A Short Update on the Arctic Sea

It looks like the mystery of the Arctic Sea may never be solved. Whilst moored in a Finnish harbour around new year (it’s working again now), the captain found none of the alleged hijackers’ bullet holes inside the ship.

It was late last July when mysterious hijackers were supposed to have captured the ship. After a long and sometimes farcically complicated chase, Russian forces re-took the ship in August and arrested eight men for hijacking.

Russia maintains it was carrying timber to Algeria. Others say it was actually carrying anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, and that Israeli forces took the ship and struck a deal with Russia to make it look like they had rescued the ship in return for making it do an about turn. It seems Netanyahu most likely did make a hasty visit to Moscow, and Russia did have a contract to supply the missiles to Iran, which Israel strongly opposed. But Russia says its investigation, as yet shrouded in secrecy, will be full and transparent. It also firmly denies the arms shipment claims. Any revelations concerning this would of course be intensely embarrassing now that Russia has done that.

Time, and a wall of official silence, have now frozen the story. Whether it will be properly investigated is tough to say and anyone wanting to get to the bottom of it will most likely come to a dead end rather quickly. We may find out more if the ship is used in the future as a bargaining chip in negotiations or becomes part of a diplomatic row.

For now though, it seems this twisty turny high seas thriller has been dry docked. It looks like some official force has managed to relegate it to the place of a very diminutive footnote of 2009.

UN Security Council Takes a New and Welcome Approach to Drugs Trade

Rather belatedly, I’d like to point readers to an excellent brief by James Cockayne of the International Peace Institute on last month’s UN Security Council presidential statement on global drugs trafficking. Cockayne calls it a “milestone in the global drug control debate, and a turning point in the world body’s approach to the issue.” He writes:

The presidential statement – a political pronouncement by the Council falling short of a binding resolution, but agreed unanimously by its fifteen members – constitutes the first coherent political commitment by the Security Council to tackle the world drug problem based on “common and shared responsibility.” This is code for the idea that demand reduction is as important as reduction of supply. The statement sends a signal that even if the major security implications of drug trafficking fall on production and transit states in the global South, consuming states in the global North also have responsibilities in tackling the trade. While the Council has previously made similar noises in relation to drug trafficking in specific countries such as Afghanistan and Guinea-Bissau, and even the region of West Africa, this is the first time it has ever made such a commitment on a global scale.

UNODC head Antonio Maria Costa focused on trends in the Sahara/Sahel in his address to the Security Council prior to the statement’s release, arguing for greater regional action:

He described how cocaine trafficking from the West and heroin from the East are creating instability and spreading addiction. He said that “we have acquired evidence that the two streams of illicit drugs – heroin into Eastern Africa and cocaine into West Africa – are now meeting in the Sahara, creating new trafficking routes across Chad, Niger and Mali.”  He warned that, like in the Andean countries and in West Asia, “terrorists and anti-Government forces in the Sahel extract resources from the drug trade to fund their operations, purchase equipment and pay foot-soldiers.” He also said that drug trafficking in the region is taking on a whole new dimension – becoming larger, faster and more high-tech.

He urged Member States to create a trans-Saharan crime monitoring network to improve information, monitor suspicious activity, exchange evidence, facilitate legal cooperation and strengthen regional efforts against organized crime.

But as Cockayne points out, one of the more impressive aspects of the presidential statement is its call for greater trans-regional action, in particular greater cooperation between Latin America, West Africa and Europe to tackle the drugs trade and associated ills still rapidly expanding in West Africa. In a further nod to supra-regional collaboration, he notes that international efforts to deal with Somali piracy may be instructive in devising new counter-strategies in other regions of Africa.

Finally, Cockayne breaks down the real significance of the statement in practical terms. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years, but anything that promotes the consideration of drug trafficking within conflict management has to be taken as a hopeful sign.

[T]he Council “invites the Secretary-General to consider mainstreaming the issue of drug trafficking as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and peacebuilding support.” Cutting through the bureaucratic jargon, what this signals is that in future the UN Secretariat will not need to seek a specific mandate from the Security Council to consider drug trafficking in designing and planning field missions.

