The Decline of South Africa

The Economist comments on the decline of South Africa. Slow growth, poor education, labour unrest in mining, unemployment, inequality, a rich black elite, and a huge crime wave.
How did this happen?
ANC rule began in 1994 with solid institutions

… a proper Parliament and electoral system, a good new constitution, independent courts, a vibrant press and a first-world stockmarket

But good institutions were not good enough.

the party’s incompetence and outright corruption are the main causes of South Africa’s sad decline.
The ANC … has sought to undermine the independence of the courts, the police, the prosecuting authorities and the press. It has conflated the interests of party and state, dishing out contracts for public works as rewards for loyalty

Look at the contrast:

the Democratic Alliance (DA), led by a doughty white woman and former anti-apartheid journalist, Helen Zille …. runs Cape Town and the encompassing Western Cape province better than the ANC runs most of the rest of the country.

A sad story. The Economist does not raise the question why the ANC and the rich black elite are “corrupt and incompetent”.

Mali: Separation for the Tuareg Makes Sense

Tuaregs seized the Saharan north of Mali in March 2012. Worried by this and by the rise of Islamists, in October the UN Security Council, France, and Ecowas began planning an intervention.

So, Ecowas, the West African grouping dominated by Nigeria, will probably police, in imperial style, the northerly desert possessions of Mali. And, France will probably give weapons to Bamako. No doubt the French will use such euphemisms as “capacity-building” as they arm whomever useful they can find in Bamako.

This effort at repressing the resentful and increasing the power of the undeserving hardly seems wise. Can outsiders even be sure they know who is who there? Are there any good guys there?

Instead, why not let the Tuaregs of the Saharan north separate from the south? A bonus: the Tuareg want to separate, but the Islamists don’t.

The Tuareg are an unusual ethnie. A Berber people, they spread south from the Maghreb into the Sahel after camels were domesticated. Thanks to their skills with desert and camel, they long controlled the trans-Saharan caravan trade between Timbuktu and the Maghreb.

(Earlier thoughts on Mali here.)

What If … Would President Al Gore Have Invaded Iraq?

Yes!

So says Frank P. Harvey , who is taking up arms against the dominant explanation of the Iraq war: that Bush, the neocons, and the vulcans were behind it.

Harvey makes a convincing counterfactual case that Gore, if he had been President, would also have invaded Iraq.

My take: I am persuaded by Harvey about what caused the war – much more than just Bush and the neocons. But, we should not lose sight of the judgment that Bush and the neocons and the vulcans must still take responsibility for the war. That is why a focus on what they did still makes sense.

More:

A paper: “President Al Gore and the 2003 Iraq War: A Counterfactual Critique of Conventional “W”isdom”

The book: Explaining The Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence by Frank P. Harvey (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

A review (pdf) at H-Diplo by Richard Ned Lebow and the response (pdf) by the author.

Aid Realism

An idealistic aid worker in Haiti feels the onset of realism:

I still believe in helping people. I still believe my heart is in the right place. But I question myself more these days, and question what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. I question whether the work I’ve done here will really even make any difference. Is it even working? We’ll know that as we conduct final follow-ups over the next two months, now that production and installations are nearly finished. I’m wary though. Every biosand filter I’ve ever seen in Haiti that was not one of ours was broken and unused. Just today I went to get a sandwich and found four or five of them in front of the sandwich shop, all in various stages of malrepair, waiting to be turned to rubble and probably used to patch holes in the street.

To Separate or to Unite

Frank Jacobs and Parag Khanna in The NYT speculate on areas of the world that might either break-up or unite.

I’m generally for separating ethnic groups in conflict, so let’s take a look.

First, Jacobs and Khanna’s envisaged break-ups:

1-Mali. I am mildly for the Tuaregs of the North to separate. Quite what form that might best take remains to be seen.

2-Belgium. A good idea. Walloons and Flemings are drifting apart. What to do with Brussels is the limiting problem here.

3-Congo. I’m agnostic. The problem is less rival ethnicities and more predatory rulers at all levels. Separation will not solve that problem.

4-Somalia. A good idea. The northern part (Somaliland) is already de facto separate. Somaliland should be recognized as sovereign.

5-Syria. I’m tentatively for separating Alawi and Sunni. Full break-up may not be practicable, but autonomous areas may be.

6-Kurds. Already the Iraq Kurds have autonomy, which has been a positive development. Shows the benefits of separation.

7-Pakistan. Many parts of Pakistan already have a fair amount of autonomy. Afghanistan may benefit from separating the Pushtuns from the others.

Jacob and Khanna’s potential unifications:

8-Arab Gulf. What for?

9-Azerbaijan uniting with the Azeris in Iran. No need.

10-China & E Siberia. Why? China has no historic claim to Eastern Siberia.

