by David Steven | Mar 8, 2009 | Conflict and security
In Small Wars Journal, Sergeant Michael Hanson laments the weight of the equipment that a US marine carries to keep himself safe. 40 pounds of body armour, plus a pack that can weight twice as much again (at a total of 120 pounds or 54 kilos, that’s like lugging Jennifer Lopez around wherever you go).
The consequences are predictable:
This weight limits their speed, mobility, range, stamina, agility and all around fighting capability. They can’t go out far and they can’t stay out long with all of this gear. It is simply too much. Combat patrols are typically four hours, and even that short amount of time is exhausting. Our Marines are being consistently outrun and outmaneuvered by an enemy with an AK, an extra magazine and a pair of running shoes.
Sergent Hansen believe that the flight to security (“all the best equipment for our soldiers”) – ends up making soldiers less secure. You’ll find a similar sentiment in General Petraeus’s admirably concise counterinsurgency guidelines. Walk, is one of his directives. You can’t commute to this fight, is another.
But where does this leave civilian agencies? I doubt there is a single British or American embassy in the world that hasn’t seen dramatically increased security since 9/11. Many now resemble prisons.
Aid agencies, meanwhile, operate from fortified compounds in a growing number of countries, while the Iraq operations of some international NGOs are said to have hidden their use of armed guards from their own head offices. Both struggle against the prospect of an ‘armed humanitarianism.’
Petraeus calls on soldiers to live among the people, deepening their cultural understanding and ability to navigate informal networks, through prolonged and regular face-to-face contact. Diplomats, of course, need to do the same.
He advises them to “understand how local systems are supposed to work – including governance, basic services, maintenance of infrastructure, and the economy-and how they really work.” That’s the mission of development workers.
I am not trying to make a glib point here. Soldiers have the means to defend themselves (and to prevent the kidnaps that, once amplified by the media, can be strategic game changers). Diplomats and aid workers do not.
But how can civilian agencies deepen engagement with populations, while responding to growing insecurity? And what will they do if they find that – like the overloaded marine – security measures are eroding their ability to do their job?
by Alex Evans | Mar 4, 2009 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard
The Economist has a piece on its website today bemoaning the effect of the credit crunch on aid flows:
It is unclear how aid flows are responding to the slowdown but the most recent data (which predate the crisis) hardly encourages hopes of a substantial expansion. Aid from OECD countries fell between 2006 and 2007, partly because of an exceptionally high level of debt relief in 2006. Disregarding this one-off effect, aid only crept up by 2% in 2007. And as a new report from the OECD points out, a 1970 United Nations target for aid of 0.7% of rich-country GDP remains a distant dream. Only Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have reached this target. The average contribution is 0.45% of GDP.
And this sum was calculated before donor countries were hit by an economic crisis that has shifted priorities dramatically. Moreover, the size of the overall pot in rich countries will shrink as economies contract. Maintaining current levels of aid implies the unlikely earmarking of an even greater share of GDP.
Ah, the target of giving 0.7% of GNI to development assistance: bow your heads in reverence. But hang on a minute. Why are we all paying so much attention to a target that’s (a) not based on any assessment of how much money is needed to achieve any defined set of objectives, and (b) nearly forty years old?
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by Alex Evans | Feb 9, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, North America
One debate that will run and run in the coming months is on the whether, why and how of reforming US foreign assistance – a theme that Barack Obama riffed on frequently during the course of the Presidential campaign.
Over at the Center for Global Development, Sheila Herrling has just posted a Q&A on reforming the antiquated 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which created USAID in the first place. As Herrling observes, the Act has only been overhauled fully on one occasion – and that was back in 1985. So what should reform achieve? According to Herrling, a new act should:
– clearly outline the objectives and priorities of U.S. foreign assistance programs;
– consolidate decision making and implementation functions into a single independent institutional entity;
– specify the roles and responsibilities of other government agencies where appropriate;
– clarify the coordination of oversight responsibilities and functions; adjust regulatory requirements to fit the reality of implementing assistance programs; and
– discourage to the highest degree possible political and bureaucratic constraints (such as earmarks and presidential initiatives).
However, the really big question lurking in the background is whether USAID should be hived off and made into a separate department, a la DFID in the UK: expect plenty of speculation and debate about this over the course of the spring. Me, I’m not holding my breath – for two formidable obstacles stand between here and USDFID.
One: the fact that Obama can’t just create a new department with a stroke of the pen. In the US, machinery of government changes of that magnitude need Congressional approval (many would argue that the only reason the Department for Homeland Security came into being was the determined campaign run by the 9/11 families for just this outcome).
Two: the even more challenging hurdle of one Ms Hillary Clinton. Hillary made plenty clear as soon as she arrived at State that she sees development as one of the core pillars of foreign policy. It’s very unlikely that she’d see such a significant part of her empire slip through her fingers…
by Jules Evans | Jan 28, 2009 | Africa, Economics and development
We recently published an interview with the CEO of Actis, Paul Fletcher, in www.emeafinance.com. Actis is the emerging market private equity fund which was created in 2004 when DFID, the department for international development, privatised CDC and sold its private equity arm to the then-managers of CDC, led by Fletcher.
I thought it was quite a balanced piece, but I just got a call from them saying they no longer consider our magazine friendly and will neither cooperate or advertise with us.
Some people are so touchy. All I did was quote a report published by the National Audit Office in December, which revealed that Actis had made around £130mn in fees and carry from 2004 to 2007, purely from its main investor, DFID.
And the managers of Actis only paid £363,000 to the government when the fund was privatised from DFID in 2004. That’s a percentage growth of 30,000% in three years. Not bad!
I would have celebrated that if I was Actis. What an eye for a bargain they possess. But no, they seem to want to hide this fact from the public. Why? Just modest I guess.
by Alex Evans | Jan 25, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, UK
Over the past few weeks the UK government has been organising an extensive series of horizon scanning events to feed into the current revision of the National Security Strategy. In all, some 24 workshops have been held on the full range of foreign policy issues; various other events have also been held, including the Wilton Park conference I mentioned a couple of weeks back.
Having been to a few of these events, I must admit to being less than convinced that the sessions are really breaking out of the comfortable groupthink that can so easily characterise futures work. Like Charlie, I’m starting to feeling a sense of deja vu each time I attend an awayday or brainstorming session that concludes that emerging economies are, well, emerging; that resources are becoming more scarce; that everything’s interconnected; and so on.
I can see the utility of futures work that focuses on a pretty specific area – prospects for the pharmaceutical sector, say, or the future of UN peacekeeping – but I suspect that very big picture horizon scanning is only really helpful at this stage if it yields up insights or possibilities that are being ignored or overlooked.
For me, the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy undermines their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing (viz. climate change, organised crime, economic meltdown, terrorism, energy scarcity – you know, the usual list).
Normally, when we think about state fragility we assume that we’re talking about the Lebanons, Somalias and Guinea-Bissaus of the world. But as people who work in the counter-insurgency sphere have been pointing out for some time, the problem of erosion of state capacity is a whole lot more widespread than that. (more…)
