By Jeffrey H. Anderson*

The part of Obamacare that has raised premiums the most is its “community rating” mandate. That mandate effectively bans the traditional understanding of insurance, which dates back at least to the Renaissance. Insurance has always been something that one must buy before the thing happens that one is protecting against. Under Obamacare’s method of protecting those with preexisting conditions, that is no longer true. The result is the health-care equivalent of letting someone buy homeowners insurance—at no higher cost—after his or her house is already on fire, or life insurance from one’s deathbed. The predictable result is skyrocketing premiums, which we have seen under Obamacare.

Premiums in the individual market under Obamacare have risen 40 percent over the past two years. On average, according to Obamacare supporter Charles Gaba, for every $100 that an Obamacare plan cost in 2015, it cost $112 in 2016 (a 12 percent increase) and costs $140 this year (another 25 percent increase). So, on average, a plan that cost $7,500 just two years ago now costs $10,500.

Yet the link is not often made between Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections, which are frequently touted as one of the great benefits of the legislation and are allegedly popular, and Obamacare’s soaring premiums, which are unquestionably unpopular. It has been hard to know, therefore, what Americans would think of Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections if they understood the link between those protections and rising costs.

A new poll by McLaughlin & Associates, commissioned by Hudson Institute, sheds some light on this matter. It finds that, when the link is made between Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections and higher premiums, Americans prefer lower premiums to such protections.

The poll (which included 36% Democrats and 33% Republicans) asked the following question (PDF and crosstabs here):

Some say Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions protections, which now let people wait until they’re sick to buy insurance, are a good thing, while others say that’s like buying homeowners insurance while your house is on fire and this is the main reason why Obamacare premiums have gone up 40% over the past two years. Which of the following would you prefer most?

1. The current Obamacare pre-existing conditions protections remain unchanged
2. Lower health insurance premiums
3. Different pre-existing conditions protections that don’t raise premiums as much
4. Unsure

A plurality of respondents (37%) said they would prefer lower premiums. Respondents were split about evenly between whether they would prefer to keep Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections (27%) or substitute different preexisting-conditions protections that wouldn’t raise premiums as much (26%). (Independents also preferred lower premiums (37%), and they preferred different protections (28%) to Obamacare’s protections (20%).)

Thus, the poll finds that Americans favor lower premiums (with or without preexisting-conditions protections) over Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections, by a tally of more than 2-to-1: 63% to 27%. Among independents, that margin is more than 3-to-1: 65 to 20%.

At the same time, the poll finds that Americans prefer preexisting-conditions protections (whether Obamacare’s or different ones) over lower premiums without preexisting-conditions protections, by a tally of 53% to 37%.

It seems clear, then—based on the poll’s results—that Americans do want preexisting-conditions protections, but they do not want Obamacare’s preexisting-conditions protections if those lead to significantly higher premiums, which they unquestionably do. Indeed, even the Obama White House said that if the individual mandate were eliminated or rendered ineffective, Obamacare’s “community rating” mandate (coupled with “guaranteed issue”) would make health insurance “cost prohibitive,” “would lead to double digit premium increases,” and “would significantly increase the cost [of] health care spending nationwide.”

As Stephanie Cutter wrote on the White House blog in 2011,

“We don’t let people wait until after they’ve been in a car accident to apply for auto insurance and get reimbursed, and we don’t want to do that with healthcare. If we’re going to outlaw discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, the only way to keep people from gaming the system and raising costs on everyone else is to ensure that everyone takes responsibility for their own health insurance.”

Experience has subsequently shown that even with Obamacare’s unprecedented individual mandate in effect, this “gaming” and those “double digit premium increases” have occurred.

What would “different pre-existing conditions protections that don’t raise premiums as much” look like? Hudson Institute’s “An Alternative to Obamacare,” which I authored, describes such commonsense protections as follows:

“First, no one should be dropped from their existing health insurance, or have their premiums or other costs increased, on the basis of a health condition….

