Archive for August, 2009
The New York Times reported today on tense relations between Russia and Ukraine, as “both sides resort to provocations and recriminations.”
It is the Crimean Peninsula, appended to Ukraine by Stalin but heavily populated by Russians and Crimean Tatars, “where the tensions are perhaps most in danger of bursting into open conflict,” though “both countries publicly avow that they do not want the bad feelings to spiral out of control,” Times reporter Clifford Levy notes.
The situation could worsen in next five months, as the January 2010 Ukrainian election “might cause Ukrainian candidates to respond more aggressively to Russia to show their independence,” Levy writes.
Crimea is “roughly 60 percent ethnic Russian and would prefer that the peninsula separate from Ukraine and be part of Russia” and Sevastopol, where Russia maintains a naval base, “has an even higher proportion of ethnic Russians.”
Levy writes:
Sergei P. Tsekov, a senior politician in Crimea who heads the main ethnic Russian communal organization, said he hoped that Russia would wholeheartedly endorse Crimean separatism just as it did the aspirations of South Ossetia and another Georgian enclave, Abkhazia.
(Map copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
Polling by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that Pakistani attitudes are shifting. They are far more worried about extremism, and feel less positive about al Qaeda and the Taliban.
- Seventy percent have an unfavorable view of the Taliban, vs. 33% in 2008. On al Qaeda, 61% now hold unfavorable views, compared to 34% last year.
- Nearly two-thirds of Pakistanis — 64% — see the US as an “enemy,” though 53% think improved relations between the two countries are important.
- India is viewed as a very serious threat by 69% of those polled, while 57% see the Taliban this way, and 41% label al Qaeda a serious threat.
- China is viewed positively by 84% of Pakistanis.
- Pakistanis have strong authoritarian impulses: “78% favor death for those who leave Islam; 80% favor whippings and cutting off hands for crimes like theft and robbery; and 83% favor stoning adulterers.”
- Pakistan may have some resistance to fragmentation: “89% say they think of themselves first as Pakistani, rather than as a member of their ethnic group.”
- Pakistanis are not deeply unhappy with their lives, despite poverty, instability, corruption, etc.: “74% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with their overall lives.”
- Only 5% now support suicide bombings targeting civilians “in defense of Islam;” 41% did so in 2004.
Public hostility to the US suggests that it would not take an outright extremist takeover to create a hostile regime in Pakistan. Politicians might find it a rewarding stance in an election, and in office, though economic and diplomatic costs might make this a risky strategy.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy)
Earlier this month Slate and the Global Business Network got together to think about how the United States might come to an end over the next 100 years.
They devised four scenarios:
- Collapse — A series of disasters fray and ultimately destroy American social cohesion. “The country could fall apart as our national creeds of freedom, democracy, and openness are gradually abandoned.”
- Friendly breakup — “The country dissolves peacefully because the overhead of running a large nation becomes unmanageable.” This includes an amicable version of the red-blue US disintegration scenario.
- Global governance — “The national government declines in importance relative to the world community,” in order “to head off the challenges of the ‘non-zero-sum,’ globalized world: climate change, biological weapons, pandemics.”
- Global conquest — The US and the rest of the world are conquered by force. Peter Schwartz of GBN sees this as the least likely.
The larger world would not fare well in the collapse or global conquest scenarios. Forces large enough to destroy the US would likely handle most other places severely as well. The friendly breakup scenario could be positive or negative: it might indicate that the world was integrated and peaceful, and thus safe for smaller states — the pattern now developing in Western Europe — but it could also leave a power vacuum if the US simply stepped away from its current role.
(Thanks for article tip to Kristin Nauth)
(Image courtesy aprilzosia, Flickr)
Analyst Andrew Bacevich questioned the US strategy in Afghanistan on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today.
We don’t need to fix Afghanistan and the world, he said; we simply need to defend the US. The American interest in Afghanistan is limited to insuring “that Afghanistan does not become a sanctuary for a large number of jihadists plotting attacks against the United States.”
Our current strategy and level of commitment does not reflect that limited interest, he said. The current approach fails “to think seriously about where our interests lie and to think seriously about how much power we have available and where it can most effectively be used.”
As an alternative, “explore the possibility of providing incentives to the warlords to get them to rule their little patch of Afghanistan in ways that keeps the Taliban and especially keeps al-Qaida out. In other words, we would pay them in order to accomplish that for us.”
Present strategy leads to “perpetual occupation,” according to Bacevich.
This alternative strategy could present several issues:
- The warlords are often corrupt and brutal — sometimes as brutal as the Taliban — and backing them could be difficult for Americans to stomach.
- The brutality and oppression of the warlords brought the Taliban to power in the 1990s, and could enable them to triumph again.
- If American aims are limited to blocking hostile jihadists, we might do as well negotiating with the Taliban directly, as some say is inevitable.
(Image courtesy NASA)
A researcher has found that fertility may go up again after countries reach a high level of development.
The pattern has long been that fertility is declining pretty much everywhere, and in the developed world is has dropped below replacement levels — about 2.1 babies per woman — in many countries.
Lower fertility has many societal, economic, and environmental benefits, but rapid fertility drops drive rapid “aging” of a society, with rising ratios of seniors to workers.
