UN-LIKELY

Just a quick one - what the hell is the UN not doing that it should be doing in Haiti with 9,000 blue helmets already there?!

It's tragic they lost so many of their own in the earthquake (viz. conservative estimates are 34 peacekeepers), but why can't the other 8,966 peacekeepers roll up their sleeves and pitch in?

Or is there some reason they can't, like;

- It's not within their mandate;

- Someone hasn't filled out the right form;

- "For safety and security reasons...."

- It's "pending" or "in process"

- Amiable platitudes need to be broadcast on BBC/CNN/AJ/etc. by some UN Aid Lord prior to any token, poorly managed gesture can be made

- Funding is not approved

Oh, for God's sake! C'mon UN, get off your backsides for once!

Links again

http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTOP/ntopNews_uUSTRE60D5VB20100114

STOP PRESS!! INEXACT SCIENCE UPDATE

It appears that the unintended benefits of Inexact Science are even more potent than initially reported.

A man currently detained in Saudi Arabia is claiming that his terrorist leanings were motivated by the memory of his Inexact Science Experience.

Mohammed al-Awfi said his Inexact Science Experience started six years ago at the Bagram U.S. military base in Afghanistan before he 'graduated' to Gitmo (we should all know by now that extraordinary rendition is when that fortuitous tap on the shoulder comes in the form of the Inexact Science Opportunity).

BBC journalist Peter Taylor reports that, "Al-Awfi claimed his U.S. interrogators... sat him on a chair, made a hole in the seat, and then pulled out the testicles from underneath which they then hit with a metal rod."

But that is not all - there's more!

Taylor goes on to report that al Awfi alleges, "They'd then tie up your penis and make you drink salty water in order to make you urinate without being able to do so, until they make you scream."

Al Awfi was amongst a select group of the best of the best Inexact Science Experiential prospects. He then moved up to the Science's Higher Learning Orbit, through the Deradicalization and Rehabilitation Campaign in Saudi Arabia.

The DRC in Saudi Arabia reportedly "involves counseling by Muslim clerics to alter their thinking, extensive contact with their families, and practical help to reintegrate them into society."

Taylor notes that, "When I asked al-Awfi why the rehabilitation program had not worked for him, he said it was because the memories of what he had suffered at the hands of Americans were far more powerful than any corrective inducements he had received in the program."

This sort of testimonial is proof undeniable of the efficacy of the Science.

It came as no surprise to his trainers that after passing through DRC in Saudi, in January 2009 al Awfi joined the Yemen-chapter of al Qaeda, as a Commander no less.

The Unspoken Public-Private Partnership between Inexact Science and prominent insurgent networks such as al Qaeda is by now well documented. What's interesting here is the affirmative action by al Qaeda that accredits Inexact Science graduates and reinstates them with a corresponding al Qaeda rank.

Linksagain:

http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTOP/ntopNews_uUSTRE60C5WO20100113

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23554

Quick Peacemeal: Inexact Science

A recent Pentagon assessment using Inexact Science (more on that later) has shown that about one in five detainees released from Gitmo have joined or are suspected of joining militant/insurgent groups.

"There are 198 detainees left at Guantanamo, which once held 750...Among those still being held there, roughly 91 are Yemeni.

"A previous Pentagon assessment last April showed that 14 percent of former detainees had joined or were suspected of joining militant groups, up from 11 percent in December 2008.

"The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the revised Pentagon assessment showed that percentage had grown to about 20 percent.

"Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell...said the vetting process for releasing detainees was an 'inexact science,' adding: 'You know, we are making subjective calls based upon judgment, intelligence. And so there is no foolproof answer in this realm. That's what makes this so difficult.'"

As an aid worker, I am pretty sure that there might be lessons learned from The War on Terror on self-sufficiency and sustainability. Gitmo is now providing that critical feedback loop we aid workers all strive for: By disaffecting new terrorists and feeding them back into failed states and fragile spaces which (as we all know by now) incubate insurgency and terrorism, and in turn, these spaces become new and challenging contexts for Surgettes to apply their COINtastic solutions and do nation-building. Perhaps there's something we could all learn from this approach; I believe the military calls it iterative learning or something.