Instead, the UN Secretariat is now empowered to consider drug trafficking as a potential amplifier of insecurity around the world – and then to work through a range of demand-side and supply-side approaches to support the efforts of states, civil society and sub-regional and regional bodies to tackle the problem.

Reading List: Corruption, Global Security and World Order

Corruption, Global Security and World Order

Robert Rotberg, ed. (Brookings Institution Press, 2009)

Corruption is a human condition and an ancient phenomenon. From the beginnings of civilization, public notables have abused their offices for personal gain while citizens have sought advantage by corrupting those holding power. Today, global security is threatened as never before by fiscal uncertainty, competition and mutual suspicion among world powers, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and tyranny. This book reveals corruption to be at the very center of these global threats and proposes a combination of remedies such as positive leadership, enhanced transparency, tougher punishment, and enforceable new sanctions against shady activities. ‘Corruption, Global Security, and World Order’ explores the ties between corrupt practice and threats to global peace, corrupt practice and the suppression of human rights and development, corrupt practice and the maintenance of tyranny, and corruption in health and education. Robert I. Rotberg and a distinguished group of contributors discuss the global ramifications and implications of deeply embedded corruption. They demonstrate how criminals and criminalized states now control numerous areas of the world. The book explores issues of human and drug trafficking, and it shows how nuclear and WMD smugglers often coexist with other traffickers. Chapters examine the various ways in which corruption deprives citizens of fundamental human rights, assess the connection between corruption and the spread of terror, and examine ongoing efforts and strategies to reduce and contain – yet hardly ever to eliminate – corruption.

Funding the Taliban: More COIN Heresy in Afghanistan

Many people will tell you that the US finally gets counterinsurgency. It’s difficult, complicated and often demoralising, but we do know what we’re supposed to be doing. There’s loads of little success stories from Iraq and Afghanistan to point to, don’t you know.

And then you read a story like today’s How the US Army Protects Its Trucks: By Paying the Taliban — and it’s hard not to think that at least in Afghanistan, at the broader strategic level, we don’t actually know what we’re doing. A key element of COIN is denying funding to insurgents and, if necessary, providing resources to indigenous counterinsurgent forces. Instead, the Taliban are raking in millions skimmed off of US security contracts — not just because of corruption and cronyism, but as an unintended consequence of rules of engagement and other military/strategic decisions.

It’s not a new story, but the article provides a number of interesting cites and stories. The gist of it is: Coalition forces need to move large amounts of military supplies around the country by truck. Very expensive contracts are arranged with local security and shipping companies, which are usually attached to a warlord or local power broker. But the Taliban and other armed groups control traffic on the roads and must be paid off to allow a convoy through without being attacked. Ka-ching!

In intrastate conflicts, bribing militants at checkpoints is of course nothing new and largely unavoidable. What is striking about the situation in Afghanistan, however, is the sheer amount of money that is likely being funneled into Taliban coffers; the common estimate is that at least 10 percent of foreign contracting money is diverted into payoffs to avoid attacks. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars. In a country as poor as Afghanistan, that kind of money goes a long way.

The military’s hands are basically tied: having been posted to provincial bases, they need their supplies. The manpower (government or private) required to protect convoys simply isn’t there, given the size and terrain of the Afghan battlespace. The corruption networks that feed this process are not merely opportunistic but embedded in current political structures and arrangements. This is a problem that cannot be resolved at the tactical or even operational level, but it does not seem to command a lot of attention at higher levels of decision-making. New approaches that call for concentrating on cities and larger towns and gradually expanding areas of stability, do not really address the problem of convoys being attacked as they travel through empty rural spaces.

It is, however, reassuring that greater attention is being paid to deciphering the sources of Taliban funding and moving to block them. Perhaps uncovering the real size of militant profits from our own contracts will shock people enough to move on this issue.

At any rate, the article also points to a few other issues that come up often in crime-conflict discussions, such as the problems that arise from the personalisation of politics in conflict zones — ie, the destabilising effects of political and economic systems based on individual power politics rather than depersonalised institutions and processes. Meet the Wardaks:

NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan. What NCL Holdings is most notable for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghan’s current defence minister, General Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahideen against the Soviets.

