'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Thursday 22 December 2011

Foreign Affairs Response

My response (subscription only) to Bing West's excellent Review Essay article in Foreign Affairs. Interestingly, West has recently talked about money in COIN here.

Sunday 18 December 2011

Counterinsurgency Remixed

Back to the future: what now for the COINquistadors? 


Talk from Andrew Exum that COIN and in particular FM 3-24 is set for an overhaul. It's an interesting blog post. Then follows the announcement proper of an open-sourced approach to the revised manual, here


Hearts and Minds: About to be relegated to the annals of military history?


I think COIN identifies the problems, that is, it asks the right questions, but perhaps not all its answers are correct. Prine, Burke and Few at SWJ wrote a piece on how FM 3-24 could be rewritten, so there are some ideas out there and there have been narrower manuals since, most notably FM 3-07. The resistance or reluctance, perceived but perhaps not actual is because this is recent doctrine, and in doctrine, as a set of rules, if one part is overthrown or revised, it suggests that all is fallible and there's a risk that the whole edifice could come crashing down. Look at the problem in relativity right now with the faster than light particles. 


In the UK there has been an ambitious attempt to syncrete civil and military spheres within a single publication, JDP 3-40, Security and Stabilisation: The Military Contribution, featuring input from the Insurgency Research Group at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, eminent strategists such as Colin Gray and indeed, from Dr David Kilcullen. It's a manual designed to 'sit above' (Hew Strachan's words) the army's doctrine on COIN and even comes with a 67-page 'guide' (.pdf here) to the publication, 'not an alternative' but 'complimentary' in case you need extra context whilst perusing your copy of JDP 3-40.

Since it represents a prolonged doctrinal engagement with the field as such, condemning COIN and FM 3-24 to the waste-basket of military history is myopic in a strategic landscape that's so uncertain and may require intervention at any time to prevent escalatory threats. It's a competition now between revision and abandonment with champions on both sides but COIN doctrine is of immense worth precisely because it has seen battle. 

As an analogy, the counterinsurgency operation is like an NFL campaign - after a run of indifferent results, the critics speak out. They blame the coach. But some observers question whether it's the coach or the players. Indeed, then the criticism gets divided. Is it the coach and his tactics; is it the coach giving tactics that the players cannot implement; is it the players not implementing the coach's tactics. The point is, critics look at COIN doctrine, look at the results and immediately blame that doctrine, but we require nuanced interpretations of how doctrine is distilled into combat. It's so easy to criticize and write off doctrine - the skill is in implementation, in problem-solving. Asking the right question is difficult, the right answer is more so.


There are concerns with revision. For example, FM 3-24 is a military field manual but COIN requires a large civilian segment. As such, it's difficult for the military doctrine to represent an overarching COIN doctrine, something which it is seen to represent. FM 3-24 isn't really a COIN bible, it's a COIN bible on the military aspect. If you try and process COIN solely through the military then you create an artificial relationship, an unwanted relationship, between the external military and the civilian population. You want to coalesce civilian state institutions, but the military controls the money and thus acts as judge, jury, and everything else. Thus there's never any relationship between the civilian and the state; the state becomes redundant.   


Even JDP 3-40, which having been published in November 2009 represents recent UK defence thinking is little more than a distillation of previous U.S. FMs. At some times becoming so florid as to be vague, it no more solves the issue of money than its 'predecessors'. It's positive to assert the need to 'Employ Money as a Weapon System. Use a targeting board process to ensure the greatest effect for each ‘round’ expended, and to ensure that each engagement using money contributes to the achievement of the unit’s overall objectives' (4A-2) but the idea of an "engagement using money", as the civilian population continue to press for remuneration isn't going to assist the deployed officer. 


The Great Error


Later in JDP 3-40, a subheading addresses 'money' specifically and it is here that the authors are culpable of at the least naivety. Lesson One in the memorable Fog of War from the 85-year old Robert S. McNamara was "empathize with the enemy". Well, empathize with the population, too.  


The first line from JDP 3-40 in the money section, after the obligatory FM 3-24 quote ("some of the best weapons for counter-insurgents do not shoot" - perhaps a little confusing to the soldier who has been intensively trained in how to kill using various small arms) from the addition that she gave to the republication of FM 3-24 by the Chicago U. Press, is this:


"In the battle to influence decisive actors, the judicious use of money can help persuade both individuals and groups to accept the authority and legitimacy of the host government." 


