From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Thu Jan 29 2009 - 15:32:37 EST
"Take the case of Somalia: America sent troops there in 1992 to help the
United Nations stave off a humanitarian catastrophe, but the armed chaos of
Mogadishu soon drove it out. In recent years, America has again been active
in that region, carrying out air strikes in Somalia against suspected
jihadist camps. It supported Ethiopia's military invasion in 2006 to defeat
the Islamist militias that had taken power in Mogadishu (arguably causing
even more chaos) and is now backing an African peacekeeping mission for the
same reasons. The waters off the Somali coast, moreover, have become one of
the prime zones of piracy at sea, disrupting shipping through the Suez
Canal. Even China has felt the need to send warships to the Gulf of Aden to
protect its shipping"
Failed states
Fixing a broken world
Jan 29th 2009
>From *The Economist* print edition
The planet's most wretched places are not always the most dangerous
IN ALMOST any discussion of world affairs, there is one thing on which doves
and hawks invariably agree: much more needs to be done to shore up states
that are failing, in a state of collapse, or so poor that they are heading
in that direction.
For development-minded people, such benighted places are an obvious concern
because of their desperate suffering; and for hard-nosed strategists, states
that hardly work are places where terrorists could step into the vacuum.
Indeed there is a certain convergence between these points of view: aid
workers agree that security is essential to prosperity, and generals want
economic development to boost security.
In America these days, defence planners say they worry more about weak
states, even non-states, than about strong ones. "Ungoverned, undergoverned,
misgoverned and contested areas" offer fertile grounds for terrorists and
other nefarious groups, says the Pentagon's National Defence Strategy,
issued last year. The penning of that document was overseen by the defence
secretary, Robert Gates, who will remain in charge of defence policy under
Barack Obama. Large chunks of its language could have been issued by
bleeding-heart aid agencies or the United Nations: it speaks of the need to
"build the capacity of fragile or vulnerable partners" and to address "local
and regional conflicts" that exacerbate tensions and encourage
drug-smuggling, gun-running and other illegality. To the chagrin of
old-school sceptics, nation-building is now an integral part of American
strategy.
Similarly, the European Union's declared security strategy sees state
failure as an "alarming" phenomenon. It opines that: "Neighbours who are
engaged in violent conflict, weak states where organised crime flourishes,
dysfunctional societies or exploding population growth on its borders all
pose problems for Europe."
A rather precise taxonomy is offered by Robert Cooper, a British diplomat
and Eurocrat, in his book, "The Breaking of Nations". He splits the world
into three zones: Hobbesian or "pre-modern" regions of chaos; areas ruled
effectively by modern nation-states; and zones of "postmodern" co-operation
where national sovereignty is being voluntarily dissolved, as in the
European Union. In his view, chaos in critical parts of the world must be
watched carefully. "It was not the well-organised Persian Empire that
brought about the fall of Rome, but the barbarians," he writes.
Strategists have worried about failing states ever since the end of the cold
war. At first, zones of war and chaos were seen primarily as threats to the
people living within them, or not far away. But since the attacks on America
in September 2001 such places have increasingly been seen as a threat to the
entire world. Western intervention is now justified in the name of fighting
terrorism, not just of altruism.
Take the case of Somalia: America sent troops there in 1992 to help the
United Nations stave off a humanitarian catastrophe, but the armed chaos of
Mogadishu soon drove it out. In recent years, America has again been active
in that region, carrying out air strikes in Somalia against suspected
jihadist camps. It supported Ethiopia's military invasion in 2006 to defeat
the Islamist militias that had taken power in Mogadishu (arguably causing
even more chaos) and is now backing an African peacekeeping mission for the
same reasons. The waters off the Somali coast, moreover, have become one of
the prime zones of piracy at sea, disrupting shipping through the Suez
Canal. Even China has felt the need to send warships to the Gulf of Aden to
protect its shipping.
Afghanistan, too, is often seen as a classic example of the perils of
collapsing states: acute poverty and years of civil war led to the rise of
the Taliban and allowed al-Qaeda to turn into a global menace. After the
American-led intervention in 2001, both have rebated themselves across the
border in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions, from where they wage a growing
insurgency in southern Afghanistan, destabilise Pakistan and plot attacks
against Western targets around the world.