According to Rob Stein in the Washington Post, Hans-Peter Kohler found that countries which reach a high quality of life often increase their birthrates. The threshold is a human development index (HDI) of 0.9, which reflects high levels of income, longevity, and education.
Kohler speculates that the key may be social structures and employment situations that enable women both to work and have children. This would explain, he notes, why Japan has not achieved this fertility rebound, given its high level of gender inequality.
Immigration could clearly play a factor, as most developed countries (but not Japan) have greatly increased immigration in recent decades, but Kohler says it cannot account for the full effect — and this would not explain why Canada has not had such a rebound.
Sociologist S. Philip Morgan casts some doubt on the development-driven theory, telling the Post that other factors could be at work, such as ideological changes. (These two ideas are not necessarily contradictory; development is an important driver of ideological change, according to theorists such as Ronald Inglehart.)
(Image courtesy yananine, Flickr)
On “Fresh Air” on NPR, Charles Sennott said today that the US plan for Afghanistan does not look like a plausible route to success.
The US and allied force ratios are not right for a vast, rural country such as Afghanistan, he said.
On the Taliban, Sennott said that its leadership shows a range of outlooks, and some Taliban leaders see the movement’s embrace of extreme policies during its time in power as a mistake.
As for how things will go forward, negotiations with elements of the Taliban are “inevitable,” Sennott asserts, though the organization may not yet have a realistic position to bring to talks.
(Image courtesy NASA)
In last week’s Newsweek, Andrew Bast argued that outsiders might be well-served by standing aside as the Islamist Al-Shabab group attempts to seize control of more of the country.
Bast writes that:
- “The Islamist group is far from monolithic, and could well splinter without a foreign enemy to rally against.” Foreign military intervention provides that rallying point.
- “Many of Somalia’s factions—like the Abgal businessmen who run Mogadishu’s port—are well armed and unlikely to be steamrolled by religious fanatics.”
- “Should they somehow manage to actually seize power, Al-Shabab would then face the immense challenge of governing,” as Somalis would likely resist fundamentalist rule.
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
The Washington Post reports another ominous factor for the stability of Nigeria.
David Hecht writes that Nigeria “cannot feed its 140 million people, and relatively minor reductions in rainfall could set off a regional food catastrophe, experts say.” Increased rainfall variability — which is a likely outcome of climate change — could cause this.
“The reality is that if the rains are bad throughout the region or the price of inputs became unaffordable, there could be massive food shortages, and neither the government nor any other institution stands ready to help,” a Nigerian agricultural official told Hecht.
Thirty-eight percent of young Nigerian children already suffer from malnutrition, and 65% of the population is food-insecure.
Nigerian instability would be disastrous for Africa, potentially dragging down much of West and Central Africa with it. Hecht writes of the direct effect of Nigerian food shortages driving food beyond affordability in poorer neighboring countries, but instability could add massive refugee flows, economic disruption, and spillover violence.
On the positive side, Nigeria could feed itself: the article notes that more than half of the country’s arable land is not being used, and only 7% of the land that could be used for irrigated farming is under the plow. If this were changed, Nigeria could be self-sufficient in both rice and wheat.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
Iraq is planning to clamp down on the Internet, raising concerns that it will revert to a restrictive approach more typical of the region. Iraq currently has many Internet providers and hundreds of Internet cafes.
A government official told the Associated Press that “All Web sites that glorify terrorism and incite violence and sectarianism, or those that violate social morals with content such as pornography will be banned.”
An Iraqi press freedom group said that the plan was an “attempt to control the flow of free information on the Internet and limit the knowledge of the citizens,” the AP reports.
This can be taken as another sign that the overall durability of a democratic Iraq is still in question. As the US departs, there could easily be backsliding on human rights and democratic practices. The populace will not want to be oppressed, as they were in the Saddam years, but they may well be happy to limit the freedoms and rights of ethnic, political, and religious minorities.
(Image courtesy Mike Licht, Flickr)
Fareed Zakaria advocates doing nothing with Iran in this week’s Newsweek (”On Iran, Do Nothing. Yet,” August 3, 2009, p. 26).
In the short term, the US should not confer legitimacy on the post-election regime, and in any case has already made a serious offer of talks.
In the longer term, he suggests that passive measures — deterrence and containment — are better than active alternatives in confronting a nuclear-armed Iraq. He notes that that approach “worked against Stalin and Mao and works against North Korea, a far more unstable and bizarre regime.”
Zakaria also examines the trend others have noted: that Ahmadinejad represents not the ultimate expression of the religious regime, but its loss of power to secular and military forces. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is losing its distinctive religious basis and becoming another Middle Eastern dictatorship — except that it now hosts an opposition movement that does not seem ready to quiet down.”
It is unclear which Iranian elite is “better” from a Western perspective: the mullahs don’t have the “apocalyptic” mindset that some in the US and Israel ascribe to them, Zakaria notes, but they do have deep-seated beliefs that tend them toward anti-Western and anti-Israeli directions. Ahdmadinejad’s faction could conceivably end up more pragmatic; one of his recent disputes with the clerics was based on his appointment of a top deputy who said that Iranians were friends with everyone, “even Israelis,” contravening a central tenet of Iranian policy.