This is wrong. Since the foreign soldiers don't speak Pashto, Dari, or Farsi (there's a pronounced Iranian influence in the region although you have to scrape at the surface to find it) and since they are in no way acting as if subordinate to the government, if ISAF give out money, it legitimizes the foreign occupation but marginalizes the government. I'm going to write more on this, in scholarly prose, in a later journal book review, but think about how the Afghan views ISAF. ISAF bombs your house, you go to ISAF for money, they give you some. How is that legitimating the host government? To the Afghans it says, "The government play no part in this monopoly on violence." 



Identities


Finally, as Chairman of the JCS Martin Dempsey said recently, counterinsurgency is defined by the actions of the adversary. Let's not forget that Taliban Afghanistan was a pariah state, so who really knows them? Who understands the refugee camps in Baluchistan? "Know your enemy" is the often quoted Sun Tzu. But the Taliban were alien to us. The guiding ideology was called "Deobandi" but how far is this religious-based group guided it? We went in blind and to some extent we still are blind.  



Conclusions



I think that the central element of COIN, that of the military engaging with a host population, given the threat that the United States faces from 'failed' states is a vital one. The future scenarios for engaging a host population are myriad, and whilst counterterrorism ops with UAVs and proxy forces on the ground are ascendant, the 'cultural turn' created a valuable repository of thought. Gian Gentile concedes as much, here in Parameters, 2009, 39(3), p.6: 'Population-centric COIN may be a reasonable operational method to use in certain circumstances, but it is not a strategy.' The last words go to LBJ, 10 March 1964, trying to understand how to sell Vietnam to the public he murmurs: "This morning Senator Scott said, 'The war which we can neither win, lose, nor drop, is evidence of an instability of ideas, of floating judgements, [and] our policy of nervous conciliation which is extremely disturbing.'


Further reading:



Maybe the excitingly titled, "Confronting the Hydra: big problems with small wars", Lt. Col. (Aus) Mark O'Neill.


Incidentally, I think Josef Ansorge at Cambridge has undertaken research which considers the extravagant number of references to "hydra" in the war on terror and what this may mean for the discourse. But I could be wrong.  


I've been reading:


William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (Norton, 1958)

Thursday 1 December 2011

The Myth of the Arab Spring

Describing this year’s upheavals in the Middle East and Maghrib has been a treacherous undertaking exacerbated by a collective failure to forecast them. Labelling these events has been just as difficult: Arab spring; Arab awakening; Arab revolutions and Arab uprisings have all been employed in analysis, the latter evoking the World War I-era revolt of the Arabs against Ottoman suzerainty made famous in the West by the role of T. E. Lawrence. Only the Arab element in the recent descriptions is constant and yet it is the only element which is also clearly erroneous.
           
When Lawrence assisted the uprising against the Turks, there was success in conflating the various tribal identities beneath the banner of being Arab. This was possible because the various tribes, instead of warring against each other, could coalesce beneath the banner of being Arab against an occupation: I am Arab, you are Turk. In the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Auda Abu Tayi puzzles over the idea of such identity overarching familial loyalty: ‘The Howitat, Ajili, Rala, Beni, Saha; these I know, I have even heard of the Harif, but the Arabs! What tribe is that?’ To which Lawrence replies: ‘They are a tribe of slaves. They serve the Turks.’

Distinguishing friend from enemy accompanied by a language of justification shapes the character of conflict. If the rebels in the uprisings identified themselves primarily as Arab, the enemy would therefore be non-Arab. Such a depiction does not accurately describe the situation; rather, each revolt has been an internal conflict in which the rebels assert an absence of relations of reciprocity between the government and those it governs. In constructing their identity, the rebels view themselves as true patriots disenfranchised from the wealth of the nation-state; the enemy are corrupt elites enriching themselves to the detriment of their people. The rebel seizes and holds the public places whilst the enemy’s territory is the diffuse state apparatus of corruption and violence; in Egypt rebels attacked the police quarters, they being part of the architecture of suppression.

Assigning the regional label ‘Arab’ to these intrastate conflicts hinders our understanding. These are not cultural or religious wars rather conflicts fought over economic and social injustice: identities have crystallised along the lines of the haves and have-nots. Even in Bahrain, in which the majority Shia are suppressed by the ruling Sunni minority; in protest, they demand economic justice. In Syria, the middle class has been slow to take up arms: their comfortable prosperity requires great injustice and insecurity to make them risk all against the ruling elite although their position worsens with the continued economic paralysis, hence al-Assad’s lip service to Arab League mediation. The rise of the middle classes hence acts as buffers to the status quo where, as the Roman historian Sallust observed, ‘few men desire liberty, the majority desire only fair masters.’

