Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change

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OPINION

Western policies seem more interested in carbon-dioxide levels than in life expectancy.

By 

CALEB S. ROSSITER

Updated May 4, 2014

Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.

But that is the opposite of what's desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.

I've spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for "friendly" dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial.

A boy stands in front of wind turbines at the Ashegoda Wind Farm, near a village in Mekelle, Tigray, 780 km (485 miles) north of Addis Ababa October 25, 2013. Reuters

But I oppose my allies' well-meaning campaign for "climate justice." More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay "reparations" to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls "climate aggression." And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.

The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that "even if the mercury weren't rising" we should bring "the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner." He sees the "climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction."

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Rethinking Property in the Digital Era

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on May 5, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/rethinking-property-the-digital-era-10388

May 5, 2014 

Jennifer McArdle

In the seventeenth century, political philosopher [3]James Harrington [3] noted that the determining element of power in preindustrial England was the ownership of land. James Madison, arguably the father of the U.S. Constitution and an admirer of Harrington, later summed up his views in an aphorism—“power follows property.” 

‘Data’ has emerged as the twenty-first century ‘land’, the new form of power. Big data, and in particular, personal big data—the zeros and ones, that, when combined, can reveal unique information about individuals—has already begun to demonstrate its transformative potential. As data begins to reveal more about individuals, its value and impact on those individuals will increase. Conceptions of property must expand from the physical to the virtual to meet twenty-first century realities. Data should be viewed as a form of property. 

The Ramifications of Personal Big Data 

Global digital data is doubling yearly, and individual consumers create the majority of that data, producing, in essence, digital footprints. These individual consumer digital footprints—downloads, e-mails, ‘likes’, cell-phone location readings, clicks, and purchases—are just the beginning. People are becoming increasingly socialized into sharing more personal information. The [4]Quantified Self [4] movement aims to measure all aspects of our lives with technology, and the new wave of wristbands, like Sony’s SmartBand, are increasingly helping to facilitate that. On their own, personalized bits of data are not particularly useful, and only appear to provide relatively esoteric indicators of a particular individual. Big data, however, by fusing flows of information with insights derived from behavioral science, now allows advertisers, search engines, and social media platforms to try and [5]predict and model human behavior [5]. 

While our personalized big data can help facilitate healthier living, [6]smarter cities [6], and increasing web simplification through personalization, there is also a darker underbelly to the accumulation of this information. In a recently released report by the [7]World Privacy Forum [7], Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman note that data brokers, analytical firms, and retailers, are using personal data to create hundreds of inaccessible consumer scores, ranking individuals on the basis of their perceived health risk, likelihood they will keep their job, and their supposed propensity to commit fraud. Perhaps more importantly, last week the Obama administration released the findings of their ‘Big data and Privacy working group [8],’ noting that big data analytics can “lead to discriminatory outcomes and circumvent longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment, credit, and the consumer marketplace.” These secret consumer scores and profiles can cast an indelible stain on individuals, and have the potential to become sources of classification, profiling, and discrimination. 

Inside The Secret Digital Arms Race: Facing the Threat of a Global Cyberwar

Steve Ranger

Apr 24, 2014 -- The team was badly spooked, that much was clear. The bank was already reeling from two attacks on its systems, strikes that had brought it to a standstill and forced the cancellation of a high profile IPO. 

The board had called in the team of security experts to brief them on the developing crisis. After listening to some of the mass of technical detail, the bank's CEO cut to the chase. "What should I tell the Prime Minister when I get to Cobra?" he demanded, a reference to the emergency committee the government had set up as it scrambled to respond to what was looking increasingly like a coordinated cyberattack. The security analysts hesitated, shifting in their seats, fearing this was the beginning, not the end, of the offensive. "We think this could just be a smokescreen," one said, finally. And it was. 

Before the end of next day, the attack had spread from banks to transport and utilities, culminating in an attack on a nuclear power station. The mounting horror of the analysts, the outrage and lack of understanding from the execs was all disturbingly authentic, but fortunately, none of it was real. 

The scene formed part of a wargame, albeit one designed by the UK's GCHQ surveillance agency among others to attract new recruits into the field of cybersecurity. As I watched the scenario progress (hosted in a World War II bunker under London for added drama) it was hard not to get just as caught up in the unfolding events as the competition finalists played the security analysts tasked with fighting the attack, and real industry executives took the role of the bank's management, if only because these sorts of scenarios are now increasingly plausible. And it's not just mad criminal geniuses planning these sorts of digital doomsday attacks either. After years on the defensive, governments are building their own offensive capabilities to deliver attacks just like this against their enemies. It's all part of a secret, hidden arms race, where countries spend billions of dollars to create new armies and stockpiles of digital weapons. This new type of warfare is incredibly complex and its consequences are little understood. Could this secret digital arms race make real-world confrontations more likely, not less? Have we replaced the cold war with the coders' war?

Even the experts are surprised by how fast the online threats have developed. As Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security company F-Secure, said a conference recently, "If someone would have told me ten years ago that by 2014 it would be commonplace for democratic western governments to develop and deploy malware against other democratic western governments, that would have sounded like science fiction. It would have sounded like a movie plot, but that's where we are today."

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists

http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/big-snoop

Stuart Taylor, Jr.