“Second, there should be a one-year buy-in-period for young adults who are looking to buy health insurance on their own for the first time, during which time they would be exempted from paying more…due to preexisting conditions….

“Third, parents should be granted a similar one-year buy-in-period for newborns, during which time they couldn’t be denied insurance for their child, or be charged more, because the child was born with, or had quickly acquired, a preexisting condition….

“Fourth…[those] who have maintained continuous employer-sponsored coverage (for a period of at least a year), but then lose access to that coverage, should be able to transition to a plan in the individual market—one of their own choosing—without paying higher premiums because of a preexisting condition. They should have a two-month grace-period between the time they leave a job…and the time they buy insurance through the individual market, during which time this protection would apply….

“Fifth…those who have remained continuously insured in the individual market (again, for at least a year) could switch to a different plan—either with their existing insurer or another—that provides the same, or a lower, level of coverage (with such classifications to be determined by the states), without paying more because of a preexisting condition….

“Sixth, $7.5 billion a year (with a 3 percent annual increase following year-1) in federal funding should be allotted for state-run “high risk” pools….No one could be denied affordable coverage through such high-risk pooling, no matter how unhealthy he or she might be.”

Such commonsense provisions would give Americans preexisting-conditions protections that don’t send premiums through the roof. The McLaughlin & Associates polling suggests that this is what Americans want.

About the author:
*Jeffrey H. Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Before moving to Hudson, Anderson co-founded the 2017 Project with William Kristol and ran it as Executive Director throughout its nearly two-and-a-half-year run (from early 2013 through the summer of 2015).

Source:
This article was published by the Hudson Institute

Pope Francis could meet with President Donald Trump at the end of May.

The British newspaper The Tablet, citing diplomatic sources, said the two will meet during President Trump’s visit to Italy.

Trump will go to the G7 summit of world leaders meeting held May 26-27 in Taorima, Sicily.

The president and the Pope have sometimes been put at odds.

During a Feb. 18, 2016 in-flight press conference, Reuters reporter Philip Pullella asked the Pope to respond to Donald Trump’s immigration stand.

Pope Francis answered: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.”

The pontiff added he would “give the benefit of the doubt” to the political candidate.

One week prior, Trump had bashed Pope Francis as a “pawn” for the Mexican government and “a very political person” who does not understand the problems of the United States.

Holy See spokesman Father Federico Lombardi on Feb. 19 told Vatican Radio that the Pope’s comment “was never intended to be, in any way, a personal attack or an indication of how to vote” and had repeated a longstanding theme of his papacy, bridge-building.

The U.S. bishops have responded critically to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders. One bars refugee admissions for 120 days and places an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees. It bars visa permissions for seven predominantly Muslim countries on the terror watch list and restrictions on refugees for 90 days.

The executive orders, which are facing legal challenges, also cap refugees at 50,000, compared to the 2016 cap of 117,000 and actual admitted refugees, who numbered 85,000 last year.

The Pope has made refugee assistance a key focus of his papacy and has temporarily named himself head of the refugee and migration section of the new Vatican Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development.

Father Michael Czerny, secretary of the dicastery, told CNA that the Holy See plans for the U.S. bishops to be its first line of communication and engagement with the U.S. government on immigration and refugee issues.

“They’re responding very well,” Fr. Czerny said of the bishops. “And for the moment, they’re the people to listen to on this issue.”

Other positions of the new president could have a bearing on U.S. relations with the Holy See.

While President Trump previously favored legal abortion, as a candidate he campaigned on promises he would support pro-life policy goals and he re-instated a policy barring federal funds for overseas organizations that promote or perform abortion.

Although President Trump was a deeply controversial presidential candidate, his surprise victory in November took place with significant Catholic support.

According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of exit polls by NBCnews.com and CNN.com, Trump secured 52 percent of Catholic voters, including 60 percent of non-Hispanic white Catholics. He lost Hispanic Catholic voters to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a margin of 67-26, though this was an improvement over 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s performance among the same demographic.