I also take this opportunity to Welcome three new bloggers to Double Negative, all chums committed to the kind of positive thinking that permeates this forum.

Rank and File is a Female Combatant , so she's really vulnerable. If she posts her views, nobody better be critical!

Five Finger Discount is a Specialist in Inexact Science. Look out for her seminal piece exploring Secret Portals and the War on Terror.

Centre Half-Forward is the more cautious and diplomatic member of the team. He often writes posts in draft form and errs on the side of not pressing 'Submit'. Not that submission is a problem for him... As our resident Conflictologist, when he does eventually submit, it never offends anyone!

Links again:

http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTOP/ntopNews_uUSTRE6044MI20100106 http://www.cfr.org/publication/21111/center_for_a_new_american_security.html

Aid Lord Perception Index

A friend recently sent me an email in which he asked the innocent question:

“Why Don’t We In Civil Society (NGOs, INGOs, campaign groups) Begin Assessing the Competence of Senior Figures on the International Circuits?”

He went on to argue that:

“International entities such as the UN, OSCE, World Bank…are hierarchies, with one or two people – almost always male – sitting at the top of the pyramid. These people hold immense power over the organisations’ staff who therefore, understandably, never criticise them for fear of their careers.

“These people at the top are virtually unassailable. They simply revolve from one top post to another, year after year after year.

“As things stand, there is no-one ‘out here’ in the wider world assessing such individuals’ performance. Their Governments go on sponsoring them, probably blind to their failures. The same names can be seen in top posts for decades.

“I suggest at the very least the world’s civil society sector should try to develop an objective assessment process for these international figures. "

I think the idea is sound. I am glad someone else maintains their rage against impunity in the face of what is far too often no-outcomes, let alone poor and destructive aid/development/recovery/post-conflict programming (“Do No Harm” notwithstanding, which I think sets the bar absurdly low).

Obviously certain institutional donors, UN agencies, highly successful consultancies, and/or international organistions will probably not support this from the outset. But you never know.

In terms of means and spaces, the internet and the blogosphere is the perfect place to do this.

The funny thing about accountability is that in the majority of donor countries, there are ample precedents; think about all the municipal regulatory structures providing oversight, compliance monitoring, and professional standards supervision in the many areas of the public and private sectors. The broad aim of such regulatory controls is to circumscribe and assess the outcomes of the industry in question against wider policy, public interest, and community expectations.

Indeed, why is it that in this particular industry, i.e. international aid and development, a huge gap exists in terms of supervision and regulatory controls?

Centre Half-Forward (Welcome!) and I kicked around some possible indices for an Aid Lord Perception Index:

Salary + fringe benefits/funding raised (not including base or institutional funding from permanent endowments, compulsory member states’ contributions, etc.)

Travel costs per year/#new deals signed

Travel costs per year/new deals signed in $

Average number of reporting lines between Aid Lord in question and a project manager directly responsible for a specific project

Total headquarter costs/total funding

Total number of emails sent by him in the last six months

Recipient government perception responses (qualitative)

Donor government perception responses (qualitative)

One concern I have are outliers or anomalies. These are organizations whose business model will make them look unduly ineffective – such as organizations that spend most of their resources on policy development. The other group of possible outliers and anomalies are organizations that move huge volumes of materiel and get paid accordingly, e.g. logistics, food, etc. These organizations, particularly during emergency/disaster response, may look really effective, but this may often has little to do with their respective Aid Lord.

Methinks there are many things to consider.

