Another colonel
Thinks it’s his turn to spring clean
The big boss – hi coup!
politics
24
Feb 10
There’s not enough topical poetry about the politics of Niger
25
Jan 10
Facts both Astonishing and Disturbing
- The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is 0.4% of total UK government spending. In an age of globalisation, how is it possible to invest so little in your primary vehicle for dealing with other governmental and intergovernmental actors?
- 85% of basic services in Southern Sudan are provided by NGOs (source: anonymous donor). Not only is it difficult to know where to point the finger on this one, it’s difficult to know whose finger would be doing the pointing. Certainly not mine.
- Remittances to Haiti were 19% of GDP in 2002 but rose to 50% of GDP in 2008. Take a barely-there legal economy, factor in the financial crisis, and things don’t look great for the reconstruction. I’m sure the US will take things in hand though.
- Congo (Kinshasa) would be screwed if people were allowed to live where they wanted, so it’s a good thing freedom of movement isn’t a human right. Haiti was pretty ropey even before the earthquake, but it’s looking pretty good for Iraq.
5
Dec 09
An education in terror
David Blair’s coverage of education in Pakistan – more accurately, the lack of education in Pakistan – threw up some interesting stats in the war on terror.
This year the central government will spend 66 per cent of its budget on defence and debt servicing, and only 2.5 per cent on education. Throw in the immense burden of corruption and there is precious little money for schools. The central education budget is only £478 million, or about £6 for each school-age child in the country. Defence, by contrast, receives £2.6 billion according to the official figure – and probably more in reality.
As Blair points out, over the border in Afghanistan primary school attendance for boys (although not for girls) is higher at 66% to Pakistan’s 23%. The situation for girls in Afghanistan is of course dire compared to boys purely because of ideology rather than finance, which is one reason why I don’t share Una Vera’s relative optimism about the position of women.
An entire generation of girls has not missed the opportunities afforded by basic education, and the current crop of female activists in Afghanistan is from the previous generation. Blair’s article is fair-handed about the role that madrassas play in offering rudimentary education to the poor, but he doesn’t look too far to the future. I can’t blame him – it’s not a pretty sight.
Lack of educational opportunities in Pakistan is the single biggest problem the country faces, a timebomb waiting to happen no matter who happens to be in power once the dust of the war on terror settles. It drives an even bigger wedge between the Pakistani elite and the people who they govern, and it closes the door to future growth for Pakistanis in every area of life.
The article does mention that DFID and other actors are investing in the educational system, but that the funding tends to go through the government, which creates problems due to corruption. So here’s an alternative suggestion: why not channel funding through the madrassas, an already existing network of educational facilities?
This gives Pakistan two opportunities. First, it won’t cost as much as starting from scratch, although obviously in areas where there are no facilities, scratch is all we got. Second, it creates more pathways for dialogue between the government and the people, undermining the monopoly that religious groups currently have.
For success, the key thing would be to work with madrassas to expand the curriculum beyond religious study, into relatively non-controversial areas such as science and languages. There’s no reason why, if it’s handled properly, at a future date madrassas could become integrated into the national education system. Not ideal, but better than what exists now.
I have no illusions that this would be ridiculously difficult to pull off, and that neither the government of Pakistan or the madrassas is likely to engage with it quickly, given their ideological antipathy. The tragedy of Pakistan is that nobody else seems to have alternative suggestions – it’s just business as usual, as if state-based education was the only meal on the menu.
30
Nov 09
In Isolation
This, I love.
In Pandemic 2, the plucky island nation of Madagascar (plucky, and also riven by political conflict) closes its borders as soon as a pandemic is declared, isolating the island completely from outside contamination and ensuring its survival. In the real world the outcome of this strategy is North Korea, and good luck with that.
At my regional airport, passport inspection comes complete with facemasks, handwash and a sheet exhorting you to report your symptoms to the nearest medical centre.1 The pandemic has re-awakened all sorts of interesting cultural krakens, and BLDGBLG has embarked on a large scale project examining notions of quarantine and isolation from a spatial / architectural perspective. There’s a particularly interesting interview with history professor Krista Maglen, whose research focuses on the prevention of infectious disease, where she discusses how physical space determines cultural space when it comes to controlling the spread of disease.