April 29, 2014

When Edward Snowden hit the send button on a laptop in Hong Kong last June, just shy of his 30th birthday, he became the poster boy for an acutely American conundrum: the tension between the government's constitutional commitment to the privacy of individuals and its responsibility for the safety of the nation.

A precocious computer whiz, Snowden had worked on network security for the Central Intelligence Agency before becoming a systems administrator on contract to the National Security Agency. In both capacities, he had pledged not to divulge state secrets. He had also taken an oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The Chinese government's decision to let him pause in Hong Kong while fleeing arrest, and the Kremlin's grant of asylum, complete with Russian President Vladimir Putin's endorsement of Snowden's "honor," guaranteed that he would be condemned as a traitor in the United States.

WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR

But vilification was by no means universal. Across the political spectrum, from the Tea Party to human rights organizations on the left, there is wariness of unwarranted government intrusion into citizens' private lives. In an interview in Hong Kong en route to Moscow, Snowden played to that deep strain in the U.S. body politic. He characterized himself as a patriot and whistleblower, bent on saving his country from becoming an Orwellian security state.

That conceit resonated with some back home. Five months later, on the eve of Thanksgiving, a civil libertarian group called the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund bought space for a giant ad on the sides of Washington, D.C. buses. Its message: "Thank You Edward Snowden." Just before Christmas, Snowden gave The Washington Post a 14-hour interview that boiled down to "You're welcome." A number of year-end summaries of 2013 proclaimed the dawn of "the Snowden Era." Snowden's current whereabouts are unknown.

Pew Research

The Russians and the Chinese — who, like the United States, are superpowers in the realm of cyberhacking, cyberwarfare, and every other form of eavesdropping — have barely masked their schadenfreude.

With the approach of the first anniversary of the most copious and sensational leakage of intelligence secrets in history, the consequences of his actions continue to reverberate. In addition to evidence that the NSA had been collecting and storing some of the phone records of most Americans as well as the emails and other private Internet correspondence of many citizens, Snowden revealed that the agency has the ability — and indeed the practice — of listening in on phone conversations of foreign officials, most notoriously (but no longer) Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany.

Will Silicon Valley Get Off As Easy As NSA As White House Seeks to Shift Surveillance Debate Away From the Spies

May 3, 2014

In Surveillance Debate, White House Turns Its Focus to Silicon Valley

David E. Sanger

New York Times

Adm. Michael Rogers, tapped by President Obama to head the National Security Agency, which could gain access to more data. Credit Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — Nearly a year after the first disclosures about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices at home and abroad, the agency is emerging with mandates to make only modest changes: some new limits on what kind of data about Americans it can hold, and White House oversight of which foreign leaders’ cellphones it can tap and when it can conduct cyberoperations against adversaries.

The big question now is whether Silicon Valley will get off as easily. It was the subject of a new White House report about how technology and the crunching of big data about the lives of Americans — from which websites they visit to where they drive their newly networked cars — are enlarging the problem.

At their core, the questions about the N.S.A. are strikingly similar to those about how Google, Yahoo, Facebook and thousands of application makers crunch their numbers. The difference is over the question of how far the government will go to restrain the growth of its own post-Sept. 11 abilities, and whether it will decide the time has come to intrude on what private industry collects, in the name of protecting privacy or preventing new forms of discrimination.

President Obama alluded to that at the White House on Friday, when he was forced to take up the issue at a news conference with one of the N.S.A.’s most prominent targets: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who said she was still not satisfied with America’s responses to the revelations that her phone — and her country — were under blanket surveillance for a dozen years.

“The United States historically has been concerned about privacy,” Mr. Obama said, trying to seize some high ground in the debate. His string of assurances along that line rang a bit hollow last year, as the administration reacted to each disclosure by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, with assurances that the programs were among the most closely monitored in the intelligence world, and that they were necessary to protect the country.

But by January, Mr. Obama had arrived in a different place. After approving, for five years, a government program to collect telephone metadata — the information about telephone numbers dialed and the duration of calls — he acceded to recommendations to leave that information in the hands of telecommunications companies. Quietly, the White House ended the wiretapping of dozens of foreign leaders.

Now, by expanding the debate to what America’s digital titans collect, Mr. Obama gains a few political advantages. He is hoping to reinvigorate legislative proposals that went nowhere in his first term. And now that the revelations about the N.S.A. have tapered off, at least for a while, his aides seem to sense that Americans are at least as concerned about the information they entrust to Google and Yahoo.

The Rhyme of History

Published 12/14/2013

http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/rhyme-of-history

Earlier this year I was on holiday in Corsica and happened to wander into the church of a tiny hamlet in the hills where I found a memorial to the dead from World War I. Out of a population that can have been no more than 150, eight young men, bearing among them only three last names, had died in that conflict. Such lists can be found all over Europe, in great cities and in small villages. Similar memorials are spread around the globe, for the Great War, as it was known prior to 1940, also drew soldiers from Asia, Africa, and North America.

… if we can see past our blinders and take note of the telling parallels between then and now, the ways in which our world resembles that of a hundred years ago, history does give us valuable warnings.

World War I still haunts us, partly because of the sheer scale of the carnage—10 million combatants killed and many more wounded. Countless civilians lost their lives, too, whether through military action, starvation, or disease. Whole empires were destroyed and societies brutalized.