11-Korea. Let us hope it happens one day, peacefully.

(See also Steve Saideman’s comments.)

Another Downward Step Afghanistan

NATO is suspending joint operations with Afghan forces. This is due to several recent attacks on NATO troops by Afghans in police or army uniform.

But the point of having troops there is supposed to be training Afghan forces prior to NATO leaving in 2014. So, the rationale for keeping troops there has just evaporated.

One lesson that might be learned from this fiasco: there is no need to train Afghans how to fight. They are quite capable of figuring that out for themselves. What NATO might have done instead is simply give the Afghan government enough cash to buy the loyalty of enough clients to keep it in business and otherwise leave well alone.

Another lesson: NATO might also have allowed a separation of the rival ethnic groups giving the Pashtuns and the others either autonomy or independence instead of trying to keep incompatibles hitched together.

A third lesson: modern Western militaries continue their poor record of success in fighting insurgent rebellions. The underlying reason is not I think some flaw in their counter-insurgency strategy. It is more fundamental: the war aversion of Western liberal nations. To inflict the kind of decimating violence that would thoroughly smash and cow a rebellion has become (quite rightly) unthinkable.

Libya: A New Failed State?

Its hard to have a successful state in Libya. Since the war against Gadaffi, militias continue to exist. They were never disarmed. Underlying this is the division of Libyan society into numerous clans.
Christopher S. Chivvis reports in Foreign Policy on Libya’s Downward Spiral:

Initial efforts to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate these militias into a centralized Libyan army under the authority of Libya’s leadership were quickly abandoned … small-scale turf wars between militias and struggles over access to smuggling routes in Libya’s distant southern reaches, a new kind of violence had begun to emerge over the summer.
This violence has come in three forms:
First, attacks against Libyan government officials and buildings, both in Benghazi and in Tripoli. Car bombings and small-armed assaults on government buildings indicated a different kind of threat than militia turf wars.
Second, more aggressive actions by radical Islamist militias, who recently destroyed a number of Sufi shrines charging that Sufi practices are un-Islamic.
Third, attacks against diplomats, including an attack against a U.S. diplomatic vehicle in Tripoli and an attack on the British ambassador’s car in Benghazi. Until this week, these attacks looked like isolated incidents. Now they appear in a different light.

The “Clash of Civilizations” After Twenty Years

Next year (2013) will be the twentieth anniversary of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” idea. It was a stunningly successful piece of punditry. The phrase became an instant catchword. The idea was widely debated and bitterly criticized. What’s left, after two decades?
What Huntington got wrong: a couple of really crucial things. First, he anticipated war among civilizations. But this was quite wrong. All kinds of war have in fact declined. It is not that civilizations alone are at peace, almost everyone is at peace. Second, because he envisaged war, he prescribed a new set of rules to prevent it in which leading states of each civilization would be recognized as having special rights and responsibilities to police their civilizations, intervening where necessary. But this updated spheres-of-influence notion was a non-starter. It was unnecessary to keep the peace, and it was unrealistic, since lesser states were never likely to give their civilization’s big power the right to intervene in their affairs.
What Huntington got right: also a couple of crucial things. First he realized that civilizations exist and they are important. Second, he also was right to speak of a clash among them in the sense not of a war but of contention for status or prestige. Civilizations compete for prestige as do other sorts of grouping.

Global Challenges

Joshua Goldstein asked eight International Relations scholars to envision global challenges in 2030:

Here are the issues they think are top of the agenda:

-Maintaining US hegemony
-Promoting international human rights law
-Middle East peace
-Regulating transnational corporations
-Piracy on the high seas
-Whether international organizations limit democracy
-Preventing another 2008-style economic crisis
-Spreading democracy around the world

An interesting list, which raises the question of whether these are the most urgent issues, and if not, what are the most pressing predicaments of the next decades?

The Failed States List and The Successful States List

Foreign Policy magazine has put out its 2012 Failed States list.
What we also need is a Successful States list, to remind the world how to do things right. At the top is the Norden (Scandinavia, Germany, Swiss, Austria) plus a good slice of Anglosphere (Canada, Australia). No huge surprises there.
As for the most Failure, we have Somalia, followed by Congo, Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Again, no great surprise.
But how reliable is the list? North Korea is quite high (#22) despite it being a tyranny not a failure. Mali is quite low (#79) despite its recent near-collapse.
Here’s what I wrote about Mali on Aug 24 this year:

Ethnic rebellion? Check. Touareg rebellion reignited by Gadaffi’s downfall.
Military coup? Check. In March 2012 disgruntled sergeants and junior officers mutinied then seized power. (How easy was that?)
Corruption? Check. It had been a sham democracy, with nepotism and corruption rampant.
Islamism? Check. Islamists seized control of the north.