SATURDAY ESSAY
AFGHANISTAN, HAMID KARZAI & POLITICAL REFORM
THE ELECTION IN AFGHANISTAN is finally over, and what a charade it has been. Some two weeks ago, the West pushed Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, into a second round of voting in an attempt to wash out the stain of wholesale fraud and corruption. One million odd votes, mostly in favour of Mr. Karzai, were declared invalid after an investigation by the UN raised the point of non-existent “ghost” polling. Now Barack Obama and others have rushed to congratulate Mr. Karzai on winning another five years. Never mind, then, that he was unchallenged because his political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew, complaining that officials who oversaw the cheating and illegality had not been sacked. Never mind, either, those same officials who promptly ruled Mr. Karzai the winner, despite the dubious nature of the entire legal process.
No doubt, though, many in Afghanistan have been relieved and spared the difficulty of a second round run-off in the face of hostile Taliban threats, voter apathy and indifference, and the approaching winter. Westerners coping with the unsavoury crisis unfolding in the country by the day must also be relieved that they had averted, for now, street protests by Dr. Abdullah’s supporters, which could have stoked political violence and open Pushtun-Tajik rivalry.
Small comfort, some may say. The election has been a debacle for both Afghanistan and the West. Costing in excess of $300-million, the electoral fiasco has deepened, yet further, the country’s crisis. Since the vote, more than 170 NATO soldiers have been killed. Ever more Westerners, particularly those in Britain, understandably ask why their compatriots must keep dying to prop up and support the inept and corrupt Hamid Karzai. Public opinion in Britain is soaring fast against continued British involvement in Afghanistan; this week, a callous “rogue” Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers, to whom he was trained, adding further to the country’s heavy casualties.
Afghans, too, it would appear are losing faith in the West. The most senior U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has requested a substantial increase in resources – rumoured to be in the region of 40,000 additional troops – that, he says is needed to “gain the initiative and reverse the insurgent momentum”. He insists that without more Western troops and massively larger Afghan forces, more Afghans could throw their lot and support towards the Taliban. If so, the West would have failed. His counter-insurgency plan seeks to protect the Afghan population and win its allegiance to a legitimate Afghan government. That is why this election has been so damaging: Mr. Karzai’s legitimacy is what has suffered most.
Mr. Karzai has a way of ignoring his Western protectors; such stubbornness has been apparent for many months. He should not think that he is quietly safe for the next five years, or that the United States needs him more than he needs it. President Obama must soon declare his strategy and decision on Afghanistan, put off for the past two months, on whether the U.S. will heed General McChrystal’s call for more troops, and by staking his presidency on the Afghan war. However, the case for propelling a surge is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Many in Mr. Obama’s own entourage think it is time to give up on Afghanistan; if that happens, Mr. Karzai will not survive in power.
Hamid Karzai, on his part, has pledged to remove the “stigma” of corruption and by forming an inclusive government that will be a “mirror of Afghanistan”. He even urged “our Taliban brothers to come home”.
Fine words, perhaps, but it is deeds that will count. Mr. Karzai must appoint competent ministers and replace the sycophants in his midst; he should proceed to prosecute corrupt officials; he should move his brother, Ahmad Wali, accused of being both a drugs baron and in the pay of the CIA, away from his power-base in Kandahar; and, central to government, should boost programmes to entice Taliban fighters to the negotiating table. Still more, he should launch a reform of the constitution, devolving some of his over-centralised powers to parliament, and to provincial and district governors. Why couldn’t that task be entrusted to his rival, Dr. Abdullah?
Afghans will care more about what Mr. Karzai does with power than how he regained it; regaining his authority will be central to his immediate task. Now, in his second and final term in the Arg, the fortress that was previously home to Afghan Kings, Mr. Karzai must choose his place in history. If he reforms boldly, he may yet be remembered as the father of post-Taliban Afghanistan, a modern-day Abdur Rahman, the 19th century British-backed emir who united the country. But, if he sticks to his old ways, Hamid Karzai could become another Najibullah – the last Communist president who, abandoned by Russia, was strung up in 1996 from a Kabul lamppost.
Saturday, 07 November 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA: 12-MONTHS INTO OFFICE
WHEN PRESIDENT OBAMA was elected he made it plain that this was an event of some importance. He relayed to America and to the world that his supporters had “put their hands on the arc of history and bent it once more towards the hope of a better day.” He made promises to end the war in Iraq, to sort out the Taliban, to provide health-care for all and to erect a cap-and-trade system to save the planet. 12-months on, he has done none of these things, and some of his most avid supporters are starting to grow impatient.
Some may say that, for his part, Mr. Obama is beginning to sound exasperated. “I never thought any of this was going to be easy … Change is hard … and big change is harder” he told a crowd gathered in New Orleans this month. The crowd was friendly enough, but smaller than the crowds he used to attract during his campaign trail, and less starry-eyed, too. One young mother in the audience was reported as saying she didn’t buy “all the hype of hope and change”; generally speaking, though, she reckoned the president was “on the right path”. However, she thought his bailouts of banks and over-leveraged homeowners – many of whom had little by way of collateral in the first place – were “a slap in the face for those of us who are fiscally responsible”.
One of the main reasons why so many of Mr. Obama’s fans are disappointed is because he promised the impossible: such is the power of his oratory, that many people believed him. Many American voters remained convinced that before Barack Obama became president he would deliver all the niceties on his presidential wish-list without raising taxes on any but the rich and powerful. Mr. Obama, since, has done little to dispel the idea that he can work miracles.
In his inauguration speech, he declared: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Yet, about once a week since that day, he has ordered the assassination of “suspected” terrorists. These assassinations, carried out with Hellfire missiles fired from hovering drones, are often brutally messy. According to a recent report released by New America Foundation, an American think tank, it took 15 attempts to kill Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan who was finally blown to smithereens in August. Hundreds of people, some of them children, have died in these (unmanned) drone attacks. Mr. Obama would presumably include “not killing children” as being among his ideals. Sometimes, however, and what is becoming more common is that he sets aside this ideal in the interests of safety.
That may, or may not, be the right thing to do. It is absurd to profess, as is being done, that there is no trade-off “between our safety and our ideals”. Was that the case, Mr. Obama would already have closed the military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay; nearly all the prisoners he inherited from the Bush administration are still there. Meanwhile, and perhaps even more worrying for human rights groups is that he says he will continue “rendering” freshly captured terror suspects to third countries. Is this “change we believe in” or merely Bush with panache and style?
Can President Obama deliver on his election pledges?
AT HOME, far from ushering in a new era of friendly bipartisanship, which the president so promised before coming to office, he seldom opens his mouth now without bashing his opponents or his predecessor. Recently, he told a group of wealthy Democratic donors that, “I don’t mind cleaning up the mess that some other folks made … but, while I’m there mopping the floor I don’t want someone saying: ‘You’re not mopping fast enough or you’re not holding the mop the right way’.” His handling of the media, too, has become aggressive. A recent attempt to exclude Fox News, a conservative network, from a pooled interview with the White House pay tsar was so crude that even liberal networks objected.
Measured against the expectations of those who docked pictures of him riding a unicorn, Mr. Obama’s presidency would seem a failure. Measured by a more reasonable and realistic yardstick, however, it has solid successes. The financial system, for instance, appears to have stabilised. Continuing where Mr. Bush left off, Obama intervened to prop up ailing banks and insurers. Such action no-doubt averted political and economic catastrophe. The bailout may cost him votes, but it was necessary. The U.S. economy, although still in a terribly poor state, could now be through the worst of things as official data shows this week that America has moved from recession and into growth, albeit marginal.
His big domestic reforms are taking time, but this should hardly come as a surprise. He intends to reshape health-care that amounts to a staggering one-sixth of the U.S. economy/GDP. The details of the Obama health-care plan must be agreed on by a supermajority of senators, all of them opinionated to some degree and some of who remain nervous about re-election. Small wonder, then, that the health-care deal has not yet been sealed. Cap-and-trade will be next, but since this would reallocate trillions of dollars and affect everyone who uses energy, it could prove even more contentious. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs could be on the line in industries that remain dependant on fossil fuels.
MR. OBAMA’S election to office dramatically improved America’s image abroad. That must surely count for something, even if it has yet to pay tangible dividends. He has unnerved America’s trading partners by caving in to congressional pressure for protectionism, but has avoided sparking a full-blown trade war. Slowly, but surely, he is pulling out of Iraq with due prudence and care. His preference for talking to rogue states such as Iran and North Korea has so far yielded no substantial benefits, but diplomacy with such difficult issues would hardly ever have been swift. U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is up in the air – his indecision alarms hawks, but others contrast his methodical deliberation favourably with his predecessor’s impetuousness.
THE LITMUS TEST of Mr. Obama’s presidency is not whether he changes things quickly, but whether he changes them for the better. Perhaps, as the economy starts to recover, he will lay down a more constructive path towards fixing the budget. Perhaps his health-care reforms will curb costs in the long-term. Perhaps he can reach a deal with Iran, and even set-up a cap-and-trade system that the world so craves from America in avoiding the environmental dangers associated with climate change. It is still too early to know any of this: but, in the next few months, America and the world will start to see whether Mr. Obama can deliver on his election promises.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH & THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION
… Measures that appear to counter the Reformation: But, in doing so, has Pope Benedict XVI created a rod for his own back?
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, the Church of England voted to admit women to the priesthood. Since then, many disenchanted individual members of the 80-million worldwide Anglican Communion have been quietly and discreetly converting to Roman Catholicism. And, since 2003, when the Episcopalian Church – the American branch of the Communion – first ordained an openly gay bishop, the number of alienated conservatives has been greatly increased by their Church’s growing tolerance of homosexuality.