But there’s another reason the war continues to haunt us: we still cannot agree why it happened. Was it caused by the overweening ambitions of some of the men in power at the time? Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers, for example, wanted a greater Germany with a global reach, so they challenged the naval supremacy of Great Britain. Or does the explanation lie in competing ideologies? National rivalries? Or in the sheer and seemingly unstoppable momentum of militarism? As an arms race accelerated, generals and admirals made plans that became ever more aggressive as well as rigid. Did that make an explosion inevitable?

July 1916: During the Battle of the Somme, British soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment occupy a German trench near Ovillers-la-Boisselle in northern France. 

Wikimedia Commons/Imperial War Museum

Or would it never have happened had a random event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater not lit the fuse? In the second year of the conflagration that engulfed most of Europe a bitter joke made the rounds: “Have you seen today’s headline? ‘Archduke Found Alive: War a Mistake.’” That is the most dispiriting explanation of all—that the war was simply a blunder that could have been avoided.

June 28, 1914: Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip is captured in Sarajevo after assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, along with his wife, Sophie.

Wikimedia Commons

The search for explanations began almost as soon as the guns opened fire in the summer of 1914 and has never stopped. Scholars have combed through archives from Belgrade to Berlin looking for the causes. An estimated 32,000 articles, treatises, and books on World War I have been published in English alone. So when a British publisher took me out to lunch on a lovely spring day in Oxford five years ago and asked me if I would like to try my hand at one of history’s greatest puzzles, my first reaction was a firm no. Yet afterward I could not stop thinking about this question that has haunted so many. In the end I succumbed. The result is yet another book, my own effort to understand what happened a century ago and why.

It was not just academic curiosity that drove me, but a sense of urgency as well. If we cannot determine how one of the most momentous conflicts in history happened, how can we hope to avoid another such catastrophe in the future?

Just look at the actual and potential conflicts that dominate the news today. The Middle East, made up largely of countries that received their present borders as a consequence of World War I, is but one of many areas around the globe that is in turmoil, and has been for decades. Now there’s a civil war in Syria, which has raised the spectre of a wider conflict in the region while also troubling relations among the major powers and testing their diplomatic skills. The Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of poison gas—a weapon first deployed in the trench warfare of 1914, then outlawed because world opinion viewed it as barbaric—nearly precipitated American airstrikes. Commentary on these developments was filled with references to the guns of that long-ago August. Just as policymakers then discovered they had started something they could not stop, so this past summer we feared that such airstrikes might lead to a wider and more long-lasting conflict than anyone in President Barack Obama’s administration could foresee.

How Did the Israeli Air Force Get Hold of An Iraqi MiG-21?

April 29, 2014

How the Israelis got their hands on an Iraqi Mig-21 Fishbed

The Aviationist

Built in more than 11,000 examples and acquired by countless countries around the globe, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 was introduced in several Arab arsenals in the early 1960s, becoming the most modern among the Soviet jets flown in the Middle East in that period.

After it entered the active service, Israelis feared that the Fishbed was superior to the Mirage III fighter jets hence they needed as much details about it as possible to assess its capabilities since any information about this new fighter could give to the Israeli Air Force aircrews an edge over the enemy pilots in combat.

Therefore, the IAF made it clear to Israeli national intelligence agencies that it needed detailed information on the MiG-21 and, preferably, an example to test.

The interesting story of how the IAF was able to procure a MiG-21 is reported in Bill Norton book “Air War on the Edge, A History of the Israel Air Force and its aircraft since 1947.”

According to Norton, Captain Munir Radfa, an Iraqi MiG-21 pilot, was convinced to fly his Fishbed to Israel, with the promise that his family would be brought out from Iraq and that he would be paid $ 300,000 to re-establish himself in Israel.

After the transfer of his family initiated, Captain Radfa waited to be assigned a long range training sortie over the western desert during which he would try to reach Israel.

On Aug. 16, 1966, while flying in aircraft 534, a MiG-21F-13 Fishbed-C with a full load of fuel, Radfa broke away from his formation and made his way to Israel.

The MiG-21 flew across Jordan and entered Israeli airspace just south of the Dead Sea thanks to a flight path provided by the Israelis that would have avoided his detection by Jordanian radar stations.

As described by Norton, two Jordanian Hunters pursued the MiG, but the Fishbed flew at high speed at an altitude of about 30,000 ft, making the intercept impossible. Moreover the flight path of the MiG-21 to enter Israel was chosen far from populated areas, allowing the shooting down of the Iraqi fighter in case of false defection.

The Power of Discourse

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-power-of-discourse

by Angela Karrasch and Heather Gunther

Journal Article | May 2, 2014

The Power of Discourse

Angela Karrasch and Heather Gunther

Organizations exist only as far as their members create them through discourse....it is the principle means by which members create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are. - Mumby and Clair, 1997

Col. Gordon “Skip” Davis sat at the conference table in the dusty operations center in Afghanistan and paged through his notes. It was June 2008 and surrounding him were the over-caffeinated members of the combined joint planning team representing the Commander, International Security Assistance Forces (COMISAF). They were eager to meet and greet their inter-agency and inter-governmental partners in the effort and had worked hard to prepare for the engagement. While Col. Davis had already met the representatives from the United Nations (UN) and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA), his team wanted to make a good impression by sharing their initial mission analysis. Col. Davis allowed them to brief with the caveat that the ISAF planners would seek input from the others.

