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Sri Lanka’s New Strategic Move: In The Name Of St Antony’s Church – OpEd

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Katchatheevu was ceded to Sri Lanka by the Indian government in 1974. As a result, India and Sri Lanka are only separated by 12 nautical miles. Until the Eelam war broke out in 1983, Palk Bay was peacefully maintained, with the fishermen in both countries enjoying mutual use of the strait for their livelihood. In the last three decades it has become a hot topic for Indian policy makers, especially as it reflects on Tamil Nadu state politics. The Sri Lankan navy arresting Indian fishermen for fishing near the islet of Katchatheevu has aggravated the issue further. The naval forces have also increasingly denied the fishermen’s rights to fishing close to the islet, creating uproar in India. The main concern for Sri Lankans is – firstly, preventing any form of re-growth of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). However, apart from a small number of media reports, there is little substantial evidence that the LTTE are in fact regrouping. Hence, the Sri Lankan army have received widespread condemnation from Indian political parties for their atrocities, which include gunning down the impoverished fishermen.

Secondly, Sri Lankan fishermen “who have just commenced fishing after the end of war in 2009” (www.idsa.in) raised concerns that Indian fishermen were taking their livelihood by using bottom trawling to achieve more catch per venture. At the same time, the third round of bilateral meetings, which took place between the fishermen in March 2015 and involved both countries, ended on a positive note. However, the May 2015 meeting that was aimed at providing a sustainable solution to the fishermen’s issue ended in a deadlock.

India faces many other challenges as well as dealing with Sri Lanka, such as rehabilitating the war-hit zone and issues with pending war crimes. Moreover, the Indian ruling elite is sensitive to the expanding Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean; especially considering the possibility of Chinese advances overwhelming their relationship with Sri Lanka.

President Rajapaksa’s administration had completed all the necessary homework to bring Colombo closer to Beijing during and after the war with the LTTE. Under his government Sri Lanka had taken a view that their relationship with the Chinese should match their relationship with India. This would be a strategic shift by the Sri Lankan government to balance India’s influence on security matters, particularly if India acted against Sri Lanka’s interests in the future. Moreover, since 2009 China has been trying to bring Sri Lanka’s ambit into part of the “strings of pearl” against India in the Indian Ocean. Whether Sri Lanka was aware of the strategic direction of China’s plan against India or not, they cannot now reject the support they are receiving from China. Not only has China helped to modernise the Sri Lankan military and develop their infrastructure, but it has also invested around $5 billion in the country.

In this context, it appears that the Sri Lankan government’s unilateral decision to demolish and reconstruct St Antony’s church in Katchatheevu was made without consulting the Indian Government. This has encouraged all political parties across India, particularly in Tamil Nadu, to stand together with one voice, demanding that New Delhi step in to impede Sri Lanka’s efforts. This atmosphere strengthens the reiterated stance of politicians in Tamil Nadu to put pressure on New Delhi in order to take back Katchatheevu. Furthermore, the current heated atmosphere Katchatheevu issue will have serious implications for the 2019 parliamentary elections.

With China’s support, Sri Lanka might be intending to expand its navel force. Though Sri Lanka has denied building a naval base, India is not easily convinced. In actual fact, there was no real reason to demolish and rebuild this traditional church In Katchatheevu. Thus, it can be perceived that China has strategic motives in backing up Sri Lanka, since the islet is just 12 Nautical Miles or 17 km from the Indian side of Rameshwaram. By providing a continuous flow of investment to Sri Lanka, Beijing could be hoping to permanently contain India’s interests in the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, India’s ambitious Sethsamudram Shipping Canal Project, which is supposed to pass near to the Katchatheevu would create serious sensitivity to India’s security, especially if Sri Lanka moves to expand its naval base.

What should India do? First of all, the post cold war realignment has allowed Asian countries to seek new friends, and Sri Lanka is no exception.

Furthermore, the post 2009 war has allowed Sri Lankans to develop strategic relations with other countries, especially China, which in turn is a real concern for India. The emerging China – Sri Lanka relations should be dealt with cautiously in the early stages. Otherwise, India’s relationship with Sri Lanka could mirror the estranged relations of the US and Cuba following the cold war. Like Sri Lanka, Cuba is a small island and proved a strong strategic contender against the US during the cold war, which serves as a good lesson for Indian policy makers.

Secondly, India should understand and learn about the China – Sri Lanka relations and their hidden motives. China maintains a strong influence in Sri Lanka due to India’s few strategic mistakes during and after the 2009 war. India’s hesitation to take the opportunity to develop the Hambanthotta port would have serious implications on India’s future security if it did not act immediately on the issue of St Antony’s church. “For the stirring of milk brings forth curds, and the stirring of anger brings forth blood” says the Old Proverb. In 2010, the Rajpaksa Administration offered India the job of developing the port, which we turned down. China then accepted as a result of strategic motives. India may have turned the job down as a result of the huge investment demanded by the project. Or perhaps it hesitated in the face of Tamil Nadu state politicians’ reluctance to provide continued assistance for Sri Lanka’s development.

Finally, the new government in Sri Lanka, under the leadership of President Mathripala Sirisena has demonstrated that they are more in favour of their immediate neighbour India than China. However, after considering China’s huge investment agenda, Sri Lanka is likely to seek parallel relations with the two countries. Prime Minister Modi and his team should pay closer attention to the neighbouring island’s movements and articulate our foreign policy more carefully. Since India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Mr. Ajit Doval originates from the school of realism, it is not surprising that his advocacy to the prime minister is based on this philosophy. However, the Indian diplomatic circle should not repeat the mistake it made with Nepal. Nepal is slipping into China’s hands due to our policy mistake and it is possible to identify parallels with the situation in Sri Lanka. India should keep in mind that our rivals are waiting to put the island nation completely in their ambit. Hence, mutual cooperation with Sri Lanka is essential and continuously assisting them for their security and stability would give India a strategic advantage in balancing China in the Indian Ocean. If this is achieved, Colombo at least should remain within our grasp.

*Antony SV Viglious Clement, Senior Editor, Modern Diplomacy.


Bulgaria: PM Says Country Won’t Form Part Of United NATO Black Sea Naval Task Force

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Bulgaria’s prime minister ruled out participation in plans to form a united NATO Black Sea naval task force to counter the Russian Navy in the region. The president of Romania said the initiative is about joint drills, not maintaining a separate fleet.

“I always say that I want the Black Sea to see sailboats, yachts, large boats with tourists and not become an arena of military action … I do not need a war in the Black Sea,” Reuters cited Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boiko Borisov as saying at a media briefing.

“To send warships as a fleet against Russian ships exceeds the limit of what I can allow,” Borisov told reporters in Sofia on Thursday, as cited by Bloomberg. “To deploy destroyers, aircraft carriers near [the resort cities of] Bourgas or Varna during the tourist season is unacceptable.”

After the USS Porter (DDG-78), armed with assault cruise missiles and an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (primary weapon: Standard Missile 3), entered the Black Sea last week, Moscow promised “response measures” to Washington.

“If a decision is made to create a permanent force, of course, it would be destabilizing, because this is not a NATO sea,” Russian news agencies quoted senior Foreign Ministry official Andrey Kelin as saying.

“Let’s stop with the speculations that fleets will be set up against anyone,” Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev stressed, adding that “Bulgaria is a peaceful country and its foreign policy is not aimed at anyone.”

President of Romania Klaus Iohannis, who visited Bulgaria on June 15-16, and discussed the initiative with both Borisov and Plevneliev, has said the initiative’s sole purpose is “practical cooperation in joint exercise.”

Iohannis called the news about NATO fleet in the Black Sea a “misconception.”

“Nobody wants to create NATO fleet. That’s nonsense. NATO has neither the resources nor the desire to maintain a Black Sea fleet,” Iohannis said as cited by TASS.

Countries without a Black Sea maritime border are banned from keeping their warships in the area for over 21 days under the Montreux Convention.

According to Iohannis, discussions on forming a joint naval task force in the Black Sea were initiated about a year ago, after in spring 2014 citizens of the Crimean Peninsula voted in a referendum in favor of reunification with Russia. It enabled Moscow to regain full control of its long-standing naval military stronghold and its vast harbor in the city of Sevastopol. Up to that time it had been leased from Ukraine.

Obama Meets With Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman

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US President Barack Obama met this morning in the Oval Office with His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, to continue discussions begun in April at the US-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit in Riyadh.

According to the White House, President Obama expressed appreciation for Saudi Arabia’s contributions to the campaign against the Islamic State. Reviewing recent Iraqi gains against the Islamic State, the President and Deputy Crown Prince discussed steps to support the Iraqi people, including increased Gulf support to fund urgent humanitarian and stabilization needs.

With regard to Syria, the two leaders reaffirmed the importance of supporting the cessation of hostilities and a political transition away from Asad.

The President and Deputy Crown Prince also agreed to build support for Libya’s Government of National Accord, the White House said.

With regard to Yemen, President Obama welcomed Saudi Arabia’s commitment to concluding a political settlement of the conflict and of GCC support to address urgent humanitarian needs and rebuild the country. More broadly, the President and Deputy Crown Prince discussed Iran’s destabilizing activities and agreed to explore avenues that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions.

They also discussed the important role Saudi Arabia can play in addressing extremist ideology.

The President commended the Deputy Crown Prince’s commitment to reform Saudi Arabia’s economy and underscored strong US support for achieving the recently-announced Vision 2030 goals. The Deputy Crown Prince underscored Saudi Arabia’s strong support for the Paris Agreement and welcomed cooperation with the United States on clean energy issues.

Finally, the President and Deputy Crown Prince reaffirmed the strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the White House said.

Negative Rates, Plunging Yields And A ‘Fix’ For The Economy – OpEd

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On Tuesday, the 10-year German bund slipped into the bizarro-world of negative rates where lenders actually pay the government to borrow their money.  Aside from turning capitalism on its head, negative rates illustrate the muddled thinking of central bankers who continue to believe they can spur growth by reducing the cost of cash. Regrettably, the evidence suggests otherwise. At present, there is more than $10 trillion of government sovereign debt with negative rates,  but no sign of a credit expansion anywhere. Also, global GDP has slowed to a crawl indicating that negative rates are not having any meaningful impact on growth. So if negative rates are really as great as central bankers seem to think, it certainly doesn’t show up in the data.  Here’s how the editors of the Wall Street Journal summed it up:

“Negative interest rates reflect a lack of confidence in options for private investment. They also discourage savings that can be invested in profitable ventures. A negative 10-year bond is less a sign of monetary wizardry than of economic policy failure.” (“Money for Nothing“, Wall Street Journal)

Bingo. Negative rates merely underscore the fact that policymakers are clueless when it comes to fixing the economy. They’re a sign of desperation.

In the last two weeks, long-term bond yields have been falling at a record pace. The looming prospect of a “Brexit”  (that the UK will vote to leave the EU in an upcoming June 23 referendum) has investors piling into risk-free government debt like mad. The downward pressure on  yields has pushed the price of US Treasuries and German bund through the roof while signs of stress have lifted the “fear gauge” (VIX)  back into the red zone. Here’s brief recap from Bloomberg:

“Today’s bond market is defying just about every comparison known to man.

Never before have traders paid so much to own trillions of dollars in debt and gotten so little in return. Jack Malvey, one of the most-respected figures in the bond market, went back as far as 1871 and couldn’t find a time when global yields were even close to today’s lows. Bill Gross went even further, tweeting that they’re now the lowest in “500 years of recorded history.”

Lackluster global growth, negative interest rates and extraordinary buying from central banks have all kept government debt in demand, even as yields on more than $8 trillion of the bonds dip below zero.”….

The odds of the U.S. entering a recession over the next year is now the highest since the current expansion began seven years ago, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development also warned this month the global economy is slipping into a self-fulfilling “low-growth trap.” What’s more, Britain’s vote on whether to leave the European Union this month has been a major source of market jitters.” (“Most Expensive Bond Market in History Has Come Unhinged. Or Not“, Bloomberg)

There are a number of factors effecting bond yields: Fear, that a Brexit could lead to more market turbulence and perhaps another financial crisis. Pessimism, that the outlook for growth will stay dim for the foreseeable future keeping the demand for credit weak.. And lack of confidence, that policymakers will be able to reach their target inflation rate of 2 percent as long as wages and personal consumption remain flat. All of these have fueled the flight to safety that has put pressure on yields. But the primary cause of the droopy yields is central bank meddling,  particularly QE, which has dramatically distorted prices by reducing the supply of USTs by more than $2.5 trillion in the US alone.    David Stockman gives a good rundown of what’s really going on in an incendiary post titled “Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section”.  Here’s a clip:

“…One of the enduring myths of Bubble Finance is that bond yields have plunged to the zero bound and below because of “lowflation” and  slumping global growth. Supposedly, the market is “pricing-in” the specter of deflation. No it isn’t. Their insuperable arrogance to the contrary notwithstanding, the central banks have not abolished the law of supply and demand.

What they have done, instead, is jam their big fat thumbs on the market’s pricing equation, thereby adding massive girth to the demand side of the ledger by sheer dint of running their printing pressers white hot. Indeed, what got “priced-in” to the great global bond bubble is $19 trillion worth of central bank bond purchases since the mid-1990s that were funded with cash conjured from thin air.”

(“Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section“, David Stockman’s Contra Corner)

Central banks have never intervened in the operation of the markets to the extent they have in the last seven years. The amount of liquidity they’ve poured into the system has so thoroughly distorted prices that its no longer possible to make reasonable judgments based on past performance or outdated models. It’s a brave new world and even the Fed is uncertain of how to proceed. Take, for example, the Fed’s stated goal of “normalizing” rates. Think about what that means. It is a  tacit admission that the that the Fed’s seven-year intervention has screwed things up so badly that it will take a monumental effort to restore the markets to their original condition. Needless to say, whenever Yellen mentions “normalization” stocks fall off a cliff as traders wisely figure the Fed is thinking about raising rates. Here’s Bloomberg again:

“Last year, inflation in developed economies slowed to 0.4 percent and is forecast to reach just 1 percent in 2016 — half the 2 percent rate most major central banks target, data compiled by Bloomberg show.”

So what Bloomberg and the other elitist media would like us to believe is that these highly-educated economists and financial gurus at the central banks still can’t figure out how to generate simple inflation. Is that what we’re supposed to believe?

