Phosphorus: The Next Big Power Conflict

There's a scene in Alan Moore's famous comic book (he resented the term 'graphic novel') between the Batman and the Joker, in the rain, at a deserted funfair. The Joker is walking around and he says:

"Do you know what triggered the last World War? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors!'

The joke is on us. National provisions for populations means safeguarding citizens right to consumerism will create resource conflicts around minerals necessary for foodstuffs. Crazy.

The historical accuracy aside, seemingly small controversies can escalate provided there is enough momentum already gained between the antagonists. Simply put, even telegraph poles can be the straw that caused the camel to go to war.

Phosphorus is critical to phosphate fertilisers, themselves critical to 'global food security' says The London Times in a feature on food miracles (a great summary of the problem and history is here at Business Insider). The richest supplies are in Morocco and China and the latter is now less eager to export it than it used to be. Moreover, that 'India is already almost one hundred percent dependent on imported phosphorus' shows the possible antagonisms that could arise over access to minerals.

China has a plan. The plan is to secure resource access globally. To safeguard resource access, it will develop its military, in order to combat US military hegemonic status, should the US confront it over resources. The United States may assume that China is developing its military in order to assert regional authority but it is something much more precise: China understands that the rise of the Asian populations and their consumerism will lead to turbulence in terms of resource access. Whilst America has spent the last ten years engaged in military confrontation to ensure physical security, China has been engaged in soft power offensives aimed at resource security.

The idea is simple: secure resources for your population and your nation survives. Given the nuclear status of China, conflicts will only erupt at the local level, hence China needs high end military technology and cyberintelligence.

China is already resource wealthy. It possesses supplies of most minerals necessary for US manufacturing, for example. C. Robert Taylor argues that US domestic phosphorus supplies will be exhausted in 15-30 years and that this resource, not oil, will then be the key security factor in US foreign policy. Taylor notes that:


Morocco and China hold 60 percent of the world’s known phosphorus reserves while the U.S., South Africa and Jordan hold most of the rest.
Wisely, China, “has imposed a 100 to 175 percent tariff to curtail phosphorus exports, yet the U.S. continues to export to China. Troubling, ain’t it 

Food is key. The reason is obvious. You don't have to kill to survive. You don't have to consume luxury goods to survive. You don't have to have three foreign vacations a year to survive. You don't need to upgrade your home entertainment system to survive or even buy Homeland Series 1 on DVD boxset to survive. But you do have to eat. And if you think that's far fetched, look at what happened to global markets in April 2012 when the cost of Spring Onions and Cabbages in China soared.

Cry Havoc, and let loose the forces of Anonymous

Of course, it makes good sense.Some individuals or groups are collaborating as Anonymous and hacking sites containing sensitive data. Earlier this month it launched DDoS attacks against the UK Home Office's website.

So of course, it makes sense. Earlier this month Anonymous launched attacks against Chinese sites. Its "Anonymous China" twitter feed proclaimed, "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible." And provided those who accessed it information on anti-censorship programmes.

So of course it makes sense. The American government has been the main target of Anonymous so its important to stress a new, more malicious enemy.

So of course, it makes sense. China's hunger for corporate espionage is harming America, claimed Richard Falkenrath, Former Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to the White House. Right wing conspiracy theorists see the RQ-170 drone lost over Iran as being brought down by a Chinese cyberunit, or more generally, just the Chinese.

So of course it make sense. Adam Segal, writing April 20, 2012 in Foreign Policy, argues Anonymous should attack five key Chinese websites. It's not us, it's them, is Segal's tone - China has the really good secrets. 

Afghanistan end-game

Much has been written and talked about regarding what the end game in Afghanistan looks like. Today the US and Afghanistan have finalised their strategic partnership arrangement.


Very much it's reminiscent of the CCCP's withdrawal from Afghanistan when it continued to give massive financial aid to shore up the regime, successfully. When the aid stopped, the regime was toppled.


The NYT reports:

However, the United States is already anticipating that it will make a substantial contribution toward paying for Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014 and is searching for contributions from its NATO partners. The amount is not settled but a figure of $2.7 billion a year has been under discussion.  There would be additional foreign aid for civilian fields.


