Matt Yglesias

Conditions Deteriorating in Guinea

In my safe havens piece I wrote that “Broken states, alas, are not all that rare.” This is a difficult point to raise without coming across as glib, but it is the reality. Neither the American public nor the American press has much taste for foreign affairs coverage. We basically see media attention and political controversy attach to either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there’s not the bandwidth to cover both of them simultaneously, much less the whole wide world.

But read, for example, Elizabeth Dickinson’s post about how Guinea’s year-old junta is unraveling:

All the comes at a time when the junta itself is falling apart. Dadis comes across as crazy, drugged, or bi-polar in his interviews and TV spots. He has become increasingly fragile, observers say, as the pressures of patronage and a fractured junta coalition weigh on him.

And fractured the junta certainly is. The group of 30 or so soldiers who came to power, with the backing of about 500 more, make up just a handful of the armies 20,000 forces. Within the high ranks, the most obvious split has emerged between Dadis and his defense minister, General Sekouba Konaté. The latter was an important figure in the military prior to the coup as is largely percieved as the biggest “threat” to Dadis’s rule — an impression codified by the fact that, since earlier this year, Dadis has refused to let his defense minister out of his sight for more than a few moments (they are pictured together above). When Konaté left the country several weeks ago to Morocco (the rumor mill claims he was sent to procure arms), many in Guinea wondered if he would be let back in to the country. His whereabouts now are unknown.

There’s also this Human Rights Watch account of the premeditated murder of protesters in the country, but we can probably safely dismiss that as part of HRW’s vast anti-Israel conspiracy.

Anyways, none of this is to say we should withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan and invade Guinea instead. It’s just that the real humanitarian and security issues involved in weak or fragile states need to be kept in some kind of perspective and our actual policy commitment should be balanced.

Famine in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is in the grips of a new food crisis that the UN World Food Program says will require $285 million in international assistance over the next six months to avert mass starvation.

I don’t think we should construe the existence of famine conditions in the Horn of Africa (there are problems beyond Ethiopia) as a reason not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. But I do think it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t look at individual elements of our foreign policy in isolation, or see the Afghanistan situation with tunnel-vision. Is there some reasonable calculus of risks in which it makes sense to spend tens of billions of dollars on prevent a situation of chaos in Central Asia but doesn’t make sense to spend a fraction of that in the Horn of Africa? Alternatively, if the US lacks the tools and skills to solve profound governance and economic problems in the Horn of Africa why do we have the needed skills and tools to solve them in Central Asia?

Martin Plaut, the BBC’s Africa analyst, has this to say about the role of bad public policy in contributing to the situation:

There is no doubt poor and erratic rains have hit the Ethiopian harvest. But large parts of the country have not been hit by drought. So why the current crisis?

It is in part the result of policies designed to keep farmers on the land, which belongs to the state and cannot be sold. So farms are passed down the generations, divided and sub-divided. Many are so small and the land so overworked that it could not provide for the families that work it even with normal rainfall.

At present only 17% of Ethiopia’s 80 million people live in urban areas. Keeping people in the countryside is a way of preventing large-scale unemployment and the unrest that this might cause.

This does seem like a system that will make it very hard to increase agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, Oxfam has an excellent new report out called “Band Aids and Beyond” about the need for donors to do more in the way of giving communities the tools they need to prevent food crises, rather than just throwing them aid after disaster strikes. If I may toot my colleagues’ horn for a moment, CAP had a report on a similar, though somewhat broader, theme “The Price of Prevention: Getting Ahead of Global Crises” back in November.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan

Looks like American commandos have killed wanted terrorist Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. This is one of the guys whose presence in Islamic Courts Union-controlled was cited as a reason for U.S. support for the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that plunged the country into chaos leading to the deaths of huge numbers of people. That didn’t work in terms of dislodging our key suspects, but now we’re managing to kill terrorists anyway.