Nonsense. If Obama rehired the 500,000 public sector employees who got their pink slips during the recession, then we’d have positive inflation in no-time-flat. But the bigwigs don’t want that. They don’t want  full employment or higher wages or workers to a bigger share in the gains in production. What they want, is a permanently-hobbled economy that barley grows at 2 percent so they can continue to borrow cheaply in the bond market and use the proceeds to buy back their own shares or issue dividends with the money they just stole from Mom and Pop investors. That’s what they really want.  And that’s why  Krugman and Summers and the other Ivy League toadies concocted their wacko  “secular stagnation” theory. Its an attempt to create an economic justification for continuing the same policies into perpetuity.

So what can be done? Is there a way to turn this train around and put the economy back on the road to recovery?

Sure. While the political issues are pretty thorny, the economic ones are fairly straightforward. What’s needed is more bigger deficits, more fiscal stimulus and more government spending. That’s the ticket. Here’s a clip from an article in VOX that sums it up perfectly:

“But if the exact cause of the bond boom is a little unclear, the right course of action is really pretty obvious: If the international financial community wants to lend money this cheaply, governments should borrow money and put it to good use. Ideally that would mean spending it on infrastructure projects that are large, expensive, and useful — the kind of thing that will pay dividends for decades to come but that under ordinary times you might shy away from taking on…..

The opportunity to borrow this cheaply (probably) won’t last forever, and countries that boost their deficits will (probably) have to reverse course, but while it lasts everyone could be enjoying a better life instead of pointless austerity.” (“Financial markets are begging the US, Europe, and Japan to run bigger deficits“, VOX)

That’s great advice, and there’s no reason not to follow up on it. The author is right, these rates aren’t going to last forever. We might as well put them to good use by putting people back to work, raising wages,  shoring up the defunct welfare system, rebuilding dilapidated bridges and roads, expanding green energy programs, increasing funding for education,  health care, retirement etc. These are all programs that get money circulating through the system fast. They boost growth, raise living standards, and build a better society.

Fixing the economy is the easy part. It’s the politics that are tough.

US State Department ‘Diplomats’ Demand War On Assad (And Russia) – OpEd

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In a move that the New York Times reports is nearly unprecedented, some 51 mid-level State Department employees have signed a letter calling for the Obama Administration to begin bombing the Assad government in Syria immediately.

Demonstrating the reality that the “soft power” of diplomacy is in fact just a front for the “hard power” of bombs, these “diplomats” demanded the administration immediately initiate:

[A] judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed US-led diplomatic process.

Yes, to these supposed trained “diplomats,” the “diplomatic process” consists of making final demands after the military has bombed your opponent to hell.

The memo was filed in what is known as the “dissent channel,” where State Department employees who disagree with current policy can register their dissent without fear of reprisals.

What are these supposed diplomats furious about? Why do they demand that the US begin actively bombing the secular Assad government? They accuse the Syrian government of ceasefire violations because when Syrian forces attack al-Qaeda’s Nusra front, the US-backed forces who fight alongside al-Qaeda are also caught up in the attack.

One might think these State Department employees would better spend their energy urging the US administration to demand that its “moderate” rebels in Syria stop intermingling with al-Qaeda.

The State Department employees are also furious that the Obama Administration has been too focused on fighting ISIS in Syria and not focused enough on fighting the Assad regime. According to the New York Times article:

[T]he State Department officials argued that military action against Mr. Assad would help the fight against the Islamic State because it would bolster moderate Sunnis, who are necessary allies against the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Of course this is more of the kind of fantasy-based analysis that led to the brilliant idea of overthrowing Gaddafi in Libya because it would bolster democratic-minded forces there and result in a model moderate, representative government in the country. We all know how fantasy-based foreign policy works out. The examples are too numerous.

To normal people living in the actual reality-based community, the idea that the US should attack the main opponent of ISIS (Assad) to bolster the fight against ISIS seems idiotic. But then most people who live in reality are not the ill-informed, ideology-driven generalist Foreign Service Officers who likely make up the majority of those who signed the letter.

Additionally, the frayed thread that the Obama Administration hangs onto to justify its attack on sovereign Syria is that ISIS poses a clear and present danger to the US and therefore the US military must be involved in Syria (absurdly using the 9/11 military authorization as a fig leaf). Take away that transparently thin rationale and behind it you have pure, naked US aggression against a country that poses no threat to the United States and is fighting the kind of radical Islamist insurgency that one might expect the US would also oppose.

As John Kerry himself said:

You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.

This move by State Department employees mirrors a similar dissent launched at the time also by Foreign Service Officers during the Clinton Administration demanding that the US become more militarily involved in the crises stemming from the post-communist break-up of Yugoslavia. We also know how that worked out.

What does it mean when a country’s diplomatic apparatus demands that it engage in aggressive war even to the risk of a nuclear conflict with Russia? Something is deeply rotten in the empire. The rot goes deep. And it threatens all of us.

How to fight this rot? Join the Ron Paul Institute this September in Washington, D.C. for a conference that will demand an end to the crazed militarism of the neocons who control our foreign policy.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

Wave Of Popular Anti-Corruption Action Will Transform Latin America

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Anti-corruption initiatives in several Latin American countries, notably Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia, are driving a region-wide wave of change, said government, business and civil society leaders in a session on corruption on the final day of the World Economic Forum on Latin America. Corruption “is at the front of people’s minds no matter where you go,” Brazil-based Brian Winter, Editor-in-Chief of Americas Quarterly in the US, told participants. “It won’t go away, especially with young people.” While corruption in the region is nothing new, “something different is happening right now; something has clearly changed”.

The investigations into corruption scandals in Brazil that have led to the suspension of its president on charges of fiscal irresponsibility are the most dramatic example of the wave of anti-corrupt action across the region, Winter reckoned. In Guatemala, meanwhile, a former president and vice-president are facing charges of corruption and money laundering. “We are taking to court those who, according to object and transparent investigations, are guilty of corruption,” explained Thelma Esperanza Aldana Hernández, Attorney General of Guatemala. She described the anti-corruption efforts as an “alliance of public and private sectors and civil society” that aims to achieve the civil peace that has proven elusive for her country. “Citizen participation is key. Today, the men and women of Guatemala are fighting against the culture of corruption.”

The actual extent of corruption in Latin America is a matter of debate. Some surveys indicate that, while the region has high levels of corruption, they are not as high as in Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa or South-East Asia. The perception that corruption in Latin America is rising may be due to more widespread reporting and the spread of social media. “Fifteen years ago, people had very little access to information, but now everybody has it,” explained Juan Carlos Botero, Executive Director of The World Justice Project in the US. “Information about corruption has become so generalized that the social pressures to address the problem have become more important.”

It is crucial is not to confuse the symptomsfor the disease, Botero warned. With corruption, “the patient has a fever. But what is causing that fever? It is the institutional framework at large.” While increased reporting may be due to the perception that corruption in Latin America is on the rise, Elizabeth Ungar Bleier, Executive Director of Transparencia por Colombia and Member of the International Board of Berlin-based Transparency International, believed that the problem is mounting. Certainly, corruption is more sophisticated, she stressed. “The [negative] effects of corruption on the most vulnerable sectors continues. There is no declining trend.”

Ungar was particularly concerned about corruption in post-conflict Colombia. “Peace building is about rebuilding trust of citizens in the government and it raises questions about human rights, poverty and the security of citizens,” she said. With Colombia moving towards signing a peace agreement with armed revolutionaries by the end of this year, “struggling against corruption in the post-conflict era is not something we can postpone. This is at the heart of peace building in a country like Colombia.”

What factors are giving strength to the anti-corruption sentiment and activism in Latin America? Winter argued that there has been a “secular change” in people’s tolerance of corruption and their sense of the punishment it deserves. The rise of people out of poverty and expansion of the middle class have meant that many more citizens are no longer focused on hand-to-mouth subsistence and are now more interested in the quality of life and such issues as good governance and the rule of law. The spread of democracy and the strengthening of democracies in the region have also mattered. “The challenge is to get from the old thing to the new thing, from the old structure to a new structure that is not totally clean but materially better,” said Winter. “In Brazil, we see how difficult this is.”

To bolster this shift, the region needs new names, particularly the youth, to get involved, Winter advised. “These people need to get off the sidelines and into politics.” Investors should not be chased away by the noise created by the wrenching process of addressing corruption, he remarked. “If you see a country where this is happening, that may be where to make a long-term bet.” For his part, Sergio Romani, Chief Executive Officer, South America Region of EY in Brazil, said he is confident that the storms of scandal and anti-corruption investigations will bring major benefits. In Brazil, he concluded, “we are in a bad place, but we have got to get through it to have a better country. I hope that this will ripple through Latin America.”

Croatia: President Kitarovic Backs Early Elections

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By Sven Milekic

After consultations with MPs, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic confirmed that Croatia will go into early elections, most likely in September.

After MPs axed Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic and the government fell, 82 out of the 151 MPs filed demands for the dissolution of parliament on Friday, which will lead to early parliamentary elections during the summer.

“An absolute majority [of MPs] have taken the position that elections should be held,” she said, admitting the initiative for dissolving parliament.

Once parliament is dissolved, the President will have to schedule early elections between 30 and 60 days.

“The constitutional deadline of 30 days for consultations can’t be shortened, therefore I appeal to the chair of the parliament to debate and decide on the dissolution of parliament as soon as possible,” Grabar Kitarovic concluded, underlining that the majority of MPs want elections in September.

The demand for the dissolution of parliament was first filed by three MPs of from the left-wing opposition Croatian Labourists last week.

Earlier this week, the strongest opposition party, the Social Democratic Party, SDP, said it would support the initiative with its 42 MPs.

Their partners from the centre-left coalition in last November’s elections, the Croatian People’s Party, HNS, and Croatian Pensioners’ Party, HSU, have joined in with their nine and two MPs respectively.

Additionally, the SDP’s traditional partners on the centre-left, the regional Istrian Democratic Assembly, IDS, have supported the initiative with their three MPs.

As announced earlier, when Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic was removed and the government fell on Thursday, the former junior government party, the Bridge of the Independent Lists, MOST, will back the demand with its 12 MPs.

Also for dissolving the parliament is the representative of the Italian national minority, Furio Radin, the representative of the Roma minority, Veljko Kajtazi, two representatives of the Serbian minority, the president of the People’s Party – Croatian Reformists, Radimir Cacic, two representatives of the centre-right Croatian Initiative for a Dialogue, HRID, two representatives of the regional right-wing Croatian Democratic Assembly of Slavonia and Baranja, HDSSB, the head of the anti-establishment Living Wall, Ivan Vilibor Sincic, and an independent MP, Stipe Petrina.

Although the majority are for the immediate dissolution of parliament, the chair of parliament, Zeljko Reiner, has decided that the session on dissolving parliament will take place on Monday.

With growing demands for dissolving parliament, it is clear that the former leading government party, the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, cannot gather the 76 MPs it needs to form a new majority without MOST, as they claimed they could.

Tomislav Karamarko, former vice prime minister, who resigned on Wednesday, and head of the HDZ, however said that his party will continue to attempt to form a new government headed by Finance Minister Zdravko Maric.

“We said that we have a candidate for prime minister. As for these 82 signatures; we’ll continue to negotiate with those with whom we negotiated; we aren’t giving up and elections are not an option for us,” he said.

After consultations with the President, Karamarko noted that the 82 MPs had only signed up for dissolving parliament and had not yet “voted for it”.
– See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-parliament-to-dissolve-early-elections-in-september-06-17-2016#sthash.qLaLV8ss.dpuf

Formula 1 Grand Prix Of Europe Kicks Off In Baku

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Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe has kicked off in Baku.

Eleven teams, with two drivers in each, will compete in the race.

The Baku City Circuit is the second longest F1 track, with a length slightly over six kilometers.

The specially constructed street circuit will see F1 cars race around the stunning downtown area of Baku, incorporating its UNESCO-protected old city – Icheri Sheher historical-architectural reserve – as well as its modern skyline and beautiful Caspian Sea promenade.

Hermann Tilke, the architect behind most new Formula 1 tracks, designed the layout of the circuit.

The Baku City Circuit loops around the central and the most picturesque streets of Baku. When it came to selecting the perfect route for the race, the organizers decided to emphasize the panoramic view of the city.

Another interesting fact is that the cars will race in an anti-clockwise direction. Overall 30,000 spectators are expected to watch the race live from grandstands located at different parts of the circuit.

The length of the widest part of the track is 13 meters, and the narrowest width is 7.6 meters between the turns 7 and 8, which are situated along the Icheri Sheher (Inner City).

The Start and Finish lanes will be located at the Azadlig Square. Moreover, the Formula 1 Paddock, team garages and pit lanes are also located here.

Formula 1 first practice session and second practice session, GP2 practice session and GP2 qualifying will be held on the first day of the races, June 17.

GP2 first race, Formula 1 third practise session and Formula 1 qualifying will be held on the second day of the races on June 18, while the GP2 second race and 2016 Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe will be held on the last day of the races, June 19.


What Actually Makes A Marriage Invalid?

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By Matt Hadro

A virtual brouhaha erupted Thursday after Pope Francis said in unscripted remarks that “the great majority” of marriages today are null, due to a “provisional” culture in which people do not understand permanent commitment.

Although his comment was later revised to say that “a portion” of marriages are null, the question remains: What exactly makes a marriage invalid?

“It’s certainly in my experience that the kind of provisional culture, the conditional and temporary way in which we view real permanent institutions, has an impact on marriage, on the way that we live our marriages, on the way that we relate to our spouses, and those kinds of things,” J.D. Flynn, a canon lawyer in Nebraska, told CNA.

Pope Francis, during a Thursday question-and-answer session at the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress, decried today’s “culture of the provisional” where people are unwilling to commit to a lifelong vocation.

“It’s provisional, and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null,” he continued. “Because they [couples] say ‘yes, for the rest of my life!’ but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know.”

The Vatican on Friday revised the remarks in the official transcript, with Pope Francis’ approval. The text was changed to say that “a portion” of marriages today are null, not a “great majority.”

Many couples “don’t know what the sacrament is,” the Pope said on Thursday. “They don’t know that it’s indissoluble, they don’t know that it’s for your entire life. It’s hard.” Pope Francis faulted, in part, lack of good marriage preparation in teaching engaged couples about the truth of marriage.