While most political parties in Serbia, including the ruling Progressives, have yet to name their candidates for April’s presidential elections, Sasa Jankovic officially launched his presidential campaign on Tuesday.

“In the name of the citizens, I want to be the president of Serbia as the protector of all of us,” Jankovic said.

As Ombudsman, he has crossed swords with the Serbian authorities on many occasions.

He made it clear several months ago that he will run for the presidency after a number of writers, artists and public figures urged him to stand in November.

He has also received support from two opposition parties, the New Party, led by Zoran Zivkovic, and the Democratic Party. Together, these two parties won about six per cent of the votes in last April’s general election.

But in recent months he has been accused by pro-government media and activists of using his public office for his personal political campaign, although he denied this.

“I will run to bring back the smile, the dignity and the future of Serbia,” he wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

Analysts have suggested that Jankovic could count on the backing of many voters who are not party-affiliated.

However an opinion poll published last week by Faktor Plus agency suggested he could count on around eight per cent of the vote, and would be soundly beaten by any candidate backed by the ruling Progressive Party.

Jankovic announced that he would resign on Monday at an event marking the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the Ombudsman’s office in Serbia.

“Serbia now has an institution. Institutions are things that preserve the dignity of citizens, so preserve them. Protect the Ombudsman’s office, we will need it, as I’ve finished my mission here,” he said.

When he first said he would running for the presidency, in December, Jankovic also hinted that the current ruling parties had undermined the rule of law and the constitution.

“For citizens, it would be the worst for Serbia to enter the EU as it is, without the rule of law and with a corrupted, silenced media and devastated institutions,” he said at the time.

In recent years he has had a series of differences with the Progressive Party-led authorities.

He came under fire in January 2015 after he filed criminal charges against two military policemen on suspicion that they had attacked members of a special police unit, the Gendarmerie, while on duty.

The incident occurred during the Belgrade Pride march in September 2014 when members of the Gendarmerie clashed with two members of the military police, along with Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic’s brother, Andrej Vucic, and Predrag Mali, brother of Belgrade mayor Sinisa Mali.

Jankovic also caused controversy when he stated in a report last year that the Belgrade police had refused to respond to calls from people who saw around 30 masked men armed with baseball bats and equipped with diggers tearing down buildings on the Belgrade riverbank and allegedly beating up local residents.

The government has shrugged aside accusations that the diggers went in to clear the terrain for the controversial Belgrade Waterfront redevelopment project.

Jankovic crossed swords with the government again in November 2016 when he imposed oversight measures over police in the south-western town of Novi Pazar who had refused to execute court judgments ordering the demolition of illegally-erected buildings.

By Harish Venugopalan*

In the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th centuries, colonialist countries divided Somalia into five parts—the United Kingdom (UK) took two parts while Italy, Ethiopia and France took one each. The Somalis fought for independence from all the colonial powers. Northern and Southern Somalia gained independence on 26 June 1960 and 01 July 1960, respectively. All parts of Somalia would eventually form a Greater Somalia.^[i]

From 1960 until 1969, Somalia was a democratic state. Through a coup d’etat in 1969, Siyad Barre came to power. Barre forged close ties with the Soviet Union, which provided aid to Somalia throughout the 1970s. Trouble started when Barre attempted to take back the Ogaden Somali territory from Ethiopia and the Soviets decided to back Ethiopia. This enraged Barre, resulting in Somalia and the Soviet Union severing their ties. Consequently, the United States (US) became close to Somalia. The US gave Somalia foreign aid for military technology, amounting to US $163.5 million between 1980 and 1988, and four times that for economic development.