The risk in Somalia, however, is that as a consequence of the invasion and the ensuing insurgency, the Somali Islamist movement is now a lot more radical and al-Qaedaish. One doesn’t want this country to turn into a new recruiting grounds for international jihad at just the moment that al-Qaeda’s global appeal is on the wane.

Drought in Kenya

The NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman reports on drought conditions in Kenya:

So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.

“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.

The same climate change that’s causing a surge in wildfires in California is also going to give us more droughts, more crop failures, and more famines. Human societies have, over the years, located their farms and population centers based on certain expectations about rainfall patterns. Upsetting those patterns upsets all those human arrangements and leads to starvation and death. Alternatively, as people try to relocate themselves to more viable land we’ll have war and death (and probably starvation too).

The World Food Program says there are four million Kenyans in need of assistance. That’ll cost $576 million but less than half the required amount has been raised. This is the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to take seriously the neoconnish mindset that’s extremely interested in international humanitarian issues if and only if humanitarian problems can allegedly be ameliorated by bombing someone or deploying American troops somewhere. The total bill for saving millions of people from starvation would be tiny compared to any military adventure. And yet the folks eager to wave the banner of “idealism” on behalf of launching wars are going to be nowhere to be found on this issue.

Obama’s Tough Love for Africa

I’m always reading on the Corner that Barack Obama is a far-left radical driven by anti-American and anti-Western impulses. Under the circumstances, it’s weird that he keeps giving speeches that are so at odds with his world view:

President Barack Obama addresses the parliament of Ghana (White House photo)

But despite the progress that has been made — and there has been considerable progress in many parts of Africa — we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Countries like Kenya had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born. They have badly been outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent.

In many places, the hope of my father’s generation gave way to cynicism, even despair. Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

One sociological finding I’m fascinated with is the fact that the extent to which one overestimates one’s personal degree of control over one’s fortunes is an important predictor of success. In other words, success in life is partly a result of circumstances and luck and partly a result of individual effort. And people who overestimate the importance of effort at more likely to succeed. It makes sense when you think about it, but it’s also a bit paradoxical.

In that light, I think this is a useful kind of message to spread. It’s not helpful to a country to have its politics dominated by post-colonial grievances and attempted blame-shifting. But particularly amidst a global economic crisis, I think it’s striking the extent to which few countries really are masters of their own destiny. And it’s not just Africa. The Canadian banking system, for example, is very strong and the Canadians don’t seem to have made any important errors in macroeconomic policy. But they’re going to have a painful recession just like everyone else, because Canada’s economy is very intertwined with America’s. And you see tons and tons of this sort of thing in poor countries where the prices of commodities they export can collapse for reasons that are far outside their control. And, again, the Ghanas of the world are very seriously impacted by the nature of the global trading regime and by rich countries’ immigration policies, but Ghana has no real ability to influence either of those things.

Africans Need Aid Because They Don’t Have Money

Foreign aid has a lot of critics in part because it has a lot of problems. In particular, in the first couple of post-colonial decades there was enormous overpromising and people thought that foreign aid could really spark economic growth. Hasn’t worked. And while many countries have made progress in terms of sparking increased growth rates, nobody’s figured out a reliable path for external actors to really make that happen. That said, aid critics have a bad habit of terribly overstating their claims and neglecting the fact that, for example, aid aimed at curing disease saves people lives.

At any rate, Peter Robinson seems unduly impressed with Dambisa Moyo:

Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid responds to her critics — including former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. “Surely,” Gerson has written, “Moyo should recognize the difference between aid provided to oppressive kleptocrats and aid given to faith-based organizations distributing AIDS drugs.”

Moyo’s reply?

I’m not going to sit here and say the fact that 2 million Africans are on HIV drugs is a bad thing. Of course that’s a good thing. But whose responsibility is it to provide those HIV drugs? American society does not operate by sitting around and waiting for handouts. Why should we as Africans?