Still, many traditionalist Anglicans have held back, reluctant to sacrifice their hard fought liturgies and heritage. On October 20, however, Pope Benedict XVI offered them a seemingly way out of their unease and into the Catholic Church. In doing so, though, he created a new headache for the beleaguered Anglican leadership, under the leadership of Dr. Rowan Williams, and resuscitated an old and historic conundrum for the Vatican.
FOR YEARS, Vatican officials have been mulling over what to do about Anglican splinter groups who sought to join the Catholic Church as a body. Foremost among these is the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), led by an Australian Archbishop, John Hepworth. It had been thought the Pope might offer the TAC a status within the Roman Catholic Church like that given to the conservative fellowship, Opus Dei – one that gives its members their own clerics rather than putting them under the local diocesan bishop.
But the papal decree goes, unexpectedly, much further. It enables not just the TAC, but any Anglican group – community, parish, even an entire diocese – to enter into communion with Rome without sacrificing its traditions. The so-called “Apostolic Constitution” (the highest form of pontifical ordinance) creates a new entity that transcends diocesan boundaries: the “personal ordinate”, similarly designed to the “military ordinates” for Roman Catholic clergymen serving in the armed forces. In charge of each will be a former Anglican prelate. Following re-ordination to the Church of Rome, the Vatican has already taken several dozen rebel Anglican priests, some of them married. It makes other exceptions to its rules, too, such as that of priestly celibacy for the Eastern Catholic Churches, who recognise the authority of the Pope but who use their own rites. The Vatican does not, however, permit married bishops. Thus, the pastors of these new “personal ordinates” must either be unmarried bishops or married priests.
Archbishop Hepworth duly declared himself “profoundly moved by the generosity” of Pope Benedict. Rowan Williams, appearing stunned at such a papal announcement, complained that he had been informed only at “a very late stage”.
No wonder the Archbishop of Canterbury was shocked. The papal scheme will make it even harder for the Anglican leader to sustain an already difficult balancing act. In attempting to keep his worldwide Communion together, Dr. Williams is hewing to a relatively conservative line on homosexuality that would involve gay-friendly Americans settling for a sort of associate status. In his own Church, Rowan Williams has very much gone along with a liberal policy on women. Preparations are in order for the ordination of female bishops. In addition, there is likely to be an end, too, to the procedural devices allowing traditionalist clergy to avoid serving alongside, or under, women. It is this that may have persuaded the Vatican to act: how to respond to conservatives who felt the Church of England was about to make their position untenable.
Up until now, an uneasy alliance of low-church evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics has struggled to resist Anglicanism. Whilst as many as one in seven Church of England priests could convert to Rome, the balance in the Church of England will now likely be in favour of the liberals. The evangelicals certainly won’t go to Rome and it seems probable they may now be abandoned by their Anglo-Catholic allies.
THE EFFECT on the Catholic Church may be far-reaching. With the Pope signalling a willingness to grant married prelates the authority, if not the status, of bishops, it seems apt to ask just how much longer he can hold onto the line of priestly celibacy in the Western Church. Celibacy is widely ignored in Africa and Latin America.
The Pope’s initiative sounds like a vindication of the idea of married priests, which was one of the main achievements of the Reformation. For the Roman Catholic Church to continue with its past ideologies is apparent that it became an obstacle to Benedict’s dream of re-evangelising Europe. Dogmatic stances have also played direct cause in the collapse of Europeans studying for the priesthood.
CRUCIALLY, whilst the new legal structures by which Anglicans may enter the Roman Catholic Church may sound a pedestrian organisational matter to Canonical lawyers, it is potentially the most explosive development in Anglican-Catholic relations since the Reformation. The Church of England’s witness to the life of the nation has been a valued and historic civic resource. Its position has been dangerously undermined.
Saturday, 24 October 2009
Related:
AFGHAN ELECTIONS 2009
IT will never be known how the voters of Afghanistan voted in their country’s presidential elections on August 20. Nearly two months after polling took place, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is still trying to separate fraudulent votes from the ballot. In some Afghan provinces, many more votes were counted than were actually cast. E.U. election monitors have characterised 1.5-million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it becomes nigh impossible to untangle.
The fraudulent elections complicate the job of President Obama as he continues to weigh-up the recommendations from his most senior military commander there, General Stanley McChrystal: as many as 40,000 additional troops are being called for to support General McChrystal’s envisaged counterinsurgency strategy. But, for that strategy to work, America needs a credible Afghan partner.
A WAR undertaken to defeat Al-Qaeda is increasingly seen through the lens of such elections. It is quite conceivable for people to ask why our soldiers should be fighting for a corrupt Afghan government clinging to power by fraud.
Afghanistan will remain beyond our grasp, until a number of identifiable problems have been fixed. Largely, the problems are focussed around the ‘Ghost Vote’.
Afghans perpetrated the fraud; they remain ultimately responsible for the consequences. They include the local election staff, government officials overseeing proceedings, and the local warlords and power brokers. Crucially, too, Afghanistan’s Independent Elections Commission (IEC), a seven-member board appointed by Karzai to supervise the elections, was anything but independent. For instance, its head met weekly with Karzai – but not with the other candidates – and the commission consistently made decisions that benefited the Karzai regime.
Political stability in Afghanistan required that the elections went smoothly, a prerequisite, too, for the continued military mission. The U.N. Security Council tasked the U.N. mission in Afghanistan to support the IEC and other Afghan institutions in the conduct of “free, fair and transparent” elections. But, anecdotally, certain actions could have been taken that could have reduced the risk of fraud. It has been learned, for example, that in July, there were 1,500 polling centres (out of a total of 7,000) sited in places either controlled by the Taliban or so insecure that no-one from the IEC, the Afghan army or police had ever visited. It became obvious that these polling centres would never be open on Election Day. They were also perfect vehicles for fraud. Since no observer, campaign representative or voter could go to the locations, it would be easy for the election staff (either on its own or in collaboration with local officials) to say voting had taken place and then reporting a tally.
A team of ambassadors from the U.S., NATO, the E.U. and the U.K. urged the election commissioners, and the Afghan Ministers of Defence and Interior, to close down these ‘ghost polling centres’. Such requests were rejected; the President, Hamid Karzai, widely benefitted from the fraud. On Election Day, these ghost polling stations produced hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes for Karzai.
With support from U.N. election experts working within the commission, the IEC published safeguards to exclude obviously fraudulent ballots from the preliminary tally of election results. These guidelines were a matter of common sense. For example, they excluded results from polling centres that had never opened or those that reported more votes than they had ballot papers for. A week before the IEC was to announce the results, it has now been learned that it was considering abandoning those safeguards. Direct intervention by impartial observers led to a flow of complaints from Karzai who complained of “interference”; the IEC did vote to keep the safeguards in place.
Days later, though, the IEC discovered that sticking to its published safeguards would exclude fraudulent Karzai ballots to keep his total below 50%. This would lead to a second-round runoff, which Karzai desperately hoped to avoid: the IEC reconvened and voted 6:1 to drop the safeguards. The commissioners explained that they had just read, again, Afghan election law and discovered that they had no authority to throw out fraudulent votes. Such novel and inventive reading of the law did not convince many Afghans.
THE U.N. RAISED almost $300-million from the U.S. and other Western countries to pay for the Afghan elections. The taxpayers from these countries must surely have expected that the U.N. expended this money on elections which were honest and transparent, not fraudulent. And countries sending troops to Afghanistan will have expected the U.N. to have supported and embraced elections that would have put Afghanistan on a path to democracy and stability, and not ones that would make the military mission incomparably more difficult. It is preposterous to suggest, as senior U.N. officials do now, that the U.N. had no authority to insist that the Afghan authorities conduct proper and honest elections.
There is no easy solution to Afghanistan’s election mess. If the ECC removes enough fraudulent votes, Karzai will fall below 50%, and there will be a second round voting. However, the factors that caused the problems on August 20 – ghost polling stations, corrupt election staff and a partisan commission – are still present. Dealing with those factors will require better leadership than the U.N. mission so far has demonstrated. If Karzai emerges the winner, from a rushed and incomplete audit process that is now under way, Afghanistan’s internal peace will depend on Karzai’s opponents accepting, or at least tolerating, the outcome. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main political opponent, has said publicly that he does not believe the U.N.’s envoy is neutral. By failing to address the obvious and apparent fraud in the elections, the U.N. has lost credibility that is desperately needed for it to act as a postelection peacemaker.
KARZAI’S OPPONENTS are likely to remain sceptical that the complaints process can change a fraudulent election into a good one. The Obama Administration should focus on persuading Karzai to adopt some of the opposition’s program, including arrangements for genuine power-sharing by Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic groups. Even so, Afghanistan’s flawed elections have now become a major drag on Mr. Obama’s new strategy, which just a few months ago seemed to offer real hope for that war-torn land.
Saturday, 17 October 2009
SIR RICHARD DANNATT
GENERAL Sir Richard Dannatt, who retired from the British Army, this week, was unusually vocal during his tenure as Head of the British Army. He suggested, for instance the army was “running hot” because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; he implied, too, that the government was breaking the “covenant” with soldiers by not providing adequate pay and conditions for fighting men; and, he often voiced his opinion that he wanted more resources for operations in Afghanistan.
Since his retirement became officially known in August, the political wrangling between Sir Richard and the British Government has intensified. No longer deemed to be constrained by his curtailing Crown appointment, General Dannatt confirmed that the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had turned down a direct request for 2,000 additional troops for Helmand province, sending instead a “temporary” rapid reinforcement of 700, which has since become permanent. The government insists that the former Army chief was “simply wrong”; the General, in turn, accused it of resorting to the “politics of smear”.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, former Head of the British Army, has been vociferous in his calls against Gordon Brown for not allocating more resources to Afghanistan.