Earlier this year, the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named as one of the six companies that would handle all the US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract, for “host nation trucking”, was large but not gargantuan. But over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a weapons system”, the US military expanded the contract 600% for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “Service members will not get the food, water, equipment and ammunition they require.”

Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360m, or a total of nearly $2.2bn. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10% of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defence minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold…

The private security industry in Afghanistan has developed quite differently from the private military model seen in Iraq, where firms such as Blackwater were arms of the US government. The industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

Apparently, the Afghan intelligence service suggested to the Americans a while back that instead of paying these huge sums of money for warlord protection/militant payoffs, the money be used to put together a professional convoy protection force. According to the article, ‘the suggestion went nowhere’.

An American trucking executive sums it up: ‘The army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them’. And in the process, enriching local warlords who act as middlemen.

Military commanders on the ground don’t like it but have to live with it. But the rest of us should take a step back and ask: what are we really doing here? To me, this is one of the values of raising issues of corruption and criminality in the conflict arena — people can sit around day and night debating political and military strategies, but unless those plans include options for conducting COIN without having to pay the insurgents to let you do it, I’m not sure how much progress we can really expect.

Crime-Conflict Nexus at Oxford

As an update on the CCN project’s recent activities:  Jeni and I were invited to give a seminar at Oxford University last week as part of their Changing Character of War (CCW) Programme’s lunchtime seminar series (please note there is an error in the events page: neither Jeni nor I are Doctors yet). The title of the paper was ‘The Crime-Conflict Nexus: Implications for Stabilisation and Counter-Insurgency’, and we’re very grateful to Professor Hew Strachan for chairing the session and to all that came along, particularly those that contributed to the lively discussion that followed.

We presented our approach for analysing the problem space in this sprawling area, namely through recognising the three forms of crime-conflict nexus that we identify: the logistical, the conceptual, and the governance subversion nexus. In particular, we emphasised that using this tripartite framework is helpful as a basis for challenging the dominant mindset among practitioners and policy-makers that tends to consider this problem primarily in logistical terms (i.e. the flow of resources from criminal activity to insurgents), which in turn has encouraged a largely targeting mindset (i.e. whoever supplies the insurgents should be included in the security force ‘hit list’).

But, as we argued, if you critique that view with considerations for the conceptual and governance subversion forms of nexus then you can immediately expose why this could be a counter-productive response that omits this issue’s crucial nuances (in this post I’m going to leave the details for the formal paper we’ll be working up). Ultimately, the crime-conflict nexus as a subject of interest to practitioners is one that has primarily governance strategy implications which are potentially foundational to the effectiveness of COIN and stabilisation operations; and which are far and above more important than the military targeting implications. To add some richness to the paper, we ended with a discussion of the devilishly complicated applications to contemporary Afghanistan.

There was a great discussion that followed for several hours, both in the room and after; with a great deal of debate on the problem of balancing local governance considerations with central state-building agendas.

Some of the most engaged were the military officers in the audience. Their personal experiences on operations also further drew out the point that always needs to be repeated in this area: there really aren’t ever any wonderful or neat solutions. There are instead only ever moral and practical compromises with consistently messy and flawed results. That of course leaves a crucial, but unanswered question: do we have the stomach to fully face that fact and everything that comes with it on operations? We’re just going to have to wait and see for the answer.

You needn’t make your vote count- We’ll do that for you!

Local elections have just been held across Russia. Millions of Russians have had the opportunity to go and vote for their local representatives. This is modern Russian democracy in action.

“Of course United Russia will win. I won’t bother voting because it will make no difference, but that’s not so bad is it?”

Such is the view of my landlord’s representative, in her twenties, who came to collect the rent a few days ago. It’s typical of so many Muscovites and Russians I’ve talked to. Let’s examine each of the three things she said.

1. Of course United Russia will win.
This was (barring a popular uprising) a certainty. They won with a large majority in most seats. The fact that this can be said is a ringing indictment of the state of Russian ‘democracy’. The United Russia government removed all independent candidates from ballot sheets using the tried and tested method of ‘invalid application forms’. Apparently ALL the independent candidates wanting to stand made mistakes on their forms or had faked the signatures needed to support them. Only opposition parties were allowed to stand, and only because United Russia doesn’t consider them a threat. They briefly walked out of the Duma when they heard about the farcical vote. The Communists, meanwhile, are one of the main complainants about the lack of democracy. Nikolai Gubenko, a communist sitting on the Moscow Assembly, has complained that the ordinary fare of political campaigning – holding gatherings, meeting voters, and putting up posters – has been made very difficult. If this evidence is anything to go by then opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was right to call the election ‘fraud, farce, 100%’. Even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was outraged by the vote.