Perhaps the worst perceived Aid Lord(s) could get an award. Possible awards could be:

- If not already obtained, Man of the Year in Time Magazine;
- Return business class trip to tribal administered areas in Pakistan for a speaking
tour alongside Ronan Farrow;
- Round-the-world aid convoy with British MP George Galloway;
- His own ten-acre plot in Gaza to do whatever he wants with; or
- His own hut in a Millennium Development Village with residency requirements.

The best perceived Aid Lord doesn’t need to be awarded because he’s paid well and he's DOING HIS JOB. But, if rewarding mitzvah is your thing, perhaps he could win a symbolic set of golden keys to Jerusalem or something. Or mayor of Kabul (actually, that’s taken – the ballots have spoken).

Links again:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/1009/Special_liaison_Holbrooke_appoints_Mia_Farrows_son_as_liaison_to_NGOs.html
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201016165325573953.html
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/10/peter-galbraith-on-afghan-election-fraud

Alas, Today's Terrorists Don't Write

I never thought of terrorism along these lines:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=2AB221C13D4D53E51973B72BF6628111.w6?a=526631&f=112&sub=Columnist

Roger Cohen is tremendously provocative columnist, whose favourite pieces of mine range from drone wars (although, he started his piece about how the US weaponised the fruitfly) and a deliciously sarky piece about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Anyway, Cohen's irreverent musing links intrepid revolutionaries of yore with displacement/resettlement of today's pre-terrorists and their subsequent anti-Western militancy.

I know of no written treatise/manifesto/exegesis penned by Zawahiri, Bin Laden, Haqqani, Mullah Omar, al Sadr, Irwandi Yusuf, Prabhakaran, Kony, or Mehsud (or his lucky donkey); no equivalent to Mao's guerrilla bible from 1937.

By comparison, today's guerilla, or 'insurgent' if you prefer, is a dull sociopath.

Still, the point Cohen makes is really interesting; to what extent is displacement or resettlement in the West a feature of modernday terrorist experience and subsequent thought patterns? Certainly travel to places like Waziristan, Peshawar/Rawalpindi, Quetta (oops all Pakistan), and um, Sudan?, London?, the seething airport lounges of Lagos; are these the paltry incubation sites for anti-Western militancy?

Hardly.

No wonder the poor sods are so dull and disaffected! Ho, Mao, Che, Castro, and Friends had Cuba, Argentina, Paris, Moscow and many other FUN places to scheme and conspire. Perhaps if we offered today's pre-terrorists (starting perhaps with Gitmo ex-cons - sorry I can't say "con" because they were never convicted - I meant "detainee") happier sanctuaries, they might write more. Then we would learn more about them (and learn what's wrong, for crying out loud!).

This Happy Potential Terrorist Sanctuary would have psychoanalysts fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Arabic. We could construct an adventure course where we would play corporate trust games - they always look like fun (learning to trust sniping co-workers to break your fall off a jungle gym). Even contemporary writing classes and workshops; where we explore other ways of expressing oneself without resorting to C4. Day care would have to be made available; Bin Laden could really use this - the dude is really lacking parenting skills.

I think I'm onto something. Perhaps I should start working on a proposal - "Camp Ray of Sunshine" or something. I suspect that hosting it in Cuba might give everyone the wrong impression so we'll choose somewhere fun and lively, and remote (naturally). Galapagos might work actually.

Links again:

Bin Laden and Parenting:
http://us.macmillan.com/growingupbinladen

Cohen on Drone Wars and Fruitflies:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13iht-edcohen.xml

Cohen on Obama's impromptu Nobel:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13iht-edcohen.xml

Fear and Loathing in Africa

What is it about vacuums, editors/publishers in the US, and Africa?

Altitude sickness.

As soon as its 'African' they lose all their critical faculties and instincts of inquiry. They get so high on their moral pedestal, the air thins out.

If the Ishmael Beah hoax (at the very least he was fast and loose with his factotums) was not enough, they are prone to the dumbest of assertions. Seriously, it's altitude sickness or lack of oxygen or something.

Case in point: Dambisa Moyo's contribution to the body of work that is Self-Loathing Ex-World Bank Employees Seek Redemption in Print.