For one thing, in the developed world we clearly do offer financial assistance (”handouts”) to indigent people suffering from illness. Even in the United States there’s Medicaid and people get treated at emergency rooms regardless of their ability to pay. Meanwhile, in terms of HIV drugs obviously the reason Africans find themselves needing to rely on handouts is that the continent is so full of poor people. Ultimately, obviously, the ideal solution would be for Africans to get richer. But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless someone gives them medicine. And even better, the marginal cost of producing extra HIV medication is really low. There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.

The Biggest Challenge in the World

For years now, I’ve been cataloguing the wreckage that’s resulted from the disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia back during Christmas of 2006. At the time, the invasion was generally cheered by conservatives and ignored by the mainstream. Ever since, terrible things have been happening. For example, Antonio Guterres is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees so he knows a lot about bad situations. And what does he think is the very worst situation? Well, it’s Dadaab in Southern Kenya where 280,000 Somalis are currently living:

Laura Heaton at Enough Said observes that “The camp was built to accommodate far fewer inhabitants, but since the beginning of the year, Dadaab has seen an influx of 4,000-5,000 new arrivals each month.” At the moment, UNHCR is trying to expand the camp to accommodate its many inhabitants but is having trouble getting Kenya to agree to offer up more land. All that aside, the sheer quantity of people is staggering. “Camp” doesn’t really fit the bill when you’re really talking about a small city all full of absolutely desperate people.

The Success of Development

Soweto, South Africa (Wikimedia)

I’ve been sort of in a funk about the prospects for doing something to improve the lives of the world’s poorest ever since I read Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms which suggests that the state of play in places like Africa is actually worse than most people think. One possible antidote, it seems, will come from development economist Charles Kenny, whose The Success of Development aims to kick me out of my miasma:

A lot of people are depressed about the state of global development. And they are particularly miserable about Africa. There is a widespread belief that the region remains mired in a Malthusian trap, home to many of the ‘bottom billion’ who are living in ‘fourteenth century’ conditions. And many argue that aid has been a dead loss in fixing the problem. According to this view of the world, we’re stuck in a serious crisis of development.

This book explores the bad news and the good news about development. It lays out the evidence on growing income disparities between the global rich and the global poor that are at the heart of a narrative of crisis. And it chronicles the failed search for a silver bullet to overcome economic malaise.

But it also discusses the considerable successes of development. Not least, the evidence for any country being stuck in a Malthusian nightmare is threadbare. The book points to global progress in health, education, civil and political rights, access to infrastructure and even access to beer. This progress is historically unprecedented and has been faster in the developing world than in the developed.

Interestingly, he’s making the book available for free online. Felix Salmon says he’s been glued to his Kindle all day reading it. I haven’t had that luxury, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.

What “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’” Can Teach Us About Piracy

I don’t know how many of you have played the game “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’”—either the old computer game or the newer XBox version—but for a while I was a devotée of the XBox game and I think it illustrates some key points about pirate policy that endure for the modern day. The main one is that anti-pirate military patrols are pretty much a lost cause. The ocean is just too big. A pirate only gets taken down this way because of hubris—you might deliberately try to attack and seize a military ship and wind up biting off more than you can chew. But the risks of actually getting caught are tiny relative to the rewards of successful piracy.

The only countermeasure that really works well is to escort a dedicated merchant vessel with small anti-pirate military craft. This, however, is rarely done for the exact same reason that we’re hesitant to do it today—it’s expensive. Arming the merchant vessels themselves is a geopolitically and legally dicey move in today’s environment. But “Pirates!” illustrates that this is inherently problematic as there are serious tradeoffs between cargo capacity, speed, turning performance, and cargo capacity that give dedicated pirate ships an intrinsic advantage against any kind of economically reasonable hybrid vessel.