By the late 1980s, after the Ogaden war, Barre’s policies in the north resulted in discontent amongst the Isaaq clan. (There are five major clans in Somalia—the Isaaq, Darood, Digil and Mirifle, Dir, and Hawiye—and various smaller clans.^[ii]) The Isaaq were the largest northern clan, and they felt isolated from the current politics and state resources. Some moves, such as resettling of Ogaden refugees in northern areas, were seen as southern attempts to subvert northern interests. There was an uprising against Barre, led by the northern Isaaq clan, and in response, Barre ordered bombings of northern towns, villages and even rural encampments. Gradually, the uprisings would spread to the southern areas, and in 1992 Barre was forced to flee.^[iii] Somalia’s defeat in the war led to a bitter blame-game. This ultimately resulted in uprisings against him.^[iv]

Chaos in Somalia after Barre

As a result, Siyad Barre fled Mogadishu in January 1991. Troops commanded by Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid pursued Siyad Barre, while Ali Mahdi Mohamed, who was a wealthy Mogadishu businessman, declared himself the new president and formed a government. In the north, the Isaaq clans formed an independent Somaliland. Ali Mahdi’s claims to power were not recognised by groups beyond his own control.^[v]

As a result of the power struggle between the two warring clan lords, Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohamed, thousands of Somali civilians were killed and wounded. By 1992, an estimated 350,000 Somali people had died due to disease, starvation or as direct casualties of the civil war. Following this, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approved a military mission called ‘Operation Restoration Hope’, entrusting the US with the task of protecting the food shipments from the warlords. However, the US got involved in entanglements with local groups.

In 1993, Somali rebels shot down two US helicopters, killing 18 US Army rangers and one Malaysian UN soldier. A severe battle followed, which claimed the lives of hundreds of Somali civilians. In 1994, the US formally ended its mission in Somalia, which had cost the US $1.7 billion and left 43 American soldiers dead and 153 injured.^[vi]

The United Nations Operations in Somalia (UNOSOM), which was a more well-developed move to bring about stability to the country, instead of achieving its target, entered into a conflict with the powerful warlord, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid. The UNOSOM failed, and left Somalia in a permanent state of collapse and war.^[vii] Somalis suffered heavily under Aidid’s reign and from subsequent fighting among warlords. Following Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid’s assassination, Hussain Farah Aidid took over.^[viii] However, this did not result in a stable administration.

It was only in 1999, through a conference sponsored by the Republic of Djibouti, that assistance was given to Somali civil society groups, after which the negotiating parties came to an agreement that paved the way for the Transitional National Government (TNG). While this could have been a turning point in Somali history, the TNG failed, mainly due to the incompetence and greed of its leaders combined with the relentless attempts of Ethiopia and its allies to undermine the agreement.^[ix]

Over a period of 16 years, Somalia had 14 failed attempts at forming a government. One of the fundamental problems was that the TNG was dominated by Mogadishu-based clans, especially the Hawiye/Haber Gedir/Ayr sub clans, and thus was not a national unity government. It faced opposition in the form of a loose coalition of clans called Somali Reconciliation and Rehabilitation Council (SRRC), which was backed by Ethiopia. The SRRC’s leader was Abdullahi Yusuf, president of the autonomous state of Puntland in northeast Somalia. ^[x]

In the second half of the ’90s, commercial opportunities opened up in Somalia. While businessmen had to pay security to the militia, they did not receive substantial security in return. This frustrated them, and thus, they surreptitiously paid the militiamen and ensured that the gunmen were under the command of the local Sharia courts. The Sharia militia became a reputed security source, more reliable than the warlords’ groups. The TNG government which was formed in 2000 ensured that the Sharia militias declined temporarily as the business groups also shifted their support to the new government.  After the TNG failed, the businessmen formed huge private security forces to protect their assets. These private groups became the most powerful militias in Mogadishu, unchallenged until 2006.^[xi]

Eventually, the TNG was forced into accepting the peace conference sponsored by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The chief directors of the conference were Kenya and Ethiopia. They chose to form a tactical alliance with the warlords. This resulted in the emergence of a new government led by the warlords in 2004. Ethiopia, through its influence, was able to dictate the choice of president and prime minister to their advantage.^[xii] The old SSRC coalition was fiercely anti-Islamic in nature and based outside Mogadishu. On the other hand, the Mogadishu-based coalition was supported by the Arab world, had an anti-Ethiopian attitude and contained Islamists in its alliance. It preferred a strong unity government rather than a federalist state and was dominated by the Hawiye clan.