The introduction/foreword by Niall Ferguson says of Dambisa; "an African view of Africa's Problems".

By her own account, this is a woman born in Zambia, whose father has a PhD from University of California, and a mum who is a leading banker. Dambisa spent big chunks of her formative years in the U.S. Her CV amongst other things reads;

- MBA in Finance and Bachelors degree in Chemistry from American University;
- Harvard for her Masters in Public Administration;
- PhD from Oxford;
- Two years working with the World Bank; and
- A stint with Goldman Sachs.

That's an African View?

It's the view of an exceptionally privileged Zambian-born woman who trawls through contemporary American thinking on Africa and comes up with a different point of view. It’s a pretty long bow to draw when one describes this rarefied viewpoint – however well-meaning the compliment is intended – as somehow representative of a homogenous ‘African view’.

At worst, Dambisa’s book entitled Dead Aid is 154 pages of circular corroboration. At best, it’s a thorough desk review of all the most prominent thinkers; another way of looking at it, is that it is an instructive example of how to schmooze and tip one's hat to all the Big Thinkers in the Faculty of Aid and Development.

Being that as it may, some people will find this slim volume controversial because it is openly critical of aid by advocating a 'tough love' approach to causing development and stability in Africa. Again, this is not in and of itself ground-breaking when one considers the genre; Self-Loathing Ex-World Bank Employees Seek Redemption in Print.

The main thrust of her argument is that aid to Africa in all its forms negatively reinforces corrupt/conflict-fractured/poor African states so 'we' in the West should impose stricter conditions and make more time-critical demands upon these regimes/states. Wean Africa off the big bosom of the West, so to speak.

As I flicked pages restlessly - and with a trace of exasperation I will admit – through Dead Aid, I couldn't help but imagine the ambience in which the book was written;

- The soft tap-tappa noise of perfectly manicured fingers on the soft keys of laptops, singing in syncopated chorus with all the other laptops in the sort of cafe that serves drinks called "grande" "frappacino" and "doppio". Everyone greets one another and the Barista named William with "Hi-ee!" and cute little wash-on, wash off hand waving. William, probably a carrot top (never set foot in Italy), says his obligatory 'ciao';
- The swatch and rustle of patent leather cases, belts, clasps, satchels, handbags, and clutches. Embossed with names like Prada and Hermes;
- Entering into atriums and climate-controlled rooms; the sterile whooshing drone of electric doors, lifts, and elevators;
- The twinkle-clinkle and steady murmur of the kind of restaurant where the wine and the water comes from France or Italy (or some other thinning glacial spring in Europe);
- Lunch consists of Ligurian olives, rich fetta, Sicilian parma and swino nero, bread with names like ciabatta or baguette or panini, bufala mozzarella, marinated peppers and aubergine, washed down with coffee that came from a machine named Gaggia;
- Meat with citations like loin, rump, and fillet (as opposed to 'goat' or 'beef');
- Chuckling friends, colleagues, irony, and private humour.

Here are some ambient noises and dynamics I don't hear when I read Dead Aid:

- The dull roar of a diesel engine as you clock up 750km per week;
- Papa Wemba or Mama Afrika on squealing cassettes;
- The soft thud of stool hitting the latrine's hand-dug pit;
- The whine and ratta-tatta of heavy rain hitting corrugated iron sheeting;
- The stiff clicks and taps of a manual typewriter while you wait two-three-hours-maybe-all-day to meet yet another incompetent senior bureaucrat;
- Chickens, chicks, turkeys, and all manner of fowl jabbering in a constant background cacophony;
- Lunch, if you're lucky;
- Dinner is upland rice, a sloppy broth, and a long slender rooster thigh so taut you need elbow room to break it apart;
- Mzungu! Omuzungu! Mono! (For obvious reasons, mind)
- Eh! Ah-ah! Percussive exclamations in stereo with the poultry
- People hold hands when they greet, and fix you in the eyes;
- Guffawing, full body laughing, probably at someone making a gaffe.