In his impromptu comments, the Holy Father was not declaring any particular marriages to be invalid, as Church tribunals do when they establish that a marriage never actually existed, Flynn said. He added that “it’s important for people to remember that the Church always presumes the validity of a marriage unless it’s proven otherwise.”

Whether the number of invalid marriages is “a portion” or “the great majority,” such cases do exist, and the Church has very specific processes in place to evaluate them.

Just because a couple encounters difficulties does not mean their marriage is invalid. “Marriage is, by its very nature, a difficult thing,” Flynn said, “and the Church instructs us to presume that God has given us the grace of marriage, and to rely on that grace, and to ask God to strengthen that grace.”

When a tribunal does examine the validity of a particular marriage, it looks at two primary factors from “the time [the couple] attempted consent,” or the time that they made their wedding vows, Flynn explained.

First is the “object of their consent,” he said. “Did they intend against what marriage really is, or did they intend to marry as the Church understands marriage?”

The second factor is the person’s “capacity for consent,” he added. “Did they have the ability to make a full and free human act of consent?”

There are some key ways that a “provisional culture” can affect people’s marriages, he said. For example, grounds for annulment can include when “a person might directly and principally intend against a permanent marriage.”

“That is to say,” he continued, “‘I marry you but I intend to end this perpetual union when I see fit’.” This can’t just be an admitting that divorce “happens,” he noted, but rather “an intention against the permanence of the marriage” at the time of the wedding vows.

Another nullifying factor is “ignorance” of the nature of marriage as “a permanent union between a man and a woman, that in some way is ordered to the procreation of children through sexual cooperation,” he said.

“We presume that everyone who has achieved puberty is not ignorant of marriage. The law of the Church says we’re supposed to presume that,” he said.

So for ignorance to nullify a marriage, “you have to prove in a definitive way that they really had no knowledge of the concept of marriage as a permanent union.” And this would be ignorance of a “basic human understanding” of marriage, Flynn clarified, not an ignorance of graduate-level theology of marriage.

Also, a person’s “grave” psychological defects or a “grave defect in their will or in their cognition” can be factors mitigating a person’s “ability to choose” to marry someone, he said. And this has a higher risk of happening in today’s culture.

He acknowledged that “it is true that in a breakdown of the family, in a ‘provisional culture,’ in the ‘culture of death’ as John Paul II said, it’s more likely that people’s ability to choose the act of marriage will be mitigated.”

There are other factors that can nullify a marriage as well. One question is if someone is “free to enter into the human relationship of marriage,” Flynn said.

“In other words, are they capable of having a human relationship at all with other people, or do they suffer psychologically in a way that they wouldn’t be able to?”

Another question is, “Does a person reserve to themselves the right to create children in an intentional way?” Flynn asked.

Although the Church teaches that contraception is gravely wrong, using it does not make one’s marriage invalid, he clarified. For that to be the case, someone “has to intend, directly and principally and definitively, not to grant the other person the right to the good of children. Not to be open, in any way, at any point in the marriage, in a definitive sense, to children.”

Furthermore, if a person takes their wedding vows with the definitive intention not to be faithful, the marriage would not be valid. This is different than a case of someone vowing to be faithful and then cheating on their spouse later, he clarified.

The Church’s annulment process is thorough, he said, and for good reason.

“It’s very difficult to kind of mete out what a person had intended on their wedding day, which is why the Church’s process for a declaration of nullity is so exhaustive,” he said, “and why it’s often the case that it’s difficult to come to a conclusion.”

“Because you have to go back to an earlier time and get real testimony about what a person’s capacity was or what their intentions were,” he added.

Other present-day marital problems Pope Francis mentioned are couples who are living together in a sexual union before marriage, and couples who are expecting a child before marriage, and who are rushed into marrying in a “shotgun wedding” rather than “accompanied” by the Church in order to spiritually “mature.”

Mary Rose Verret, who with her husband Ryan runs the “Witness to Love: marriage prep renewal ministry,” emphasized the importance of the Church teaching these couples about Christian marriage, and ensuring they are living in accord with Catholic teaching and are ready to receive the sacrament before they make their vows.

Couples who want to enter the marriage prep program, but who are cohabiting or expecting a child, should not be rushed into marriage at the expense of formation, she insisted. “Don’t push them to get married. Accompany them, wait with them, be a witness to them, but don’t just push them to get married.”

Even married couples who are accompanying engaged couples in their ministry need catechesis, Verret added. These “mentor couples” are picked by the engaged couple to help them prepare for marriage and go through the marriage prep process with them.

“They do the ‘virtue development’ workbook, they’re coached in accompaniment, and they even go to the marriage prep retreat with the engaged couples. They do all of it with the engaged couple,” Verret said.

“And what we hear from them is ‘this is the marriage prep I never received’,” she said.

“The big thing that we’re trying to do is give marriage preparation to an entire generation that did not receive it.”

Witnesses Testify In ECHR In Georgia’s War-Related Case Against Russia

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(Civil.Ge) — Seven judges from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) completed on Friday hearing testimonies from witnesses in an inter-state application lodged more than seven years ago by Georgia against Russia in connection to the August, 2008 war.

The Strasbourg-based Court heard on June 6-17 total of 33 witnesses, 16 of them summonsed through the Georgian government, 11 – Russian government, and six summonsed directly by the Court.

The Court “will now continue its examination of the case,” ECHR said on Friday.

Georgia appealed ECHR on August 11, 2008, a day before the ceasefire agreement was signed with Russia and the final, formal inter-state application was filed in February, 2009 alleging that Russian military forces and separatist forces under their control carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks against civilians and their property in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Georgia claims violation of eight articles of the European convention on human rights, involving right to life; prohibition of torture; right to liberty and security; right to respect for private and family life; right to an effective remedy; protection of property and right to education, and freedom of movement.

ECHR found the complaint admissible in December 2011 and the case was relinquished to the Grand Chamber, consisting of 17 judges. Such relinquishment of cases in favor of the Grand Chamber happens if the case “raises a serious question of interpretation of the Convention” or if there is a risk of departing from existing case-law.

It is Georgia’s second inter-state case against Russia in the Strasbourg-based court.

Georgia has won the first one in 2014, when ECHR ruled that the arrest, detention and collective expulsion of Georgian nationals from Russia in the autumn of 2006 violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Unending India-China Dance – Analysis

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By Bhaskar Roy

India-China relations have come a long way since the 1962 border war, mostly in the positive direction. India has over 4000 kilometre long border with China, but Beijing maintains it is much shorter because it does not accept India’s territorial claims and sovereignty on sections of the border.

Neither India nor China can wish each other away. As the two countries continue to rise, with China still ahead of India the gap is slowly narrowing but problems instead of receding are multiplying.

For India, the China policy is not a zero sum game. Successive Indian Prime Ministers have proved it and Prime Minister Modi has done so most emphatically. Mr. Modi’s policy is not to counter China but to promote a shared vision of mutual benefit and developing together. Indian governments, including the present Modi government, have tried to ensure that China is not rubbed the wrong way. In fact, India can be faulted for conceding too much at times.

India’s efforts have been to try and build trust. But trust must be verifiable, not built on thin air. There is a huge problem here.

One would dare say that there is a lack of understanding in the Indian establishment dedicated to China policy, of understanding the Chinese mind and interpreting what the Chinese say and what the Chinese media writes.

Over a decade ago an idea was being bandied about in the Indian establishment that the Chinese official media such as the party’s mouth piece the ‘People’s Daily’, the official news agency the Xinhua, or the military PLA flagship newspaper ‘the Liberation Army Daily’ and others are like the Indian media. They are not. Why such an idea was floated is anybody’s guess. The Chinese establishment, both of the party and the government, never hid the fact that the Chinese media served their establishment by law enshrined in the party’s and the State’s constitution.

Now President Xi Jinping has made it abundantly clear that the media serves the Party and the State. Any violation attracts strict action.

A recent example- A documentary film was aired over the Chinese Central Television (CCTV)showing the Lashkar-e-Toiba’s (LET) involvement in the Mumbai Terrorist attack. The reaction from some quarters in India was that China may be moving to support India in listing Jaish-e-Mohammd (JEM) Chief Masood Azhr as a terrorist in the UN Terrorism Committee. The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded (June 16) officially, saying that the documentary “does not represent the position of Chinese government.” Spokesman Hang Lei clarified that “China’s stance against terrorism is unchanged.”.

The message was very clear: China is not going to change its stand on Masood Azhar.

The documentary is question was an American production. It was translated into Chinese by the CCTV. But it was not an innocent show either. Nothing can be aired by the CCTV without official clearance.

It was aired to see India’s position/reaction on the Masood Azhar issue. The other reason, to educate the Chinese people about the threat from Islamic terrorism with Pakistan not named but in a parenthesis. China is acutely aware of the potential of Pakistan-based terrorist groups, to indoctrinate, train and arm Uighur militants fighting for independence in Xinjiang. The only time that a senior leader had named Pakistan in providing the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) sanctuary was in 2008, in the run up to the Beijing Olympics.

Since then, China readjusted its strategy. It has co-opted the increasingly dependant Pakistan’s establishment. It has also opened discreet communication with Pakistan’s right wing religious groups. It has maintained close contacts with the Taliban (Afghan) which views China as a friend. All stitched up in this region, at least for now.

In a manner, some of these Pakistani groups are turning out to be China’s sleeping assets. Masood Azhar thanked China for its stance against India.

China’s stand, let alone fight, against international terrorism has been deceptive. Its fight against “three evils”- religious extremism, separatism and militant violence- remains within the borders of the country. Beyond that, it is either silent or cursory or juggling with semantics. As long as China is protected from external extremism, it can take care of its internal militancy and separatists. Meanwhile, it will remain happy with India being slowly bled by terrorism.

China will be mindful of its assets and interests. Currently, they are vulnerable in Pakistan. The Pakistan Army has dedicated an army division to secure the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. (CPEC).

Returning to the Azhar issue, it is not a nonnegotiable issue for China. Putting a technical hold on the Indian move in the United Nations means a door has been kept open. Its moves will depend upon circumstances. If and when China finds its position untenable, or can benefit by notifying Azhar as a terrorist, it will go along.

India’s membership to the Nuclear Supplier’s Group (NSG) is a much bigger issue for China and its ally Pakistan. The next meeting of the 48 member group to be held in Seoul on June 24-25 will consider India’s membership. China has come out openly with its opposition to India’s bid and is supporting Pakistan’s membership saying that India and Pakistan are both non signatories to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The decision of the NSG is on a consensus. Therefore, one member can take the other forty-seven down!

Given Pakistan’s proliferation record, its nuclear button in the hands of the army, with its tactical weapons deployed on India’s borders controlled by a Brigadier or a Divisional commander, Pakistan has no chance to go through even if it had signed the NPT.

Pakistan is a highly explosive concoction of nuclear weapons, jehadis of all kinds ( with some even fighting the State), inflamed borders and a dysfunctional political structure; it is a fit case for nuclear disarming. Its deployment of tactical nuclear weapons is akin to North Korea threatening South Korea and Japan with nuclear strikes. Pakistan threatens the region and has avoided strict international sanctions because of its critical location.

The NPT is no longer worth the paper it is written on- North Korea is a case in point. NSG has been violated by at least one of its members-namely China. Beijing joined the NSG in 2004-did not disclose its close involvement of its Pakistan’s civil nuclear programme, and continues to supply nuclear reactors (power) to Pakistan with the excuse that it had signed the contract with Pakistan before it joined the NSG. In all legality China should have been expelled from the NSG.

Apparently the Chinese concluded that India failed to understand why they were obstructing New Delhi’s NSG membership. They carefully noted every step India was taking to either pressurise them or placate them at the same time. Mr. Modi’s latest surge to Switzerland, the United States and Mexico and the understanding with Italy, plus his telephone call to Russian President Putin, seeking support for NSG also signalled India’s diplomatic moves to isolate China in the NSG.

An article on the issue in the official Chinese Newspaper, the Global Times (June 14, 2016) a subsidiary of the Party mouth piece the People’s Daily appeared to have further clarified China’s position. It made the following points.

  • Washington views New Delhi as a balancing factor in its pivot to the Asia-Pacific strategy. Its supply of nuclear technology is to enhance India’s deterrence capability is to put China in check.
  • Pakistan is not willing to see an increasing nuclear gap with India and the outcome will be a nuclear race.
  • It will jeopardise China’s national interests.
  • US interest is to sell nuclear technology to India ( for Indian groups who oppose the India-US nuclear deal to note)

The Chinese position has become more clear with the Global Times article. Protecting and promoting Pakistan is only a small part of the Chinese argument. The much larger and long term Chinese planning is to block empowerment of India and a possible India-US strategic collaboration to prevent China’s hegemony over Asia.

India has separated its civil and military nuclear programmes and placed itself under IAEA supervision. India’s development requires massive increase of electric power capacity and nuclear energy will contribute to that. Why is China concerned over India getting nuclear power plants from Westinghouse (USA)?

Development of India’s military capacity especially nuclear and missile capability is a concern for China and will neutralise China’s advantage. India does not require the massive nuclear and missile stockpile that China has built and continues to expand to eventually counter the US.

The Global Times says “Its (USA’s) supply of nuclear technology to enhance India’s deterrence capability is to put China in check. It goes on to say that this will “jeopardise China’s interests.”

The Indian Government must understand that no amount of placating China will help in the NSG issue. Omitting mention of the South China Sea in the Modi Obama joint statement is June does not impress China. Nor does easing of visas and glossing over Chinese military intrusions.

India must take note of the recent upgradation of the Tibet Military Command, specifically targeting the India-China border. India needs fast paced defence upgradation. It is also time that India seriously thinks about China’s on going nuclear and missile proliferation to Pakistan and North Korea.

Hit where it hurts the most. The heavens will not come down. If a step is taken it must be well thought out and with the stamina to stay on course.

The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at e mail- grouchohart@yahoo.com

Pizzerias And Steakhouses Using Wood Burners Can Be Damaging To Urban Environment.

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A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.

The findings published in the journal Atmospheric Environment points out the underlining pollution causes of the Latin American city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This work is a collaborative effort by ten leading air pollution experts from seven universities, led by the University of Surrey’s Dr Prashant Kumar from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, under the umbrella of University Global Partnership Network (UGPN).