2. I won’t bother voting because it will make no difference.
Voter apathy is widespread in Russia. The population’s democratic muscle had never really been flexed before and was only starting to be used by the time Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999. He stopped it again quickly. Many think Russians have had a voice so rarely in the country’s authoritarian past they don’t feel it’s their business who runs the country or how they do it. It’s a different viewpoint which some in the West may find anathema. On the other hand these are only local and municipal elections, which are less prominent than parliamentary or presidential elections in most countries. We must also respect a population’s viewpoint. There are other points of view: who is to say that Western bickering and media frenzies (3rd paragraph) over elections are a useful waste of a population’s time?

3. But neither of the above is so bad is it.
Here we see a greater reason for the (shall we call it a) pact between many Russians and United Russia (or Vladimir Putin). When you ask Russians about the 1990s, especially the late 90s, you receive a pretty much universal answer. The scene depicted is heartbreaking. A once proud nation falling apart at the seams. Rampant crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, a miserable slaughter of hapless conscripts in Chechnya, and the greatest catastrophe of all, the collapse of the rouble. Many people’s life savings were wiped out overnight. Oligarchs bought up people’s money ‘coupons’ for a fraction of their value and were handed empires on a silver platter out of old Soviet industries. The Russian people were shell-shocked by a tragedy many found difficult to comprehend. This was their first experience of democracy and capitalism and it was an awful experience.

In response they coined the term ‘shitocracy’. If this was what democracy brought, then the West could keep it!

Capitalism is making slow and unsteady progress in Russia, but at least it’s crawling in the right direction. Democracy is now ‘managed’ by United Russia, and some observers hold that the Russian people are just fine with that.

So it’s not as simple as democratic crusaders in the West would like to see it. For Russia (as, in fact, for the establishment of all the Western democracies), order comes first. Not servitude to Tsar or the party, but order with capitalism. Russia is not China but it’s found some inspiration from there. Russia taught China how to get into Communism, now it seems China has helped show Russia how to get out. Order allows people to make money, and with that comes higher expectations for living standards and democratic rights. Russia has long had a way of defying prediction, so no doubt the country and people will find a different way of progressing. For the moment though, Russians seem happy to let massive electoral fraud go unchecked, and waive their democratic rights in exchange for some stability.

The West, with the kindest of post Cold War intentions, messed Russia up enough in the 1990s. It might be difficult for us to stand by and watch this happen to a potential democracy, and when it leads to people getting hurt the democratic world is as entitled as ever to show its alarm. But I’m sure if we take a look at the histories of most democratic countries we can find periods where they resembled modern Russia. History is never a straight spectrum of ‘progress’.

That said, let’s hope Russians realise why each vote does matter. The link between free and fair elections and more moderate and benevolent forms of government is not perfect, but it’s more identifiable than in systems of authoritarian or dictatorial power where the people have no say in government. On that basis, let’s hope this century won’t be as tragic for Russia as the previous one.

‘Afghans Oppose US Hit List of Drug traffickers’

Interesting article linked here in the Washington Post from last week with deep relevance to the debates at CCN. We have talked about the need to move away from a simple ‘logistical nexus’ mindset, as well call it, regarding considerations for the overlap between crime and conflict, as this leads to a primarily ‘disrupt’ and ‘destroy’ focus in activity. Our contrasting position, which we are increasingly arguing, is that one must also consider the ‘conceptual nexus’ and ‘governance subversion nexus’ forms of the crime-conflict issue also (see the link above ‘What is the Crime-Conflict Nexus?’). The WP article reveals some of the current problems with that mindset in action. Though, I still think there are more problems with this than the article recognises…

Building Peace After War: New Adelphi Book

Mats Berdal’s Building Peace After War is the latest edition of the International Institute for Strategic Studies‘ Adelphi Book Series. I must declare that Mats Berdal is my PhD supervisor; but even withstanding that (and given that it has already been well received by certain key individuals in the academic/policy world), it is by any standard an excellent read that had me riveted over the weekend. Personally, I judge it to be a remarkable synthesis of the literature on the vast and sprawling topic of ‘peacebuilding’ which is itself both comprehensive and succinct, and cuts to the heart of the key debates in this troubled area.