Quarantine differs very much depending on where a country is in relation to a disease source or perceived disease source… Quarantine became a very big deal [in Australia]. First of all, there’s a perceived proximity to Asia, which in the West has traditionally been seen as this great source of disease – the “Yellow Peril.” Quarantine is also a way to draw a line around White Australia, racially, just as much as it is to draw a line around the notion of a virgin territory that doesn’t have the diseases of the rest of the world.
Britain has a different relationship to quarantine because its borders are much more fluid. It can’t have borders as rigid as somewhere like Australia, for lots of different reasons: because of its empire; because it relies on maintaining open borders to let trade flow; and because Britain is itself quite undefined, in a way. It’s a composite of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The borders of Britain are much more fluid, so quarantine takes a different form there and has a very different history.
Quarantine is closely tied to immigration in the United States: Ellis Island was a quarantine processing site, as well as an immigration processing site. Until the 1920s, immigrants arriving into the United States came into facilities that were also quarantine stations, and also places where you could isolate people for disease control reasons. Part of the processing of who can and can’t get into the United States is always about quarantine—what bodies are seen to be diseased and undesirable.
This sheds much light for me on the way in which immigration discourse in the USA is shaped – on both sides, but particularly on the right – in terms of disease control. Uncontrolled immigration is an infection in the body politic – the right demands that the intruder cells be expelled, a classic CD4+ T cell response, while (broadly) leftist plans for controlled assimilation are the political equivalent of quarantine measures.
The US attempts to deal with immigration issues as if it was an island nation (in addition to shouldering its own legacy of racial tensions), as if it was a body with clearly identifiable borders rather than a free-floating concept with only a thin match to its actual spatial coordinates, which is of course a recipe for an epic fail. How should we deal with the brute fact that the history of civilisation is a history of population movements?
- Don’t. All they’ll do is give you an X-ray and charge you E50. [↩]
27
Nov 09
The Puppies of War
Lind writes in the Fourth Generation War Manual of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps:
Much of what Marines now face in Fourth Generation wars is simply war as it was fought before the rise of the state and the Peace of Westphalia. Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world.
I’m no military historian, but this viewpoint always seemed to me to be a) obvious and b) wrong. Perhaps I came of age in that post-Cold War period when Fourth Generation warfare (4GW) was simply the face of war – and certainly the big ticket wars of that time, the Great Lakes and Yugoslav wars, fit the description – but it seemed clear that the sort of war that is now described as Second and Third Generation warfare was long gone. By 1991, in fact, that sort of warfare already seemed archaic, something that you would read about in history books rather than actually attempt to wage.
So yeah, Lind seems kind of obvious here, in the same way as Hobsbawm seems when he talks about the 20th Century lasting from 1914-1991 – not obvious in a “well, duh” way, but obvious in a “thank god somebody else noticed, and isn’t that a useful way of looking at things” way.
I missed out on military history, but I did study contemporary history, and in particular a whole heap of African history. So while Lind’s statement seems obvious, it also seems wrong, because a brief glimpse through the annals of post-WWII African history reveals a glaring absence of Second and Third Generation warfare. It’s all 4GW all the time, baby. Other parts of the world tell a similar story, since most of the proxy wars between the USA and USSR were easiest to sustain at the 4GW level, with some heavy artillery thrown in and the occasional weak-ass air force. Maneuver warfare in eastern Congo? Unlikely.
If this is true, it raises a difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare from First to Second to Third to Fourth Generation. You don’t have to be John Gray to be suspicious of such a smooth narrative, particularly when it emnates largely from the Kings of Narrative, our American friends. American political history perhaps more than any other country is one in which the narrative is paramount for the sense of national identity – where most national histories are primarily the result of historical contingency, of pragmatic adaptation to external and internal shocks, American history was spun equally out of whole philosophical cloth.
Suspicions multiply when Lind talks (with caution, admittedly) about importing 4GW techniques – via the physical presence of the military – to fight gang crime on the streets of American, on the basis that gang tactics are essentially identical to insurgency tactics.
Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.