As the final slide clicked into the frame it was evident that the tone of the briefing did not communicate their collaboration. A chilled quiet settled in the room. Before the silence stretched from pensive to awkward, Col. Davis turned toward the Head of the Policy and Planning Unit, to ask for her thoughts. She stood up and said something to the effect, "Why do you need our thoughts? Looks like you have it all figured out." She walked out and all the UN and GIRoA reps followed. What Col. Davis’ team had done, confirmed later in the weeks it took to rearrange another meeting, was give the impression they weren't serious in conducting integrated planning as they had not discussed the mission together from the start.

Deciding to work more with partners and be more inclusive in our decision making is a step forward, but will not be enough. Although we interact with others in conversation every day, we aren’t very good at serious discourse, especially in groups with diverse membership. Effective discourse can have very real and significant influence on military decisions and is a key to better group decision making. This article makes the case that if more and more decisions are made by groups, we will need better discourse skills.

Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy

Reports and Papers

Chatham House Report

Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas and Sasan Aghlani, April 2014

Download paper here

Nuclear weapons have not been detonated in violent conflict since 1945. The decades since then are commonly perceived – particularly in those countries that possess nuclear weapons – as an era of successful nuclear non-use and a vindication of the framework of nuclear deterrence. In this narrative, the fear of massive retaliation and a shared understanding and set of behaviours are believed to have prevented the use of nuclear weapons. Yet the decades since 1945 have been punctuated by a series of disturbing close calls. Evidence from many declassified documents, testimonies and interviews suggests that the world has, indeed, been lucky, given the number of instances in which nuclear weapons were nearly used inadvertently as a result of miscalculation or error.

A shared belief in nuclear deterrence is not the only plausible explanation for this avoidance of nuclear war. Rather, individual decision-making, often in disobedience of protocol and political guidance, has on several occasions saved the day. Whereas the popularized image of the ‘Moscow–Washington hotline’ gives the illusion that vital communication in times of crisis is possible, these incidents reveal the reality that those who possess nuclear weapons will continue to be distrustful of one another and remain reliant on data transmitted by systems that are vulnerable to error or misjudgment, particularly when leaders have to respond too quickly to be able to make fully informed decisions.

Historical cases of near nuclear use resulting from misunderstanding demonstrate the importance of the ‘human judgment factor’ in nuclear decision-making. In addition to cases from the Cold War, recent incidents, such as the 2009 collision of French and UK submarines, along with cases of misconduct in the US Air Force revealed in 2013, suggest cause for concern regarding current laxity in safety and security measures and in command and control. Incidents similar to those that have happened in the past are likely to happen in the future. A study of cases of near nuclear use can thus address a number of important questions. What chain of events led to these incidents, and what prevented nuclear weapons from being used? How might past instances improve assessment of contemporary risks? When and how have measures taken in order to prevent inadvertent use failed? What additional measures can be taken now?

It's Not All Russia's Fault

The crisis in eastern Ukraine is far from over.

On Monday, the moderate mayor of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, was shot while riding his bicycle. Pro-Russian separatists have seized another government building in the region, and some are holding hostage a group of European military observers. The United States, convinced the chaos is all being driven by Moscow, slapped new sanctions on top Russian officials Monday, and the Europeans will probably go along.

To understand what’s driving this crisis, though, it’s necessary to look at the region the way its residents see it, not just the way it appears to the outside world.

The dominant Western narrative is all too familiar: It’s good guys vs. bad guys. Russian aggression against Ukraine and covert backing for separatist groups are the main sources of conflict, creating a very real danger that southeastern Ukraine may soon erupt into full-scale war or split off and join Russia. Throw in the kidnappings of journalists, targeted killings of local politicians and residents and renewed Ukrainian military operations against the separatists, and the whole region appears to be in flames—and it’s all Moscow’s doing. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry put it over the weekend, the Kremlin is behind the “distraction, deception and destabilization” in eastern Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the real story is much more complicated, and it has as much to do with the murky nature of Ukrainian politics as it does with Russia’s blatant meddling. On one level, the clashes in eastern Ukraine are just the latest battle between the country’s powerful and fractious oligarchs, for whom business interests—not the fate of Ukraine—are always priority number one.

By JON RALSTON 

IN THE ARENA

When Piketty Came to America

By ANDREA LEVERE and EZRA LEVIN 

IN THE ARENA

America’s Housing Market Is Broken

By GENE B. SPERLING 

The good news is that the separatists are actually quite isolated, according to recent accounts by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine. Even Kerry, despite his stern rhetoric, has indicated that fewer than 30 buildings have been occupied. And a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that the majority of southeastern Ukraine’s residents do not favor joining Russia; 70 percent want to remain in Ukraine, and only 15 percent support secession; 60 percent do not approve of armed separatists seizing government buildings.

There is no doubt that Russia has been trying to destabilize Ukraine in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and that both sides could yet tumble into full-scale military conflict. But Russia is not the only factor shaping public opinion toward the central government in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

From the outside, the Kyiv government is usually depicted as a band of selfless reformers. In fact, the differences in how it is perceived across the country are vast, with 78 percent of western Ukrainians but only 16 percent of easterners registering their approval in one recent poll.Easterners (and southerners, for that matter) see a cabinet dominated by former prime minister and current presidential candidate Yulia Timoshenko and her Fatherland political party, whose base of support is in the pro-European west of the country. Both the Party of Regions and Vitaly Klitchko’s UDAR party refused to join the government, leaving it dangerously low on eastern support.