What is it about self-loathing and the former World Bankers? So many of the big names she cites all too frequently are all dyed in the wool self-loathing ex-World Bankers - Collier, Easterly, Sachs...and now, Moyo. At least one of them is African, I suppose!

There's a willful quality to the Bank's recruitment practices. I often wonder if they consciously hire to self-loath. Their keen sense of hubris can only be described as compulsive. Do they persist in funding the woeful programmes around the world in order to feed their self-loathing?

Dead Aid is to self-loathing ex-World Bankers and their acolytes like the tantalizing Ninth Most Highly Effective Habit (is it the Ninth or is Stephen Covey already in double digits?) is for grasping middle managers with personality disorders.

Are editors and publishers at all aware of how over-represented former World Bank self-loathers are amongst their bare-all 'woe Africa' stable of writers?

It would be funny if their ideas weren't so deprived of oxygen. I get dizzy just reading the titles and dizzier still when reading how earnest and seriously they take themselves.

Although, I must say Dambisa is seriously good at sub-headings. You can see the argument unfold by just reading the table of contents.

To be fair, the book should be judged, not on the background, attractiveness (maybe I'm shallow, but it counts; Dambisa is a hotty – somehow it makes the text fly off the page!), or the good living of its author; rather it should be judged on its standalone merits.

And here it is. Dead Aid is a Big Name literature review of Africa's liaisons with the West’s donors and the vicissitudes of executing our naïve intentions in Africa. There is no significant primary or secondary analysis in amongst the 154 pages. Even the anecdotes are, for the most part, dry and passionless. That said, it's easy to read and mercifully short.

Links again:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185928/
http://michellebaltazar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/83-dambisa_moyo1.jpg

Too Big to Fail

Even their own generals doubt their own ability to collect intelligence.

At least according to Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the U.S. military and its NATO allies:

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy...ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced ... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers."

Is Afghanistan – just like Vietnam before it – too big to fail?

Made me think about an interesting post on dumb-as-rocks aid/development in Afghanistan. It is stating the numbingly obvious when I say that the constantly changing and deteriorating security climate in Afghanistan is a significant impediment to aid and development or “nation-building” as the US/NATO counter-insurgency effort terms it. The whole chicken-egg riddle of you can't have development without security (and vice versa) is nonsense too. It's a conversation that sucks in oxygen for no good reason at all. In a fragile security environment you can have stability interventions. Usually such interventions are highly contextualized. Contextualization means understanding the context – social networks, local/tribal solidarities, patterns to ethnic and cultural dynamics, and the recent historical calculus that has led communities and their allegiances to where they are now.

Hard to do when your bombing them out of the sky. Doubly hard when there are not even pilots flying the planes.

One of the pillars of effective counter-insurgency, or “COIN” as it is called at the moment, that of intelligence-gathering, is losing its burnish. The tragic events last week in which seven CIA officers only underscores that the Taleban are not really on the run. In fact, they are taking advantage of the poor intelligence-gathering practices of US/NATO.

Ready-made interventions that conveyed well in other contexts frequently don't work in complex conflict-riven contexts. This is because interventions need contextualization. This means that the success, fleeting or otherwise, in Iraq in 2007 cannot be super-imposed on a fundamentally different context.

Where are the precedents for the touted military-led nation-building that the US insists will work?

Aside from WWII and parts of the Balkans, the US government (and NATO by extension) simply cannot point to a reliable or sustainable precedent for their much vaunted military-led nation-building. If you doubt the substance of what I am asserting check out Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index; all the bottom-order countries are post-conflict.

154 Yemen (ok, not yet – but coming soon!)
158 Cambodia
168 Haiti
176 Iraq
176 Sudan
179 Afghanistan
180 Somalia (the very bottom)

Another way of grouping them together is “post-US-conflict”.