In the heat of this political rage, enter the Conservative Party, the political opposition in the UK, who have dropped a bombshell. They plan to hire Sir Richard as an adviser on defence and intend to appoint him to the House of Lords. Such political manoeuvrings might open the way for a ministerial post in any future Conservative government, although such details and plans were not immediately clear, not least because of the muddle among the Tories. For instance, when asked about the appointment, Chris Grayling MP, the shadow home secretary, thinking that General Dannatt had already been appointed by the Labour government, scathingly remarked: “I hope this isn’t a political gimmick. We’ve seen too many appointments in this government of external people where it’s all about Gordon Brown’s PR.” He quickly attempted to retract and revoke his remarks when told that General Dannatt was intending to join his own party.
It was, though, no-doubt, a Tory gimmick. David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, who delivered his party’s conference speech on October 8th, focussed much of his attention on the war in Afghanistan. It was then, supposedly, that the detail of Sir Richard’s appointment was meant, first, to have been raised. Mr. Cameron said of the ex-General: “I think he’s a man of great talent and ability, he’s been a great public servant and I think he’s got more to give.”
One wonders, then, how big a gaffe it was. British generals, like all civil and public servants, are supposed to be impartial, counselling in confidence and remaining discreet in retirement. That said, Sir Richard Dannatt’s appointment is certainly not without precedent. In recent years, both Labour and the Conservatives have sought to create so-called “goats” – government of all talents – by recruiting non-party figures. A former navy Chief, Lord West, serves as a junior minister for security in the Home Office. Lady Neville-Jones, a former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, is national security adviser to Mr. Cameron. And, just yesterday (09 October, 2009), Major General McDowall, former Head of the British Army in Scotland and the North of England, is to advise Alex Salmond, the SNP leader in Scotland, on defence matters. McDowall has also been vociferous in his attacks against the Labour government in its allocation of resources in Afghanistan.
These posts are, in large part, technocratic. Sir Richard, hugely popular among soldiers, could yet prove a partisan figure, despite his stridency. His political stance could, for example, discredit the army’s call for more resources in Afghanistan; the line he treads, from now on, might be finer than some expect.
Saturday, 10 October 2009
THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE
THIS week, on October 1st, The People’s Republic of China, marked its diamond jubilee, towards a “peaceful rise”, with a staggering display of military muscle-flexing. Goose-stepping soldiers, tanks and intercontinental ballistic missiles filed through Tiananmen Square, past the eponymous Gate of Heavenly Peace, where, 60 years ago, as every Chinese schoolchild is taught (wrongly, it now seems), Mao Zedong declared that the Chinese people had “stood up”.
IT was late May 1989 when the situation in Beijing appeared to be moving out of government control; 1 million Chinese students and workers, in non-violent protest, occupied large sections of the city and called for more rapid political reforms and a shift towards democracy. In Tiananmen Square, the vast open space at the centre of the city, students erected a monument in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, which they called the Goddess of Democracy.
Behind the scenes a furious power struggle was taking place among party leaders, some of them calling for an accommodation with the pro-democracy movement and for more rapid reform; others wanted to use force to put down dissent. This internal dispute prolonged the protest and allowed it to spread to other cities in China. Doubt was also raised as to whether the People’s Liberation Army could be trusted to act against the demonstrators, so at the beginning of June units were called in from distant provinces to deal with protesters in the capital.
On 3 June, Premier Li Peng and the faction demanding the use of force won the argument; army units supported by tanks were sent in to clear the streets of demonstrators. In the massacre that followed, an unknown number of young Chinese were killed; their bodies rapidly gathered up and removed before they could be counted. All estimates suggest that the number of dead ran into hundreds. The massacre took place in full view of the world’s media, who captured extraordinary images of heroic, unarmed protestors struggling against tanks. Coverage was carried live on CNN throughout the Western world, immensely discrediting the Chinese leadership. After the bloodbath, thousands more were arrested and imprisoned. The Democracy Movement in China was finished for many years.
Ironically, the Tiananmen Square massacre had a positive effect on events in Eastern Europe later in 1989. It showed that force was no-longer an option against large-scale public demonstrations. In a world of instant global communications, no European government gunning down opponents could maintain credibility and survive.
Saturday, 03 October 2009
Supplementary:
UNITED NATIONS: CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE
THE OUTLOOK for the “global summit on climate change” to be held in Copenhagen, in December, is uncertain. The document produced at the climate-summit in New York this week as part of the scheduled activities of the UN General Assembly was hundreds of pages long and remains with thousands of passages in brackets representing points of disagreements.
A speech delivered by President Obama on Tuesday was eagerly awaited. He freely acknowledged that America – which failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol, a policy that set-out to encourage industrialised countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases – has work to do in catching up. In stark contrast to his predecessor, Mr. Obama made clear the dangers of rapid climate change and urged the world to act “boldly, swiftly and together” to avert “an irreversible catastrophe”. Beyond that, though, he offered little that was specifically practical, although he did pledge that America would start measuring its greenhouse gas emissions more exactly, to better assess what progress is being made. Many believe that whilst the American president struck an urgent tone there was little punch to the speech.
It was China’s president, Hu Jintao, who to some extent upstaged Mr. Obama. He at least offered some specific details of the steps that his country is taking, describing how, in China’s five-year economic plan from 2006-2010, the country has set itself targets of energy intensity – the energy required to produce a unit of GDP. Mr. Hu insists that China will go further in the coming years, by trying to cut the carbon emissions per dollar of GDP produced, by developing renewable and nuclear energy. Endeavouring for China to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020, such rhetoric will be pleasing to environmentalists who at long last have something tangible from a country that is a mass producer of carbon emissions. Mr. Hu also touted plans to extend an existing reforestation programme: 175m hectares (or 18%) of Chinese land is forested today; the government wants to see another 40m hectare added by 2020. China is now the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter; its emissions are rising exponentially as its economy grows. Mr. Hu appears decisive and has attempted to show the world that he is taking seriously the ill-effects of climate change.
However, despite the soundings, the Chinese president did not elaborate or offer hard targets on the main issue, carbon intensity, only promising a reduction by a “notable amount”. So long as China continues to add coal-fired power at an alarming rate, Mr. Hu’s assurances will not satisfy those who worry anxiously that global carbon emissions are growing too quickly. Sceptics in America’s Congress, who want China to commit to hard targets, before America declares its position, will not be convinced, either, with Mr. Hu’s speech.
The cap-and-trade bill in Congress, a 17% reduction in emissions on 2005 levels by 2020, is considered by many Europeans as being too weak. Even so, that target is imperilled by virtually total Republican opposition, and the nervousness of some moderate Democrats in vulnerable electoral districts.
Whatever Mr. Obama’s personal commitment in doing something about climate change, he has limited ability by enforcing new policies. He does have the ostensible authority to do some things by executive decision, and has shown that this is possible when he changed the efficiency standards on light bulbs and on motor vehicles. And a 2007 court decision has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can directly regulate greenhouse-gas emissions which are considered an “endangerment”, a power that President Obama has threatened to use. All sides in America will no-doubt agree that legislation would be more comprehensive than single executive orders.
The slow progress of the bill through Congress has resulted in foreign partners becoming restive with the excuse that the health-care bill be resolved first. But, many now believe that America must move at the same time, if not quicker, than other economies. Climate change has been definitively defined by an economist at Columbia University, Scott Barrett, as the “biggest collective-action problem in human history”.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
Related:
- New York Times (September 30, 2009), “E.P.A. Proposes Rule on Greenhouse Gas Emissions“
EUROPEAN MISSILE DEFENCE
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA has decided to scrap plans for a US missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland that had deeply angered Russia. Under the plan, which had been proposed by the Bush administration to defend the United States and its European allies against a possible missile attack from Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East, 10 interceptor rockets were to have been stationed in Poland and a radar system based in the Czech Republic.
NATO’s new chief hailed the move as “a positive step” and a Russian analyst said the move will increase the chances that Russia will cooperate more closely with the United States in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme. Yet, the timing of the announcement was symbolically poor, coming on September 17th, the anniversary of the Soviet attack on Poland in 1939. In a country highly tuned to symbolic snubs, it matters that nobody in Washington seemed to know or care about that.
Understanding the world we live in is an integral part of blogging: plug-in to Mark Dowe's Journal for incisive and relevant day commentary.
The news was broken clumsily too: the Czech prime minister was woken by a brief phone call from Mr. Obama the night before the decision was made public. It will be disappointing for the Czech Republic who will receive nothing for its steadfast loyalty to a controversial scheme that was supposedly a symbol of America’s commitment to the region; politicians in Prague will no-doubt feel humiliated by such a reversal. Poland is at least gaining some promise of a beefed up US contribution to its security. Underpinning the US decision is its assessment that the threat of an attack is from short and mid-range missiles rather than long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Pragmatically, the American change of plan is perfectly understandable. The technology of the planned scheme was unproven, let alone disproportionate given the nascent and embryonic Iranian threat it was supposed to counter. As with the decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe in the 1980s, something that was meant to strengthen the Atlantic alliance ended up putting it under strain. Czech and Polish public opinion has been increasingly sceptical, if not, at times, even outright hostile to the bases. Other countries worried that pro-American hawks in ex-communist countries were risking an unnecessary confrontation with Russia.
America’s new strategy and plan is different. Mr. Obama has described it as a “stronger, smarter and swifter” defence of American forces in Europe and of its allies. Reinforcing existing defences against possible long-range Iranian missiles is seen as a problem for the future, given that America now says that Iran is working more on short and medium-range missiles than on long-range ones. For now, the extra deployments will be less capable sea-based Aegis missiles which could shoot down any medium-range Iranian missiles aimed at mainland Europe. After 2015, with further development, the scheme could encompass land-based versions of the SM3 missile which, the Pentagon says, would cover all of Europe by 2018.
To soften the impact of the decision to withdraw the US missile defence shield, America did reiterate its promise to place a battery of Patriot short-range missiles to defend Warsaw. Poland expects that this pledge will be US-financed, part of NATO’s commitment to the country’s defence, and fully integrated with Poland’s own air-defence system.