The Latin American megacity of São Paulo is the only megacity worldwide that uses a much cleaner bio-fuel driven fleet. With about 10% of Brazil’s total population, Sao Paulo’s inhabitants fill their vehicles with a biofuel comprising of sugarcane ethanol, gasohol (75% gasoline and 25% ethanol) and soya diesel.

According to Dr Kumar said, “It became evident from our work that despite there not being the same high level of pollutants from vehicles in the city as other megacities, there had not been much consideration of some of the unaccounted sources of emissions. These include wood burning in thousands of pizza shops or domestic waste burning.”

Despite feijoada (a pork and bean stew) being the often hailed Brazil’s national dish, pizza is revered by the residents of Sao Paulo. The ‘pizza day’ is celebrated every July and the neighbourhood pizzeria is the Sunday dinner with the family venue for most of the city’s residents. People of all ages line up for hours outside pizzerias every Sunday evening and the city is home to around 8,000 pizza parlours that produce close to a million pizzas a day and can seat up to around 600 people a time. In addition to the 800 pizzas a day being made using old-fashioned wood burning stoves, a further 1,000 a day are produced for home delivery, with Sunday being the busiest day of the week.

Dr Kumar continued, “There are more than 7.5 hectares of Eucalyptus forest being burned every month by pizzerias and steakhouses. A total of over 307,000 tonnes of wood is burned each year in pizzerias. This is significant enough of a threat to be of real concern to the environment negating the positive effect on the environment that compulsory green biofuel policy has on vehicles.”

Co-author Prof Maria de Fatima from the University of Sao Paulo added, “Although the huge number of passenger vehicles and diesel trucks are the dominant contributor to particle emissions, at least we understand the impact that this is having on the environment and can factor in solutions. The important contributions to particle emissions gained from burning of wood and the seasonal burning of sugar cane plantations need to be accounted in future studies as they are also significant contributors as a pollutant.”

Additional co-author Prof Yang Zhang from the North Carolina State University explained, “Once in the air, the emitted pollutants can undergo complex physical and chemical processes to form harmful secondary pollutants such as ozone and secondary aerosol. While most studies in Brazil have focused on impacts of vehicle emissions on air quality and human health, the impacts of emissions from wood/coal burning and meat-cooking in pizzerias and restaurants are yet to be quantified”

In addition, another part of the problem is the impact of the neighbouring Amazon rainforest. Biomass burning from the south southern edge of the forest can be transported across the Atlantic coast to Brazil and had to be included in the qualitative assessments of the city air pollution.

Citing this recent work, Dr Kumar, continued: “We believe that the contents of this new direction article provide an unprecedented approach in examining the adverse impact of air pollution in such a unique megacity as São Paulo.”

Professor Vince Emery, Senior Vice-President of Global Strategy and Engagement, University of Surrey commented: “This is another excellent example of how global challenges such as air pollution in cities need global networks to identify the problems and ultimately create innovative solutions”.

Paul Smith, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey added “It is great to see that the seed funding invested by UGPN partners has facilitated internationally co-authored work in such an important research area”.

This research follows recent work by another team of international researchers, led by the University of Surrey’s Dr Prashant Kumar that assessed how Delhi’s landscape, weather, energy consumption culture and growing urban population combined to elevate concentrations of air pollutants, including ultrafine particles, which are the most harmful to human health.

Major Differences Between Women And Men Who Commit Deadly Violence

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Women who commit deadly violence are different in many ways from male perpetrators, both in terms of the most common victims, the way in which the murder is committed, the place where it is carried out and the perpetrator’s background. This is shown by a new study that also investigated homicide trends over time in Sweden.

Sweden is in the group of countries with the lowest number of murders per capita. As in other parts of the world, the majority of cases of deadly violence are committed by men: In nine cases out of ten, the perpetrator is a man.

It is also men that have been the main focus of studies in this area. We know less about the characteristics of women who commit deadly violence, because they have been the subject of far fewer studies.

Deadly violence

A Swedish research group has now investigated how the frequency of male and female perpetrators of deadly violence has changed during the years 1990–2010. The study also investigates the similarities and differences between male and female perpetrators.

The group of researchers from Sahlgrenska Academy, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University, the National Board of Forensic Medicine and the National Council for Crime Prevention studied data covering all cases of deadly violence in Sweden during the years between 1990 and 2010.

1570 cases between 1990 and 2010

There were 1570 cases of deadly violence committed during the observed time period, and of them 1420 were committed by men (90.4%) and 150 by women (9.6%). The gender distribution of the perpetrators was stable at around 90/10% men/women throughout the investigation period.

One clear trend is that the frequency, in other words the number of cases of legal violence per capita, decreased.

“The results show that deadly violence decreased, both in terms of male and female perpetrators. The study also showed that the proportion of female perpetrators in relation to men largely remained constant during the time period studied,” said Thomas Nilsson, Researcher at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg.

Differences between men and women

The researchers were able to see several differences between men and women who committed deadly violence.

“There were more pronounced differences between male and female perpetrators with adult victims compared with when the victim was a child (under 15 years). The adult victims of female perpetrators were more often male and an intimate partner. The victims were often under the influence of substances at the time of the crime and they died mostly due to knife violence,” said Thomas Nilsson, Researcher at Sahlgrenska Academy.

Another difference was that previous violence between the victim and the perpetrator was more common in cases of female perpetrators than male perpetrators, and that women more frequently committed crimes in the home environment. The home was the most common murder scene for all cases but it was even more common for female perpetrators, where the murder took place in the home in nearly 9 out of 10 cases.

Fewer differences when the victim was a child

The differences were fewer when the victim was a child.

However, female perpetrators more frequently used asphyxia, namely, suffocation, compared with male perpetrators who committed deadly violence against a child. The female perpetrators also had fewer instances of sentences for previous criminal activity, according to the prosecution records of the National Council for Crime Prevention.

“One result in which Sweden is different from what was seen in studies from other countries is that female and male perpetrators are just as likely to commit suicide in cases where the victim is a child. According to these studies, suicide after infanticide is more common among female perpetrators compared to men,” said Thomas Nilsson.

Different classifications

Variables that were different between the sexes, regardless of whether the victims were adults or children, were those related to the classification of the offense and if the perpetrator had a severe mental disorder, respectively.

Women were assessed to have carried out the crime under the influence of a severe mental disorder more often than men. Crimes committed by women were more frequently classified as manslaughter or infanticide (due to the fact that only women can be convicted of infanticide), while crimes committed by men are more frequently classified as murder or involuntary manslaughter by assault.

Alcohol or drugs common

The majority of perpetrators, regardless of gender, committed the deadly violence with an adult victim under the influence of some substance (alcohol or drugs), while this was only true for a minority of perpetrators with child victims.

In summary, the study shows that the frequency of deadly violence has decreased in sweden during the period 1990–2010. Male and female perpetrators with child victims are more similar than those with adult victims. Another important conclusion is that female perpetrators represent less than one tenth of all perpetrators when the victim is an adult, but account for more than one third of the cases of deadly violence where the victim is a child.

Gender-specific risk assessment tools

The results show that there are fundamental differences between female and male perpetrators of deadly violence, which should be considered in the development of gender-specific risk assessment tools and risk management strategies. Future studies should focus on, among other things, the distinct role that the influence of substances appears to play when it comes to deadly violence against adults and children. The research group believes there is also a need for further studies on time trends of female perpetrators and deadly violence.

“Finally, the social and criminological differences we found between male and female perpetrators of deadly violence should be taken into account in the implementation of preventative measures, and the effectiveness of these measures should in turn be evaluated in future research. These measures should focus in particular on issues relating to the relationship between the victim and the perpetrators as well as the crime scenes, since the primary differences between male and female perpetrators appear in those areas,” said Thomas Nilsson, researcher at Sahlgrenska Academy.

The study A Time Trend Study of Swedish Male and Female Homicide Offenders from 1990 to 2010 is published in the scientific journal International Journal of Forensic Mental Health.

American Growth And Inequality Since 1700 – Analysis

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Americans have long debated when the country became the world’s economic leader, when it became so unequal, and how inequality and growth might be linked. Yet those debates have lacked the quantitative evidence needed to choose between competing views. This column introduces evidence on American incomes per capita and inequality for two centuries before World War I. American history suggests that inequality is not driven by some fundamental law of capitalist development, but rather by episodic shifts in five basic forces: demography, education policy, trade competition, financial regulation policy, and labour-saving technological change.

By Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson*

When did America become the world leader in average living standards? There is little disagreement about how American incomes have grown since 1870, thanks to the pioneering work of Simon Kuznets and many others.  Yet income estimates are weak and sparse for the years before 1870.  In spite of that, our history textbooks imply that the road to world income leadership was paved by the institutional wisdom of the Founding Fathers and those who refined it over the two centuries that followed.  While those institutions were well chosen, in a new book we show that British America had attained world leadership in living standards long before the Founding Fathers built their New Republic (Lindert and Williamson 2016). Furthermore, the road to prosperity was far bumpier than the benign textbook tales of American economic progress imply.

Was income ever distributed as unequally between the rich, middle, and poor as it is today?  As we are constantly reminded, the rise in US inequality over the half century since the 1970s has been very steep. The international research team led by Atkinson et al. (2011) has charted the dramatic 20th century fall and rise of top incomes in countries around the world, including the US.  However, until now evidence was not available for before WWI.  Thus, there is still no history of American income inequality for the two centuries before WWI, aside from a few informed guesses. We now supply that distributional evidence back to 1774.

A new approach with new data

Armed with new evidence, we apply a different approach to the historical estimation of what Americans have produced, earned, and consumed.  National income and product accounting reminds us that we should end up with the same number for GDP by assembling its value from any of three sides – the production side, the expenditure side, or the income side. All previous American estimates for the years before 1929 have proceeded on either the production or the expenditure side.

We work instead on the income side, constructing nominal (current-price) GDP from free labour earnings, property incomes, and (up to 1860) slaves’ retained earnings (that is, slave maintenance or actual consumption). Our social tables build national income aggregates from details on labour and property incomes by occupation and location for the benchmark years 1774, 1800, 1850, 1860 and 1870. No such income estimates were available for any year before 1929 until now.

Our unique approach leads to big rewards. One reward is the chance to challenge the production-side estimates using very different data and methods.  As we see below, our estimates are often dramatically different. An even bigger reward is that the income approach exposes the distribution of income by socio-economic class, race, and gender, as well as by region and urban-rural location.

New findings about American income per capita leadership

America actually led Britain and all of Western Europe in purchasing power per capita during colonial times.  Britain’s American colonies were already ahead by 38% in 1700 and by 52% in 1774, just before the Revolution (Figure 1). Angus Maddison’s (2001) claim that American income per capita did not catch up to that of Britain until the start of the twentieth century is off by at least two centuries.

Figure 1 Real purchasing power per capita: America versus Britain, 1700-2011

Figure 1 Real purchasing power per capita: America versus Britain, 1700-2011

Since the 1770s, America’s big income per capita advantage over Britain has not increased.  The only historical moment in which the US soared well above its colonial lead over Britain and the rest of the world came at the end of WWII.  Since then, the American per capita income lead over Britain has fallen back to colonial levels.

But note the vulnerability of America’s relative income per capita to costly wars. Fighting for independence may have cut American income per capita by as much as 30% between 1774 and 1790.  The causes seem clear – war damage, mortality and morbidity among young adult males, the destruction of loyalist social networks, a collapse of foreign markets for American exports, hyper-inflation, a dysfunctional financial system, and much more. Then, by 1860, the young republic had regained its big income lead, this time by as much as 46%. This was a period of rapid catching up with and overtaking of Western European per capita incomes, including that of Britain. Fast per capita income growth and even faster population growth made the America the second biggest economy in the world by 1860. However, the US lost most of that big lead (again) during the destructive Civil War decade. It gained the lead back once more by 1900, and briefly lost it (again) in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

American colonists probably had the highest fertility rates in the world, and their children probably had the highest survival rates in the world.  Thus, the colonies had much higher child dependency rates, and family sizes, than did Europe – and even higher than the Third World does today. What was true of the colonies was also true of the young Republic.  It follows that America’s early and big lead in income per capita was exceeded by its early lead in income per worker.

New findings about American inequality

Colonial America was the most income-egalitarian rich place on the planet. Among all Americans – slaves included – the richest 1% got only 8.5% of total income in 1774. Among free Americans, the top 1% got only 7.6%. Today, the top 1% in the US gets more than 20% of total income. Colonial America looks even more egalitarian when the comparison is by region – in New England the income Gini co-efficient was 0.37, the Middle Atlantic was 0.38, and the free South 0.34. Today the US income Gini is more than 0.5, before taxes and transfers. Colonial America was also far less unequal than Western Europe. England and Wales in 1759 had an income Gini of 0.52,and in 1802 it was 0.59. Holland in 1732 had an income Gini of 0.61, and the Netherlands in 1909 had 0.56.  Also, if you agree with neo-institutionalists that economic equality fosters political equality, which fosters pro-growth policies and institutions, then America’s huge middle class is certainly consistent with the young republic’s pro-growth Hamiltonian stance from 1790 onwards. That is, the middle 40% of the distribution got fully 52.5% of total income in New England, the cradle of the revolution!

As Figure 2 shows, it did not stay that way. A long steep rise in US inequality took place between 1800 and 1860, matching the widening income gaps we have witnessed since the 1970s. The earlier rise was not dominated by a surge in the property income share, as argued by Piketty (2014). Rather, this first great rise in inequality was broadly based, with widening income gaps throughout the whole income spectrum – rising urban-rural income gaps, skill premiums, gaps between slaves and the free, North-South income gaps, earnings inequality, and even property income inequality.

Figure 2 Income inequality in America, Britain, and the Netherlands, 1732-2010

Figure 2 Income inequality in America, Britain, and the Netherlands, 1732-2010

From 1870 to WWI, American inequality moved along a high plateau with no big secular changes. Rather, the big drama followed afterwards.  Figure 3 documents that the income share captured by the richest 1% fell dramatically between the 1910s and the 1970s, and the share of the bottom half rose, for almost all countries supplying the necessary data. This ‘Great Levelling’ took place for several reasons. Wars and other macro-shocks destroyed private wealth (especially financial wealth) and shifted the political balance toward the left.  The labour force grew more slowly and automation was less rapid, improving the incomes of the less skilled. Rising trade barriers lowered the import of labour-intensive products and the export of skill-intensive products, favouring the less skilled in the lower and middle ranks. And in the US, the financial crash of 1929-1933 was followed by a half century of tight financial regulation, which held down the incomes of those employed in the financial sector and the net returns reaped by rich investors. We stress that this correlation between high finance and inequality is not spurious. Individuals with skilled financial knowledge have been well rewarded during the two inequality booms, and heavily penalised during the one big levelling (or two, if the 1776-1789 years are included).