In being charged with protecting its population, a regime will commonly identify an external adversary as the foe hence the anecdotal evidence, here from the blogger Mahmoud Salem, that Egyptian police blamed Zionist elements for the uprising. In Libya Qaddafi asserted that al-Qaeda were behind the discontent, the rhetoric additionally acting as a plea to incorporate the state’s reprisals into part of the larger War against Terror. Bahrain, without justification according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, blames Iran for agitating unrest in the country. Bashar al-Assad in Syria used a speech in June to blame foreign ‘microbes’ and there are reports that the Foreign Minister recently cited United States involvement. Such narratives justify the crackdown on the population: external antagonists backing the rebels suggest that the means employed to suppress violence are patriotic and just. Any civilians involved are simply the corrupted agents of foreign aggressors.

All change

Successful rebellions bring changes in identity. At the end of the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov, an advisor to Gorbachev, supposedly remarked, ‘we are dealing you the worst blow: we are going to deprive you of your enemy.’ Having united in efforts to bring down the dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, former alliances held together by mutual loathing of regimes and their figureheads splinter into myriad opposed groups. After ousting Mubarak, the state’s weakened monopoly on violence released older societal divides built on religious narratives including the escalating and violent discrimination against Egyptian Copts.

The fight against tyranny and injustice is only the beginning; fighting for ways to ameliorate societal deprivation in the shadow of institutional resistance is more difficult. Democratic representation as a means to a more equal distribution of wealth creates many new groups and many different identities, some of whom will be marginalised by the voting and seek other ways to prosecute their ideology. For the Copts, who represent only about ten percent of the population in Egypt, democratic representation could see they become subject to the tyranny of the majority, as popular vote means they are unable to gain representation in the new government.  

Political reform will attempt to engineer the redistribution of wealth yet the Spring revolts have cost the region an estimated $55 billion whilst a spike in oil prices benefited those oil exporters stable enough to continue processing – mainly UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (.pdf). Oil remains the only industry capable of generating enough national income to develop services, education and infrastructure but of the three revolutions in the Maghrib, only Libya is a net exporter of oil. Moreover, oil wealth is no guarantee of security or prosperity. Iraq, a nation having toppled a dictator with Western intervention and now in the grips of fledgling democracy, is in possession of significant energy reserves yet remains ravaged by insecurity. Prime-minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidates power amidst rumours of his use of ‘detention squads’ and a 2011 report by the Lancet calculated that more than twelve thousand people have been killed by suicide bombers between 2003 and 2010. Eight years after Saddam’s fall, Iraq sits 132nd of 187 countries in the Human Development Index (.pdf), its position inflated because of a Gross National Income per Capita figure distorted by oil wealth.  

Attempts to diversify industry across the Maghrib have proven arduous. Although a dominant industry, agriculture is a rural enterprise: Egypt is a country in which nearly half the population is urban with over a third of the population under the age of eighteen. Another economically meaningful industry, tourism, is beset by the economic crisis, rising fuel costs and political instability. Demonstrating the scale of the problem facing the Maghrib, World Bank data ranks Egypt, a regional powerhouse, as having a comparative GDP in 2010 to Portugal, one of the poorest countries in the European Union, this despite Egypt possessing a population eight times the size. In such a state, it is necessary to develop education and promote tertiary industry, as difficult as this may be.

Although greatly needed, external investment in the ‘Spring’ is a precarious undertaking at a time when Western economies are on a perilous trajectory. At the G8 summit in May, leaders created the Deauville Partnership to work with parties including Saudi Arabia and have thus far pledged $80 billion over a two year period to five countries should they continue democratic reforms. But investment can easily be portrayed as Western interventionism under the shadow of neo-colonialism especially when conducted through the IMF and hence breed resentment, bolster anti-Western narratives and be used as a pawn to smear opposition candidates in elections. Moreover, Western interests in the region are far from unified. The Maghrib on Europe’s Southern border presented a refugee crisis instrumental in causing Europe to act in Libya, not so for the United States, summed up by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ dismissal of David Cameron’s proposal of a no-fly zone in March as ‘loose talk.’

The United States has concerns over Egypt and Syria because of strategic considerations in the region but is largely hamstrung in the latter by Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council. Concern over the Bahrain unrest has been mute due to Saudi influence, trade, strategic and defence relations. Even China is taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. Chinese interest in the region is predominantly economic, trade with the Middle East doubling between 2005 and 2009, but much of this is enemy transfers from Saudi Arabia and Iran and as such China will be keen to maintain a status quo, having little interest in the countries currently experiencing significant unrest.