Strategically, though, the technicalities could have additional ramifications. Whilst Russia has welcomed the decision to shelve the existing scheme, it is unlikely to be pleased about any replacements based anywhere in the former soviet empire, which the president, Dmitry Medvedev, has described as a sphere of Russian “privileged interests”. Yet, if America could obtain Russian help in squeezing Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, and if Russia also backs down on its threatened deployment of missiles in the Kaliningrad region, which borders Poland, it would be easy for the administration to walk even further away from missile defences in Europe.
America’s timing on this issue may well have been shaped by the forthcoming meeting of the UN General Assembly. Russia and China, for instance, have been reluctant to agree to further sanctions or other pressures on Iran. President Obama may hope that by demonstrating a willingness to engage Russia in Europe he might have a better chance of co-operation in the Middle East.
The Big task for Washington now is to reassure the Poles and other nervous ex-communist countries, such as the Baltic States, that it remains committed to their defence. It stresses that ample high-level structures exist in addressing these anxieties and that NATO is actively rethinking its defence plans in the east. But further discussions will be needed in allaying fears that are becoming increasingly restive. The east European countries, squeezed between an increasingly close Russian-German friendship, look anxiously towards America that it intends to safeguard their interests.
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Saturday, 19 September 2009
JURY REFORM, DUTY & JUSTICE
THE RIGHT to be judged by ordinary citizens has historically been regarded as an inalienable civil liberty. It is the cornerstone of Scotland’s criminal justice system. In courts of solemn (as opposed to summary) jurisdiction, which handle the most serious cases, there is always a jury. The only exception was the Lockerbie prosecution, which because of the special circumstances of the case, was heard before three Scottish judges sitting in Holland without a jury.
Earlier this year, a senior legal expert suggested that in certain cases jury trials are increasingly difficult to sustain. Gerard Sinclair, chief executive of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, called for a debate as to whether trial by jury is practical in lengthy technical trials. He was also concerned about cases where material not admissible as evidence is readily available to a juror at the click of a mouse. Recently a US trial had to be abandoned after it emerged that jury members had been using the internet to access information about the man in the dock.
Reform of the jury system has been underway for quite a while. The size of the jury, for instance, has often been targeted: 15 is the largest in Europe; jury remuneration costs more than £4-million a year – and, reducing the number to 11 would represent a substantial saving. However, caution is needed before dispensing with them altogether, even in long and difficult trials. Jury trials are the best way to maintain public confidence in the verdicts of the criminal courts. Northern Ireland’s controversial juryless Diplock Courts, used to try terrorist suspects during the Troubles because of widespread jury intimidation, attracted widespread criticism from human rights groups, as well as both Nationalists and Republicans.
It is fundamentally incumbent on the judge to direct the jury about the limitations of its role, which is to decide on the facts of the case as presented to them in court. In the same way juries traditionally have been warned not to read newspaper articles regarding the case before them; that stricture applies equally to surfing the internet. Jurors must realise that Googling the accused potentially jeopardises a trial.
The issue of long and complex fraud trials is one being faced by jurisdictions throughout the world. In England the Government has made several attempts to abolish juries in certain trials following the collapse of a number of high profile fraud cases.
Supporters of the jury system blame bad pre-trial management and poor presentation of evidence by prosecutors. As for the length of trials, much more could be done to streamline proceedings in avoiding unnecessary detail and repetition. Where that can be done without oversimplifying cases should be embraced as the potential benefits (such as cost savings) are enormous.
If juries are abandoned for complex fraud trials, could it be the thin end of the wedge? Trials of terrorist suspects and health and safety crimes are often just as long. This issue does still require further open-ended debate. Overarching, though, is keeping in sight the principal of trial by one’s peers. That should not simply or irrevocably be sacrificed on the alter of efficiency because the system has become administratively overburdened.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
AFGHAN REVIEW: GENERAL STANLEY McCHRYSTAL
THE REVIEW of the Afghan war, this week, by General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, came at a gloomy time. Last month was the deadliest yet for American forces as well as coming amid allegations of widespread vote rigging in its recent presidential election. In General McChrystal’s strategic assessment, he describes the situation on the ground as “serious”. He tempered his pessimism, though, by saying that the war is still winnable but argued, strenuously, that a new strategy with new impetus and momentum is needed.
The thrust of General McChrystal’s argument is not new. Previously, he has been at pains in pointing out the need and priority to protect the population, before hunting insurgents. The U.S. has claimed to be doing exactly that long before he took over command in June. The emphasis now, he says, must be winning hearts and minds by, for example, curtailing air strikes.
The fine details of the report are unclear, but it is believed the General has asked for a big increase in Afghan troops and police. Interestingly, the review does appear too side step, at least for the time being, the question of whether more US troops are needed. As Americans become increasingly wary about their involvement in this war, sending more soldiers and marines may not be a popular option for President Obama. For the first time since the Afghan war started, a survey carried out jointly between ABC News and the Washington Post, showed that a majority of Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is now not worth fighting for. Between January and August of this year, 182 US soldiers have been killed. Such a view is gaining ground, too, in Britain, with many people sceptical and cynical of how the government intends to meet with its overall Afghan objectives. Since the war started in 2001 Britain has lost more than 200 servicemen, killed mainly through changing insurgent tactics and the use of improvised explosive devices (IED’s). If American, British, Canadian and Dutch forces press deeper into the militants’ southern stronghold, rising casualties and fatalities may make the war even more unpopular.
The furore and commotion surrounding the presidential election has made things worse. Since the vote on the 20th August, Afghan officials have been inundated with charges of fraud and corruption, mostly committed in favour of President Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, has presented substantial evidence of forged ballots, coercion and other irregularities. The Electoral Complaints Commission, now saddled with more than 2,000 complaints, has led to Mr. Abdullah saying that he will not concede defeat because of the scale and level of fraud officially recorded.
Worryingly, as the post-election dispute drags on, the risk of serious unrest increases. According to the latest count, Hamid Karzai’s share of the vote stands at 46%, still short of the 51% needed to avoid a second-round run-off. Rumours are abound that the U.S. is attempting to broker a coalition government, though this is resolutely denied both by the U.S. embassy in Kabul and by the leading factions in Afghanistan.
If Mr. Karzai does win, as seems likely, he will no-doubt have a difficult time of it. Much of Afghanistan continues to lie beyond the government’s limited reach, its role and authority is non-existent across vast swathes of the south and east of the country where the Taliban has firm control. In the north, government control is patchy and intermittent.
In the run-up to the August elections, Mr. Karzai secured the support of former warlords who will be rewarded with cabinet posts when the new government is eventually formed. The return of controversial figures like Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek militia leader, will only confirm a disheartening sense among Afghans that their vote had been flogged. Mr. Dostum delivered tens of thousands of votes to Mr. Karzai.
Yet, security in Afghanistan can only be achieved, ultimately, through political consensus and agreement. Mr. Karzai should attempt in negotiating with other moderate elements of the Taliban, with a view of offering cabinet posts to those willing to turn away from terrorist related activities. The ‘hardliners’ among the Taliban ranks are far less than many realise.
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Saturday, 05 September 2009
MEDICAL X-RAYS & TECHNOLOGY
IN 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German physicist, stumbled across a type of radiation when he was carrying out some experiments. He labelled that simply as X, because he did not know what it was. His “X-Rays” did not remain unknown for long, as doctors and scientists seized on them to look inside living bodies. Later, engineers used them to examine the interiors of mechanical components. What has not changed much since Röntgen’s day, despite huge advances in technological and scientific innovation, is how they are made.
Most electronic devices have moved into the era of silicon chips and other solid-state technology. X-rays, however, have remained fairly static. The machines used to generate them still rely resolutely on vacuum tubes. That could soon change if Otto Zhou of the University of Carolina has his way. Dr Zhou and his colleagues are attempting to bring X-radiography into the world of modern electronics. In doing so they hope to create and redesign X-ray machines that are smaller and more compact, and able to produce more detailed pictures. Such advancements could be used to enhance security at airports, to allow engineers to check the structure of materials more easily and, especially, to enhance medical images in a way that would improve cancer therapy and treatment.
At the moment, X-rays are produced by heating a negatively charged metal filament to a temperature of around 1,000ºC inside a vacuum tube. The combination of heat and charge releases electrons, which accelerate through the tube and strike a positively charged electrode at the other end. The rays are created from energy impact. X-ray machines of this type have progressed over the years – the computed tomography, or CT, scanners used in hospitals collect hundreds of X-ray images taken from different angles and convert them into a three-dimensional picture of a patient’s internal anatomy – but, they are still, essentially, a century old.
DR ZHOU’S METHOD, by contrast, employs a process known as “electron field emission”. Fundamentally, this dispenses with the heat. Also, instead of having a single metal filament release the electrons, it relies on myriad carbon nanotubes to do the same thing. The result is a compact source of X-rays that can be controlled with great precision.
Such sources could be built into an array, each element of which is programmed to fire whenever it is required. Such an adaptation will allow for more accurate CT scans.
Existing scanners usually have but a single X-ray tube. This is rotated around the patient, taking pictures as it goes. Though the rotation takes only a few seconds, the overall image will be blurred if the patient moves. An array of field-emission devices, however, will take their exposures simultaneously, so resulting images should always be pin sharp.
Zhou has set up a joint venture with Siemens, a German company that builds CT scanners, to develop further his technology for diagnostic imaging. A prototype machine, which is believed to have 52 field emission X-ray sources arranged in a circle, is due to begin trials before the end of 2009. The new machine will be attached to a linear accelerator, a device used for radiation therapy, to allow simultaneous imaging and treatment.
