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.