In the immediate future, Islamist groups - those entities with guiding Islamic ideology as a template for government - are set to become ascendant for three reasons. Firstly Islamist groups have in place social welfare systems and political bodies, thus able to mobilise platforms quickly for elections with a solid support base. Secondly, the Qur’an is a document with great emphasis on charity and equality in wealth distribution: Allah, after all, rewards the compassionate. Thus, moderate Islamism with concessions to women and education can enjoy popular support. A group on such a platform emerged with the largest number of seats in the October Tunisian elections. Thirdly, Islamist rule provides a welcome non-Western approach to society. Given the pronounced global rich-poor divide, moderate Islamism remains attractive for a region which associates tyranny with Western backing.

The myriad new identities pose the risk of minority government hindered by concessions to allied parties. Democratic rule would hence be seen as ineffectual; weak authority that could give rise to parallel power structures including organized crime syndicates or Islamist groups who reject the nascent government and move to create welfare projects to develop relations with the population. The army may prevent violent ascent to power by radical groups who reject the political process, particularly the jihadists groups (the black flag of al-Qaeda was reportedly seen on the courthouse in Benghazi recently), but pose an institutional problem of control in and of themselves. The army, particularly in Egypt with its resistance to reform, must be tackled. The problem isn’t new just intransigent and self-enforcing. The need for legitimacy presses the development of the armed forces to ensure a monopoly on violence, but creating a military institution develops an aspect of the state acting outside of the bureaucratic structure.

In these fragile cauldrons with powerful, opposed factions unsure of the democratic process, when politics appears unable to serve needs, low-level violence will erupt. The spectre of civil war in which worsening insecurity and poverty leads antagonists to coalesce around ethnic or religious identities and blame adversaries for their predicament is a real concern. In such a setting the Weimar jurist Carl Schmitt observed: ‘all legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive themselves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish.’ Protracted, bloody, internecine civil war has become the dominant conflict in the post-Cold War landscape.

Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus stated: ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’ When a phenomenon is ill-defined subsequent explanation of it courts error. The rebellions in the Middle East and Maghrib are neither homogenous nor distinguished by being Arabian in identity. Instead, they are secular expressions of last resort when faced with political, social and economic repression; a tipping point reached where the inevitable costs of rising up against tyrannical regimes have been outweighed by the potential benefits of taking up arms. The complex regional web requires a granular understanding of the challenges faced, country by country, city by city; societal furnaces where identities will be recast and ordered anew. Only when we understand both the unity and segmentation emerging from the revolts can we begin again to construct coherent diplomacy in the region.

Tuesday 29 November 2011

Michael Pettis on China's economy

Great piece from the BBC World Service this morning on China's economy in perspective - most notably from Michael Pettis, professor of economics/finance at the University of Peking (from the looks of his bio on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace he has as much authority to talk on China's economy as anyone) - providing a welcome recalibration of the debate on how far America's relative and absolute decline has been hastened by the rise of this superpower-in-waiting. From 11 minutes onward is Pettis' contribution.

"Sign of a bubble, not a sign of healthy growth"


Minimal consumption when compared to GDP.


Productivity levels 1/10 of USA or Japan.

A similar article for the FT he wrote at the start of November 2011 is here.

Monday 28 November 2011

Gian Gentile digs a grave for COIN

The argument in 22 November article in World Politics Review is that strategy must win out over tactics, the latter being the domain of counterinsurgency. It's a subscription article and reiterates many of the points Gentile has raised before. Indeed the debate over tactics, up to operations, up to strategy and how these have been conflated and confused, is made by Hew Strachan in Survival. I'm going to write more on this at a later date, since it's fundamental to the reorientation of warfighting after Afghanistan.

The death of doctrine? (Gerome's 'Duel After a Masked Ball', 1857)

Occupy This [ ]

The world is rich and the world is poor. Over 5 billion people live on an average annual income of US$3,500 per person. In one of the many 1905 petitions of the peasants to the ruling elite in Russia, it was noted tellingly that the era was at hand when death was preferable to the present endless suffering. The moment when revolution is preferred to endless suffering is reached more quickly when there is a self-aggrandizing elite in plain view. Such bipolarity exacerbates social tension.

The situation in 1905 is an extreme example.

Occupy.

The tide has turned against Occupy in that many fixed sites are facing or have been evicted. Occupy LA for instance, faces eviction at the end of of this month. Occupy may be seen by history to be a vanguard for a more consolidated and coherent demand for social change. As such, in the future, it is a fundamental that the message of Occupy be constrained to one theatre of discontent.

Competing narratives dilute and cause friction within the protest group. Moroever, Occupy should not believe that it is capable of doing things or achieving ends which are so clearly incommensurate with their methods.