Figure 3 Income share received by the top 1%, four countries over two centuries

Figure 3 Income share received by the top 1%, four countries over two centuries

The equality gained in the US during the Great Levelling slipped away after the 1970s.  The rising income gaps were partly due to policy shifts.  The US lost its lead in the quantity of mass education, and its gaps in educational achievement have widened relative to other leading countries. Financial deregulation in the 1980s also contributed powerfully to the rise in the top income shares and also to crises and recessions. A regressive pattern of tax cuts allowed more wealth to be inherited rather than earned. These policy shortfalls are, of course, reversible and without any obvious loss in GDP.

History lessons

American history suggests that inequality is not driven by some fundamental law of capitalist development, but rather by episodic shifts in five basic forces – demography, education policy, trade competition, financial regulation policy, and labour-saving technological change. While some of these forces are clearly exogenous, others – particularly policies regarding education, financial regulation, and inheritance taxation – offer ways to check the rise of inequality while also promoting growth.

*About the authors:
Peter H. Lindert,
Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of California – Davis

Jeffrey G. Williamson, Laird Bell Professor of Economics, Harvard University and CEPR Research Fellow

References:
Atkinson, A B, T Piketty, and E Saez (2011), “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” Journal of Economic Literature 49, 1: 3-71

Lindert, P H, and J G Williamson (2016), Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700, Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press

Maddison, A (2001), The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris, OECD Development Centre Studies

Piketty, T (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge Mass., Belknap Press

Discovered Unexpected Excess Of Giant Planets In Star Cluster

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An international team of astronomers have found that there are far more planets of the hot Jupiter type than expected in a cluster of stars called Messier 67. This surprising result was obtained using a number of telescopes and instruments, among them the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The denser environment in a cluster will cause more frequent interactions between planets and nearby stars, which may explain the excess of hot Jupiters.

A Chilean, Brazilian and European team led by Roberto Saglia at the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, in Garching, Germany, and Luca Pasquini at ESO, has spent several years collecting high-precision measurements of 88 stars in Messier 67 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_67) [1]. This open star cluster is about the same age as the Sun and it is thought that the Solar System arose in a similarly dense environment [2].

The team used HARPS, along with other instruments [3], to look for the signatures of giant planets on short-period orbits, hoping to see the tell-tale “wobble” of a star caused by the presence of a massive object in a close orbit, a kind of planet known as a hot Jupiters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter). This hot Jupiter signature has now been found for a total of three stars in the cluster alongside earlier evidence for several other planets.

A hot Jupiter is a giant exoplanet with a mass of more than about a third of Jupiter’s mass. They are “hot” because they are orbiting close to their parent stars, as indicated by an orbital period (their “year”) that is less than ten days in duration. That is very different from the Jupiter we are familiar with in our own Solar System, which has a year lasting around 12 Earth- years and is much colder than the Earth [4].

“We want to use an open star cluster as laboratory to explore the properties of exoplanets and theories of planet formation”, explains Roberto Saglia. “Here we have not only many stars possibly hosting planets, but also a dense environment, in which they must have formed.”

The study found that hot Jupiters are more common around stars in Messier 67 than is the case for stars outside of clusters. “This is really a striking result,” marvels Anna Brucalassi, who carried out the analysis. “The new results mean that there are hot Jupiters around some 5% of the Messier 67 stars studied — far more than in comparable studies of stars not in clusters, where the rate is more like 1%.”

Astronomers think it highly unlikely that these exotic giants actually formed where we now find them, as conditions so close to the parent star would not initially have been suitable for the formation of Jupiter-like planets. Rather, it is thought that they formed further out, as Jupiter probably did, and then moved closer to the parent star. What were once distant, cold, giant planets are now a good deal hotter. The question then is: what caused them to migrate inwards towards the star?

There are a number of possible answers to that question, but the authors conclude that this is most likely the result of close encounters with neighboring stars, or even with the planets in neighboring solar systems, and that the immediate environment around a solar system can have a significant impact on how it evolves.

In a cluster like Messier 67, where stars are much closer together than the average, such encounters would be much more common, which would explain the larger numbers of hot Jupiters found there.

Co-author and co-lead Luca Pasquini from ESO looks back on the remarkable recent history of studying planets in clusters: “No hot Jupiters at all had been detected in open clusters until a few years ago. In three years the paradigm has shifted from a total absence of such planets — to an excess!”

Notes:
[1] Some of the original sample of 88 were found to be binary stars, or unsuitable for other reasons for this study. This new paper concentrates on a sub-group of 66 stars.

[2] Although the cluster Messier 67 is still holding together, the cluster that may have surrounded the Sun in its early years would have dissipated long ago, leaving the Sun on its own.

[3] Spectra from the High Resolution Spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (http://www.as.utexas.edu/mcdonald/het/het.html) in Texas, USA, were also used, as well as from the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute Provence, in France.

[4] The first exoplanet found around a star similar to the Sun, 51 Pegasi b, was also a hot Jupiter. This was a surprise at the time, as many astronomers had assumed that other planetary systems would probably be like the Solar System and have their more massive planets further from the parent star.


The Impact Of World War I On The Arab World Today – Analysis

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By K. P. Fabian

A part of the world where the impact of World War I (1914-1918) is still exceptionally strong is West Asia. The military campaigns waged during the war and the political arrangements entered into immediately thereafter eventually led to the emergence of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon as independent states as well as to the aborted birth of the State of Palestine. Saudi Arabia also attained its present borders as part of the same process. The Armenian Genocide of 1915-16, which the Ottoman Empire is held responsible for, is still coming in the way of successor state Turkey’s plan to gain entry into the European Union.

As Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany on 30 October 1914, London was worried that a war against the Caliph might alienate the Muslims in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. There was a need to collect intelligence and carry out the necessary propaganda work. Sir Mark Sykes, advisor on the Middle East to Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener, proposed the establishment of an Arab Bureau in Cairo. Accordingly, despite opposition from the Secretary of State for India, the bureau was established in 1916. The High Commissioner for Great Britain in Cairo was Sir Henry McMahon. Both Kitchener and McMahon had a strong India connection. The former was the Commander-in-Chief in India (1902-09) and his differences with Viceroy Curzon cut short the latter’s tenure. McMahon was Foreign Secretary during the 1914 Shimla Conference when the boundary line with Tibet, known as the McMahon line, was agreed upon.

In order to expedite the fall of the Ottoman Empire, generally known as the Sick Man of Europe for a long time, London decided to instigate the Arabs to rise up in revolt against the Sublime Porte as the Ottoman Emperor was known in Europe. The Ottomans were not unpopular in West Asia. But, Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, was wavering in his loyalty as he had learnt that Istanbul had some plans to replace him. As the Sharif, he held some influence. Kitchener made an appeal to Hussein to seize the opportunity to revolt. Hussein entered into a correspondence with McMahon and the two agreed that, if the Arabs revolted against the Ottomans, then at the end of the war Britain will assist in establishing an independent Arab Caliphate under Hussein. As to the area of the Caliphate, Syria, which was of interest to France, was excluded. Palestine was included in the description given by Hussein of the proposed Arab Caliphate. Ten letters were exchanged from July 1915 to March 1916 and McMahon never mentioned that Palestine should be excluded from the proposed Arab Caliphate. McMahon sent money and arms and the Arab revolt started in June 1916. T. E. Lawrence, a young intelligence officer, later named ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in the 1962 film on his ‘exploits’, played a much exaggerated role in instigating the Arab Revolt.

The question of Palestine takes us to the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. It was in the form of a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community. It reads as follows:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

A comment is called for on the devious phrase “non-Jewish communities”. At that time, Palestine had 670,000 Arabs and 80, 000 Jews. In other words, the Arabs were more than eight times the number of Jews. Yet, they were merely ‘non-Jewish communities’. Further, they were denied their political rights, with such rights being reserved only for the minority Jews.

Obviously, Britain had double-crossed the Arabs by issuing the Balfour Declaration. They had done another double-cross earlier by concluding the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in May 1916 to divide West Asia between Britain and France. Sykes was instructed by Kitchener, even as McMahon was still corresponding with Hussein, to negotiate with the French about the disposition of territories. Georges-Francois Picot was the interlocutor representing France in the negotiations that started in November 1915. Essentially, France and Britain divided the area between themselves so as to exercise control directly or otherwise. The Syrian coast and much of today’s Lebanon went to France. Britain took direct control over central and southern Mesopotamia, around the Baghdad and Basra provinces. Palestine would have an international administration, as other Christian powers, namely Russia, held an interest in the region. And the rest of the area including Syria, Mosul, and Jordan would have local chiefs, supervised by the French in the north and the British in the south. France and Britain were dividing among themselves the skin of a bear that was still alive. Russia was consulted later and it was agreed that Russia will pick up Istanbul and control the Dardanelles. Japan, the only Great Power from Asia, was kept in the loop.

London and Paris had not, however, foreseen the Russian Revolution. The secret deal was exposed by Russian papers Izvestia and Pravda on 23 November 1917, to be followed by the Manchester Guardian three days later. There was egg on the face of the British Foreign Office. McMahon resigned in disgust. It may be noted that the Balfour Declaration and the publication of the Sykes-Picot deal both happened in November 1917.

There was another important development in November 1917. Lenin issued his Decree of Peace urging an end to the war without annexations and indemnities. Soon, President Woodrow Wilson of the US, which had entered the war in April 1917, proclaimed his famous 14 points in January 1918. The first point was about open covenants openly arrived at without secret understandings.

When the victors of World War I met in Paris, Britain took the lead, with support from France and Italy, in propagating the idea of a ‘mandate’. They needed a new term to dignify their grabbing of territory in view of what Lenin and Wilson had said. The territories held by Germany and Turkey should not be given independence straightaway as the populations were not fit for immediate independence. They needed tutoring by the victors for a while. But neither the territories nor the mandatory powers were listed in Article 22 of the Peace Treaty that brought in the concept of ‘mandate’.

In Syria, in September 1918, the Arabs promulgated a government loyal to Sharif Hussein. In July 1919, the Parliament of Greater Syria rejected any claim by France. France chose not to send in an army, but to deceive the Arabs. In January 1920, Faisal, son of Hussein, and Prime Minister Clemenceau entered into an agreement wherein France recognized Syrian independence.

France and Britain felt the need to settle the fate of the Ottoman territories in West Asia. They convened, in some hurry, the San Remo Conference (April 1920). It was attended by Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium, and Greece. Britain got the mandate for Iraq and Palestine, and France for Syria. The Balfour Declaration was reaffirmed at San Remo. Technically, the mandatory powers should have waited for a formal decision of the League of Nations to award the mandate. They did not wait and acted promptly.

The San Remo Declaration was resented in Iraq where the Shias and Sunnis revolted in June 1920. Churchill ordered reinforcements from Iran and India. Gandhi urged Indians not to offer themselves as recruits to fight in Iraq. That was the first time India spoke forcefully against Britain using Indian manpower for its imperial projects. Churchill as Secretary of State for War wrote on file on 12 May 1919 that he was “strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.” It appears that poison gas was not used in Iraq as it was not available. The revolt lost steam by October 1920.

Following San Remo, without waiting for approval of the award of mandate by the League of Nations, France sent in its army and Faisal fled. Churchill decided to have Faisal as King of Iraq. When the French made Faisal flee from Damascus, his brother Abdullah moved his forces from Hijaz to Damascus to take on the French. Churchill invited him to a ‘tea party’ and made him change his plan and rewarded him by making him Emir of Transjordan in 1921. He became King of Jordan when the country attained independence in 1946.

When the Caliphate was abolished in 1924, Sharif Hussein declared himself the new Caliph, but was not taken seriously by many. When Ibn Saud attacked Hejaz, Hussein fled as he received no help from Britain. Ibn Saud captured Hejaz, including Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah. In 1932, Ibn Saud proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Britain worked industriously for establishing an independent state for the Jews in Palestine. Balfour himself was a Zionist. He argued that though Jews were a minority in Palestine, since it was meant to be a homeland for Jews the population of world Jewry should be compared with the population of Arabs in Palestine. Britain facilitated the entry of more Jews into Palestine and they bought land. In 1939, a British government appointed committee recommended two states, one for Jews and another for Arabs. The Jews were distressed that the Balfour Declaration was watered down. They resorted to terrorism to persuade the British to leave Palestine. On 5 November 1944, Lord Moyne, British Minister for the Middle East and a close friend of Churchill, was murdered. On 22 July 1946, the King David Hotel was blown up by a group led by Menachem Begin, a future Prime Minister of Israel. Finally, David Ben Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel on 15 May 1948, much ahead of the timetable prescribed in UN General Assembly Resolution 181 for establishing two states in Palestine not later than 1 October 1948.

Armenia was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. As Armenians were Christians, their loyalty was doubted; and they, on their part, tended to look towards Russia as their protector. When Turkey entered the Great War, some Armenians helped Russia. On 25 April 1915, the genocide began. It lasted till 1922. While the exact toll is not known, 1.5 million is a reasonable estimate. Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, coined the term genocide keeping in mind the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Lemkin prepared the draft of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. After the German Parliament passed a resolution on 2 June 2016 that the killing of Armenians starting from 1915 was a genocide, President Erdogan recalled his ambassador to Germany.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/world-war-i-arab-world_kpfabian_170616

Economic Development In Counterinsurgency: Building A Stable Second Pillar – Analysis

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By Patrick H. Donley*

The future of U.S. participation in counterinsurgency (COIN) is uncertain, but not so the probability that future adversaries will avoid U.S. conventional military dominance by using asymmetric, unconventional methods. As COIN theorist David Kilcullen warns, “Any smart future enemy will likely sidestep our unprecedented superiority in traditional, force-on-force, state-on-state warfare. And so insurgency . . . will be our enemies’ weapon of choice until we prove we can master it.”1 Unfortunately, because no two insurgencies are exactly alike, mastering COIN will be a perpetual endeavor.