The last four sentences are all narrative reinforcement, by the way, but I thought they were worth keeping in. Lind is wrong about the essential point here (and I would argue wrong in his conclusions as well). While their tactics may look similar (in the sense that there’s a limited range of possible criminal activity in any society, so it inevitably looks familiar), gang culture in the United States is primarily the result of the failure to sustain the narrative of the US – another, different symptom of this failure can also be seen in the political schisms in the US that have grown up since the turn of the millenium – and we can argue about why that narrative is failing another time.
By contrast insurgency culture in other countries is not just a response to the failure of the state’s narrative – for example, in Afghanistan. That reduces the narrative to a response to a dominant state narrative, which might seem natural to those of us who come from countries where a dominant state narrative, but is not true in many places; and to reduce it so also reduces the agency of insurgents to mere reaction. That is sometimes the case, but we need to recognise that insurgency culture presents a successful narrative in its own right in a way that street gang culture does not. So the two are not identical, they are flip sides of the same narrative coin, which means they need to be addressed differently – although in both cases the importance of establishing alternative narratives is paramount.
Back to my original point – the difficult question for the “standard” history of warfare is whether that narrative fits the facts. My answer is no. The standard history presented by Lind and others is a) Eurocentric and b) militarocentric,1 primarily an attempt to define a coherent narrative which justifies both the military and the ends to which the military is directed. Any group that didn’t buy into the post-Westphalian consensus on how war would be conducted – and that includes pretty much everybody who wasn’t a European state and who didn’t take their cues from the European states, which is to say pretty much everybody in the world – was rolling like they used to roll, all 4GW all the time, baby.
Does this make much difference to the work of Lind and others to help the military to adjust to 4GW? Not especially – although their historical interpretation might be a bedtime story to reassure the military that they weren’t wasting their time, the direction in which they’re going is absolutely the right one.2 The real question is whether a state-based military can really be “successful” in 4GW terms in a situation where the very idea of the state has lost its currency – and that seems to me very doubtful.
p.s. H/T to John Robb for hosting William Lind‘s work on his website. I count that as a public service.
19
Nov 09
Up for grabs
My dislike of U2 operates on a number of levels. Like many entertainers with a political interest, they fail to realise that you can’t speak truth to power when you are yourself one of the powerful. The meaningless kerfuffle about tickets for their MTV Berlin Wall gig exposes the precarious position such people occupy – tickets for the gig were free but limited, a deliberate marketing tactic to create a false sense of occasion.
At the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t require anybody’s help to generate a real sense of occasion – it was a real event with a real impact of an order of magnitude that is hard to understand in today’s over-mediated world. Only 20 years later, events no longer have this sense of occasion for us since they act mainly as grist for the media mill. So how to communicate the right gravitas?
This is where U2 come in, not as musicians but as event planners whose outputs can be repurposed on demand (weddings, barmitzvahs, the collapse of Communism). Yes, U2′s album Achtung Baby was recorded in Berlin and featured a Trabant on the front cover, but it was recorded after the fall of the wall – they were piggybacking on the event for a combination of self-reassurance and self-promotion even then. This concert is just the logical next step, and everybody is complicit in making it happen – the band, the government, the media, even the people holding those free tickets.
Why am I being such a curmudgeon if everybody involved got what they wanted? It’s because a) I believe actual events have real meaning which is obscured by media events, and b) I resent companies making money from our personal experiences. Will Davies believes that we’re accelerating towards the Economy of Presence, where co-location (say, at U2′s Berlin Wall gig) will be of the highest value because it’s so scarce, but I’m not sure that I agree. The ubiquitous nature of telecoms means that the distinction between being there and not being there becomes blurred, with the encouragement of the telecoms companies – who arrange things so that they make money from our experiences both ways. Presumably that’s why the organisers of the U2 gig prevented those without tickets from seeing the concert, even though it was free – to cordon off the experience so that it could be leveraged.
It’s no use saying “I was there!” if everybody else in the world replies “So was I”, after all. Yet the very technology we’re provided with nibbles at the edges of events and causes them to bleed all over the internet. I’m not complaining about that bleeding and blurring of the lines between being there and not being there in the same way that William is (I think). I’m just suspicious of groups such as U2 who magically claim to have some sort of connection to events they clearly had nothing to do with, and who are at the same time are complicit in degrading the real meaning of those events in the popular consciousness. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up in a world where the Live Aid concert as a cultural phenomenon has more resonance in the popular consciousness than the Ethiopian famine it was meant to relieve.