Balazs Jarabik is visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/a-tangled-web-in-eastern-ukraine-106110.html#ixzz30eKLm9L2

TIME OF TRANSITIONS

The poll in Afghanistan raises cautious hopes for the future 

KANWAL SIBAL

Source Link

The first round of the presidential election in Afghanistan raises cautious hopes for the country’s future, with impressive voter participation at around 60 per cent, including that of women at around 35 per cent, and the Taliban’s failure to disrupt the elections to the extent feared, given that just a little over 200 out of 6000 polling booths were affected. Many were forewarning that even more dangerous than the Taliban threat would be the dire consequences for internal peace if the elections were not free and fair. Rigged elections also risked alienating external powers whose political and financial support the new Afghan government needed for survival. In the event, such fears have been belied as the election process has been fairly credible.

If, as expected, no candidate obtains 50 per cent of the vote in the first round, the second round is slated for later. The next Afghan president will be either Abdullah Abdullah or Ashraf Ghani, with the odds in favour of the latter. While the peaceful democratic transition in turbulent circumstances from the president, Hamid Karzai, in power since December 2001, to his successor is a considerable achievement in itself, it should also help in improving the political dialogue between Washington and Kabul that has been considerably perturbed by the thorny personal relations between Karzai and Barack Obama. So far so good. The presidential election in Afghanistan is, however, only the first of the three transitions that the country must undergo before it can begin to function on its own.

The second transition — the security one — is being effected for some time already with the steady drawdown of foreign troops in Afghanistan (52,000 at present) and the progressive transfer of security duties to the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces whose number stands today at around 332,000, but is planned to be reduced to 280,000 because of resource constraints. The United States of America and Afghanistan have agreed in November 2013 on the text of a bilateral security and defence agreement, but President Karzai has baulked at signing it, leaving it to his successor to do so. Possibly he does want to to take the historic responsibility for permitting foreign military bases on Afghan soil. His view that this agreement does not protect Afghanistan against Pakistan — the primary source of the threat to its peace and stability — is not without substance. If the US, he well understands, will not fight Pakistan on Afghanistan’s behalf, would US bases then serve US geo-political interests more than those of Afghanistan?

Believing in India again

Vikram S Mehta | May 4, 2014 11:33 pm

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/believing-in-india-again/99/

Whenever a ruling establishment crumbles in India, its official language also loses authority.

It is a matter of confidence, credibility and trust. Whatever be the political hue of the next government and whoever its leader, the challenge will be to reinvigorate investor confidence in the political stewardship of the economy, restore the credibility of the executive and rebuild trust in the sanctity of policy and contracts. Else, the much-needed investment in infrastructure and manufacturing will not be forthcoming and the numbers of un- and underemployed will continue to mount. The social consequences will most likely limit the new government to one term.

Corruption scandals have hogged the headlines, but arguably the most damaging effect on investor sentiment over the past several years has been the activism of the tax authorities and the twists and turns in the interpretation of policies and contracts. A fly on the wall of the board rooms of Vodafone, Nokia, Microsoft, BP, Shell, Posco, Tesco, Walmart and many more would be struck by the paradoxical tenor of conversation. The directors would be in agreement about the potential of the country. All would accept that notwithstanding the slowdown in growth and the lacklustre leadership over the past three years, the fundamentals remain intact and India remains on track to be an economic giant. They would endorse the view that relative to opportunities elsewhere, India is an attractive destination and that it would be imprudent to push it off their agenda. That said, they would collectively hesitate to put their signature on further new investments, other than perhaps for amounts required to sustain existing activities. They would substantiate their hesitation by allusions to the arbitrariness of the tax charges on MNCs, the announcement by the BJP to reverse the UPA government’s policy on multi-brand retail, the unilateral tightening of contractual conditions that assured petroleum companies market-related prices for gas and the right to market it freely, the labyrinthine approval procedures that have bogged down major mining and power sector projects, the reluctance of the bureaucracy to take decisions for fear of attracting a vigilance enquiry and the long lead times in judicial decisions. The thread linking all such conversations would be the loss of confidence and trust in public institutions.

Cornell Professor Eswar Prasad’s wonderfully written book, The Dollar Trap: How the US Dollar Tightened its Grip on Global Finance, brings into sharp relief the positive impact that confidence and trust in public institutions has had on the direction of capital flows in our globalised and connected world. And, by implication, the negative consequences of loss of confidence and trust. Prasad writes that, notwithstanding recurring bouts of financial crisis in America that should have led to an outflow of capital, rising interest rates and a falling dollar, US treasury securities and dollar denominated assets have continued to be a favourite haven for investors. In September 2008, for instance, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, US financial markets went into a downward spiral, the credit markets froze and Dow Jones was on the skids. Economic fundamentals suggested there would be a run on the dollar. What happened was just the opposite. There was a net inflow of half a trillion dollars into US treasury securities, nearly all of it from private investors and the dollar rose in value against all other currencies. In July 2011, the government came within a day of declaring a technical default on its debt. The credit rating agency Standard and Poors did, in fact, downgrade US government debt from AAA to AA+ on August 2. There should have been a flight of capital away from dollar assets. Instead there was an inflow of nearly $180 billion in August and September, and again mostly from the private sector. In December 2012, the economy once more headed towards a “fiscal cliff”. The US Congress was at an impasse over the government’s borrowing limits. Economists wondered whether this would push the dollar off its perch and deliberated on the extent of the spike in interest rates. The dollar remained steady and the yield on US treasury bills continued to range around 2 per cent.