Conventional CT scans are used to work out the shape of the place where a dose of radiation needs to be concentrated in order to attack a tumour without damaging nearby healthy tissue. But the scan and the treatment cannot usually be done at the same time, because they interfere with each other. There are, however, no interference problems with field-emission X-ray sources, so critically these can be used to take high-resolution pictures while treatment is proceeding. This means those administering the treatment will know with precision when to continue and when to stop.
THE PRECISION of the new technology appears remarkable. Dr Zhou’s colleagues have, for example, built tiny scanners that can X-ray a mouse’s heart and lungs by taking a series of exposures at exactly the same point in the heartbeat. They are attempting to produce beams so precise that might be aimed at individual cells, a huge advancement within the field of X-radiography. That would allow a tumour to be destroyed cell by cell, something which would allow researchers and scientists to learn more about how cancer cells interact with one another, and thus reveal their vulnerabilities in a way that was previously unimaginable.
Saturday, 29 August 2009
HISTORIC SCOTLAND
SCOTLAND is known to be a country that is graced by an enviable legacy of historic buildings and monuments. These not only enrich the lives of the people who live in Scotland, but also play a pivotal role in attracting others to visit and enjoy our culture and history.
The interest, both at home and abroad, in Scotland’s heritage is huge – particularly during 2009, Scotland’s Year of Homecoming – and, as well as generating economic benefits through tourism, it can support and encourage investment in businesses, local communities and the wider Scottish economy.
HISTORIC SCOTLAND, along with many other parts of government, is modernising. The agency which is engaged in the government’s planning reform agenda has adopted a more customer-focussed approach to its work and is determined to ensure that its processes are transparent.
Historic Scotland engages with applicants, external groups, local authorities, community bodies and elected members to explain the government’s policies on the historic environment and how, specifically, its role is fulfilled by implementing the standards set down by government.
As an example of Historic Scotland’s modernisation, culture minister Michael Russell, in May of this year, launched a new project – the Scottish Castles Initiative. The initiative, which is managed solely by Historic Scotland, identifies castles and towerhouses across Scotland which are suitable for future restoration and development, in order to drive economic investment and tourism towards Scotland during the current climate and beyond.
As part of that remit, the agency created an external group to encourage contributions from a variety of experts and appointed conservation architects, Simpson and Brown, to co-write this advice.
The guidance will include an online register of towers and castles where Historic Scotland believe that restoration represents the sustainable means of securing their long-term future while protecting their significance to the nation. Scotland’s historic buildings should, as of right, play a role in the future economic development of this country.
INVESTMENT in such projects, whether it’s to create rented apartments, a hotel – a great opportunity within the tourism industry – or another commercial enterprise, can link the growth of Scotland’s economy with innovative new ways of how Scotland’s heritage is managed.
Historic Scotland is tasked with preserving our country’s great architectural heritage for future generations, while managing the historic environment in a way which encourages investment and restoration for renewed use – where that offers the best chance for a building’s sustainable future.
Encouragingly, Scotland has a good history and track record of successful restoration where new uses, within the legislation and financial budgets, can be met and be extremely beneficial.
We have an enviable architectural legacy in Scotland that is championed by people giving their time, talents, energy, expertise, passion and significant financial investment that aids the celebration of a proud heritage.
Saturday, 22 August 2009
UK/US: HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS
OVER RECENT DAYS the battle over which country, the UK or US, has the better health care system, has become rather distorted. For a start the health systems in the United Kingdom have different virtues and vices to that which exist in the United States. Yet, if the argument is taken onto the world stage in comparing international health care provision, France would probably be a better benchmark for comparison.
American critics of the NHS might well have a point, particularly where it has cited deficiencies. But, there is no-doubt that the healthcare system that is being so vigorously defended at town hall meetings across America has some glaring flaws. The US spends 16 per cent of its national income, more than any country in the world, on health. To spend $2.2-trillion, annually, and still fail to insure more than 40-million citizens can hardly be deemed a success story. Of that, administrative costs account for a third, hospital costs are always invariably high and employer provided insurance is a serious reduction of labour market flexibility. President Obama, trying desperately to find alternative ways of how healthcare might be provided better in America, has a point when he suggests that the “NHS provides universal cover for half the cost”.
The deficiencies highlighted by America’s critics of the NHS are those stemming from and classified as “socialised medicine”, which they say are amply exhibited by the NHS. They cite four-month waits for treatment and limited patient choice; they argue, too, that better insurance plans, widespread throughout the US, provide an unmatched rapidity of response and quality of care. The teaching hospitals at American universities lead the world in research and development.
The real question, albeit sophisticated, is not which one of these flawed systems is the better, but whether it is feasible to combine the virtues of both, without creating financial waste and inefficiencies. To do so would require looking, more broadly, at other health care systems around the world.
FRANCE has a system of universal healthcare financed by compulsory national insurance. Premiums are charged as a percentage of income and paid to insurers that are non-government, non-profit agencies. The French have a choice of doctor whose fee they usually pay and then claim back 75-80 per cent of the cost. The poor are exempt from payment. All patients, whether exempt from co-payments or not, may go directly to a specialist.
In 2001, the World Health Organisation (WHO) ranked health systems. The French system was judged to be the best because its system combined universal coverage, responsive providers and patient/provider freedoms, all at a cost of 11 per cent of national income, more expensive than the UK but considerably less than the costs created and absorbed in the US.
Although France tops the WHO’s list of ranked healthcare systems, this by no means suggests that health provision in France is a panacea. Cost control, as it happens, is also a serious problem in France, as it is in all insurance based systems. In countries such as Singapore, which has high-quality healthcare at a cost of only 3 per cent of national income, there is a degree of government interference in setting prices that no-doubt would be resisted in free-market countries like France and the United States. The French system, too, tends to lead to over-prescription as it rewards doctors who see patients as often as possible. The French now take three times as many pills as their neighbours in Britain, Germany and Italy.
Whilst Republicans in America have been fairly vociferous in their attacks over the socialising aspects of medicine in the NHS, it has to be accepted that Britain does not offer the answers or solution in how the US should reform in making a system that is better value for money for its citizens. However, over the long term, it is quite possible to provide universal cover at a reasonable cost without too overbearing an intrusion by the State.
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Saturday, 15 August 2009
PAKISTAN TALEBAN
… Is Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s Taleban leader, dead?
ON Wednesday of this week, Baitullah Mehsud – the supreme leader of the Taliban in Pakistan – was said to be killed in the tribal area of South Waziristan, by an American missile fired from an unmanned predator aircraft. According to both US and Pakistani officials he died in the attack along with his wife and bodyguards. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, however, says that although the Government aims for ground verification, with the use of DNA sampling, it may be impossible to confirm that he has been killed.
In 2007, Mr. Mehsud declared himself to be the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, a group of some 13 factions in the northwest, and has been, undoubtedly, a serious and menacing threat. He was chiefly responsible for the suicide-blasts that have ripped through the country’s main cities in recent years, terrorising Pakistanis who did not succumb to his cause and banishing foreign investors through fear. The United States placed a $5-million bounty on him, although his position appeared relatively secure and safe, as he was backed and supported by a bellicose tribe in remote and difficult terrain. The CIA and Pakistan’s former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, accused him of being behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007, although he denied such charges. Ms. Bhutto looked comfortably set in becoming the country’s next leader, prior to the brutal assassination.
Over the years Mehsud proved to be a formidable opponent of the Pakistani army. A former gym instructor, he was one of the last tribal military commanders with whom the armed forces parleyed and reckoned him with the title of “good Taliban” from one army general, in the hope that negotiations with him would have been fruitful. Despite such attempts, Mehsud led his militants in a fierce guerrilla war that pushed much of the army out of South Waziristan, at one time capturing and holding captive more than 200 Pakistani soldiers on a single day, and holding them hostage for several months. However, it is known that Mr. Mehsud did not send soldiers to fight coalition forces inside Afghanistan (his territory was not contiguous with those controlling men and weapons across the Afghan border) preferring to attack Pakistani security forces. The Pakistani army accused India of providing him with support.
IN 2008, Baitullah Mehsud survived an attack by Pakistani forces, which had corralled him in his fiefdom and appeared well poised to capture or kill him. Curiously, though, it appears that the army high-command negotiated a deal for him to escape. That’s difficult to understand given the dubious company, over the years, that Mehsud had kept. He was known to have generated a lengthening list of enemies: US intelligence officers accused him of hosting Al-Qaeda’s operational headquarters in his stronghold. He was also associated with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Punjabi sectarian group that has provided Al-Qaeda’s recruits in Pakistan, along with Uzbeks and other Central Asian fighters. One of his Lieutenants, Qari Hussain, a particularly barbarous individual, became adept at recruiting and turning young Pakistanis into suicide bombers.
Whilst his death is being seen as a military success, demonstrating that even Taliban leaders are vulnerable to the combined efforts of Pakistani and American forces, it is uncertain as to what might now happen next. The army had been blockading his area with at least six brigades of infantry, but will they continue to strangle his network, or carry out a major ground offensive in difficult and rugged terrain?
Since May the army has waged a campaign against militants hiding in the Swat Valley, further north, but had failed to kill or capture any important leaders. For the United States, the death of Mr. Mehsud matters, particularly given his leadership and how so influentially he spread instability within Pakistan.
Like Mr. Mehsud’s predecessor, Nek Mohammed, who was also killed by a missile strike, his replacement, too, looks certain to be another tribal militant pursuing jihad. Whilst it is unclear what influence, if any, the Taliban in Afghanistan might have in who leads the Taliban in Pakistan, senior militants from Mr. Mehsud’s umbrella group, Tehreek-e-Taliban, were said by locals to be gathering in his South Waziristan fief in seeking to appoint their next leader.
Saturday, 08 August 2009
CHILCOT INQUIRY
ON THURSDAY, of this week, the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war began. The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is to be questioned over his role in the war that is not expected to conclude until late next year at the earliest, saving the Government from any embarrassing conclusions before the next general election.