Whoops. Too late.
19
Jun 09
For Iran
There’s a firestorm in the blog teacup around Iran at the moment. Anything beyond the basic expression of solidarity with the protestors would be futile and presumptuous, and the most insightful thing that I’ve read relating to the protests was also the simplest. This quoted on the Prospect blog post by Nasrin Alavi, author of the excellent We Are Iran:
I will take part in the rally tomorrow. It might become violent. Perhaps I may be one of the people who is meant to die. I am listening to all the beautiful songs that I’ve ever heard before…. I always wanted to thin out my eyebrows… I am looking through all my family photo albums from the start. I have to call my friends and say goodbye. I just have two bookshelves full of books to my name in this world; I have told my family who to give them to. I have two units to go before I get my degree, but the hell with that… I just wrote these scattered sentences so that the next generation knows that we weren’t irrational and emotional. So that they know we did what we could to make our lives better… but we refused to give in to oppression.
The Shi’ite preoccupation with martyrdom comes through clearly, but what comes through more clearly is that this is a person with something to lose: not their life, but their hopes.
1
Jun 09
Like swatting flies (update)
When somebody acts on their beliefs, you may disagree with those beliefs, the actions that result from those beliefs or both; but at the very least, their actions reveal their convictions more honestly than their words. So when somebody shoots an “abortion doctor”1 I disagree with their beliefs, condemn their actions but praise their conviction, because at least we know where we stand with those people.2 Spare a thought for the many cheerleaders for this murderer, though – all of those who support the act, but lack the conviction to ever do it themselves. Their lives must be a hell of cognitive dissonance, righteously enraged at the world they find themselves in but too spineless to do anything about it.
24
May 09
Like swatting flies
If rational debate is an airplane, then religious discussion on the web is a flock of birds right in your jet engine. This is partly the nature of religion and partly the nature of the web, and my general rule that nobody ever had their mind changed by debating their views applies. Having acknowledged that, I will now attempt takeoff.
Your attitude towards abortion will be largely determined by a single factors: your view about whether a foetus constitutes a full human person, with all the rights that go with that. If the foetus does not possess the right to life – or possesses a circumscribed right to life – then abortion may be morally acceptable. Unfortunately if you do believe that the foetus possesses a full right to life, then you’re unlikely to be convinced by somebody who doesn’t share that belief, as illustrated by a savant going by the name Diogenes1:
I see nothing wrong with swatting flies.
Let’s say that you have a different opinion. You think the lives of flies are sacred, and therefore you think that swatting flies is grossly immoral. You hold this view with the utmost sincerity. Unfortunately for you, I’m making the rules. And I say:
* You can’t refer to fly-swatting as “murder.” That would be “hate speech,” inciting others to violence.
* You can’t interfere when I swat flies.
* You must contribute to the purchase of fly swatters.Now, with those ground-rules established, let’s begin a civil discussion of the morality of swatting flies. There’s no need for anger, recrimination, or name-calling. We have a sincere difference of opinion. Let’s– oh, wait, excuse me a moment [thwack!]– find some common ground.
This seems straightforward enough on the face of it – clever enough for some approving comments and links from other blogs – yet the analogy exposes the most basic problem with a “pro-life” position that abortion is murder. Let’s say that I do believe that flies are sacred, and that swatting them is essentially murder. If I was sitting in front of Diogenes trying to have this discussion, and he started to swat flies, wouldn’t I be obliged by my beliefs to stop him? Equally, if somebody proclaims that they believe that abortion is murder, and is fully aware that murders are being regularly carried out in their vicinity, don’t they have an obligation to go out and put a stop to it as soon as possible, no matter the risk to their own lives?
Yet presumably Diogenes – and the vast majority of pro-life advocates – take no such action, and in such a case, there appear to be two possibilities. The first is unpleasant to contemplate: that the person who sincerely holds this belief but fails to act on it is a coward, a hypocrite and (in their own eyes, at least) an accessory to murder. I don’t think that everybody who holds this belief is such a character, however, so the second possibility seems more likely: that they don’t actually believe that abortion is murder. If the latter is true, the inevitable conclusion is that they don’t in fact believe a foetus is a full person.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that this is the case: take for example one of the commenters on Diogenes’ post, a fellow named Exaudi nos2:
All we would have to do to end this argument about flies is to line the dead ones up on the side walk in front of the establishment that brought on their demise and after the pile gets pretty deep, I think the common ground would be found.