It didn’t begin with Netanyahu

May 5, 2014

By Ben Dror Yemini
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/it-didnt-begin-with-netanyahu/
US Secretary of State John Kerry stated recently that Yasser Arafat had already recognised a Jewish state. (Reuters)

Israel is a Jewish state, or the nation-state of the Jewish people, because it was established according to the UN’s two-state resolution — Jewish and Arab states — and because it is the self-determination of the majority of Israel’s citizens. Israel does not need Palestinian recognition of its Jewish character, and has never made such a demand of Egypt and Jordan. So why has Israel been insistent on recognition of its Jewish character from the Palestinians?

US Secretary of State John Kerry stated recently that Yasser Arafat had already recognised a Jewish state. He is right. It is important to understand that recognition. In the mid-1970’s, Henry Kissinger formulated the conditions for dialogue between the PLO and the US. These included an explicit and unconditional rejection of terror and recognition of Israel. The issue became relevant only in the late-1980s. The PLO’s status was damaged after its expulsion to Tunisia and the outbreak of the First Intifada. It attempted to return to centrestage through dialogue with the US. Swedish foreign minister Stan Anderson was enlisted to mediate.

In November 1988, the Palestinian National Council convened in Algiers — remembered primarily for its declarations of independence. The same council, for the first time, recognised UN Resolutions 181, 242 and 338. The developments were positive, but the decisions did not satisfy the US. Anderson didn’t give up. He invited five leading Jews to Stockholm to meet Arafat. Arafat denounced terrorism and declared his acceptance of the UN resolutions. Apparently, this was the first time the words “Jewish State” came out of Arafat’s mouth. But the US demanded a more explicit declaration, refusing to grant Arafat a visa to speak before the UN. On December 13, a special session was held in Geneva so that Arafat could speak. Once again, the US was not satisfied. George Shultz, then secretary of state, was not prepared to deviate from the explicit wording the US demanded. After consultations, Arafat convened a press conference denouncing terrorism and recognising UN Resolutions 242 and 338. He once again declared the solution was “two states for two peoples”, and a “Jewish state” in Israel. Arafat gave his statements in English, reading exactly what Shultz had given him. This time, he met US demands. On the same day, December 15, Shultz announced that the US president had decided to open a dialogue with the PLO.

The dialogue was short and futile. At the first outbreak of terror, the PLO refused to denounce it. Iraq invaded Kuwait. Arafat supported Saddam Hussein. The dialogue came to an abrupt end. Only the Oslo Accords brought the PLO back to centrestage. But the Fatah Conference in 2009, at which Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) stood at its head, unanimously decided to refute the idea of a “Jewish State”. It’s worthwhile to note the wording of the announcement: “Complete resistance, with no way back, to the recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish State’, to protect the rights of refugees and the rights of minorities on the other side of the Green Line”. Arafat himself reneged on his recognition of a Jewish state.

COSTLY LESSON

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Gwynne Dyer 

With due apologies to God, Voltaire and the Ukrainians, I must point out that if Ukraine did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent it. It is not a great power, it has no resources the world cannot do without, and it is not a “vital strategic interest” to anybody except the Ukrainians themselves. Not even to the Russians, although they are acting at the moment as though it were.

Bosnia was nobody’s vital strategic interest either. It isn’t now, and it wasn’t a 100 years ago. But Bismarck warned in 1898 that if there was ever another major war in Europe, it would come out of “some damned silly thing in the Balkans,” and an assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 fulfilled his prophecy to the letter. Some things have changed since then, however. The next world war will not come out of Ukraine no matter what happens in the next few weeks and months. Russia might invade Ukraine, there might even be a new Cold War for a while, but there will be no fighting in Europe beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Indeed, apart from the Balkans there has been no full-scale war in Europe for the past 69 years, and there was never the slightest risk that the fighting in the 1990s would spread beyond the borders of former Yugoslavia. Indeed, there was probably never a single day during the 45 years of the Cold War when either side seriously considered attacking the other. The reason was simple: they knew what would happen next, even if neither side used the thousands of nuclear weapons at its disposal. Twice in 30 years, in 1914-18 and 1939-45, a major war using modern weapons had been fought over almost all of Europe’s territory.

On the first occasion, they lost a generation of young men. The second time, most countries from Germany eastwards lost around ten per cent of their populations. Half of the continent’s great historic cities were reduced to ruins even without the help of nuclear weapons. It was a very expensive education, but the Europeans did finally learn their lesson: don’t do this any more.

No war

That is why, even as Russian tanks drive right up to Ukraine’s eastern borders and the Ukrainian army prepares to die in a fight it knows it would lose, nobody else in Europe is getting ready for war. If the Russians want part or all of Ukraine, they can have it — and pay the long-term price for taking it, which would be very high. But nothing in Europe is worth blowing all of Europe up for. Do not be alarmed by the fact that troops and planes from as far away as the United States of America and Canada are currently being sent to Nato countries that have borders with Russia. The numbers are militarily insignificant. Their purpose is simply to remind the Russians that the alliance will protect its own members should Moscow ever decide that it also has a right to “protect” Russian-speakers in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

US in the world

Thomas L. Friedman | May 5, 2014

Your Honour, I rise in — partial — defense of Mr. Obama.