At its core, a counterinsurgency is a battle for government legitimacy in the minds of its people.2 Writing in 1963, David Galula summarized the insurgent aim: “If the insurgent manages to dissociate the population from the counterinsurgent, to control it physically, to get its active support, he will win the war because, in the final analysis, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population or, at worst, on its submissiveness.”3 One of the chief ways insurgents attain popular support is by capitalizing on government ineffectiveness. In fact, government illegitimacy is considered by many COIN strategists as the “root cause of and the central strategic problem in today’s unstable global-security environment.”4 Counterinsurgents, then, must have as their primary objective the creation of a government that derives legitimacy from its ability to provide its population with effective security, responsive governance, and sufficient economic development.5 In fact, Kilcullen considers the security, political, and economic mission elements to be co-equal “pillars” in his Inter-agency Counterinsurgency Framework.6

Due to the complexities of COIN, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps collaborated in 2006 to provide their forces with “a manual that provides principles and guidelines for counterinsurgency operations.”7 Recognizing “that every insurgency is contextual,” the authors set out to highlight the “common characteristics of insurgencies” to provide military implementers of COIN “a solid foundation for understanding and addressing specific insurgencies.”8 Along with security, the manual concedes the criticality of governance and economic development to COIN success, and acknowledges that military members must work closely with “many intergovernmental, host-nation, and international agencies” to capitalize on skills such as “rebuilding infrastructure and basic services” and to facilitate the establishment of “local governance and rule of law.”9 Moreover, it advocates synchronizing these three mission elements and unifying “efforts of joint, interagency, multinational, and Host Nation (HN) forces toward a common purpose.”10

While military forces have a legitimate role in each of the mission elements, their primary expertise lies in providing a secure environment so that political and economic development can occur. To this end, the chapter titled “Executing Counterinsurgency Operations” advocates using a “Clear-Hold-Build” approach for “specific, high-priority area[s] experiencing overt insurgent operations” in order to “create a secure physical and psychological environment; establish firm government control of the populace and area; and gain the populace’s support.”11 Since publication of the military COIN guidance, many observers believe the strategy has been expanded to include a preliminary “Shape” phase (intelligence preparation of the battlefield, interagency planning, and so forth) and a concluding “Transfer” phase (bulk U.S. force withdrawal, primary responsibility shifts to HN security forces, and so forth).12 Whether the military’s “Shape, Clear, Hold, Build, and Transfer” model is correct, it provides a useful framework that political and economic development experts can use to integrate their actions with their security colleagues.

To date, political and economic developers have not created comparable models to guide their actions or inform their mission partners. Consequently, their efforts appear somewhat reactive and disjointed, and may, as a result, be perceived as being subordinate to the security mission. To address this weakness, this article focuses on the economic development mission. It proposes five key principles that should guide economic development activities in a counterinsurgency, and it presents a four-phase conceptual model that can be used by economic developers, as well as security and political planners, to better synchronize all COIN efforts. It does not, however, offer a context-independent recipe for COIN success or an easy-to-follow checklist that simplifies COIN complexities. No matter how efficiently a COIN campaign is run, success depends on a number of complicated factors, many of which are outside the economic developers’ control. Most importantly, COIN success presupposes a capable HN government partner that is willing to make the changes necessary to win popular legitimacy. Secondly, it assumes that the United States wants to defeat the insurgency and not merely alleviate some lesser risk. Both of these are weighty assumptions that may, at some stage, prove inaccurate. While this article hopes to provide general guidance that will increase the probability of U.S. COIN success, it concedes the enormity of the COIN challenge upfront.

Economic Development Principles

Rather than propose a new definition for economic development, this article uses Kilcullen’s description of the economic pillar in his Inter-agency Counterinsurgency Framework. Within the pillar, he includes “Humanitarian Assistance, Development Assistance, Resources & Infrastructure Management, and Growth Capacity” as key tasks.13 Economic development, then, is the provision of sufficient basic services, infrastructure, and economic essentials to garner popular support and engender government legitimacy. Because “sufficient economic development” is largely based on the affected population’s expectations, it is always contextually determined.

As a growing number of development experts have observed, economic development is not a panacea and cannot be divorced from security and governance. The government cannot gain sufficient legitimacy solely by building projects or otherwise infusing money into a local economy.14 In fact, such development can actually increase instability rather than decrease it.15 Andrew Wilder and Stuart Gordon conclude from their research in Afghanistan that U.S. and international aid efforts “show little evidence of . . . winning hearts and minds or promoting stability.”16 An Afghan tribal elder summed up the argument this way: “Lack of clinics, schools, and roads are not the problem. The main problem is we don’t have a good government.”17

This finding was echoed by a group of development experts who discussed the topic at the 2010 Wilton Park Conference “Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Afghanistan: Assessing the Effectiveness of Development Aid in COIN Operations.”18 The end-of-conference report found that “many Afghans believe the main cause of insecurity to be their government, which is perceived to be massively corrupt, predatory and unjust. . . . Without getting the ‘politics right’ both military and aid efforts are unlikely to achieve their desired effects.”19

In contrast to the U.S. Army’s 2009 handbook Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System, which claims that warfighters can use “money as a weapons system to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous population to facilitate defeating the insurgents,” mounting evidence indicates that money (and economic development more broadly) is effective in COIN only if it bolsters government legitimacy.20 Development can buy the population’s goodwill temporarily, but it cannot do so indefinitely by itself.21 While economic development efforts will depend on the nature of the insurgency and the specific context of the situation, U.S. economic development strategies for a counterinsurgency should broadly comply with five key principles.

Endgame Legitimacy. Economic development in COIN must have as its overriding purpose the creation of HN legitimacy. Every other aim must be subordinated to this objective. While the concept is easy to understand, it is often difficult to practice consistently and may increase local instability and opposition in the short term. It requires developers to bypass unethical local powerbrokers and shun corrupt business practices in favor of closely monitored, community-led development programs. Using this approach, developers may be opposed by economically powerful business people, corrupt government leaders, organized crime syndicates, and local warlords who seek to protect their power and influence, in addition to traditional insurgents. Nevertheless, to achieve the long-term goal of building HN government legitimacy, economic developers and policymakers must resist the urge to compromise overall mission success for short-term progress. This is far easier said than done.

One way of legitimizing the HN government is to work within the HN structure as much as possible. Rather than setting up parallel U.S. structures that delegitimize the HN government, U.S. developers should adapt to HN institutions if they exist. It is possible that the HN government has capabilities and institutions that are uniquely suited to the culture and the expectations of its populace.22 By utilizing them and building upon their expertise, the United States increases mission effectiveness, bolsters HN capability, and lends credence to the government. If the HN structures are ineffective, U.S. developers should use their expertise and financial leverage to reform them since the HN will eventually inherit the long-term mission.23 Reforming the government institutions can be problematic since affected HN officials may resist the changes and accuse the United States of neocolonial meddling—an accusation the United States is particularly keen on avoiding and one insurgents can exploit to discredit HN government legitimacy. Resolution of these conflicts will be difficult and will require diplomatic acumen, but the United States cannot simply acquiesce to HN intransigence if it hopes to be successful.

Similarly, economic development should utilize HN implementers as much as possible so that the HN gets the credit. While this development approach takes longer and may require more people to institute initially, it builds long-lasting HN capacity and engenders popular support for the government. Making this more difficult is the fact that U.S. economic developers are usually under pressure from an impatient U.S. public to generate results quickly. Consequently, developers are susceptible to two common development pitfalls. Either they are tempted to use whatever structures are already in place without regard for the negative effect such practices have on the local population, or they opt to do all the work themselves. Both of these approaches delegitimize the HN government and minimize the chances for long-term success.

Synchronicity of Missions. Economic development must be integrated and fully compatible with security and political strategies. As all three mission elements are necessary to generate the requisite legitimacy to defeat the insurgency, great care must be taken not to pursue one at the expense of the other two. This requires thorough inter-mission planning and an acknowledgment that each component affects the success of the others. To achieve this synergy, planners from all three mission sets, including representatives from the HN government, must work together to develop compatible plans. It may also require appointment of a single decisionmaker who exercises authority over all three missions.

Synchronization is also key to eliminating gaps between mission elements. The counterinsurgents’ ability to eliminate gaps between missions can be the difference between success and failure. Each COIN mission assumes prominence at a different point in the campaign even though all three operate throughout the COIN effort.24 Security is the foundational need for all others and therefore takes priority in the early stages of a COIN operation.25 Development reaches its critical point after security has been established but is a precursor to and facilitator for effective subnational governance. Lastly, political mobilization is critical toward the end of the COIN effort because the HN government must be capable of exercising long-term effective governance before successful transfer of the mission can occur.

Economic development must be synchronized with the security mission so that there is no gap between the termination of kinetic operations in the security mission and the initiation of humanitarian assistance in the economic development mission. Immediately following the Clear phase of the security mission, the local population is likely to feel a degree of cautious optimism that the HN government can positively change their lives. While locals may not yet feel comfortable expressing support for the government, they are expectant and hopeful that their lives might improve. Simultaneously, the immediate post-kinetic period is when local populations are particularly vulnerable and dependent on the government to meet their needs due to injuries, infrastructure destruction, economic upheaval, and population displacement. If the necessary assistance lags behind the security operation or is inadequate in its scope, the people’s hopes are dashed and their assessment of government legitimacy declines, possibly even below pre-security operation levels. This sense of betrayal gives the insurgent another leverage point with which to influence the population.

Moreover, the longer it takes the counterinsurgent to follow the security gains with economic development, the less able the security forces are to maintain the secure environment. Effective economic and political development activities build confidence among populations, resulting in the growth of an internal security dynamic. Without this internal security, it is virtually impossible to maintain any security at all, regardless of the number of people at their disposal. Insurgents will eventually infiltrate back into the community and exact vengeance upon those who collaborated with the government. The resultant insecurity will further highlight the government’s ineptness and create lasting doubt in the minds of the people that will be difficult to eradicate.

Similarly, there should be no gap between effective economic development and the establishment of good governance. To achieve the intended COIN effect, the local population must associate the economic development with effective HN governance, which can only be accomplished if the political mission is functional and effective while economic development is taking place. Simply put, people are more likely to respond favorably to governance when they associate it with meeting their needs.

Simultaneous Tactical and Operational Development. Economic development must be employed simultaneously at tactical and operational levels. Along these lines, the Wilton Park conferees made a distinction between “stabilization” and “development objectives” of economic aid. Stabilization funds were those used for “relatively small scale and short-term projects designed to promote stability effects at a tactical level” and development funds were for “larger-scale and longer-term development aid projects designed to promote development objectives.”26 Whether the distinction is between stabilization and development or between tactical development and operational development, economic development has the potential to generate crucial effects at both levels. Effective economic development will strive to take advantage of both domains to bolster government capability and generate popular support.

At the tactical level, economic development provides the counterinsurgent with a tool to incentivize the population to resolve factors of instability and bolsters local support for the HN government. Pragmatically, it also buys the counterinsurgent limited goodwill and forms the basis for trust from the local population. Effective economic development must take advantage of this window of optimism and provide tangible benefits that cannot easily be countered by insurgent information operations.27 Early on, tactical economic development comes in the form of emergency provisions and humanitarian assistance such as medical care, food and water, and temporary shelters. Because of the kinetic nature of the environment, implementers at this stage will primarily be military personnel.

Once immediate needs are met, tactical economic development progresses to the provision of necessary economic infrastructure (for example, wells, roads, electrical generators), resolving communal instability, and laying the framework for sustainable development institutions. Tactical economic development should not be a blank check designed to meet every individual desire within a community; instead, it should be an incentive to motivate community members to work together to identify and solve local problems. In this latter stage, economic developers provide populations with training in basic economic development principles and organizational expertise and assist them in the acquisition of necessary infrastructure development in accordance with the community’s priorities. Ultimately, the latter stage of tactical economic development should build the community’s capacity to take control of its economic future and set the stage for the political pillar to operate effectively.

Operational economic development, on the other hand, is aimed at increasing the HN government’s legitimacy by bolstering its ability to provide economically for the entire country. What tactical developers do inside and among local communities, operational developers do on a national scale—using development to resolve disputes, increase employment opportunities, and provide skills training. U.S. economic developers at this level serve as advisors to key development ministries, facilitate U.S. access to key HN leaders, and act as the conduit for HN-U.S. meetings. Moreover, they should assist the HN government in identifying and sourcing large infrastructure projects that will have a positive national impact, training government personnel to implement and oversee these projects, and increasing HN capability to use international aid effectively. Vitally important to generating confidence within the HN population and the international community is the creation of transparent procedures for financial accountability.

Host-Nation Capacity-Building. Economic development must deliberately build HN government capacity so that the government is eventually able to conduct the mission without U.S. assistance. From planning to implementation to sustainment, U.S. developers must prioritize “transferability” by using methods the HN government can perpetuate. The goal of U.S. developers should be to transfer the mission seamlessly to their HN partners so that the population experiences no difference in the quality of service it receives. To this end, the United States must avoid using equipment or software that the HN can neither operate nor sustain. This constraint can be challenging for U.S. developers, who often rely on the latest technological and mechanical tools. They must either change their way of doing business to be compatible with HN capabilities, or they must invest in the HN’s long-term infrastructure development and commit to its sustainment and maintenance until the HN is able to sustain it on its own.

Because of the lead-time required to train HN personnel and the need to avoid gaps between the mission sets, the United States must begin capacity-building at the tactical and operational levels long before the need for implementation. Once there is agreement between the U.S. and HN governments regarding the manner in which economic development will occur (in the early planning phase), the United States should prioritize the capacity-building mission at the operational and tactical levels. Early on, U.S. personnel may out of necessity lead development efforts, but they must not do so indefinitely—particularly at the tactical level. The United States must deliberately taper its involvement until it is an unseen entity providing advice, technical expertise, and funding.