Occupy is thus a statement, nothing more. In protesting and utilising networked media it is able to author a global, distinct message. Firstly this was as the 99 percent but now, as is inevitable, other messages, many solely political and some highly local (for instance Free Abdullah Ocalan tent in Occupy LSX which became sadly synonymous not with the LSX but with St Pauls) have been tacked onto the original authoring resulting in a failed, confused, self-defeating protest grouping.

Occupy is a necessary statement. In and of itself it is simply a protest but it does augur problems which have proved catastrophic in myriad previous societies. Even if occupy is simply a socially-networked anti-elite elite at work, the protest is indicative of the genuine frustrations at a widening gap in Western societies, coupled to rising basic living costs well above that of general wage increases. Real income is declining.  

Plato and the social rift

Consider Plato’s ‘Republic’ in which he critiques four forms of state – timarchy, tyranny, oligarchy an democracy. It is the third and fourth systems that are relevant here. Of an oligarchy, Desmond Lee characterises Plato’s lament:

“a society in which power and prestige went with wealth; and since the wealthy are normally few, where power goes with wealth political control is in the hands of a minority. The days of hereditary aristocracy were long over, and though there were of course old families in most states, birth had had to come to terms with wealth and, by itself, was, at the most, of limited political influence…it was the controlling influence given to wealth that Plato particularly disliked. He had the deepest mistrust of what would today be called the profit-motive and of the political influence of private wealth of private wealth; and he thought that in an oligarchy (an ‘acquisitive society’) you were bound to get increasing exploitation of poor by rich, and an increasing degree of social maladjustment and disunity in consequence. He draws a picture of growing oppression met by growing bitterness and ending in revolution” [Lee, Plato, Republic, 2nd ed, introduction, xxv]

And of democracy, the disintegration of authority as freedom becomes a social watchword:

“there is so little social cohesion dissension inevitably grows. Politically, it takes the form of a struggle between rich and poor” [ibid., xxviii]

What we have is an increasingly self-aggrandising elite – Tony Blair, (a British Prime Minister who said in 1983, ‘I am a socialist…it stands for equality’) has earned a reported £15 million since leaving office and acquired a multinational property portfolio – and a democratic mass left free of proper government by politicians so desperate to become elected that they sway to the whims of the electorate rather than attempt to achieve any meaningful or necessary measures.

In the UK, New Labour solved unemployment - a public concern - by creating a vast middle management sector within the public sector. This was paid for by increasing national debt and inevitably, by detrimental reform to private sector, but only at the lower end, where a significant mass earn just above the minimum wage and make very little contribution to the capitalist society. They merely exist. In short, democracy is mob rule, pandering only to short term interests which under Labour were job creation without actually creating any job demand. This was good politics, Labour were reelected twice but the long term implications are bleak. What was needed was a coherent long term plan but in this system of government the visionary makes a poor democrat. People want instantaneous results.

All politics are local

If we observe with detached interest the events of the Arab Spring then we are guilty of a perverse sociocentrism, a belief that our own Western societies are somehow, better, more refined – that our blood was spilled many centuries ago to achieve a universal morality which is the goal for all – and in so doing we risk condemning all that our ancestors fought for into an abyss of material self aggrandisement. Society should be the end, not the means. But it represents for many merely a competition in which material acquisition is the goal and society the medium. 

We must learn from the Arab Spring – a revolution based on social and economic disenfranchisement and the self-aggrandisement of the ruling elite. In the West an affluent middle class serves as a buffer to changes in political status quo – since they are comfortable in their means they resist any that would change from above or below the situation to their detriment. But it is an illusion to think that the entire stratum of the middle class is safe from economic turmoil. Less than a generation from now, those offspring of the middle class that will suffer financial catastrophe in this decade will be growing up with limited means and will represent a new, dynamic and highly motivated addition to the grouping of  “have-nots”. 

Saturday 19 November 2011

The Chinese are reading Foreign Affairs: we should too.

China has a past. A long one.


It doesn't see it's recent ascent, incorporating renewed diplomatic and economic power, as something novel and welcome. Instead, it sees the West as having deprived it of its vaulted position by taking its own inventions and discoveries and using them for its own gain. It sees is ascent as restoration and deserved.


China looks at its trajectory over the past 5000 years and sees itself as restoring its rightful place at the head of the world order. To stave off confrontation whilst it engages in economic enterprise abroad (developing new market nodes in Africa and South America), it labels its ascent as a peaceful rise. 



Of course, the idea of China as a monolith is a mistake. By China, I mean the ruling politburo and state apparatus, including the rise of the uber-class. The Chinese have certainly understood that resource grab represents the most important engagement in the current landscape. War is draining and diminishes authority in the international sphere. There's a fascinating article by William G. Hyland when he leaves the position of editor at Foreign Affairs in 1992 and he recaps the past 70 years of the journal. 