There has been a festival of commentary of late bemoaning the pusillanimous foreign policy of President Obama. If only we had a president who rode horses shirtless, wrestled a tiger or took a bite out of a neighbouring country, we’d all feel much safer. Your Honour, I rise in — partial — defense of Mr. Obama.

Let me start by asking a question I’ve asked about other countries: Is American foreign policy today the way it is because Obama is the way he is (cerebral, cautious, dispassionate) or is Obama the way Obama is on foreign policy because America is the way America is today (burned by two failed wars and weakened by a great recession) and because the world is the way the world is (increasingly full of failed states and enfeebled US allies)?

The answer is some of both, but I’d put a lot more emphasis on the latter. Foreign policy, our ability and willingness to act in the world, is about three things: interests, values and leverage. Do we have an interest in getting involved in Syria or Crimea, are our values engaged, and — if either is true — do we have the leverage to sustainably tilt things our way at a price we can afford?

I’d argue that a lot of what makes America less active in the world today is a product first of all of our own diminished leverage because of actions taken by previous administrations. The decisions by the Bush I and Clinton teams to expand Nato laid the seeds of resentment that helped to create Putin and Putinism.

Most presidents make their name in foreign policy by taking on strong enemies; but most of what threatens global stability today are crumbling states. Exactly how many can we rescue at one time? I’d love to help Ukrainian reformers build a functioning democracy, but the reason that is so daunting a task is because their own politicians wasted two decades looting their own country, so the leverage required to foster change — $30 billion in bailout funds — is now massive.

Who Is Afraid of Pakistan’s ISI Intelligence Agency?

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May 1, 2014

Pakistan: Who’s Afraid of the ISI?

Ali Sethi

New York Review of Books

Over the past week, a shocking debate has raged in Pakistan, in full view of the Pakistani people, about the nature and power of the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, the country’s elusive, military-operated spy agency. It has emerged in a rare face-off between the ISI and the Jang-Geo group, Pakistan’s largest media house, following the attempted assassination of journalist Hamid Mir, who hosts one of Geo TV’s most popular current affairs programs.

On April 19, as the forty-eight-year-old Mir was being driven out of Karachi’s airport, a man fired nine shots at him with a 9mm pistol, hitting him in the ribs, stomach, hand, and thigh, before fleeing the scene. Mir was rushed to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. A few hours later, his younger brother went on Geo News and laid the blame for the shooting not on some extremist group, but on the ISI itself. “A few elements in the ISI are against Hamid Mir due to his viewpoint about [former military dictator] Pervez Musharraf and the Balochistan crisis,” said Amir Mir, who also works for Jang-Geo. He added that he held the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Zaheer-ul-Islam, “personally responsible” for the attack. Still more explicit was the montage of pictures used by Geo News to illustrate this accusation: an unconscious Hamid Mir with a respirator on his mouth; a bullet-riddled car; and a photograph of Zaheer-ul-Islam—a man who shuns television appearances—looking smug and serene as he shook hands with soldiers at a ceremony.

Within minutes there was a furious response to these charges: first on Facebook and Twitter, where mysterious cyber-entities, many of them with sultry female names, unleashed a torrent of hate against the “traitors” at Geo TV; then, a few hours later, on Geo’s rival TV channels, Express and ARY, where assorted analysts and columnists attacked Hamid Mir, tried to portray the allegations against the ISI as an Indian-American conspiracy, and raised questions about the intentions of Mir Shakilur Rahman, Geo’s eccentric, Dubai-based owner. (One of the most interesting revelations to emerge in all the mudslinging last week was Rahman’s dispute with the ISI over the latter’s alleged support for an upcoming TV channel that threatens to cut into Geo’s market share.)

I’ve never met Hamid Mir and don’t watch his show with any regularity. But I panicked when I heard about the attempt on his life. This is because Mir is on the same “hit list” of media executives and journalists, apparently drawn up by the Pakistani Taliban in February, as my father, Najam Sethi, who hosts a similar program on Geo and has come under pressure for criticizing the military and Islamist groups in the past. Adding to my alarm was the timing of the attack, which came just weeks after gunmen ambushed my friend Raza Rumi, who is a columnist and a TV show host for Express News, a Geo rival. Rumi was attacked on a busy road one night in Lahore and fell to the floor of his car when he saw the first flash; his attackers took him for dead and sprayed his car generously with bullets, killing his twenty-five-year old driver instead.

Who Is Afraid of Pakistan’s ISI Intelligence Agency?

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May 1, 2014

Pakistan: Who’s Afraid of the ISI?

Ali Sethi

New York Review of Books

Over the past week, a shocking debate has raged in Pakistan, in full view of the Pakistani people, about the nature and power of the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, the country’s elusive, military-operated spy agency. It has emerged in a rare face-off between the ISI and the Jang-Geo group, Pakistan’s largest media house, following the attempted assassination of journalist Hamid Mir, who hosts one of Geo TV’s most popular current affairs programs.