For the tactical mission, the United States must strive to transfer implementation responsibilities to the HN as soon as possible. To facilitate this, the United States must ensure the HN has a rapidly deployable development capability that can quickly reach all parts of the country. Recognizing that some countries cannot afford to support permanently based local HN developers in every part of the country, the United States should train deployable HN Development Teams (HNDTs) to meet this need. These teams should comprise people who work for various HN development ministries or departments and who have the requisite skills and knowledge to mobilize post-kinetic populations, manage expectations, assess immediate needs, and distribute essential life-sustaining necessities in conjunction with applicable government departments. In addition to meeting immediate needs, these HNDTs should be trained to identify sources of instability within populations so that development resources can be used to resolve them. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) already employs a stabilization framework designed to highlight sources of instability, but to be truly effective, USAID needs to partner more comprehensively and consistently with trained HN personnel to administer it.28

Not only would HNDTs bring cultural expertise and a shared cultural identity to complex situations, but they would also represent the HN government in a way that foreigners never could.29 Additionally, because of their knowledge of the HN government, they would be better able to coordinate the people’s perceived needs with the long-term plans of the government. For instance, if a particular community desired the construction of a new school, members of an HNDT would be better placed to liaise with the appropriate government department to ensure the proposed school aligns with HN government plans and resources. Too often, foreign economic developers, hoping to engender goodwill with a population, build infrastructure projects in the wrong locations or to the wrong specifications because they do not coordinate their actions with the HN government.30 Instead of fostering HN government legitimacy, the abandoned project becomes a testimony to the HN government’s inability to meet the population’s needs.

Responsiveness to Local Input. Finally, economic development must respond to local demand. When seeking to bring economic development to a community, U.S. developers have a tendency to assume they know best what the community needs and what will most quickly resolve instability and engender legitimacy. To simplify logistical and financial planning and avoid conflict among local communities over aid equity, it is tempting for U.S. developers to eschew input from the local populace.31 While these concerns may be valid, they do not justify ignoring local input entirely. After all, the point of economic development is to create HN government legitimacy in the minds of its people, which requires government responsiveness to the perceived needs of the people. There are reasonable limits to the flexibility that can be allowed in the system, but some portion of the development budget must allow for popular input into the decisionmaking process.32

A compromise approach would be to give each community a per capita amount of money for spending on a community-selected project, in addition to other centrally selected development packages. The community project could then be used as a skills-development opportunity in which development experts mentor community leaders through every phase of project implementation. A similar approach is already used effectively by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development with its National Solidarity Program.33 Time and again, this community empowerment and rural development program is lauded by researchers and inspectors alike for its high accountability, broad popular support, and national reach.34

Regardless of the details of the economic development strategy that is implemented, U.S. developers would do well to incorporate these five economic development principles, even if it means the pace of development is slower, the selection of projects is suboptimal, or the credit for the efforts goes elsewhere. Above all, the United States should remember that if economic development is delinked from HN legitimacy, it is a fruitless exercise and a potential contributor to instability.

Economic Development Model

Utilizing the five economic development principles above, it is possible to construct an economic development model for COIN operations to guide future planning efforts. The model is composed of four phases: Shape, Stabilize, Build, and Transfer (figure 1). While three of the phases share the same names as their security model counterparts, they do not necessarily share the same timelines. Figure 2 illustrates the correlation between the security and economic development models.donley-figure1
Phase 0: Shape. This phase is primarily for planning and preparation. For the COIN effort to be successful, representatives from all three mission elements must participate equally in building a macro-level COIN plan. Because one mission element’s needs may drive the actions of the other two, it is critical that planning for all three mission elements be integrated from the beginning. For example, if successful economic development in a particular area requires uninterrupted electrical power, economic development planners should convey this requirement to the security planners so that they conduct their operation accordingly. Special emphasis should be placed on planning transition points between one mission element and another to ensure there is no gap in momentum or service to the population. Each mission element should share special considerations regarding timing, location, measures of success, and follow-on actions. At the micro-level of economic development planning, military, interagency, and HN personnel should actively participate, even if it slows the process.donley-figure2

In addition to planning, the Shape phase is devoted to identification and acquisition of necessary resources. To prevent a security development gap from occurring, the financial mechanisms, personnel, and key equipment must be ready in advance. Moreover, economic developers should identify, train, equip, and exercise HN Development Team members. Because of the questionable security environments and austere locations in which they will operate, HNDT members should possess a wide variety of skills. If development skills are lacking, the United States should consider initiating educational programs for host nationals in return for their obligatory government service. This “development college” would not only benefit the individuals and the HN government in the short term, but it would also broaden the foundation for longer term economic success as the graduates apply their skills after completing their service obligations.

Phase 1: Stabilize. This phase is divided into two stages. The first stage begins while the security mission is still conducting clearing operations. Because kinetic operations are ongoing, the military leads this phase, primarily using special operations forces and civil affairs teams who have been trained in economic development tasks. As the environment becomes more secure, economic development responsibilities shift to civilian experts from USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives and joint civil-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Economic development in this early stage focuses on providing advice to U.S. military combatants on how best to terminate their operations to facilitate economic development success, assessing humanitarian damage for planning refinements, and providing emergency humanitarian assistance. As the security effort transitions from Clear to Hold, HN economic developers play a greater support role, helping U.S. PRTs conduct initial needs assessments and stability surveys with returning internally displaced populations. They also work together to initiate small-scale projects designed to build on the population’s optimism, all the while actively managing the population’s expectations.

The second stage of this phase occurs when security has become fairly constant and the environment is relatively safe for civilian workers. The HNDTs lead this effort at the tactical level with the PRTs providing support when necessary. Because U.S. presence can be a destabilizing force within some communities, PRTs should limit their involvement to providing advice and access to U.S. development funding for projects, as needed. HNDTs should concentrate on conducting stability surveys, mobilizing the population to prioritize the community’s needs in a systematic way, and providing the community members with necessary training for follow-on infrastructure projects.

At the operational level, U.S. development experts work within key HN government development ministries. They advise the HN government departments, train civil servants, and act as liaisons between the U.S. chain of command and the HN government, as well as between the tactical development teams and central government. In addition, they advise the government on strategic messaging and help it navigate the complicated financial rules of U.S. funding. Just as tactical developers seek to gain the trust of the people at the community level, operational developers seek to gain the trust of HN government officials.

Phase 2: Build. This phase begins as the environment becomes more consistently secure and trust develops between the HNDTs and populace. At the tactical level, HNDTs continue to collect stability data, but their emphasis transitions to resolving the sources of instability using the previously collected and analyzed information. During this phase, HNDTs utilize the construction of new infrastructure projects as a vehicle for mentoring communities through the development process by training, advising, and monitoring the community’s efforts. HNDTs also begin to interact more frequently with experts from the political mission element in anticipation of the upcoming political thrust. Throughout this phase, PRTs continue to distance themselves from the day-to-day mission, and PRT expertise either moves from the tactical level to the operational, or prepares to move to the next community.

At the operational level, U.S. developers concentrate almost exclusively on building long-term capability. They emphasize their role as advisors rather than implementers and seek to transform tactical successes into broader government legitimacy by helping the government with its information operations. Former PRT members with unique development skills (for example, civil engineers, agricultural specialists) move from the tactical level to the relevant operational ministries, further increasing HN government capacity. At some point in this phase, the HN government should attain sufficient legitimacy and capability to act with minimal U.S. technical assistance.

Phase 3: Transfer. This phase must be an overall COIN decision, not just an economic development decision. It is the least complicated phase to explain but potentially the most difficult to complete. U.S. COIN planners, in conjunction with the HN government, should agree upon a timetable and criteria for an area’s readiness, as well as long-term U.S. commitments regarding advisors and financial resources.

Conclusion

In his 1963 book on COIN, David Galula conceded that some insurgencies simply could not be defeated, regardless of the COIN methods employed.35 This article may have created an impression that an economic development strategy that employs the four-phase model and the five principles of government legitimacy, mission synchronicity, simultaneous tactical and operational development, HN capacity-building, and responsiveness to local input is guaranteed to bring success. Unfortunately, it is not so. As Carl von Clausewitz warned years ago, wars are fought against living opponents with strategies and counterstrategies of their own, and they are fought in the context of complex factors that exist outside the counterinsurgent’s control.36 This is especially true when supporting another state’s counterinsurgency effort. The one truth U.S. COIN planners must keep in mind is that no amount of external U.S. assistance, modern firepower, development expertise, or sound political advice can save a country from eventual defeat if the HN refuses to govern legitimately. Consequently, the United States should invest more effort into evaluating the HN government, as well as the criticality of long-term U.S. objectives, before agreeing to augment another government’s COIN campaign.37

Nevertheless, when counterinsurgency operations on behalf of another government are required, planners must concentrate on building the HN’s capacity and legitimacy. COIN expertise and development projects do not matter if they fail to enable the HN to provide for the needs of its population and govern legitimately. Therefore, the United States should focus its efforts at the operational level as soon as possible. Developers must quickly extricate themselves from the tactical mission or else risk encouraging an unhealthy dependence within the HN government and a “recipient mentality” within the local population. Only when the HN government is required to meet the public’s needs will it be able to demonstrate the capability and persistence required to earn the trust of the population. The development model presented here is not guaranteed to generate COIN success, but utilizing the principles contained within it increases the probability that development can be an effective tool toward that end.

About the author
*Colonel Patrick H. Donley, USAF
, is a Security Forces Officer assigned as the J34 Division Chief overseeing Force Protection, Antiterrorism, and Critical Infrastructure Protection for Combined Forces Command and United States Forces Korea.

Source:
This article was published in the Joint Force Quarterly 81, which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes

1 David J. Kilcullen, “Three Pillars of Counterinsurgency,” remarks at the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Conference, Washington, DC, September 28, 2006, available at <www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/uscoin/3pillars_of_counterinsurgency.pdf>.

2 While many people have discussed government legitimacy as the key to counterinsurgency (COIN) success, Conrad Crane’s “COIN of the Realm? The Role and Importance of Legitimacy in Counterinsurgency,” a presentation at the Future Defense Dilemma Seminar of the 21st Century Initiative and the Strategic Studies Institute, April 2, 2008, was an excellent discussion on the topic.

3 David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 4.

4 Eliot Cohen et al., “Principles, Imperatives, and Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, March–April 2006, 49.

5 Authors differ in the terms they use for the building blocks of government legitimacy, but nearly all use terms that fall within these three general categories. Cohen et al., 49, cites “a culturally acceptable level or rate of political, economic, and social development” as one of their five key indicators of legitimacy. Galula discusses security, political, social, and economic measures as key enablers of popular support throughout his work; for instance, see Galula, 52, 54–55, 62–63, 84. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates defined counterinsurgency tasks as follows: “One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people. . . . these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.” See Robert M. Gates, Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, November 26, 2007, available at <www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/landonlect/gatestext1107.html>.

6 Kilcullen, 4–6.

7 U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication (MCWP) 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Headquarters Department of the Army and Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, December 15, 2006), foreword, available at <http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/Repository/Materials/COIN-FM3-24.pdf>.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., para. 5-7, page 5-3.

11 Ibid., 5-18.

12 Anthony Cordesman points out the following regarding U.S. COIN strategy: “The British have used the phrase: ‘Shape, clear, hold, and build’; while senior U.S. NSC [National Security Council] officials have used the term ‘Clear, hold, build, and transfer.’ None of these terms have yet been defined in detail, or in the form of clear operational plans and goals, and they would have to be implemented in different mixes and phases in virtually every major region and population center in Afghanistan.” Anthony Cordesman, “Shape, Clear, Hold, Build, and Transfer”: The Full Metrics of the Afghan War (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 18, 2010), slide 117. See also C. Christine Fair, “Obama’s New ‘Af-Pak’ Strategy: Can ‘Clear, Hold, Build, Transfer’ Work?” Asian Affairs: An American Review 37 (2010), 115, available at <http://home.comcast.net/~christine_fair/pubs/ClearHoldBuild_Fair.pdf>.

13 Kilcullen, 4.

14 See, for example, Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, Winning Hearts and Minds? Examining the Relationship Between Aid and Security in Afghanistan (Medford, MA: Feinstein International Center, January 2012), 67–71, available at <http://fic.tufts.edu/assets/WinningHearts-Final.pdf>; Andrew Wilder and Stuart Gordon, “Money Can’t Buy America Love,” Foreign Policy, December 1, 2009, available at <www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/01/money_cant_buy_america_love>; David Kilcullen, Greg Mills, and Jonathan Oppenheimer, “Quiet Professionals: The Art of Post-Conflict Economic Recovery and Reconstruction,” RUSI Journal 156, no. 4 (August–September 2011), 101. See also Eli Berman, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Joseph H. Felter, “Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq,” Journal of Political Economy 119, no. 4 (August 2011), 766–819, available at <www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661983>.

15 Fishstein and Wilder, 41–50; Kilcullen, Mills, and Oppenheimer, 102.

16 Wilder and Gordon; Fishstein and Wilder, 67–68.

17 Wilder and Gordon.

18 “Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Afghanistan: Assessing the Effectiveness of Development Aid in COIN Operations,” Wilton Park Conference Report (WP1022), March 11–14, 2010, 2, available at <www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp1022-report.pdf>.

19 Ibid., 2.

20 Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Handbook No. 09-27 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned, April 2009); Fishstein and Wilder, 59; Wilton Park Conference Report, 3.

21 According to the Wilton Park Conference Report, “Researchers and practitioners described ways in which aid had been used effectively to legitimise interactions between international forces and local communities (i.e., ‘to get a foot in the door’), which had proven useful in terms of developing relationships, and gathering atmospherics and intelligence. But these were relatively short-term transactional relationships, and there was little evidence of more strategic level effects of populations being won over to the government as a result of development aid,” 2.

22 Trevor Hublin, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) field worker, interview by author, February 4, 2012; Mohammed Ehsan Zia, former Afghan Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, interview by author, January 30, 2012.

23 Daniel Weggeland, “Civil Partnering: Enabling Afghan Civil Government Assumption of Risk and Responsibility,” Special Report for the International Security Assistance Force Commander, Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team, Kabul, August 2011, 3.

24 This is a general rule of thumb and an oversimplification. It is not meant to suggest that the COIN effort will progress in a smooth, unidirectional fashion from start to finish or that mission elements have only one period of primary emphasis. There are times when unforeseen complexities will force the counterinsurgent to return to a previous phase or spike the influence of a particular mission element outside the normal period so as to deal with a particular contingency.

25 According to Cohen et al., “The cornerstone of any COIN effort is security for the populace. Without security, no permanent reforms can be implemented, and disorder will spread,” 50. Similarly, Galula stated, “Political, social, economic, and other reforms, however much they ought to be wanted and popular, are inoperative when offered while the insurgent still controls the population,” 55.