So how can the pirates be stopped? Well, fundamentally the viability of your enterprise is “Pirates!” rests on the geopolitical chaos on land. The Caribbean islands are politically fragmented between Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonies with possessions of different nationalities mixed together and everyone always at war with someone else. Consequently, out by the main range of islands you’re never far from a friendly port where you can duck in to resupply, to sell your wares, to recruit more crew, to fix your ship, whatever. When things can get problematic is if you start spending time in the parts of the mainland that are uniformly under Spanish control. Here, if the Spanish get hostile enough that they won’t let you dock in their cities you can get in real trouble. Not because the Spanish ships are so militarily formidable, but simply because the sheer distance to safe harbor reduces your options. If your pirate crew is actually strong enough to defeat the Spanish garrison on land, you’re fine. But if not, you might be done for.

To make a long story short, to curb the Somali pirate problem you need to fight them on land. This was recognized by everyone back in December but it hasn’t materialized since nobody really wants to try to mount a serious operation to bring Somali territory under control. And far be it from me to question that decision. I don’t want to either. But given that reality, while we can try to mitigate the pirate problem at sea, we’re never going to resolve it and suggestions that the Obama administration should snap its fingers and make this problem go away are absurd. What we need to do is wait until such time as someone or other establishes some kind of coherent control over Somali territory and then deal with piracy issues as part of our relationship with that person / group / organization or whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, the last time it appeared that a coherent de facto government was emerging in Somalia—the Islamic Courts Movement—we helped sponsor an Ethiopian invasion that plunged the country back into chaos. We need to stop doing that! You can read about Somalia in greater detail on the ENOUGH Project’s website, but the baseline point I would make is that we could start helping in Somalia by resolving to not do things that make the situation worse anymore.

Coup in Guinea-Bissau

Via Robert Farley, something’s going down in Guinea-Bissau:

Army troops shot dead the president of the tiny west African country of Guinea-Bissau early Monday, following a bomb attack that killed the army chief of staff, according to diplomats in the region.

News reports said army troops blamed the president, João Bernardo Vieira, for the death of the army chief, Gen. Batista Tagme Na Wai, who died in an explosion on Sunday night. Diplomats, who spoke in return for anonymity under customary rules, said the president was killed at around 5 a.m. in an attack outside his house and the country’s borders had been closed. “Nobody knows who is in charge,” one diplomat said. “Nobody knows what the army will do.”

The reason the country is so tiny is that there was an itty-bitty Portugese colony here squeezed between the French colonies of Senegal and Guinea. My sense is that though having been colonized has done little good for anyone, my sense is that the post-colonial experience of Portugal’s former colonies in Africa has been worse than that of the French or British colonies.

Gettleman on Somalia

If you have the chance, please do read Jeffrey Gettleman’s article on Somalia in Foreign Policy magazine. It’s not only a great piece in its own right, but it’s a useful corrective to some of the imperial hubris that’s often wafting around in Washington:

In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world.

The whole country has become a breeding ground for warlords, pirates, kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen, and idle, angry youth with no education and way too many bullets. There is no Green Zone here, by the way—no fortified place of last resort to run to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trouble. In Somalia, you’re on your own. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds. [...]

It’s crunch time for Somalia, but the world is like me, standing in the doorway, looking in at two decades of unbridled anarchy, unsure what to do. Past interventions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U.S. forces fought predacious warlords at the wrong time, backed some of the same predacious warlords at the wrong time, and consistently failed to appreciate the twin pulls of clan and religion. As a result, Somalia has become a graveyard of foreign-policy blunders that have radicalized the population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of starvation.

There’s an enormous tendency in this town, and in establishment circles more generally, to see American involvement in a situation as by definition offering a solution. And certainly the United States has involved itself constructively in many situations around the world over the decades. But it’s not some kind of law of nature that us poking around somewhere is a good idea. And in Somalia, at least, our involvement has been hugely destructive. Not, I think, because we meant badly. But because we’ve been unable to simply accept that the internal politics of Somalia and the regional politics of the Horn of Africa just aren’t something that the American people or the American government are knowledgeable about or competent to deal with. We’ve engaged fitfully, thoughtlessly, and in a manner that usually involves us getting manipulated by the much-better-informed and much-more-committed players on the ground.