Which is similar to the Russian's annual aid back in the early 1990s. Not so much nation-building, as regime-propping. Offshore balancers are in the ascendency in terms of fashionable thought and with good reason after the confused aims and utopian ideals cited in the Iraq and Afghan invasions. 


So where are we? When Russia left Afghanistan, it ranked 170 out of 174 in the UNDP's Human Development Index (Barakat, S. (2004). Reconstructing war-torn societies: Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (p.7)).

In 2001 in ranked 89 of 90 in a UNDP Human Poverty Index using various indicators. In 2006 it conspicuously did not feature on the numbered tables, being considered in separation to that with other states lacking enough data. In 2011, it ranked 172 out of 187 (Democratic of Congo was in last place, probably justifying even greater faith into the theory of Resource curses now that globalization has opened up the world's resources to all markets). There can be no doubt, given the numerous documentaries that have emerged, that Western forces went there to do good, to nation-build, to conduct counter-insurgency. But this was war, with resistance, and there was never a post-conflict setting, never a time when the resistance had subsided to such an extent that nation-building could begin. Defence won out over offence. 

Psychological and physical traumas after Iraq and Afghanistan

Dignity comes in many forms. Lt Col. Tammy Duckworth lost her legs in a helicopter crash which came under RPG fire in Iraq. She is the current Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs in the United States Department for Veterans Affairs.

In November 2012 she will stand as the Democratic nominee for the 8th Congressional District of Illinois, standing against conservative Republican Joe Walsh, having stood and lost for the 6th Congressional District in 2006.

Duckworth is standing on a platform of strong social cohesion, especially protecting Medicare. She has made the point that there are hidden costs to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Advanced battlefield aid has meant the return of many combat troops that would not previously have survived their injuries. The accelerated use of IEDs in both theatres amplified the injury rate.

Liberal democracies have a duty of care to their returning service personnel. Costsofwar's (Part of The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown's Watson Institute) research concludes:

• Over 6,000 US troops have died, as have 2,300 Pentagon contractors
• Over 550,000 disability claims have been registered with the VA as of fall 2010
• Nearly 70,000 allied troops have been wounded
• A RAND study screening of returning troops found 26 percent likely had some kind of mental health condition.
• Toxic dust exposures in theater have been associated with high rates of respiratory, neurological, and cardiovascular disease in returning troops
• The middle class is somewhat overrepresented, the poor and the very wealthy underrepresented among the casualties[1]

550, 000 disability claims in a population of 311, 591, 000 people represents a disability claim of 0.176% of the population. Which means that as a result of the war on terror, 176 in every 100 000 have filed disability claims in the United States. These are hidden costs.

But more difficult to gauge, assess, treat and hence reintegrate soldiers are psychological traumas. In the Canadian film "Passchendaele", there is a general sense of the inhumanity of war, that men cannot prepare for its horrors, and that, also, bodies becomes twisted into shapes by explosions that are incomprehensible to the human mind. The documentaries are starting to emerge on Iraq and Afghanistan that deal with this explicitly. The three-part documentary series by the British Broadcasting Service, Our War, is one such attempt, which incorporates a large percentage of footage shot by the troops themselves and only recently released by the Ministry of Defence (first, second, third).

Though politicians may be desperate to draw a line under Iraq and Afghanistan, as the two theatres of the War on Terror that incorporated substantial troop deployment, the media may come to delve deeper into it as the picture of what the aftermath actually looks like becomes clearer. A Daily Mirror investigation concluded that mental health problems in the UK military stood at 2, 510 in 2010, and those with severe PTSD, at 185. These are diagnosed mental injuries. It seems probable that given the machismo culture of front line military forces, any mental problems would be preferrably self-medicated.

The war on terror as a name and venture is soon to be confined to history but the hidden costs will still be very much a part of our liberal democracies for decades to come. Identifying this, and giving voices to those who have important things to say, such as Tammy Duckworth, will be vital to the relationship between civil society and our armed forces in the coming decades.