In 1978 Walter J. Levy wrote that oil-consuming nations needed to develop alternate energy sources, and that the United States needed to discourage often wasteful spending by OPEC members on rapid development and military buildups:

We cannot much longer afford a situation in which the importing countries waste a substantial part of their energy while the producing countries waste a substantial part of their oil revenues. In the past we have too often been stymied in our efforts to cope with these problems by entrenched national or private interests on all sides. If we should ultimately fail, this period in our history could truly be characterized as ‘the years that the locust hath eaten.’

The failure of the United States not only to lead the industrialized nations out of the oil crisis, but even to design an effective national energy policy, was a major factor in the "renewed decline of respect abroad for U.S. policy," Bundy concluded.




There are failures that Hyland highlights. Most importantly and indeed farsightedly given the comfortable position America found itself in, in 1992, Hyland stresses those in the journal who have spoken out about the necessity of economic security, for national security. Hyland references Gaddis:


Another Foreign Affairs author, John Lewis Gaddis, deplored the lack of strategic thinking in U.S. policy, and its harmful effect on containment of the Soviet Union.

We really ought not to go on framing long-term national security policy in response to short-term domestic political expedients, crossing our fingers each time in the hope that the result will relate, in some way, to the external realities we confront, and to our own long-term interests. We ought not to neglect, to the extent that we do, the relationship between national security and the national economy. 



Hence arguably the greatest folly of the War on Terror was not Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the smaller wars that constituted a wide arena of counter-terrorism operations, instead it was to fight foreign militarised wars by increasing debt rather than increasing taxes. This had two incredibly damaging effects.


Firstly, and most importantly, it created no onus on the people to in some way share the burden. Forced to make no financial sacrifice, the people of America did not think of themselves 'at war'. Whilst the military fought abroad in nation-state theatres of Iraq and Afghanistan, America feared only an amorphous, indistinct threat of terrorism. This created a fundamental disconnect between the soldier and the state. As the famous slogan on the white board shows:




If the people had been taxed, this long war would never have stretched as far as it did. Economic investment by the people would warrant results, but not having to pay meant that the military got to prosecute a low-intensity war that went on to become America's longest war (in Afghanistan) and the visceral events of 9.11 meant that there was little oversight in the early years, on how the military spent their money. Now, as emotions have receded, there are the questions, and Martin Dempsey has got a host of them from the leading officials in the past year. 



The second problem is the direct assualt on the American economy caused by leveraging a global war against terrorism. There will never come a day when terrorism humbly boards the USS Missouri and signs terms of surrender.


Terrorism doesn't wear a top hat: Japanese surrender signatories arrive on USS Missouri
G W Bush and the Republicans inherited a budget deficit of US$5 trillion. When he left office it was about US$10 trillion. Fighting the war with debt and developing homeland security which restricted trade and travel, both vital facets of the economy, meant that when Obama took office, implementing the war on terror has contributed to this deterioration in fiscal health. Obama has had little ability to stem the tide. An aging population requires more expensive healthcare (the only industry where technological innovations make applications more expensive) and he inherited two major combat zones abroad. Currently, debt is at about US$14.5 trillion. Increasing at a rate faster under Obama than under Bush.



During this decade of descent, China has ascended to a more central stage economically. Recently, a delegation fighting to save the Euro went, very publicly, cap in hand to China. But the Chinese can sit back: They can literally afford to wait. President Obama has recently appeared to marginalise Europe in his considerations, going to Australia and talking of Pacific partners, forming a new US military presence in the north of the country.


So, the UK desperately needs a period of introspection - finding some way to close the rich-poor divide and homogenizing an increasingly fractious society. In this instance, a Liberal-Conservative alliance is the best possible platform through which to proceed. True, it's not going to be easy, but the possible dangers of leaving unadulterated the ethnic cleavages crystallising and the widening number of those in poverty as inflation, food and energy prices rise mean a decline in real income, are real and serious. 




Intrastate Inequality

There was an important event which was beamed into the homes of millions last month and which engaged the intrastate inequality debate. It captured the interest of the nation and divided it. Of course, it was the introduction of a new Sesame Street character, Lily, a 7 year old character who is, "food insecure", meaning that she's on the American poverty line. 