Quite unusually for the civil war literature that emphasises political dynamics, a significant proportion of the book is devoted to issues associated with crime. I’ll let you read the book to get into the detail of his full argument, but here are some interesting extracts to give you an idea:

The relationship between organised crime and violence in post-conflict settings – especially in the immediate and early post-war phase that is the focus of this book – is more complicated than the public pronouncements of policymakers on the subject typically suggest. Such statements, unsurprisingly and not without good reason, emphasise the costs of organised crime, presenting the need to combat and eradicate it as a moral imperative. And yet, as an issue confronting peacebuilders on the ground it has repeatedly presented morally complex dilemmas and policy trade-offs … an exclusive focus on combatting or eradicating organised crime, drawing upon traditional law-enforcement models and categories, has not only met with mixed success but has sometimes threatened to undermine the fragile stability that characterises post-conflict societies in the early phase of external involvement. [p.69]

… At the very least, this discussion suggests that efforts to meet the challenge posed by organised crime in post-conflict societies must proceed from a nuanced understanding of the roots and functions of this kind of crime in the local community, including the degree of local legitimacy that it may enjoy. All-important in this regard is the need to unravel the relationship of organised crime with ‘existing authority structures’ within a peacebuilding environment, establishing whether that relationship is ‘predatory’, ‘parastic’ or ’symbiotic’. Such understanding must then feed into the strategy adopted for meeting the challenges posed by crime and criminal enterprises in post-conflict settings. Policy initiatives must also take account of and reflect the actual resources available for addressing the challenges identified, while seeking to minimise the unintended consequences of tackling only a limited aspect of what is necessarily a larger and more multifaceted challenge. [p.71]

Reading List: Organised Crime and Trafficking in the Caucasus

Organised Crime and Illegal Trafficking in the Caucasus

Caucasus Analytical Digest (September 2009)

This issue discusses the security threats emanating from networks of crime and corruption in the South Caucasus. It analyzes the Georgian Mafia, their activities and evolution in the 1990s, and evaluates the success of Georgia’s fight against organized crime. The publication also provides an opinion poll on the reliability of and trust towards the police in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia and a chronicle of the events in the Caucasus between 17 July and 15 September 2009.

Governance: Formal vs Informal Systems. Really?

I’ve been catching up with one of my favourite journals, Conflict, Security and Development. I’ve been meaning to post some summaries of a few of the most interesting articles of recent months. Before that, however, here is an aspect of one article that I want to pounce on.

Robert Egnell and Peter Haldén have an excellent article on Security Sector Reform (SSR) and the implications of state theory, entitled “Laudable, ahistorical and overambitious: security sector reform meets state formation theory”, CSD, Vol. 9, No. 1. It’s a first-class analysis that I’ve found highly thought provoking. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in SSR or post-conflict reconstruction/governance issues in general.

However, on p.44/45 they go into some of the failings of SSR in Sierra Leone and the stagnation in governance and economic development there. They explain how part of the problem is that the state is bypassed by a “complex web of informal networks”. As a result, the state cannot occupy any kind of central position in the running of society and governance in general:

“In such networks ‘big men’ distribute resources, organise their followers in collective endeavours and co-ordinate communication … Clearly, these networks offer ways for individuals and groups to gain their livelihoods and, although to strikingly different degrees, security, power and wealth. These structures are not clans or tribes – which would be tantamount to ‘organisations’ – they are unofficial networks that encompass organisations and actors such as secret societies, businessmen, chiefs, the military, warlords etc. They are tied together by key persons, called ‘big men’ which means that the channels and vehicles of power are not bounded, permanent nor grounded in territory or other kinds of fixed membership. Indeed it has been pointed out how ‘fluctuating’, ‘changing’, ‘intangible’ and ‘fluid’ these highly important networks are. Hence this fluid situation is one in which ‘exit’ from one network to another is normal, in a similar way that a consumer may shift between purveyors of goods or providers of services, depending on which network is best at satisfying one’s political needs.”