On April 19, as the forty-eight-year-old Mir was being driven out of Karachi’s airport, a man fired nine shots at him with a 9mm pistol, hitting him in the ribs, stomach, hand, and thigh, before fleeing the scene. Mir was rushed to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. A few hours later, his younger brother went on Geo News and laid the blame for the shooting not on some extremist group, but on the ISI itself. “A few elements in the ISI are against Hamid Mir due to his viewpoint about [former military dictator] Pervez Musharraf and the Balochistan crisis,” said Amir Mir, who also works for Jang-Geo. He added that he held the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Zaheer-ul-Islam, “personally responsible” for the attack. Still more explicit was the montage of pictures used by Geo News to illustrate this accusation: an unconscious Hamid Mir with a respirator on his mouth; a bullet-riddled car; and a photograph of Zaheer-ul-Islam—a man who shuns television appearances—looking smug and serene as he shook hands with soldiers at a ceremony.

Within minutes there was a furious response to these charges: first on Facebook and Twitter, where mysterious cyber-entities, many of them with sultry female names, unleashed a torrent of hate against the “traitors” at Geo TV; then, a few hours later, on Geo’s rival TV channels, Express and ARY, where assorted analysts and columnists attacked Hamid Mir, tried to portray the allegations against the ISI as an Indian-American conspiracy, and raised questions about the intentions of Mir Shakilur Rahman, Geo’s eccentric, Dubai-based owner. (One of the most interesting revelations to emerge in all the mudslinging last week was Rahman’s dispute with the ISI over the latter’s alleged support for an upcoming TV channel that threatens to cut into Geo’s market share.)

I’ve never met Hamid Mir and don’t watch his show with any regularity. But I panicked when I heard about the attempt on his life. This is because Mir is on the same “hit list” of media executives and journalists, apparently drawn up by the Pakistani Taliban in February, as my father, Najam Sethi, who hosts a similar program on Geo and has come under pressure for criticizing the military and Islamist groups in the past. Adding to my alarm was the timing of the attack, which came just weeks after gunmen ambushed my friend Raza Rumi, who is a columnist and a TV show host for Express News, a Geo rival. Rumi was attacked on a busy road one night in Lahore and fell to the floor of his car when he saw the first flash; his attackers took him for dead and sprayed his car generously with bullets, killing his twenty-five-year old driver instead.

As might be expected among any group of political journalists and commentators, Mir, Rumi, and my father have taken different positions on various issues of national policy. But their shared occupational hazard—the discussion of “sensitive” subjects in a conflict-riven country—has put them under similarly nebulous threats. Hamid Mir, for example, had angered the Taliban by giving favorable coverage to the anti-Taliban education activist Malala Yusufzai, who herself was nearly assassinated in 2012; and he had angered the Pakistani military for suggesting that other high-ranking military officials be tried in the case against General Musharraf, who is accused of treason.

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 by Carlotta Gall

Book Review: The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 by Carlotta Gall

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2014) 

Reviewed by Bruce Riedel 

Thursday, May 1, 2014 

In early February 2009, Richard Holbrooke, the newly named Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, took me aside at the State Department to tell me he was getting panicky messages from Pakistan’s generals about President Obama’s decision to appoint me chairman of a special review of American policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. Richard said the generals in Pakistan were concerned that I would be too tough on them. I told Richard I had every intention of exposing the generals’ connections with the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda during the review, an exposure which seemed essential to any serious policy review of what had gone disastrously wrong for America in the war in Afghanistan.

Now we have a dramatic and in-depth expose of Pakistan’s double-dealing and duplicity in the Afghan war written by a veteran American journalist. Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 lays out in detail how Pakistan’s intelligence service, the army’s Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, first helped to build the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s and then to rebuild it after the American intervention to destroy the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 2001. The ties between the Taliban and ISI have been known for years—but never in this depth and clarity.

The author uses her years of interviews and visits to remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to tell the story of how the ISI helped Mullah Omar and his lieutenants escape from the Americans in 2001, regroup in Quetta and Peshawar, Pakistan in 2002 and then stage a fierce come back in Afghanistan after 2003. In the process, Ms. Gall sketches the most detailed portrait yet written of the elusive Mullah Omar and his relationship with ISI and Pakistan’s generals. Her reporting makes clear the generals can’t fully control their protégé, but Omar cannot survive without their patronage and help.

It is a complex relationship but one in which the ISI has the upper hand and calls the shots. Strategy for the Taliban’s war is made in the ISI’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, not in Quetta or Peshawar. The Wrong Enemy also clearly establishes who is the godfather of the ISI-Taliban resurgence in the last decade. Pakistan’s policy of rebuilding the Taliban after 2001 was the brain child of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, according to the book, who first as Director General of the ISI and then Chief of Army Staff directly oversaw the resurrection of the Afghan Taliban and its offensives against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Kayani’s goal was to “tip up” America in Afghanistan to ensure it did not put in place a stable regime dominated by Pakistan’s historic enemies in the country, the non-Pashtun minorities that had fought the Taliban in the 1990s. Kayani advocated a “formal strategic assistance” relationship with Omar and his Quetta Shura governing council. President Pervez Musharraf went along with Kayani’s policy of abetting the Taliban’s come-back. The Wrong Enemy also lays out in frightening detail how close the ISI came to victory in Afghanistan. Ms. Gall’s reporting from Kandahar, southern Afghanistan’s biggest city and the Taliban’s de facto capital before 2001, between 2006 and 2009 shows the rebels were on verge of seizing control of the city more than once. The small Canadian NATO garrison was outnumbered and isolated until President Obama’s surge in 2010 finally curbed the Taliban. Ms. Gall argues the Obama surge inflicted serious and perhaps crippling blows on the Taliban but she acknowledges that it is too early to count them out, especially with American and NATO combat forces ending their mission this year.