformed. So I’m proud to say that Gleneagles has turned out to be that rare thing – a summit that matters.’ If anywhere else in the world needs rescuing, they know who to call.

The Tories are going to spend the aid budget on helicopter gunships! Alex Evans-

Or so you might believe from your RSS feeds this morning. The Guardian, BBC, FT and others are all carrying the story that (as the Guardian has it), “David Cameron gives green light for aid cash to go on military”. Various NGO campaigners have predictably gone, well, ballistic.

But actually… both David Cameron’s actual remarks, and the background briefing subsequently given to the press, have stressed that all this would happen within existing rules on what counts as aid, i.e. the OECD DAC definition of ODA.

These rules are abundantly clear about what can and can’t count as ODA in the security and conflict domain. First and foremost, it counts as aid only if it’s “administered with the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective”.

This principle is applied in a pretty conservative way, too. The rules are explicit, for instance, that activities to combat terrorism are “not reportable as ODA, as they generally target perceived threats to donor, as much as to recipient countries”; given the effect on development of Boko Haram or AQIM in the Sahel, you could well argue that that’s actually too restrictive.

What about peacekeeping? Bottom line: some of it’s allowed, but not “the enforcement aspects”. The sort of stuff you can include from peacekeeping, on the other hand, is stuff like human rights, election monitoring, rehabilitation of demobilised soldiers, advice on economic stabilisation, or mine removal. In other words, the sort of stuff that DFID already funds loads of, and rightly so. Spending on “military services and equipment” is only allowed if it’s being used for humanitarian assistance or development services.

Against this backdrop, people taking to Twitter and the airwaves to denounce the diversion of aid from schools to soldiers have either not got their facts right, or are being disingenuous. (In fairness, the anonymous government spokesperson who’s been saying that “hundreds of millions” could be diverted from DFID to MOD is being disingenous too – it’s very, very hard to see how that much could be spent through MOD while keeping within ODA rules.)

So it’s a non-story, basically - and I’m not sure that development advocates are helping their case by being this easy to provoke into fury even when the facts don’t warrant it.