Gordon Brown and other decision makers in the build-up to and aftermath of the conflict are also likely to appear as witnesses. As the inquiry began, opposition parties warned that because some evidence would be heard in private it could give people such as Mr. Blair the chance to escape public scrutiny.
However, Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry chairman, has said that as many of the testimonies as possible would be heard in public, with the possibility of some sessions being televised and streamed live on the internet.
Sir John has also pledged not to shy away from highlighting any mistakes made by the Government and individuals during the period from the summer of 2001 until the end of this month covered by the inquiry. He says the inquiry will be determined to be thorough, rigorous, fair and frank and, if the inquiry finds mistakes that were made, or if issues could have been dealt with better, it intends to say so openly and without fear or favour.
The panel has already made its first request for Government documents and will meet in private to examine the material. The first witness testimonies – from the families of military personnel who died in the six-year campaign – will be heard in late autumn, while key figures such as Mr. Blair will be called for much later.
CATHARSIS
THE CHILCOT INQUIRY does provide an opportunity, now, for a national catharsis over the events and decisions that were made over the Iraq war. It will not end the anger and grief but it provides a chance to balance the emotional passion with a thorough and comprehensive narrative about what happened over the course of the eight years from 2001 until 2009, and not just in 2002-03.
Many demands for an inquiry have been fuelled by a belief that there is some dramatic piece of evidence buried in the Whitehall files that, when disclosed, will damn Tony Blair and his cabinet. In reality, though, most of the reasons for going to war are known.
The intelligence failures were mainly of exaggeration (“sexed up”), and reflected the widespread belief in most secret agencies that because Saddam Hussein had previously used weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he still had the opportunity to do so again. But why, when senior officials began to doubt that assessment in late February 2003, was there no review of policy?
THE REAL QUESTIONS are about Mr. Blair’s judgement, not his integrity. Why, for instance, didn’t he press the case for continued containment rather than pursuing the course of military action? Most crucial of all, why was the decision-making for the subsequent occupation of Iraq so inadequate? Insiders reckon that the most damaging revelations will be about Anglo-American tensions after the fall of Baghdad, not about the run-up to the war.
Sir John Chilcot has made a good start. He has ensured that as much as possible is heard in public. Everyone will have a chance to have their say, starting with the families of those who died and veterans’ groups. That is crucial to the catharsis. It has to be right that this bitterly divisive chapter is closed in a way which holds all to account, even if the report’s conclusions will not be ready until after the election. Large amounts of public evidence will be given before polling which will surely reflect, anyway, how the British public will elect their next Government.
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Saturday, 01 August 2009
GALILEO & THE PENDULUM
GALILEO GALILEI WAS born in Pisa in 1564, and came from an impoverished (noble) Florentine family. Educated at the monastery of Vallombrosa near Florence, he studied Latin and Greek, but found the science he was taught distasteful. He came to disagree with and despise the Aristotelian philosophy that prevailed in his day. He showed a practical aptitude for mechanical invention.
His father sent him to Pisa University in 1581 to study medicine. Just two years later Galileo inferred, first from casual and then from systematic observations of a swinging lamp in Pisa Cathedral, the properties of a pendulum. Whatever the range of the oscillations, however wide the swings, the time scale was deduced to be the same. This phenomenon has, since, become to be known as isochronism. He then applied the same principle to the human pulse. Until this time he was kept completely ignorant of mathematics by his father, who uncannily sensed that Galileo would become preoccupied with it and that would lead him to neglect medicine. Galileo by chance overheard a lesson being given in Geometry, which immediately caught his interest. He pleaded with his father to be allowed to study mathematics, and his father reluctantly agreed.
In 1585, Galileo was withdrawn from university before taking a degree, because his father could no longer afford to keep him there. Galileo returned to Florence, where he lectured to the Florentine Academy.
The observation and later proof of isochronism turned out to have had a very useful application. Since it made no difference whether the pendulum swing was short or long, the time interval of the pendulum swings was a reliable constant. This was exploited in clocks. It is a phenomenon that is so familiar that we take it for granted, but it does regulate the mechanism of a clock extremely well, and therefore formed the basis of several generations of clock technology.
The earliest mechanical clocks were introduced into Europe in the thirteenth century. A clock was erected at Westminster in 1288 and another at Canterbury four years later. None of these early clocks was fitted with a pendulum. Instead, they had a crown-wheel escapement that was controlled by two slowly oscillating weighted arms; this device was known as a foliot. The time of swing of the two arms was very variable, so these early clocks were very poor time-keepers, often losing or gaining as much as an hour in a day.
The introduction of the pendulum, then, became an important stage in the development of the clock. Once Galileo had discovered its principle it was soon adopted into clock design. It consisted of a weight or bob mounted on the lower end of a vertical rod suspended from a flexible support. The time of the swing can be calculated very precisely by using a formula, but basically it is proportional to the length of the pendulum: correcting the clock, if it is running slow or running fast, can be achieved by shortening the pendulum, or more usually by moving the weight up or down a little. The pendulum therefore made it possible to adjust clocks –hence, making them keep accurate time. By the time the age of the train and time-tables, this level of accuracy became all-important.
Saturday, 25 July 2009
BRITISH RESOURCES IN AFGHANISTAN
THERE is no greater abdication of the duty of government than to send a nation’s troops into battle insufficiently or ill-equipped to fulfil the strategic goals set for them by politicians. As the death toll continues to mount in southern Afghanistan, and the Helmand province where the bulk of the British are based, there is a widening gulf between ministerial assurances that the Army is properly resourced and the consistent claims by senior officers that this is untrue. Just yesterday, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, weighed into the argument by suggesting that more helicopters and troops are needed in Afghanistan to avoid loss of life. Whilst Sir Jock says that helicopters are not invulnerable to attack, they do offer movement for troops in avoiding the improvised explosive devices intermittently scattered on the ground which are catching soldiers unawares, and the opportunity to divert routes when soldiers are transiting to military occupied zones.
Given the ambitious scope of this mission and its inherent dangers, there were never enough troops, either, to take and hold ground in Helmand in order to allow the Afghan Army and police to move in and subjugate the Taliban. Nor were there sufficient helicopters to transport troops swiftly and safely around the region without having to travel in convoys susceptible to increasingly murderous roadside bomb attacks. And if the troops were to spend more time on the ground as part of the “hearts and minds” campaign among the local population, too little thought was given to how to protect them by acquiring armoured vehicles able to withstand the bombs now being deployed.
Since these shortcomings have been apparent for some time, for the Government then to order Operation Panther’s Claw ahead of the August 20 presidential elections in Afghanistan, bordered on the reckless, though the American “surge” does mean more helicopters are now available to all NATO participants.
It is not sufficient for ministers to say that the Helmand mission is necessary to protect this country from Islamist terrorists by stopping al-Qaeda once again finding a base in Afghanistan. Whilst there will always be public-doubt concerning the strategic importance of this operation, that acceptance is gaining ground when people are told what would otherwise happen if troops were pulled-out – the threat to our streets and cities, and to mainland Europe, should now be an obvious one. The military presence in Afghanistan aims to contain and suppress the threat of terrorism from spreading much further.
GOVERNMNENT ministers must not deliberately confuse criticism of the mission itself with the way it is being conducted. Even at the height of this nation’s greatest peril between 1940 and 1943, Winston Churchill and his Cabinet still had to defend their conduct of the war in Parliament. No one questioned the strategy of defeating Nazi Germany; but it was perfectly valid to criticise the tactics if they meant disproportionate or unnecessary casualties.
The evidence that the Government has asked our soldiers to do too much without proper support is overwhelming. Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of The Army, asked for an additional 2,000 troops more than a month ago to back up the offensive. On what grounds were they refused other than cost? Accusations of “playing politics” levelled at Gen Dannatt by Labour MPs and unnamed ministers are a disgrace. The Government should be listening to and acting upon what he is saying not seeking to traduce him. Why, furthermore, has Gordon Brown not prevailed more forcefully upon other NATO countries, notably Britain’s EU partners, whose interests are also served by the defeat of the Taliban, to share more of the burden?
As well as a failure to back up the Helmand mission militarily, the Government is making a poor job of it politically, too. Last week, Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary (the fourth in three years), set out the long-term goals of the operation in a speech at Chatham House. With respect to that august institution, this was not the proper forum for such a statement. What is needed is a debate in Parliament before MPs leave for their summer recess, next Tuesday. It should be opened by the Prime Minister who needs to answer the criticisms while making a coherent and cogent case for a military commitment that is likely to last years and cost many lives. Parliament is where public concerns must be aired and discussed. By the time ministers return in October, the fiercest fighting will have taken place. If the Government will not offer a debate, then the Conservatives should insist that time is found for one.
I accept the national interest case for this operation; but believe that popular support will be lost unless the Government can make a better handle of things than it has so far of explaining why so many young men are being killed thousands of miles from home. These are matters for which the Prime Minister is directly and personally accountable; it is a responsibility he cannot shirk. It is not the case, either, that questioning the prosecution of the war is a betrayal of the troops who are fighting it.
As things stand, the Prime Minister himself creates the impression that he fails to grasp what is happening in Helmand or how it could be put right.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
G8: A BRIEF HISTORY
INITIALLY, the group was made up of just six. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing issued the opening statement during a joint press conference of the economic summit, in Rambouillet, France on November 17, 1975. The group was expanded further when Canada joined in 1976 and Russia, officially, in 1997. The nations wanted an informal forum to co-ordinate their macroeconomic policies during the downturn, in addition to formulating a common strategy in dealing with the developing world, which had become less dependent on them.