Lily: Purple with rage at US inequality
In fact, the introduction of Lily to Sesame is probably more important in the long-term than the now infamous Occupy Wall Street, simply because Lily's character will infuse the next generation of Americans with a normative expectation of inequality and poverty for a certain percentage of the population. Lily will probably be cast as a really moral, effervescent and helpful character, thus showing America that some may be poor, but in fact, they're happy and good people so let's get on with everything. Perhaps in a later episode she will be sold a sub-prime trailer - at 67 times her annual income - in a nondescript trailer park in Kentucky, where Oscar will visit her periodically and stay in her trash can. 


Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Street has raised over $500 000 for its continuing campaign, though it notes that it isn't sure how to distribute this money. Now that's the problem that the government has, isn't it? So government isn't that easy after all, indeed. I have a great problem with what I have seen thus far of the protests:


1. Let's theorise that in some way they have gained inspiration from the Spring protests in the Maghrib and Middle East, but


1i. The Spring protests sought to occupy public spaces as a symbol of the unity of the population against the regime and


1ii. In so doing could create enough disruption to the function of the population that the nation-state and its economy would meltdown, which proved successful in Egypt for example, but



2. Occupy seek to occupy the space of those they campaign against, the stronghold of "capitalism", Wall Street, or in London, the Stock Exchange. 


2i. In this way they differ from the Spring tactics and it is to their detriment, since


2ii. The state apparatus cannot let them interrupt the capitalist machinery, neither does Occupy have enough physical numbers leaving their employment to cause detriment to the functioning of society, and hence


2iii. They find themselves confined, respectively, to Zuccotti Park (NYC) and the West side of St. Paul's Cathedral (London). In the case of the latter, their plan to occupy the London Stock Exchange (the twitter hashtag is occupyLSX) was vetoed by the police. 


3. Capitalism is not found in the park and to occupy a small area of St Paul's is to lend a strangely element of religious confrontation to the mixed messages (One of the larger tents there is painted with "Free Abdullah Ocalan", which is not an anti-capitalist message, but a political one. And the two heads that have fallen are not businessmen but clergymen). 


4. To confront capitalism in this way it is necessary to striate its movement, to make 'swiss cheese' of its smooth, seamless operations. This is singularly not achieved by the Occupy movements. Bankers walk past the encampment at St Paul's in the morning, laughing. No street is barricaded, no door is barred. The media, the 24 hour news-crew keep the tents there, but it is time to pack up and go home. 


5. Capitalism is striating itself, more and more nodes disintegrating, first in Greece, now Portugal, Italy, Spain, to name just European nations. 


6. To Occupy, yes, what you have done is important, but go home, re-read "A Thousand Plateaus". You are rapidly become a menagerie, a tourist attraction, an open zoo. Develop doctrine, public relations. Speak to Naomi Klein. You are now, to paraphrase Edward Said, "A living tableau of queerness".


Occupy, which began in Spain or Kuala Lumpur depending on the news source you read, has been mimicked in at least 95 cities. The student fees protest in London yesterday (surely a much more meaningul protest) had a tiny breakaway of protestors trying to camp at Trafalgar Square, moved on immediately by police. So why has Occupy struck a nerve?


Inequality when a section of society are deprived of the necessities of existence is a disquieting phenomenon but it's survival of the richest unless the masses formulate a coherent response. Moreover, they must pick their battleground - when an Italian restaurant owner and celebrity chef compared bankers to Hitler and Stalin the bankers coagultaed on social media, urging each other to cancel reservations and avoid the eateries, boycott other of the chef's products. The chef was forced into a grovelling apology. The bankers hold sway in areas, that cannot be denied - money talks. Ten percent of British GDP is from the financial services. Indeed, since less than 10% of those employed are in this sector they can justifiably claim to punch above their weight in terms of contributions. Occupy needs to pick new terrain. 





Striating only themselves: protestors unable to occupy any area than disrupts the capitalist flow

Saturday 12 November 2011

Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature"

"We're in the least brutal period in human history" is how the World Service sums up Steven Pinker's thesis. Pinker uses historical data sets to measure violence. Deaths worldwide are at 1/2 person per 100 000, declares Pinker. He compares this to "the worst years of" World War II, which he calculates as 300 deaths per 100 000.



Using data sets is always controversial (see for example the debate over Democratic Peace Theory using the Correlates of War database [Tarak Barkawi has critiqued this data set]) but this is an extremely valuable work. The debate over New and Old wars is saturated but placing violence within an empirically analysed, quantitative historical trajectory is a significant development. From this, the methodological debate and the reasons for what we see are set to break out into the social sciences.


"A problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won" is how Pinker elegantly defines how we are increasingly seeing violence. 


Is the increasingly visual nature of war, beamed into hour homes in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, causing us to develop anti-war norms? We get conflict fatigue.  Pinker also examines and endorses the trade theory - greater economic interdependence reduces the probability of going to war with each other. John Darwin touches on this in After Tamerlane. 