26 Ibid., 4.

27 General David Petraeus made the following observation, “[T]he liberating force must act quickly, because every Army of liberation has a half-life beyond which it turns into an Army of occupation. The length of this half-life is tied to the perceptions of the populace about the impact of the liberating force’s activities. From the moment a force enters a country, its leaders must keep this in mind, striving to meet the expectations of the liberated in what becomes a race against the clock.” David H. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq,” Military Review, January–February 2006, 3, emphasis in original.

28 Hublin, interview. In Afghanistan, USAID is seeking to implement the District Stability Framework and its successor program, Stability in Key Areas, an approach that trains and utilizes host-nation personnel to collect data on sources of instability. See USAID, Office of Military Affairs, “District Stability Framework: Social Science Underpinnings of Complex Operations, MORS Mini-Symposium,” PowerPoint Presentation, October 18–21, 2010, George Mason University. According to an unpublished report from Hublin, the Tactical Conflict Assessment and Planning Framework was administered effectively by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development Rapid Deployment Teams. In his report, Hublin stated, “[Local] citizenry openness in passing information to the [Afghan] Stabilization Team throughout the week was the single most important factor contributing to its success.” Trevor Hublin, “Stabilizing Rural Areas of Afghanistan: A Proposed Model for National and Provincial Partnership with the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, Farah Province Case Study,” October–November 2009, unpublished report, 9.

29 Ronald E. Neumann, “The Hole in the Whole of Government Needs Leadership and Learning Organizations,” unpublished paper, 5.

30 “Nowhere to Turn: The Failure to Protect Civilians in Afghanistan,” Joint Briefing Paper by 29 Aid Organizations Working in Afghanistan for the NATO Heads of Government Summit, Lisbon, November 19–20, 2010, 19, available at <www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bn-nowhere-to-turn-afghanistan-191110-en.pdf>; Michael Young, “Development at Gunpoint? Why Civilians Must Reclaim Stabilization Aid,” Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2010, available at <www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67052/michael-young/development-at-gunpoint?page=show>; Fishstein and Wilder, 48.

31 Wilton Park Conference Report, 15.

32 Hublin, interview; Zia, interview; Fishstein and Wilder, 46–47.

33 According to the National Solidarity Programme’s (NSP’s) Weekly Status Report from December 3–9, 2011, the program has mobilized 28,745 communities, presided over the election and training of over 28,521 Community Development Councils, and funded 47,721 community-selected subprojects worth over $964,000,000 since its inception in 2002. Moreover, the approach increases popular ownership over a project and builds long-term partnership capacity at the tactical level. Marwa Mitra, NSP, email to author, January 29, 2012, “National Solidarity Programme Weekly Status Report,” Kabul, Afghanistan, January 21–27, 2012. Especially impressive is the fact that the NSP has achieved these results when the maximum dollar amount for any village is $60,000. The NSP is not designed as a rapidly deployable program but a deliberately planned program that takes 2 years from initiation to project completion. A modified version of this program that can immediately respond to post-kinetic situations could create the conditions for longer term development and stability.

34 Among others, see Hamish Nixon, Subnational State Building in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit Synthesis Paper Series, April 2008, 38; Friedrich W. Affolter et al., “Transformative Learning and Mind-Change in Rural Afghanistan,” Development in Practice 19, no. 3 (May 2009), 326; Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program has Reached Thousands of Afghan Communities, but Faces Challenges that Could Limit Outcomes, SIGAR Audit-11-8 Economic and Social Development/NSP (Washington, DC: SIGAR, March 22, 2011), ii; Gregory Warner, “The Schools the Taliban Won’t Torch,” Washington Monthly, December 2007, available at <www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0712.warner.html>; John A. Nagl, Andrew M. Exum, and Ahmed A. Humayun, A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The National Solidarity Program (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, March 2009); Andrew Wilder, “Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan,” Middle East Institute, April 20, 2012, available at <www.mei.edu/content/losing-hearts-and-minds-afghanistan>; Paul Fitzgerald et al., Introduction to Afghanistan, 1979–2009: In the Grip of Conflict (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 2009), 143–146, available at <www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Publications/Detail/?ots777=0c54e3b3-1e9c-be1e-2c24-a6a8c7060233&lng=en&id=110391>.

35 At the end of his book, Galula concedes the following: “Is it always possible to defeat an insurgency? This work, through a common intellectual accident, may have given the impression that the answer is a strong affirmative. . . . Obviously, it is not always possible to defeat an insurgency,” 96.

36 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75–78, 85–86, 89.

37 For an interesting discussion on the topic of partnership evaluation, see Michael C. Veneri, “The Partner Predicament: U.S. Building Partnership Capacity, the War on Terrorism and What the U.S. Cannot Overlook,” Synesis 2 (2011), available at <www.synesisjournal.com/vol2_g/2011_2_G7-17_Veneri.pdf>.

Latin American Agriculture To Drive Growth And Food Security

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Latin America can significantly boost food production to become a global “breadbasket” while driving sustainable and inclusive growth for the region, according to leaders meeting Friday at the World Economic Forum on Latin America.

Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina, noted that the region will play a key role in feeding a global population that will reach 9 billion by 2050. The region’s abundant natural resources – including 28% of the world’s arable land and one-third of its freshwater supplies – will help meet growing global demand. “Argentina is a leader in food production, and we are prepared to support Colombia’s agricultural development through technology transfer and other means,” he said.

Colombia is prioritizing agriculture as a key pillar of its post-conflict development strategy to provide sustainable livelihoods in rural areas, said Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia. “We will significantly invest in rural areas, with more roads, infrastructure and financial support for smallholder farmers in the post-conflict regions, with policies aimed to benefit all Colombians,” he said.

In working discussions at the event, four governments committed to develop and advance public-private partnerships in the agricultural sector linked to the World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture (NVA) initiative.

Mexico will advance progress of the VIDA partnership, which engages 40 companies with the government to increase sustainable production of four commodities, engaging thousands of smallholder farmers. The partnership works to support and empower producers through policy alignment, capacity building and financing, and is expected to mobilize over $100 million in private-sector investment in 2016.

Nicaragua announced the launch of the CultiVamos partnership, championed by government, business and academic institutions, with an initial focus on three commodities, plus improving irrigation and insurance, with a goal of benefiting smallholder farmers.

Colombia announced that it will join the New Vision for Agriculture initiative and strengthen private-sector engagement in the Colombia Siembra programme, which focuses on expanding production of 11 key commodities.

Argentina confirmed that public-private partnerships are a key tool for further boosting its productivity, and committed to work with private-sector partners to further develop this agenda.

The private sector is ready to expand its role as a partner for sustainable agricultural development, according to Svein Tore Holsether, President and Chief Executive Officer of Yara International. “We have committed significant investment in Latin America as well as other regions, in order to support countries in sustainably developing their agriculture sectors. Through the New Vision for Agriculture, all stakeholders can join this effort, and I look forward to seeing concrete progress when we meet again next year,” he said.

The World Economic Forum committed to join the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to support this agenda. “We look forward to supporting Latin American and global partners in working together to expand public-private partnership for sustainable and inclusive agricultural development,” said Lisa Dreier, Head of Food Security and Agriculture Initiatives at the World Economic Forum.

Putin Seeks Closer Europe Ties As Economy Falters

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By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday (17 June) said he was willing to reach out to Europe to mend relations shattered by the Ukraine crisis but insisted the West was responsible for the bad blood.

Putin was making a pitch at Russia’s major annual economic forum in Saint Petersburg to improve business ties with Europe, as Moscow desperately tries to breathe life into its recession-hit economy battered by Western sanctions.

“European business wants and is ready to work with our country. European politicians need to reach out to business, to show wisdom, far-sightedness and flexibility,” said Putin.

“We remember how all this started. Russia did not initiate today’s collapse,” he added.

“We hold no grudge and are willing to reach out to our European partners but obviously this can’t be a one-sided game.”

Russia’s energy-driven economy is locked in its longest slump since Putin came to power over 16 years ago, caused by both Western sanctions and plunging oil prices.

Crimea sanctions renewed

As Putin was talking news emerged that the European Union had rolled over for another year sanctions adopted in response to Moscow’s March 2014 annexation of Crimea, which prohibit the EU from doing business on the peninsula.

Sources in Brussels say that broader economic sanctions over a pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine that have hit Russia’s financial sector could be extended by the EU as early as next week ahead of their expiration at the end of July.

Russia in August 2014 introduced an embargo on a raft of food from the West in retaliation for the sanctions.

Speaking to EurActiv.com, Russian Ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov, said that – to his direct knowledge – Juncker and Putin did not discuss sanctions because “that is not in our agenda”.

“It is a problem the Europeans created and when they solve it they know where to find us”.

Putin, in his speech, said, “In my talks with French and German businessmen I see they want to cooperate with our country. Russia did not initiate downfall of our relations.”

Asked about the current version of a ‘Cold War’ between the West and Russia, Putin said, “I would like to think nobody interested in that, for sure not us, no need for that.”

“Negotiations are difficult but this is the only way to reach acceptable solutions,” he added.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who sat next to Putin on the stage, came to the economic forum with a large delegation of businessmen.

He pointed out that the spiral of tit-for-tat measures have hit European producers.

“The sanctions and those put in place in reprisal negatively affect both Russian and European companies,” he said in an interview with TASS news agency. “Both sides suffer.”

Speaking on Thursday at the forum the head of the EU commission Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia that the economic sanctions would not be dropped until Russia fully implemented a peace deal to end the conflict in east Ukraine that the West blames on Moscow.

“The next step is clear: full implementation of the agreement – no more, no less,” Juncker told Russia’s main economic forum ahead of a meeting with Putin.

“This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed.”

The Juncker-Putin meeting – their first in Russia since the EU imposed sanctions – had sparked Kremlin hopes it might signal the start of a return to business-as-usual with the bloc.

Putin, who has previously insisted that the worst of Russia’s economic crisis is over, said he was targeting a return to growth rates of “no lower than four percent”.

But Russia’s gross domestic product shrank by some 3.7 percent last year and the IMF predicts its economy will contract by 1.5 percent this year before experiencing modest growth in 2017.

On Syria, Putin asked, “Do we want to replace an undemocratic regime by another? We need to use democratic tools.”

“Process will be difficult”, nothing will happen easily…, “ he added. The Russian leader suggested that President Assad was also committed to the political process, in drafting a new constitution and then holding parliamentary elections, saying, “We talked about that and Assad agreed to that, under control of the UN.

“There is nothing bad about that,” Putin concluded.

Trump talented?

When asked if he still held to his opinion that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was “talented”, Putin paused – to laughter from the audience – and replied, “I just said [in the past] he is bright person, isn’t he?”

“I welcome that he wanted to restore US-Russia relations, don’t we want that?”

“The US is a great power, right now maybe only superpower, and we accept that.”

“The world need a country as strong as the US is, but not that interferes in our affairs or EU-Russia relations”

Why Did Obama Receive Dalai Lama Through White House’s Back Door? – OpEd

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US President Barrack Obama hosted the Dalai Lama at the White House on June 15. Even before the meeting, China conveyed it’s displeasure and warned President Obama that his hosting of the Dalai Lama would “damage mutual trust and cooperation” between China and the US.

Since assuming the position of President, Obama had previously hosted the Dalai Lama three times. Each time, China has objected.

Instead of telling China firmly that he would meet the Dalai Lama, President Obama received the Dalai Lama on June 15 into the White House through the back door. President Obama has tried to keep the meeting without undue publicity and held the meeting behind the closed doors.  Obama met the Dalai Lama in the Map Room instead of in the Oval office and he took care to ensure that the press would not be invited. Obviously Mr. Obama wanted to keep the news about his meeting the Dalai Lama as secret to the extent possible and to ensure that the photographs of the meeting and the images would not be flashed around the world.

It is surprising that the President of USA, which claims itself to the torch bearer of freedom and pledged supporter for the cause of liberty and human dignity, does not have the courage to stand up to China and tell China in clear terms that the Dalai Lama has been sinned against and has not sinned.

Does President Obama lack courage of conviction?

The above incident highlights the fact that for President Obama, the commercial and business relations with China are more important than the cause of freedom. In other words, it makes one suspect that US would not hesitate to compromise with it’s commitments to the cause of free democracy, when it’s commercial and business interests are involved. Many may think that this is hypocrisy and also suspect that President Obama may lack the courage of conviction.

Is China afraid of the Dalai Lama?

The ground reality is that Chinese forces forcibly entered into Tibet and occupied Tibetan territory and forced the Dalai Lama to flee the country. China has forcibly made Tibet as one of the provinces of China, and Tibet is no more an independent country in the world map. The USA strongly condemned the occupation of Tibet by China, but practically has done nothing beyond this to help Tibetans gain freedom and independence, so that the glory of Tibet can be restored.

Now, thousands of Tibetan refugees are living around the world and new generation of Tibetans living in other countries have not touched Tibetan soil or felt the Tibetan spirit. Obviously, China wants to erase any memory about Tibet everywhere in the world and therefore, when anyone would recognize the importance of the Dalai Lama, China objects and threatens.

Why is China objecting so strongly and vehemently about President Obama receiving the Dalai Lama in the present condition, where Tibet is firmly under the control of China and there is no likelihood of Dalai Lama entering Tibet again?

Today, there are pockets of protest in China, however feeble it may be, by people who are demanding freedom and democracy. The memory of Tiananman Square protest has not vanished. China has a reasonably strong economy and mighty military power, but it is still scared about the clamor for freedom and protests against suppression of individual liberty. Chinese leadership is well aware of the fact that it is sitting on a volcano of demand for freedom and eruptions may happen anytime.

Many Chinese citizens do harbor the internal embers of an explosion that continues to burn beneath conscious awareness about the craving for personal liberty.

The Dalai Lama carries the image around the world that he is a victim of China’s aggression and in the process, he has come to represent a thought that so long as the Dalai Lama would not get his rightful place in Tibet, the concept of liberty in the world would remain unrealized.

The Dalai Lama, who is a peaceful man, may be strengthening the clamor for liberty amongs Chinese citizens by his very presence.

Is Chinese leadership afraid of the Dalai Lama, a man who carries no arms, possesses no army, but has only the moral strength that a victim of violence and force will possess?

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