The End in Somalia

The disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia seems to have reached its ultimate conclusion today as the Ethiopian-backed nominal government totally collapses and Islamist insurgents capture Baidoa. Now we’ll have to reach some kind of accommodation with the Islamists, which is what we should have done back in late 2006, but we’re now going to be dealing with a more radicalized and anti-American crew than otherwise would have been there.

At the time of the invasion back around Christmas 2006, right-wing commentators were busy offering unusually stupid opinions. Robert Farley reminds me of a classic Corner post in which Deborah Glick and Cliff May teamed up to explain the “real” (i.e., fake) roots of European skepticism about the operation:

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance “in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.” Also, the people who write for The Corner are idiots.

Good News in Congo?

Good news is, of course, a relative term when it comes to Congo—perhaps the country that’s seen the most suffering over the past ten years. But it seems the government of Rwanda cut a deal with the government of Congo to form an agreement to crack down on Hutu militias the Rwandans don’t like and have Rwanda turn on its proxy, the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda who Rwanda used to fight the Hutus but who’d been making all sorts of trouble and attempting, as Rwanda-backed rebels in Congo tend to, to overthrow the central government.

Mark Goldberg observes that this is a pretty unexpected turn of events since “last month a no-nonsense Security Council ‘panel of experts’ report showed that Nkunda was essentially a front for Rwandan business interests in Eastern Congo.” One hopes Kigali’s decision to switch sides will help put Congo back on a path toward stability.

Good News (By Somalia Standards)

The situation in Somalia continues to be extraordinarily bad, but the resignation of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed from the presidency of Somalia’s de jure but powerless government counts as good news. His hardline stance has, along with incredibly irresponsible behavior from the US and Ethiopia been a significant contributor to Somalia’s problems. I wouldn’t say that this makes a turnaround likely, but it’s certainly more likely than it was before.

Terrible to Even Worse in Somalia

Things are getting worse and worse in Somalia:

The pirates off Somalia’s coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia’s population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia’s Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death.

And now, with the government on the brink and the Islamists about to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what?

“It will be bloody,” predicted Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide. “The Ethiopians have decided to let the transitional government sink. The chaos will spread from the south to the north. Warlordism will be back.”

US press coverage of this situation keeps ignoring the US role, but had American policymakers tried to dissuade Ethiopia from invading two years ago rather than encouraging the invasion, we could have saved thousands of lives, avoiding this piracy problem, and had a more manageable Islamist situation. But at the time, most conservatives applauded the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion to be a smashing success and thought maybe we could learn a thing or two about the utility of harsh measures in sticking it to the wogs.

Today in Piracy

Excellent animated primer on the Somalia pirates issue:

Next, Peter Lehr makes the case for Somali pirates in The Guardian while Robert Farley offers the counter-counter-intuitive argument that piracy is bad. And to repeat yesterday’s point to some extent the pirate issue needs to be dealt with on land in terms of bringing some measure of stability and security to Somalia.

Wonking Out on Somali Pirates

Most of the coverage I’ve seen of the Somali pirates issue has viewed this primarily through the lens of amusement — modern-day pirates! But of course there are real policy issues here. In particular, at the end of the day it’s not easy to fight pirates at sea. The ocean is extremely large, boats move around, and circumstances are generally unfavorable to law enforcement. You need to fight the piracy on land. If you tried to run a pirate ring out of San Diego, you wouldn’t get very far — there are police in southern California. But Somalia has, obviously, been in a state of political chaos for a long time now. And when the country looked like it was heading for a measure of political stability under the Islamic Courts Movement, the US decided it would be smart to back an Ethiopian invasion-and-occupation of the country that ultimate wound up resulting in more chaos than ever. But whatever you think of the past, going forward you would ultimately want to solve this issue on land. In other words, by creating some kind of political stability in Somalia.

If you’d like to learn more about these issues, I’d recommend the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa page and also the ENOUGH Project’s Somalia page (which doesn’t seem to be loading at the moment, but should come back). Either that or we can make more jokes about how pirates are funny. Arrrr funny.