In my past life I was a civil servant in the UK’s MoD. Anyone who’s spent time as a civil servant will find that even in such a centuries-old, formal state structure, the real business, the major leaps, the initiatives almost all really get done through (or as a result of) informal networks. These networks are unnamed, often fleeting, sometimes momentary and always “fluctuating, changing, intangible and fluid”. Informal coalitions, strong “big men” personalities always emerge to shape how things get done within the formal, official structure of the civil service. In my view, the official structure is really a veneer of officialdom in which we take comfort, but beneath that it really comes down to the individuals and their relationships with each other, which are by necessity informally based.

I understand that informal networks that are illicit and clandestine, and hence often serve highly unpleasant purposes, are of course different to the informal networks within formal state structures that I am describing. But the point I am ambling towards is that getting things done through informal networks is not itself a bad thing per se. In fact, it’s very rare for any of us to use systems that aren’t based on informal relations in some way (the exceptions perhaps are things like police arrest and court procedures, but those are pretty stark procedures compared to most of the activities that day-to-day governance relies upon).

I would say that in even the most developed states, most government and non-government business gets done through the same “complex web of informal networks” that Egnell and Haldén descibe. It’s just how humans work. An organisation (whether a business, university faculty or government department) may have a formal diagram indicating the structure and mechanisms it professes to run upon, but at the end of the day it’s the personalities and the relationships between individuals that decides how things get done. The formal structure doesn’t really do anything itself other than acting as a diagrammatic approximation of the informal network, which will itself be of variable accuracy.

Informal networks aren’t bad, they’re fundamental, and can actually form the basis of some of the best of social initiatives (for a conflict resolution example think of the Anbar Awakening, but I’m also talking of even the most banal internal UK government initiatives). Instead of formal vs informal, the real difference between good and bad governance is the accountability, oversight and intervention mechanisms for protecting people and public interests. It’s these latter factors, not formality or informality, that is key to the result I feel.

Economics, Conflict Resolution, COIN and Development: Corruption Still Very Thorny

Last week I was lucky enough to attend an excellent day-long roundtable event at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. It was part of the launch of a new programme at IISS on ‘Economics and Conflict Resolution’.  Some great people spoke, and for myself it amounted in part as a refresher on all things to do with conflict, security and development, but also an update on the leading academic and practitioner thinking in this area.

Given current endeavours in Afghanistan and the troubled dependence of NATO strategy on a legitimate and effective host government ally (see previous post on this), corruption came up quite a bit. At the end of the session Lord Malloch-Brown commented that while a huge amount of ground had been covered and great insights raised, there was so much in the day’s discussion that held deep and unresolved tensions.

They listed several of these, but one tension I perceive, and which I feel wasn’t emphasised enough, is the issue of how to deal with corruption in host nation partners. One of the DFID practitioners emphasised that even though there is an attrition rate on aid supplied to a developing state through corruption, you still have to keep pouring the aid into it as it will strengthen the state’s institutions. In this view, by-passing the state institutions, as many NGOs and donors do in development projects, will just serve to undermine them, which is a bad idea because strengthening the host state is the whole point.  The money has to go to the central government, not because it is the most efficient, but because you have to build the legitimacy of the state.

I have a huge problem with this as it relies on the assumption that the host government ally deserves the donors’ belief in its potential for legitimacy. In some parts of the world (such as Somalia) the state is the most predatory and unpleasant entity that people have to face in their lives, and the forming of coalitions to revive the power of the central state can be the most dangerous of events regardless of efforts to improve central state legitimacy. In such parts of the world that have suffered protracted conflict and state collapse, power is all too often simply structured against the possibility of the sudden re-establishment of a legitimate state and a single set of governing institutions. Interests groups emerge which, when empowered within the state, will only endeavour to serve themselves.

