“The undeclared war on Pakistan”

by | Jan 3, 2009 | Conflict and security, Global Dashboard, South Asia, UK

With just over a couple of weeks to the inauguration, it’s finally sinking in: Barack Obama’s Presidency is going to imply some pretty fundamental changes to the global war on terror. Serious thinking on how to dismantle Guantanamo is well underway – as is discussion about which of America’s allies will be willing to welcome its detainees (Australia and Britain both profess reluctance; Portugal, on the other hand, looks well on course for a special relationship with the new Administration).  A sea change on torture and rendition also appears to be a racing certainty.

In Iraq, too, massive changes are underway.  As well as the rich symbolism of the sock and awe incident, there’s now also yesterday’s more tangible proof of how far things have moved on: the Iraqi government has assumed control of the Green Zone. 

Now, pause to wonder: are these changes likely to have a significant impact on the capacity of radical Islamist groups to recruit and retain committed volunteers – whether in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia or wherever?  After all, Guantanamo, torture, rendition and Iraq surely represented four of the principal sources of the sense of grievance so essential to effective radicalisation.  Does that mean the outlook on counter-terrorism is finally brightening?

One possible reason why not, of course, has to do with Gaza.  Olmert’s rationale for Israel’s attacks is not hard to discern – Hamas ended its ceasefire, there’s an election in February, he wanted to rebuild Israel’s credibility after the 2006 debacle in Lebanon, there was only a brief window of opportunity before Obama’s inauguration.  But even so, the fact that Israel’s attacks have so far killed 436 Palestinians (compared to 172 dead in Mumbai) will clearly fuel a sense of outrage among many – including this blogger – and will provide a powerful recruiting sergeant for Islamist groups everywhere.

But another answer to the question of sources of grievance after Bush can be found by taking a stroll down my local high street, in a part of East London that has one of the highest proportions of Muslims in the capital.

Today, the activist posters you see on lamposts and on the walls of the shops selling mobile phone skins and international calling cards have one key message: end the undeclared war on Pakistan.  If you visit Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website, meanwhile, you find that just beneath the coverage of Gaza from the last fortnight, it’s Pakistan that’s the focus of attention and grievance – a point made even clearer by this youtube video of theirs from the start of December.

[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uI47aQVLoq0]

You might think it odd that Islamist opinion in the UK should be focusing on a relatively small number of drone attacks in Pakistan when a major troop surge is about to take place over the border in Afghanistan. But think again, and you realise that of course it makes eminent sense for Hizb ut-Tahrir to focus on the grievance of most direct relevance to Britain’s large diaspora community – and to weave political Islamism into long-standing fears about Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House represents a welcome turning point on many components of the ‘war on terror’.  But the evolving situation in Pakistan (on which Obama is hawkish, remember) may well represent another – especially here in the UK.  If Obama steps up US attacks on Pakistan’s border areas, then many British Muslims will doubtless listen to what Gordon Brown has to say about it with keen interest…

Ten foreign policy predictions for 2009*

by | Dec 29, 2008 | Global Dashboard, Global system

  1. Mexico: The world’s leading narco state will, unnoticed, dissolve into total chaos destabilising the surrounding region.
  2. Middle East: February elections in Israel will see Binyamin Netanyahu being voted in while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be voted out in Iranian elections in June.
  3. Asia: H5N1 will return with a vengeance.
  4. Bosnia: A growing culture clash between conservative Islam and the country’s avowed secularism will result in an increase in violence in the country.
  5. Africa: Robert Mugabe will be assassinated.
  6. UK: There will be no election in 2009.
  7. Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will abandon further attempts to join the European Union and instead turn East and focus on regional diplomacy.
  8. Iraq: Elections will be relatively peaceful in much of the country.
  9. Somalia: The US or France will be drawn into a short, intense ground war in the South West of the country.
  10. Afghanistan: In May Britain will increase the number of troops in the country. In October a European deal with the Obama administration will see France, Germany and Italy do the same.

* I will happily blog when these predictions are proven wrong.

Top 10 books of 2008

by | Dec 28, 2008 | Influence and networks, Off topic

My top 10 books of 2008 are an eclectic mix of insightful analysis, counter-intuitive reasoning, master story-telling, and solutioneering. Some brilliant books were published in 2008, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers just gets squeezed out but is still recommended reading. Below, in no particular order, are my top 10.