The presidency rotates each year among the members, with a new term beginning on January 1. That country then assumes responsibility for planning and hosting some lower-level meetings, which serve as the basis and lead to the mid-year three-day event attended by the major players. This year’s G-8 president, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, had the honour this week of hosting Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso, Russia’s President Dimitri Medvedev, U.K.’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the U.S.’s President Barack Obama in L’Aquila, the town hit by a horrific earthquake in April. The G8 summit is not, however, and never has been, the place to draft details on major policy initiatives. Rather, it is an opportunity to bring the main and big issues to the table, allowing the leaders to debate and deliberate them together.
Certainly, notable achievements have been attained during its 34-years existence. With no topic off limits, areas of mutual interest such as the economy, energy, environment, foreign affairs, health, labour, terrorism and trade tend to get discussed. And, in turn, these discussions are reported upon in the press, sparking conversation among like-minded people and groups around the world. Look past those quintessential and archetypal G-8 buzzwords like “consultation”, “global social integration”, and “millennium development goals” and you will see that, in recent years, the G-8 summit has given eventual rise to debt forgiveness for poor countries, a significant aid package for Africa and a genuine desire in tackling climate change with an acceptance by all leaders in now reducing carbon emissions by up to 80% by 2050.
Nevertheless, protests do go hand-in-hand with the event as activists often allege that it’s the G8 members themselves who are responsible for creating the crises they’re trying to solve such as poverty and global warming. In the last decade there have been some major demonstrations, ranging from the relatively peaceful such as the 225,000 people who took to the streets of Edinburgh in July 2005, as part of the Make Poverty History campaign, to the undeniably violent and extreme such as the Genoa G8 protests of July 201, which drew an estimated 200,000 demonstrators with hundreds injured – and even some deaths – following clashes with police. And, as recently as Tuesday of this week, the day before the start of this year’s G8, there were 36 arrests after clashes in Rome.
As for the official business, the 2009 G8 was dominated by discussion over a new form of world governance in light of the global downturn. A better-structured form of dialogue in dealing with the emerging powers – Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa – was also discussed at length.
With terms such as recession and emerging economies looming large, it’s almost as if the annual summit has come full circle from its beginnings back in 1975. Déjà vu?
Related/Supplementary:
- G8 Summit 2009, by Mark Dowe
- Independent (Saturday, 11 July, 2009) : Leading article — Africa still needs our aid – but it’s not just about money
Saturday, 11 July 2009
AMERICA’S BILL OF HEALTH
AMERICA’S health-care system is the costliest in the world, consuming around 16% of the country’s economic output. Comparisons with other richer countries and within the United States show that its system is not only growing at an unsustainable pace, but also provides questionable value for money and dubious medical care. Economists at the OECD found that America does indeed do well on some measures, such as breast-cancer survival rates and cervical-cancer screening, but does worse in others. Infant mortality was 6.7 per 1,000 births in 2007, against an OECD average (excluding Mexico and Turkey) of 4.0. Reforms are being considered to extend coverage for the 49-million people with no health insurance, possibly by obliging individuals to buy insurance.
DIAGNOSING what is wrong with America’s health-care system has been the easy part. Even though one dollar in every six generated by the world’s richest economy is spent on health—almost twice the average for rich countries—infant mortality, life expectancy and survival-rates for heart attacks are all worse than the OECD average. Meanwhile, because health insurance is so expensive, nearly 50m Americans, an obscene number in such a rich place, have none; those that are insured pay through the nose for their cover, and often find it totally inadequate if they get seriously ill or injured.
The costs of health care hurt Americans in three other ways. First, since half the population (mostly children, the very poor, the old, public-sector workers) get their health care via the government, the burden on the taxpayer is heavier than it needs to be, and is slowly but surely eating up federal and state budgets. Second, private insurance schemes are a huge problem for employers: the cost of health insurance helped bring down GM, and many smaller firms are giving up covering employees. Third, expensive premiums depress workers’ wages and net disposable incomes. It should be more affordable.
Every rich country faces some of these problems, but nobody suffers worse from them than America. This summer’s debate (2009) about health care may determine the success of Barack Obama’s presidency. What should and can he do?
IF he were starting from scratch, there would be a strong case for a system based mostly around publicly funded health care. But America is not starting from scratch, and none of the plans in Congress shows an appetite for such a European solution. America wants to keep a mostly private system – one that brings in the uninsured and cuts costs. Reforms will continue to be painful, and require more audacity than Mr. Obama has shown so far.
Yet, the uninsured are the relatively straightforward in dealing with. All you need do is “mandate” everyone to take out health insurance, much as drivers are legally required to have car insurance. Poorer Americans would get subsidies, and (as with car insurance) insurance-providers would be forced to offer affordable plans and not exclude the sick or the old. This has already happened in Massachusetts as well as in a raft of countries, including the Netherlands, Israel and Singapore. All the main proposals now working their way through Congress include some version of a mandate.
The catch, though, is that all these subsidies are expensive. Those congressional plans might cost $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion over ten years: the White House is anxiously trying to massage the estimates downward, as well as working out how to plug the hole through various savings and tax increases. This open-shock for the mandate is really just a reflection for its knock-on effect: the overall cost structure of American health care. One of the worst things about Mr. Obama’s approach to health reform is that he is concentrating on a symptom, not the underlying disease. It is the underlying disease to which he needs to treat if health care in America is to be fit and ready for purpose.
Tougher government would surely start by attacking two huge distortions that make American health care more expensive than it needs to be. The first is that employer-provided health-care packages are tax-deductible. This is unfair to those without such insurance, who still have to subsidise it via their taxes. It also encourages gold-plated insurance schemes, since their full cost is not transparent. This tax break costs the government at least $250 billion a year. Mr. Obama still shies away from axing it, as do the main congressional plans on offer; but it ought to be phased out over time.
ANOTHER big distortion is that most doctors in America work on a fee-for-service basis; the more pills they prescribe, or tests they order, or procedures they perform, the more money they get – even though there is abundant clinical evidence that more spending does not reliably lead to better outcomes. Private providers everywhere are vulnerable to this perverse incentive, but in America, where most health care is delivered by the private sector rather than by salaried public-sector staff, the problem is made worse than anywhere else.
The trouble is that many Americans are understandably happy with an all-consuming and saturated health care, which allows them to see any doctor they like and get any test that they are talked into thinking they need. Forcing people into “managed” health schemes, where some bureaucrats decide which treatments are cost-effective, is politically toxic; it was the central tenet of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous failed reform in 1994. Politics and health-care in America does though require finely tuned in overcoming social inequality.
There is solid evidence to suggest that by cutting back on unnecessarily expensive procedures and prescriptions, anything from 10% to 30% of health costs could be saved: a significant sum. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the California-based Kaiser Permanente system have shown that it is possible to save money and produce better outcomes at the same time. So reform must aim to encourage more use of managed health care, provided by doctors who are salaried, or paid by results rather than for every catheter they insert or drug they prescribe. Medicare, the government-run insurance scheme for those over 65, could show the way, by making much more use of results-based schemes and encouraging more competition among its various providers and insurers. Increased competition will always tend to reduce market prices, and should be encouraged.
In the end it will be up to the private health-care system. One thing that should be unleashed immediately is antitrust: on a local level many hospitals and doctors work as price-fixing cabals. Another option, favoured by many Democrats and the president, is for the government to step in with a results-based plan of its own, to compete against the private industry. Whilst costs may be lowered in the long-run, under such moves, that could harm innovation and distort the market further. Still, Mr. Obama should use results-based plans as a future threat and contingency, rather than implementing it now. The state cannot be held to ransom because of profitable objectives by private firms. If the private sector does not meet certain cost-cutting targets in, say, five years, a public-sector plan should automatically kick in. Such a prospect would encourage hospitals and doctors to accept a painful but necessary reform, now.
Supplementary:
- Health-care spending in rich countries (public : private mix)
Saturday, 04 July 2009
CLINICAL DEPRESSION
CLINICAL DEPRESSION is classified as being a serious ailment, although it should be noted that almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a clinical psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
Dr. Nesse’s hypothesis is built upon the assumption that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones – in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals, when moods are low, he argues, is a waste of energy and resources. He promotes the view, therefore, that there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as being unattainable and which inhibits their pursuit – he purports that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.
Nesse’s theory is neat and compact, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.
They concluded that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unattainable goals. That supports Dr. Nesse’s proposition. The new study, though, also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.
Mild depressive symptoms should therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, severe depression can be the consequence.
THE importance of curtailing inappropriate targets or unachievable goals has already been demonstrated by Dr. Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated directly with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Wrosch concluded that it is “healthy” to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.
Dr. Nesse also believes and draws upon the persistence factor as a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America – the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. Persistence, Nesse says, is part of the American way of life: people there are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals and targets, which can then lead to depression. Dr. Nesse admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but worth science and medical research considering, and exploring further. Depression, though, might well turn out to be an inevitable part of living in a dynamic society.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
THE PUBLICATION OF THE GUTENBERG BIBLE (1456)
JOHANNES GUTENBERG was born in Mainz in 1400. The family seems to have been expelled from Mainz and settled in Strasbourg. Gutenberg was known to have been in Strasbourg between 1430 and 1444, where probably he begun work as a printer by 1439. By 1448 he was back in Mainz again, and by 1450 he was working in partnership with Johannes Fust, who financed Gutenberg’s printing press with 800 guilders. This was not a happy partnership. It ended after 5-years with Fust suing Gutenberg for the 800 guilders and receiving the printing equipment in lieu of payment. It is not known whether in amongst all the quarrelling they produced or published any books during this period, but Gutenberg must have devoted a lot of time to the preparation of the plates for his great project, the first printed Latin Bible.
Fust then carried on the business with the help of Peter Schoffer, his son-in-law, the two of them completing the famous ‘Gutenberg Bible’ which Gutenberg had begun. This historic and extremely ambitious feat was accomplished in August 1456. It involved the printing of 1282 pages in two columns with gaps left for hand-painted illuminated initials. Meanwhile, Gutenberg himself set-up another press in Mainz with Konrad Humery: archive evidence shows that Gutenberg went on struggling with debt repayments.