This is a common trope on the anti-abortion side: if only people were aware of the true nature of abortion, they’d all come out against it, and therefore it’s acceptable to publicly exhibit the process and results of abortion.3 Now I have a problem with the idea of exhibiting corpses in public, especially for political purposes, and it seems that most people share this feeling: I wouldn’t, for example, suggest that we pile up the corpses of victims of traffic accidents to make a case for more cycle paths.
Exaudi nos’ suggestion implies that either he believes that it would be acceptable to do such a thing, or that he doesn’t believe that an aborted foetus has the same status as a corpse. If it’s the former, one has to wonder why he doesn’t propose such tactics for other political campaigns – but if it’s the latter, then the only conclusion we can draw is that, if he believes that an aborted foetus does not possess the same status as a dead person, then he neither believes that a live foetus possesses the same rights as a live person.
- I really, really hope that pseudonym is meant to be ironic. [↩]
- “Hear us” for those of you who skipped Latin class and/or aren’t Catholic. [↩]
- I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anti-abortion campaigners enjoy posting videos that graphically show aborted foetuses, but some of them do seem to take a certain grim satisfaction in it. I won’t link to any videos, but they’re easy enough to find. [↩]
24
Apr 09
Now lie in your linguistic bed
New Kosova Report carries an opinion piece entitled God has stopped speaking Serbian. It’s a polemic against Serbs not learning Albanian, disguised as concern for the future of Serbs in Kosova. Thus,
If before Serbs did not really have to learn Albanian because Albanians could and had to speak their language, now learning Albanian is a must to function economically in Kosovo. Otherwise, there won’t be any future for Serbs here. While Serbian is an official language along with Albanian across Kosovo, this is barely essential if only 6% of the population is Serbian… The key for prosperity for all the minorities in Kosovo – Serbian, Roma, Turkish and Bosniak – is being able to function in the dominant language – in this case Albanian.
This is a fairly moderate view in Kosova, acknowledging at least that Serbs (and other minorities) have a place in the country – but even moderation has its limits in Kosovo.1 The basic limit of that moderation is that Kosova is Albanian, and anybody who wants a piece of that future – no matter how long their communities might have lived there – needs to buy into that.
Linguistic chauvinism was one of the factors that drove the conflict in Kosovo prior to 1999, and continues to be a hot topic in the region (particularly in countries with Albanian minorities), but the notion that Serbs must learn Albanian is of course bullshit. If Serbs are citizens of the new Kosova, and Serbian is one of the official languages of Kosova – both of which the article agrees with – then it’s up to the majority to make the necessary accommodations to the minority. Given how many Kosovar Albanians have lived (and continue to live) in Switzerland, I’m surprised that they haven’t noticed this rather basic requirement of a multilingual state.
Switzerland isn’t the best example – the Swiss-German continually chafe at the fact that they need to learn French to work in the government, while the Swiss-French seem to have little requirement to learn German. However they don’t use this as an excuse to force the Swiss-French to learn German, or to deny that they can be citizens if they don’t. This seems like common sense to me, but that’s not how we roll in the Balkans, unfortunately. And so the merry-go-round continues, with language used as a club to bash people with.
Depressing. If you want some more positive news about Albanian-Serb relation, then this report in Balkan Insight will warm the cockles of your heart. Serbs visiting Pristina? Astonishing:2
… of course I was reluctant to speak Serbian openly at first. But whenever someone overheard me speaking it in a café or restaurant, the only reaction was pleasant surprise and genuine joy. Most Albanians in those situations will squeeze out as many words of Serbian they know (be it a lot or just a little), smile, ask how are things in Belgrade, or even play some music commonly considered as “naša” (covering a wide array from Serbian turbo-folk over Bosnian sevdalinke to Croatian soft pop, but that’s an altogether different story). It seems they don’t think we eat little children for breakfast. Which is food for thought, if you can pardon the pun.