Soldiers on the School Run
Last night I was at the Royal Geographical Society for the annual IRC-UK lecture, ‘Soldiers on the School Run: Sensible Strategy or Disastrous Compromise?’ This is the latest in a series of events trying to define what it is we’re up to in the business of humanitarian interventions. It’s clear to honest professionals in both the military and the aid industry that the way we are dealing with complex emergencies is not working and needs to get a lot better – fast. There’s no choice. The rate of State failure is accelerating. We simply cannot afford too many Somalias.
On the one hand, the military is engaged in adapting to WW4 – the kind of battles waged or imagined in WW2 and the Cold War are history. WW4 is a counterinsurgency war. Neither the battles between national armies that characterized WW2, nor the long distance threatening of the Cold War are relevant to today’s forces fighting jihadists in the fields and villages of Afghanistan. It is a far more complex mission than previous forces had to consider. The WW4 soldier is expected to be part diplomat, part aid worker, and part nation builder. Panelist Ahmed Rashid believes there is a crisis between the military and the NGOs in Afghanistan. The rate of change in mission has been too rapid for the military to adapt its strategy from the Cold War, and their command structure is incompatible with the way NGOs work. But the heart of the problem is the very different perspective of each organization.
For the NGOs, whose objectives range from acute disaster relief to long term development, and who therefore expect to spend anything from a few weeks to years in a given place, the issue is how to maintain independence from the military on which they increasingly rely for logistics and security. It is axiomatic in the Aid industry that aid should be ‘independent, neutral and impartial.’ But in the management of complex emergencies there is increasing involvement of the military, and the politics of military intervention means that there is no neutrality or impartiality. The NGOs are fearful that the more they are identified with the military, their safety will be in jeopardy. It is well known that on this basis the Taliban considers Aid workers to be ‘American Slaves. Mike Young is IRCs director for Asia and the Caucasus, and he’s been at it for 12 years. He doesn’t believe in big plans, he’s all for local, which takes time and trust. He’s frightened that if the Taliban remain after the US and UK forces leave, the locals who worked with the Aid agencies will be killed as collaborators. He remains very doubtful of the long term effectiveness of military based Aid, but admits that we’re stuck with what we’ve got.
Major General (Ret.) Tim Cross, who is a veteran the Gulf, the Balkans and Iraq argued that for the military it wasn’t a question of whether they should be doing development and humanitarian intervention, but how. On balance he said that he thought both the military and the NGOs were doing ‘a reasonable job’, but that ‘we have to keep talking to each other.’ So they have very different missions, and very different ways of operating. But they find themselves working together out of necessity. And not only with NGOs. The US marines have been trying to use academics in its efforts for ‘hearts and minds’ and to avoid accidental civilian casualties. The Human Terrain Systems embed social scientists and anthropologists with combat troops to help tacticians with local knowledge. This new kind of counterinsurgency war/complex emergency situation is demanding rapid adaptation, and if that means embedding academics and /or humanitarian workers, so be it.
Uneasy bedfellows they may be, but it looks like they will be stuck with each other for the foreseeable future. Nation building is new and over the last 10 years it’s been pretty hit and miss. Perhaps what is happening is that two distinct mindsets are having to merge, because the prospect of large parts of Africa and Asia collapsing is too dire to imagine.
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Migration
For the last couple of years, while I’ve been spending time on the ocean whenever possible, there’s really been little to say. Much as expected the financial system has imploded and now the people of Europe and the US (at least) are essentially bankrupt, while a number of bankers are incredibly rich. Despite various politicians and banking professionals on both sides of the Atlantic professing astonishment at how such a thing could happen, it was in fact predictable. Soros, Taleb, and a host of others warned for years that the system was a keg of dynamite. It is very difficult to see a way for the economies of the west to recover on a comfortable timeframe. Unfortunately this comes at a time when what we needed in the world was a financial system that would allow us to make the best possible investments in climate remediation efforts and energy infrastructure alternatives to oil and gas. That money has now evaporated or has been spent on private luxury.
On the ecology/climate front I have seen nothing to make me change my initial assessment that we are now past the point of being able to control the speed of ecological collapse in various critical environments and stop the global temperature increasing beyond anything our species has experienced. On the contrary, the acceleration of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere continues unabated despite the endless round of meetings and treaties. The reason is not hard to see: for politicians it is simply impossible to make the kinds of commitments necessary and stay in office. We are now at 385ppm, and increasing by about 2 ppm per year. So it is inevitable that we will pass 400ppm, at which point our climate will begin to resemble the Miocene, the last time levels were this high. Temperatures were 3∞ to 6∞ C higher and sea level was 24-40m higher.
Worse, it appears from some recent articles that fewer, rather than more, people in the US and Europe believe in anthropogenic climate change. Which means that even if there are some measures we can take it will be very hard to get anything through democratic governments. We are left with trying to come to terms with how to manage in an increasingly chaotic environment with things as they stand. While we haven’t much experience dealing with this level of disruption, there are examples of cultures and societies in the past confronting ecological, financial and population challenges. We don’t have a great record. From the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in 2200 BC, civilization has been repeatedly overwhelmed by natural disasters, overpopulation and financial ruin – rare high impact events to which complex societies are unable to adapt. Despite our technological prowess we are in no better position to deal with such events than Sargon’s subjects. They had, however, a minimal advantage: there was somewhere else to go. We have a global civilization and there’s nowhere else to go.
The traditional response to collapse has been migration on a mass scale by the survivors. There’s nothing in the current circumstances to suggest that the same thing is not happening now. Even the IPCC, which is generally on the conservative side of things, never mind the Pentagon, sees the burgeoning levels of migration from what we used to laughingly call the ‘developing world’ as a major security issue and those nations at the receiving end will increasingly respond militarily. I’m wondering what kind of government changes that requires. Clearly the current liberal governments of the West don’t seem to be advocating such measures, but I’m beginning to wonder how far down the road (think Cormac McCarthy) we go before increasingly frightened populations demand military response. What kind of government does that call for? At what point are people scared enough of the influx to want what is essentially a military government? What does that look like and how would it happen?
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