Gutenberg has been credited with the invention of printing, but it seems likely that printing already existed in a rudimentary form. Gutenberg nevertheless takes the credit for refining and using the new technology for a highly significant and ambitious project. Apart from anything else, the Bible is a very long book. Gutenberg remains the best claimant to the title ‘inventor of printing’, even though no books have survived bearing his name as their printer.
Until Johannes Gutenberg’s time, bibles were hand-made, scarce and expensive. Producing them, whole pages at a time, on a press, made bibles cheaper and more accessible. Gutenberg’s activity led to the democratisation of Christianity, the reduction of the power of the priests who recited and interpreted the Bible for the rest of the community, and the consequent reduction of the power of the Church. The publication of the Gutenberg Bible led directly to the Reformation itself.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Related:
- (Mark Dowe, February 21, 2009): “The Reformation and Religious Enlightenment”
The Amazon, deforestation and local economy
THE FUTURE of the forest, in particular the Amazon, is becoming of increasing importance. Brazil’s government hopes that land reform in the Amazon will slow deforestation but environmental groups seriously challenge this assertion.
The Amazon has a chequered if not rich history. Rubber, for example, drew the Amazon into the list of hinterlands that could be tapped if supplies were tight elsewhere, allowing growth to accelerate in much of the world from the 19th century onwards. And today new demands on the Amazon’s riches will determine the future of the forest.
Some 900-miles downriver to the east in Amazonas state, stands Manaus. Rubber barons built the city from the 1860s onwards. Its early residents made up for their distance from the European centres of fashion by trying to outdo Paris during the belle époque in drinking and debauchery. Now Manaus’s Zona Franca is the workshop for most of the televisions, washing machines and other white goods sold in Brazil. Special arrangements allow firms such as Sony and LG to import parts tax-free from elsewhere in the world and assemble them there. Despite being surrounded on all sides by thick forest, Manaus hums with manufacturing industry.
Some 350 miles to the south-east, in Pará state, the high gold price has encouraged a few hundred garimpeiros, or wildcat miners, to follow rumours of a strike and trek for days through the forest to a place, not far from Itaituba, which they have optimistically named “Bom Jesus”. They live in shacks with tarpaulins to keep off the rain, digging square holes and sifting through the red soil in the hope of finding a seam of gold. Malaria lurks there; cyanide is often cited as being present in the water.
There is nothing in Manaus to suggest that the Brazilian state exists. Its place has been taken by a local man who claims to own the land – though it actually belongs to the federal government – and takes a percentage of any gold found, while charging the workers exorbitant prices for supplies that are dropped off by small planes.
In Mato Grosso state, 400-miles south, the Amazon meets the agricultural frontier. Much of the world’s growing demand for protein is satisfied here. The state, which was once thought to have poor farmland, has been transformed over the past few decades and is now the country’s biggest producer of soybeans for vegetable oils and cattle-feed. Mato Grosso is also home to an unproductive kind of agriculture, which involves ranching small numbers of cattle on newly deforested land. The forest in the state shrank by 105 square miles in the three months from November to January, according to the Brazilian Space Research Institute, which uses satellites to monitor deforestation.
All of these places are part of the Amazon rainforest, an area one-and-a-half times the size of India, or nearly eight times the size of Texas. Most of it lies within Brazil. It is home to 20-million Brazilians, or 10% of the country’s population. Many of them live a delicate and hardy existence in places that are hot, wet, often disease-ridden and sometimes dangerous. These people have gone from being heroes who answered the government’s call to populate and subdue an empty region, to environmental criminals who are wrecking the planet, all the while standing on the same spot and doing what they have done for decades.
No government would think of condemning so many of its people to persistent poverty and destitution in the name of saving trees. Moving them is impractical and would be unjust, since the state moved them in the first place, under a policy that began in the 1960s and lasted for two decades. Other institutions helped too; the World Bank, for example, provided a loan that financed a large migration from the south of the country to Rondônia state in the days before it cared about the environment. A vast migration was accomplished with promises of free land, subsidies and a slightly menacing marketing campaign that exhorted people to ocupar para não entregar (“occupy it or lose it”). Parts of Brazil’s government remain anxious that covetous foreign powers may try to annexe the Amazon forest unless the country can find something useful to do with it.
TO IMPROVE the lives of Brazilians living in the Amazon, the government has devised a set of policies known as Plano Amazônia. They envisage an expansion of road-building in the forest, as well as some big hydroelectric projects. Both are loathed by people who want to preserve the trees. Plano Amazônia also contains measures to slow deforestation, but these will be hard to enforce. Money is short, the area to be policed is vast, and the folk who make money when the trees are cut down are endlessly ingenious.
Many people derive their income from deforestation. In Tailândia, a town in Pará surrounded by sawmills, some 70% of the population depends on logging in some way. The loggers work in tandem with cattle farmers: once the loggers take the best trees from an area, the rest is cleared and burnt. The farmers then sow grass and raise cattle. The land is quickly exhausted as pasture, but it then passes to another type of farming, while the loggers and cattle move farther into the forest and begin all over again.
This pattern helps to explain why the rate of deforestation tends to move with prices for beef and Soya, with a lag of about a year. Yet it is a wasteful way of using land. A recent study of some 300 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Science, shows that deforested areas enjoy a short economic boom, then quickly fall back to previous levels of development and productivity as the frontier moves on. Deforestation also, of course, reduces the rainfall on which Brazil’s agriculture depends.
GIVEN the hardships that farmers in the Amazon face, it may seem surprising that they do not just give up. One reason is that clearance and cattle bring in extra money from other sources. The farmers are also property developers of a kind. Jungle land can be grabbed for nothing, avoiding what is normally a huge outlay in farming. And ranchers often sell the land they have deforested to another user, even though they do not legally own it. Most people who study deforestation reckon this creates an incentive for farmers to push farther into the forest, rather than staying where they are, spending money on improving their land and raising productivity.
Ending this cycle is one aim of a land-reform bill that was recently approved in the Brazilian Congress, though not without controversy. This law is now with the president, who has the power to veto parts of it. The government claims that the legislation will at last enable it to discover which farmers are operating on illegal land and in the informal economy, and in the future will make it possible to work out who is committing environmental crimes.
Many environmentalists, however, think the law Holdings in America’s Great Plains, impressively neat and rectilinear from the air, were laid out in various early land laws and then parcelled out among pioneers. Brazil’s frontier has never benefited from such an elegant application of geometry. A study from Imazon, a non-profit research outfit, suggests that just 14% of privately owned land in the Amazon is backed by a secure title deed. The rest is covered by fake documents or simply by right of settlement.
With Gun crime and criminal behaviour rampant in pursuit of land, any new laws will interpose the Brazilian state into resolving issues. It would, for instance, be a better and lawful judge between competing claims or by handing back smaller plots of land to their apparent owners and reclaiming very large ones for the state. In the long-run such measures may prove useful. Land regularisation is of fundamental importance for halting deforestation.
Enforcing the new regime and accompanying laws will be difficult. IBAMA, the federal agency charged with this task, collects less than 1% of the fines it imposes during operations in the Amazon. It is not something that is feared as a serious threat by people who break the law; the sporadic weakness of the Brazilian state is partly to blame for this. But any government would struggle to police the frontier between forest and farmland, which is far longer than America’s border with Mexico. This is why many environmentalists now argue that the only way to fix the problem is to give people who live at the frontier something more profitable to do. The government has begun to change the region’s economies. Since July, 2008, farmers without titles to their land are supposed to be denied access to subsidised credit, though this too has become hard to enforce.
Efforts to commercialise forest products, from Amazon River fish to oils for use in cosmetics, are also under way. Amigos da Terra, in a study of these businesses, finds them to be profitable when they form clusters and turn out finished products. It is believed that in 20-years a viable forest economy will emerge if laws and measures are enacted now in avoiding the ill-effects associated with deforestation.
Speeding up this process is one of the motives behind the $1 billion donation for the Amazon announced in September by Norway’s government. The Brazilian government has set up an Amazon Fund for this money and any future donations. Norway will have no say in how it is used, but the amount of money it releases from the fund will be linked to Brazil’s success in slowing deforestation. Germany will give something to the fund, too. Norway’s ambassador to Brasília, says lots of other countries are watching Norway to see how the experiment goes, and will chip in if it is a success.
Amazon states hope to acquire another stream of money, in the form of payments for not cutting down trees, from the UN initiative known as REDD, which will be discussed in Copenhagen in December. Payments of this kind are already being made in Amazonas state: $8.1m from private companies such as Marriott hotels and Bradesco, a big bank, is being handed over by the state government to 6,000 families in exchange for not cutting down any more trees. The challenge is to extend such schemes to the trees on the edge of the farmland, which are most at risk.
TO BRING A MORE ELEVATED FORM of economic development to the region, Brazil’s government is convinced that it needs to build more roads in the forest. This too is controversial. Some 80% of deforestation happens within 30 miles of a road. Seen from Google Earth, the southern part of Pará state looks as if someone has dropped large fish skeletons on the jungle, as spines of deforestation push into the trees from either side of the roads. Deforestation is more severe where a road is good, which is why the proposed asphalting of the BR-163, from Cuiabá in Mato Grosso to Santarém in Pará, is held up by a legal wrangle. However unpalatable road-building may be, it will be needed if the people who live in the Amazon are to lead a better life.
IN THIS VISION of the Amazon, the forest will be preserved as a large national park with sprinklings of industry added to enrich its inhabitants. The agriculture at its edge will be more productive than it is today, making use of abandoned land and raising yields to meet domestic and foreign demand without encroaching farther into the jungle. This aim is plausible, as well as commendable, but it will take decades to accomplish. In the meantime, the forest will continue to shrink.
Saturday, 13 June 2009