Western intelligence agencies say that, with the recent improvement in
security in Iraq (a totalitarian state that became a failed state only after
the American-led invasion), the world's jihadists now prefer to head for
Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen.
Misrule, violence, corruption, forced migration, poverty, illiteracy and
disease can all reinforce each other. Conflict may impoverish populations,
increase the availability of weapons and debilitate rulers. Weak
governments, in turn, are less able to stop corruption and the production
and smuggling of arms and drugs, which may in turn help finance warlords,
insurgents and terrorists.
Instability breeds instability. The chronic weaknesses of civil institutions
in Sierra Leone and Liberia contributed to the outbreak of devastating civil
wars in both countries, fuelled by the profits from the illegal smuggling of
"blood diamonds". Meanwhile war and genocide in Rwanda contributed to the
collapse of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s. The chaos there,
sustained in part by fighting over mineral resources, sucked in Rwanda,
Burundi and Uganda. Chad and Sudan support rebels in each other's countries.
At the very least, there is evidence that economic growth in countries next
to failing states can be badly damaged. And if a poorly functioning but
important oil-producing state like Nigeria were to fall apart, the economic
fallout would be global. Moreover, weak governments may lack the wherewithal
to identify and contain a pandemic that could spread globally.
That said, the interplay of these factors is hard to describe, and the very
definition of failed states and ungoverned spaces is anything but simple.
Few states have completely failed, except perhaps for Somalia. And even
here, the territory is not completely ungoverned. A part of the country,
called Somaliland, is more or less autonomous and stable—and another bit,
Puntland, is relatively calm, although it is the source of much piracy. The
region to the south is dominated by warring clans, but even here some
aspects of normal life, such as mobile telephone networks, manage to
survive.
Lesser breeds before the law
One starting point in any analysis of failed countries is the theory of Max
Weber, the father of social science. He defined the state as the agency
which successfully monopolises the legitimate use of force. But what does
legitimate mean? In some places, state power is exercised, brutally but
effectively, by whoever is top dog in a perpetual contest between
kleptocrats or warlords whose behaviour is lawless in every sense.
If definitions are elusive, what about degrees of state failure? Perhaps the
most detailed study is the index of state weakness in developing countries
drawn up by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC. This
synthesises 20 different indicators and identifies three "failed"
states—Somalia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo—along with
24 other "critically weak" ones. One striking feature of such tables is that
states fail in different ways. Among the ten worst performers, Iraq is
comparatively wealthy and does well in social welfare, but is highly
insecure; Zimbabwe is comparatively secure, but ruined economically and
politically. The next ten-worst performers are even more mixed.
The collapse of states is as varied as the states themselves. Some were
never functioning states at all, just lines drawn on maps by colonisers.
Many African borders encompassed lots of ethnic groups and divided some of
them. When the colonialists left, so did the bureaucracies that supported
these entities, abandoning them to poverty, civil war or both. The cold war
helped fuel many conflicts, for instance in Angola and Mozambique, where
superpowers backed rival factions. Other parts of Africa, such as Somalia,
fell apart after the withdrawal of superpower support.
The conflicts of Central America died down in the years following the end of
the cold war. But the fighting in Colombia has dragged on, as the FARC
guerrillas finance themselves through drugs and kidnapping. The end of
Soviet communism freed or created many countries in Europe. Some prospered
as they were absorbed into NATO and the European Union, while others
fragmented bloodily, notably Yugoslavia. Enclaves of "frozen conflicts"
remain on Russia's periphery—for example Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Transdniestria which survive as unrecognised statelets with the Kremlin's
support.
Whichever way state collapse is assessed, it will always be an imperfect
measure of priorities for policymakers. On a map of the world using the
Brookings index of weak states, the epicentre is self-evidently sub-Saharan
Africa, particularly around Congo, with blobs of red in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Myanmar. But this overlaps only in part with, say, the ungoverned spaces
that America's State Department regards as the nastiest havens for
international terrorists, such as al-Qaeda.
On that list, Iraq and Afghanistan figure prominently—but in these
countries, arguably, the problem is more one of national insurgencies than
international terror. Once the tribes of western Iraq (whose grievances were
local) had been induced to switch sides to the Americans, al-Qaeda was
quickly evicted from that area. Al-Qaeda's senior leaders are sheltering in
Pakistan, yet this ranks as only the 33rd- weakest state on the Brookings
index.