However, I expect that the central state-building approach works (or at least, is not disastrous) where the state is not deeply and violently contested by a powerful and growing insurgency(/ies). In such a more benign scenario then you can have continuing runs of setbacks and dodgy dealings going right to the top as long as you feel you are slowly working towards that much longer term aim of a legitimate and effective state. Peace gives you time and room for continuous governance errors. But when you’re facing the Taliban who are building highly effective conflict institutions to maintain and expand their military and governing influence, I sense this model just won’t do. Counter-insurgency is all about governance, and it is essential to get the governance strategy right if all the other activities (including the application of force) are going to have utility. As certain previous studies have shown (including David Kilcullen’s original PhD thesis) in civil wars power usually leaks further and further down the state-society structure to the local level. The village community is the frontline in the governance strategy for all sides in civil wars, and it’s at that level that the Taliban concentrates and derives its potency.

Efforts to connect all these local governates up into a cohesive and singular state structure can come later (which, btw, I expect is the central Taliban leadership’s plan). Until then, one needs to concentrate on empowering what Ken Menkhaus calls a ‘mediated state’ where the central power has almost no influence at the community level, and instead one encourages and empowers the ‘mosaic’ of governates that communities almost inevitably self-form in the absence of central state power. And as DFID and other development agencies have repeatedly found, it tends to be village-level community governance that is the most trustworthy recipient of aid, because those communities understand better than anyone what the aid is meant for.

I feel it’s time to be brave with the implications of this and forget the central state building agenda in Afghanistan, and I don’t mean replacing that approach with the ‘empowering regional governors’ cop-out that has also emerged, because it amounts to the same thing. The central (or regional) state is not an inevitable good. Give development power to those who deserve and need it most and let the central state form around that, not above it, before it, or even with primacy over it. Deep corruption in Afghan state institutions isn’t going to go anywhere soon, but if we change the governance strategy then we can change the entire strategic meaning of corruption in Afghanistan.

Of course, we may just be too far behind events now for such a shift to have any impact. And anyway, based on my conversations with those working in British defence and foreign affairs, the likelihood of such a shift in thinking being taken on board is almost nil.

Follow-up: Sex and Security

A few weeks back I mentioned a new MICROCON report on peacekeeping and local sex industries. Today’s Asia Times carries a related story on the use of brothels by private security contractors in Kabul.

A report by the Washington, DC, Project on Government Oversight recently released publicly tells of the wild naked antics of members of ArmorGroup (AG), which has a United States State Department contract to provide security for the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Hardly mentioned is the use of local bordellos by some contractors. It took a lawsuit filed on September 9 by James Gordon, a former ArmorGroup director of operations, and subsequent whistleblower, against ArmorGroup North America and associated defendants – ArmorGroup International (AGI), Wackenhut Services Inc (WSI), and various management individuals – to bring details to light. Among other things he charges that AG:

* Allowed AGNA managers and employees to frequent brothels notorious for housing trafficked women in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and shutting down the plaintiff’s efforts to investigate and put a stop to these violations.

* Deliberately withholding documents relating to violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act allegedly committed by AGNA’s program manager and other AGNA employees when responding to a document demand from US Congressman Henry Waxman on behalf of the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The article also recounts failed investigations into allegations that DynCorp employees participated in trafficking-related activities in Bosnia, starting ten years ago with reports that “five male DynCorp employees had purchased female prostitutes from a Serbian organized crime outfit.”

The details in the article should prove interesting to anyone looking at the in-theatre behaviour of private security contractors and the lengths to which corporate entities will go to protect their reputations and revenue streams. The author, David Isenberg from PRIO, also has a forthcoming study on these issues.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about corruption as a strategic problem in Afghanistan. I don’t think most people think of brothels and sex trafficking when they think about corruption in this context, but to the extent that such behaviour by foreign forces (private or not) contributes to local perceptions of foreigners as corrupt or illegitimate, perhaps it should be part of the conversation.

Extra-Judicial Killings in Mumbai: Vigilante Heroes and Self-Interested Villains

A while back I posted about certain Pakistani Taliban using trained suicide bombers as a business opportunity for settling family scores, and how this echoes similar dynamics in many other cases. Another interesting case has come to light in India, reported in the New York Times. There has been a longstanding practice of police killing suspects in serious crime, but at the NYT explains:

Known euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.

In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the number of gangsters they had killed.