Yet Pinker in the quote compares the present day with World War II. Many who fought in that conflict are still alive. It was a national ideological with racial architecture that drove this war in Europe and Africa. In the Sino-Japanese theatre, each foe dehumanized the other. Ideologies can be as potent a weapon as a nuclear arsenal and the question I have is, does social networking make antagonistic ideologies more or less likely?



A full World Service piece on the Pinker work is here


Friday 28 October 2011

China and the European arms embargo

When you're going cup in hand to a country, it's very difficult to maintain the moral high ground. For a state, economic prosperity allows "ethical dimensions" to foreign policy (in theory). Now that China will almost certainly take a stake in the E.U through the sale of bonds, China will ask serious concessions of Europe, including a lifting of the arms embargo that Europe placed on its trade with China, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 when several hundred unarmed civilians protesting peacefully for democratic reform were killed. There were later reports that troops searched the main Peking university campus for ringleaders, beating and killing those they suspect of co-ordinating the protests.


The European arms industry is notable in that in includes a large amount of American spin-off technology and joint-concept development. American military spin-off technology is always entering the media, for example this woman's artificial exoskeleton enabling her to regain movement in lower limbs. But after 9.11 a significant portion of greater budgetary allowances went in Homeland Security - in particular, developing methods to combat chemical and biological weapons, or coping with dissemination, or of nuclear fall outs.


Even so, the US military research and development budget is peerless. But it's projected that research and development as a percentage of total defense spending is set to fall from 34.4% in FY2011 to 34.0% in FY2012, and that is set against a total reduction in defense spending. The conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation proposed this scenario under a re-elected Obama:






The conservatives rail against the differing trajectories of the United States and China and the EU developments will be vilified in the right-wing media. But the US defense budget, now running at about 5% of GDP (it was 4.7% in FY2010) became inflated after 9.11, pursuing two foreign occupations and concerned about the use of CBN weapons on its own soil. The U.S. defense budget is still about six times that of China but the generational gap in technology is closing. Given the aging population in the United States as the baby-boomers hit retirement (lucky them) there is teh requirement for a correction in spending. Military expenditure as a percentage of GDP is still historically low for the United States (it hit 3% in 1999-2001 as there became a vacuum of perceived threats) which reached as high as 9.4% on the Vietnam war. True, Europe spends as nations anywhere between 1 and 2.5% of GDP on military, but it was not a superpower in the Cold War, forced to alloy its military-industrial complex into foreign policy.


Yet there are problems with the EU-China development. With technology, China, like Israel in the specifically military sphere, and India is a leader in reverse engineering (reverse engineering,  Guochanhua, also has a subsidiary area related to copyright and computer code called Clean Room Design or Chinese Wall). Reverse engineering requires creativity and innovation. With today's technology, it also requires vast computational expertise which fits and compliments China's designs on building a peerless cybercapability. The danger isn't at all that China will procure European military hard and software, but that its brilliant reverse engineering will create a second generation of these acquisitions, rendering obsolete the equipment the European's sold. 


Robert Gates, concerned with the lack of interoperability between the ever advancing United States and his European allies offered a plaintive critique in Munich shortly before he left his post as Secretary of Defense. Nato had a "dim if not dismal" future because of European penny-pinching. In the current list of priorities with the European Union, Nato isn't top. "It's the economy, stupid." People must eat before they can go to war.


If the arms embargo is lifted it will certainly show that American hegemony has disappeared because at the height of their power in the 90s they would never have allowed such a move. Further, if the arms embargo is lifted (and surely the European Union will not lift all aspects of the embargo) the conservative commentary in America will paint Europe as set to become a military research and development laboratory for China. This will further lead to fragility in Nato. Presumably the UK, out of the Euro, may retain some independent juristiction on its arms trade, but it works hand in hand with so many European partners that this may be a moot point. 


Of course, wealth is relative and not homogenous in a society. In fact in several new authorative reports the very rich in society have not just got relatively richer, but absolutely wealthier, despite the economic downturn. I'm writing a blog on this in the next couple of days. 


Today, the words of Eisenhower as he warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex seem ironic:



"we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."



This economic development could very much shift the strategic landscape. The United States, which really underpinned materially the Libya adventure, and without which, the Gadaffi regime would probably still be in existence in some form, could step back from European military assistance in the future. Consider the furore over the stealth helicopter crashing in Abottobad and the fears of Chinese reverse engineering. Given that mindset, why would the U.S. give Europe cutting-edge technology in the future? Joint Strike Fighter? What Joint Strike Fighter?