One area of concern is the Sahel, a vast semi-arid area south of the Sahara
desert. The Americans fear that in this region Islamist terrorists could
begin co-operating with existing rebel outfits, such as the Tuareg, or with
drug smugglers. The Pentagon has created a new Africa Command to help
monitor the area more closely and train local government forces.
The State Department identifies other ungoverned spaces such as Yemen (30th
on the Brookings index), parts of Colombia (47th), the seas between the
Philippines (58th) and Indonesia (77th), bits of Lebanon (93rd) and the
"tri-border area" between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay (none ranked as
particularly weak).
Conversely many of the most wretched places in the world—Congo, Burundi,
Zimbabwe, Haiti, Myanmar and North Korea—are not known as havens for
international terrorists. Attacks linked to al-Qaeda, moreover, have been
conducted in well-run countries such as Britain and Spain. For American
counter-terrorism officials, the biggest terrorist threat to the homeland is
posed by European radicals who are able to travel to America more freely
than, say, a Yemeni. Some scholars worry about social breakdown in poor
mega-cities. But to regard the British Midlands and the *banlieues* of Paris
as ungoverned spaces would be stretching a point.
The common denominator for al-Qaeda's activity is not state failure, but the
fact that attacks are carried out by extremists claiming to act in the name
of the world's Muslims. Their safe havens are not necessary geographical but
social. Being based in a remote spot, far from government authorities, may
be important for training, building *esprit de corps *and, in the view of
intelligence agencies, trying to develop chemical and biological weapons.
But for al-Qaeda, remoteness alone is not enough. Terrorists need protection
too, and that has to be secured from local populations as in Pakistan's
tribal belt. International terrorists, moreover, need to be able to travel,
communicate and transfer funds; they need to be within reach of functioning
population centres. Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations, an
American think-tank, argues in a forthcoming book that international
terrorists do not find the most failed states particularly attractive; they
prefer "weak but moderately functional" states. The shell of state
sovereignty protects them from outside intervention, but state weakness
gives them space to operate autonomously.
Afghanistan's history is telling. Al-Qaeda was forged from the Arab
volunteers who had fought with the Afghan *mujahideen *against the Soviet
occupation of the country. With the end of the cold war and the fall of the
communist government in Kabul, the country fell into civil war. Arab
fighters largely pulled out in dismay.
Some went to Bosnia and Chechnya. Others intensified insurgencies back home
in Egypt and Algeria. Osama bin Laden found shelter in Sudan under the
protection of its Islamist regime. What took him back to Afghanistan was the
rise of the Taliban. Afghanistan at that time was not an ungoverned space,
but a state sponsor of terrorism; indeed, al-Qaeda arguably became a
terrorist sponsor of a state.
Terrorism aside, what of other global plagues? Afghanistan is still the
world's biggest source of the opium poppy, despite the presence of foreign
troops. Next is Myanmar, also near the bottom of the pile. But Colombia,
though not "critically" weak, is the biggest producer of cocaine. The
cocaine routes pass through countries of all sorts; Mexico is among the top
performers in the Brookings index, but is the main drugs highway to America.
Similarly, piracy depends on geography. A non-existent state may allow
pirates to flourish, but without the proximity of a shipping route they have
no targets to prey on.
Measures of corruption, such as Transparency International's Corruption
Perceptions Index, correlate strongly with the index of state weakness. But
here too there are anomalies: Russia is ranked as a middling country in
terms of state weakness, but does worse in the corruption index; Italy
scores below some African countries.
When it comes to pandemics, there is no simple correlation between disease
and dysfunctional states. The countries suffering most from HIV/AIDS are in
southern Africa: apart from Zimbabwe, most governments in that region are
quite well run. The states that have seen the most cases of the deadly H5N1
strain of bird flu are Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Egypt, none of them
among the worst cases of misrule or non-rule.
Everybody agrees that more effective government around the world is
desirable, especially for those living in or near broken countries. Failed
states always cause misery, but only sometimes are they a global threat.
Given that failures come in so many varieties, fixing them is bound to be
more of an art than a science.
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