But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings, according to the National Human Rights Commission.

In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.

Just as the Chilean government and certain other Latin American regimes used the threat of terrorism as a cover for the covert mass murder of dissidents, so too (as in this case) can police and politicians use the threat of organised crime to cover their own malicious activities for shoring up power and personal aggrandisement.

It is quite remarkable how whenever there is some form of regularity in the application of violence, where violence comes to serve an institutional function (whether in a civil war situation where collaborators are denounced and dealt with, or in a crime environment where violence plays a role in criminal or police enforcement), there consistently emerges cases of individuals abusing that institutional regularity to cover the pursuit of very different covert interests. It is the sheer frequency in the recurrence of this phenomenon that I find remarkable, but most of all makes me highly pessimistic about human political nature.

Latest Issue of Global Crime

There’s a good new issue from the journal Global Crime. Lots of good articles. One that particularly caught my eye is by professor of criminology Frederico Varese discussing the Neapolitan Camorra. This is an extract from the opening of the article:

In the raw and unadorned language of Saviano, the Camorra is not just a collection of purely parasitic, extortionary thugs, but rather an organisation that provides genuine services, such as access to cheap loans, a degree of competition among firms, and enforcement of economic agreements. The caveat is that these services are provided with utter disregard for fairness, freedom to choose, property rights, and a rule-based system of social relations. What is mutual advantage for vast sectors of the local economy produces a collective nightmare for the overall society. It is a quintessential n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which everybody starts off by maximising his own utility and ends up in the worst of all possible worlds, a universe of defection, mis-trust and fear that ultimately strengthens a criminal organisation that has claimed so many lives. My view is that until this system of mutual advantage is broken, it will be next to impossible to dislodge the Camorra.

What is pleasing about this is that not only does Varese immediately illuminate the nuances of this subject (emphasising the delivery of services and promotion of an economy, but also stressing that for most it is ghastly), he also suggests a positive strategy (of sorts) in how to tackle it, which has some plausibility according to the economic environment it is supposed to be directed against:

No matter how much individual valour anti-mafia campaigners display, the nexus of self-interest that links sizeable sections of the economy and organised crime must be weakened and eventually rescinded. Small workshops must be able to turn to banks in order to obtain loans, taxes must be low enough to reduce incentives to avoid them, and the legitimate labour market must be flexible enough to make local enterprises competitive without forcing them into the grey economy, where they become sweatshops. State regulations must be simple and straightforward and the machinery of justice must be rapid and fair. Next to structural changes in the economy, law enforcement must be able to bring to a halt the Camorra’s ability to kill and wreak havoc.

However, and sadly, one can barely imagine the scale and difficulty of the efforts required to bring such to pass. And that’s not even considering the fact that such groups are rarely passive in the face of new initiatives to eradicate their position.

Crime-Conflict and Race-Racism in Russia

A recent report by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy has found that nearly 60% of the more than ten thousand black people in Moscow have been physically attacked because of their race.

A BBC journalist was told that one Nigerian migrant had been repeatedly stabbed and then shot. Another said someone tried to remove his scalp.

The survey found Africans working or studying in the city live in constant fear of attack with many too afraid to go outside.

By the time I tried to go to the report on the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy’s website, it was already unavailable. The rest of their website worked fine.

The Chaplaincy interviewed 200 people. A quarter said they had been physically attacked more than once and around 160 said they had been verbally abused.

Russia has always been a very multi-cultural country. But there has also long been problems between different ethnic groups here. Certain ethnic Russians view central Asians as an underclass, and Africans with curious disgust. The worrying thing is that with the rise of right leaning and far right politics here, that trend is becoming more prevalent among the young, and much more violent.

We’re talking neo-Nazis here. Recently a group in the city of Perm near the Urals threatened to blow up their local cinema unless it stopped showing the so-called “extreme pro-Jewish bloodlust” World War Two film ‘Inglorious Bastards’. There are worrying crossovers in rhetoric between young Putin mobs like Nashi (in Russian the group’s name means ‘ours’), and the extreme right, which is treated with more tolerance than any liberal groups here.

This all comes at the same time as the 70th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Hitler never managed to get as far as Moscow, and certainly not the Urals. But here we are with this nonetheless.