The question is whether armed or military organizations are well placed to contextualize their interventions and achieve civilian objectives through the use of force?

The argument the buzzcutters will contend is that other organizations (invariably citing wooly NGOs and their fluffier comrades at the UN) are far too process-oriented to be able to realistically make meaningful aid interventions in fragmented and rapidly shifting contexts.

Interestingly, at odds with many of his colleagues and contemporaries, Major General Michael Flynn, senses that no matter how intricate their analyses (if and when they can get it right), no matter how swift their feedback cycles, no matter how attune their leaders are to the context; the chilling reality looms. NATO/US can’t win this war. Their keen sense of denial is akin to a consciousness of guilt.

Just like in Viet Nam.

Billions of taxpayer dollars later, after the expiry of so many young lives, and at the behest of a local population with almost no say in what is happening to them; what will be left?

Afghanistan reinvented for the Nth time.

Why does the current debate and approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan bother the Artful Aid Worker so much?

Simply put, ‘the Surgettes’ are already gathering the evidence for Viet Nam Redux. No manual or doctrine – no matter how many copies it has sold or how media savvy its authors are – can paper over the debacle that is already the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Their so-called “population-centric” approach is symptomatic of a military mindset that is dominating a rapidly deteriorating space.

For an aid-worker who works on post-conflict recovery and reintegration, albeit not in a war zone (for reasons obvious to me, but not to the Surgettes) the way that “nation-building” projects are described and implemented always presumes military objectives as part and parcel of “the process”.

Take for instance, road-building; we are told that “the process is the outcome”. This is to say that the road itself is a secondary objective – what happens during the road construction is the primary objective. The processes the Surgettes applaud are “permanent presence”; bringing “the fight” to US/NATO troops on favourable terms, winning local support in order to precipitate an intelligence-cascade, and “integrated campaign management” which appears to suggest that government is a participant-spectator not really running anything important. Many of us are left with the unambiguous conclusion that the nation-building approach is clear, hold, build, KILL. And at least from where I look at it, that’s enemy-centric.

Furthermore, the entire corpus of contemporary counter-insurgency theory with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan relies on the alignment of too many fundamental/critical/key/must-have/important requirements.

For instance in his intriguing book The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, prominent COIN expert David Kilcullen, prescribes the following conditions-precedent for his COINtastic solution to work:

"Priotization is critical"

"our strategy must seek first and foremost to build... an Afghan state capable of managing its own problems"

"Effective COIN requires security forces who are legitimate in local eyes"

"Population-centric...human-security 24 hours a day is critical"

"Integration with Pakistan strategy is also fundamental"

"Building the planning and oversight capability of the Afghan government is key"

It just goes on and on. From a technical viewpoint, the presumption of so many enabling factors being in place or created concurrently for this approach to work is fanciful in the extreme. I have never experienced such a celestial alignment of enabling factors in difficult working environments.

Military agencies should be trying to get out of there (Afghanistan and Pakistan) as soon as possible, and not being tasked with whatever their toxic strain of “nation-building” is supposed to mean. Counterinsurgents and military types don’t really understand what socio-economic reintegration and community stabilization involves, and even if they did, they can’t do it because their are the wrong agents of change.

If they are truly population-centric, then they would understand – they’re really not winning the hearts and minds. In fact, their approach is having the opposite desired outcome.

Leave it to USAID, DFID, and all the other international and non-government agencies that, despite their wooliness and many shortcomings, actually know what and how to develop and work within fragile and difficult spaces emerging from conflict.

Links again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13iht-edcohen.html
http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CWOR/nworldNews_uUSTRE5BF2TR20091216 http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTOP/ntopNews_uUSTRE60403V20100105 http://aidwatchers.com/2009/09/good-news-aid-agencies-are-beginning-to-catch-the-dumb-as-rocks-projects/
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table
http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CPOL/npoliticsNews_uUSTRE6042Q720100105 http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=20932
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kilcullen