  1. Fixing Failed States, A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart. Thousands of people can say that they have helped rebuild failing states, only a dozen or so can say they have then written about their own experiences and the experiences of other countries in lucid prose. But Fixing Failed States is not on my list solely for this reason. It’s really here because it’s the only persuasive critique of the ill-conceived, incoherent aid complex run by the U.N. and other agencies, which regularly undermines and supersedes weak states instead of stabilizing them.
  2. The Unthinkable, Who survives when disaster strikes – and why, Amanda Ripley. Fascinating and engrossing this book is a tour de force. Its gut-wrenching stories span the full spectrum of action under duress, from panic to heroism. Amanda Ripley has sifted through amazing tales of survivors from other disasters and mined various sociological, psychological, and neurological studies. Her insights are fascinating. Brilliant.
  3. The Forever War, Dispatches from the War on Terror, Dexter Filkins. To call Dexter a frontline reporter would be to diminish his work; for the most part he was not embedded in the U.S. Army — dangerous as that was – but rather embedded in both Iraq and the United States. He went out to the villages and to the countryside, talking to tribal leaders, village elders, and all the men and women (and children) he could engage. Unlike the stud scuds of the first conflict with Iraq, secure in their rear echelon hotels, and unlike the pundits and theorists, ensconced in their Washington think tanks, Filkins learned everything he has to tell us about the wars and occupations in these lands from firsthand experience. It is, quite simply, an awesome book.
  4. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky. This book will undoubtedly be a classic in years to come. It’s well researched, beautifully written and as Cory Doctorow suggests: “Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet– not only is he smart and articulate, but he’s one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I’ve been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that’s how it all works.”
  5. Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein. The story goes that Thaler and Sunstein were having lunch with their publisher when the choice of the title came up in conversation. Originally the authors wanted to call it Liberterian Paternalism, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Unsurprisingly that mouthful didn’t go down well with the publisher who suggested that individuals often just need a nudge in the right direction. The rest, as they say is history.
  6. Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, Dan Ariely. At the heart of the market approach to understanding people is a set of assumptions. First, you are a coherent and unitary self. Second, you can be sure of what this self of yours wants and needs, and can predict what it will do. Third, you get some information about yourself from your body. Standard economics, Ariely writes, assumes that all of us know all the pertinent information about our decisions and we can calculate the value of the different options we face. What the past few decades of work in psychology, sociology and economics has shown, as he describes, is that all three of these assumptions are false.
  7. McMafia, Crime Without Frontiers, Misha Glenny. This is an encompassing and wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labour smugglers, Misha makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fuelled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West.
  8. The Atlas of the Real World, Mapping The Way We Live; Danny Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford. Created by three of the team behind the renowned website worldmapper.org this is a gem of book. Open this book on any page and you’ll learn something you never knew about the world – for example in an analysis of water resources, the rainforests of South America, with 30 per cent of the world’s fresh water, make the continent balloon whereas Kuwait – dependent on desalinated sea water – completely disappears from the map.
  9. Understanding Somalia and Somaliland, Ioan Lewis. This is a beautiful book and should be required reading for diplomats, journalists and NGO workers. Gerald Prunier neatly captures Lewis’ assessment of the country: Somalia is a walking and moving exception to many rules about the nation-state and that trying to deal with it in ‘usual’ fashion not only does not help but on the contrary tends to compound the problems.’
  10. Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon. Many people won’t have heard of Homicide, a fascinating account of criminality in Baltimore that won the 1992 Edgar Award winner for best fact crime, but readers of Global Dashboard will be familiar with David Simon’s most recent effort, the HBO series The Wire. Need I say more?

What concurrency?

by | Dec 10, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK

In a letter to Robert Gates, cleverly disguised as an op-ed in The Times, soldier-author Allan Mallinson asks a very simple question: “Why, for example, are we so overstretched keeping 8,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan out of an Army of 100,000?”

It is a very good question, the answer to which lies in the MoD’s “concurrency assumptions”, the assumptions military planners use to foresee the required structure, size and capability of the armed forces. In Delivering Security in a Changing World Future Capabilities, the MoD estimated that Britain could mount “as a norm, and without creating overstretch”:

  • an enduring Medium Scale operation; simultaneously with
  • an enduring Small Scale operation; and
  • a one-off Small Scale intervention operation

It went on to say that the government reforms would allow a reconfiguration of the armed forces so they could rapidly carry out:

  • the enduring Medium Scale operation; and
  • an enduring Small Scale operation; simultaneously with
  • a limited duration Medium Scale intervention operation.

And given time to prepare, British armed forces should be capable of undertaking:

  • a demanding one-off Large Scale operation; while still maintaining a commitment to
  • a simple Small Scale peace support operation.

The first problem with all these assumptions is that they were based on a notion of a time-limited engagement i.e. getting the troops in and then out quickly. But it has not turned out this way. Both Operation Telic (Iraq) and Operation Herrick (Afghanistan) turned into enduring medium-size operations (and latterly one medium, and one small), which the armed forces struggled to sustain.

This begs the question: if the MoD cannot manage two enduring medium-size operations can it handle an enduring Medium Scale operation, an enduring Small Scale operation and a limited duration Medium Scale intervention operation all the same time, as the White Paper suggested? If the answer is negative, Britain either needs to drastically adjust its ambitions downwards or the armed forces need to grow dramatically.