The IGAD made another attempt to bring about peace in 2002. In the past, it was common practice to decide which clan would control what territories. Due to continuous pressure from the IGAD in general and Ethiopia in particular, there was success in the form of a 275-member parliament in August and the 4.5 formula in September 2004.^[xiii] According to the 4.5 formula, an equal number of places were allocated to each of the four major clans and half the places that were allotted to a clan were allocated to minorities and women.^[xiv]

In October 2004, Abdullahi Yusuf from the Mijerteen/Darood clan was selected as president of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Yusuf was also president of the autonomous state of Puntland in northeast Somalia and a close ally of Ethiopia. Yusuf made Mohammed Ghedi his prime minister. Ghedi, too, had very good relations with Ethiopia. The 82-member Cabinet that Ghedi formed, though it followed the 4.5 pattern, was made up of supporters of the SRRC alliance. The TNG was virtually isolated with people associated with it getting no substantial positions. Moreover, there were charges of corruption that insinuated that votes of MPs were purchased using Ethiopian money.

Peace Process: An Analysis

The Kenyan peace process failed because the root causes of the conflict were not properly addressed—and for this, both the Somali groups and the ineffective international mediators were responsible. Some of the militia leaders refused to sit in the same room as the TFG cabinet. The opposition was rigid and refused to consider any capital outside Mogadishu, causing a deadlock. Compounding the problem was the domination of the Hawiye clan in Mogadishu, as the clan assumed that its capture of the city gave them total rights to govern the country. Hence they were resistant to give up power. This was partly the reason the Mogadishu group was so vehemently against federalism in Somalia.

Further, direct attempts were made by the Mogadishu group to sabotage the peace process. Baidoa was captured by two Mogadishu groups to prevent the relocation of parliament to Baidoa. This was a clear breach of the cessation of violations clause signed by all the groups. The role of international actors, such as Ethiopia in the manipulations during the power transition process, was clear.  The United Nations Development Program, the EC and the World Bank were too quick in recognising Yusuf’s authority, without criticising him for his manipulations. This amounted to taking sides.^[xv]

The militant group Al-Shabaab (‘The Youth’) was engaged in a dirty game of political assassinations in Mogadishu, against Somalis who were suspected of having links with the TFG. At least three assassination attempts were made on Yusuf and Ghedi in 2005. By mid-2005, the SCIC was the strongest political and military force in Mogadishu.

A missed opportunity was the failure of the civic system that emerged from the Mogadishu Security and Stabilization Plan (MSSP) in 2015. This was a loose alliance that consisted of some major political figures from the Hawiye clan, especially from the Ayr sub-clan; Hawiye warlords including some in the TFG ministry; many leading business people in the country; and civil society groups.

The support provided by the women’s groups and civil society brought a temporary sense of security and freedom to Somalia. The Islamists, militia and the political elite worked together to ensure that the movement was destroyed. It was easy for them, since the civil society groups were unorganised and gradually lost momentum.

 The Unnecessary Conflict

Among Southern Somali conflicts, the one between Mogadishu’s Islamists and the US-backed alliance for the restoration of peace and counterterrorism was the most unexpected and unnecessary. It exacerbated the prevailing situation. By October 2005, the TFG had weakened considerably. A conflict between the Islamists and a Hawiye landlord Musa Sude, over the control of a municipal administration, had the potential to create a huge rift between the warlords and the Islamists. The US government had apprehensions about Somalia serving as a safety haven for Al-Qaeda operatives. The bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998 had increased their fears. Since there were no local governments, the US decided to forge alliances with locals, including a few warlords. However, this did not have the desired effect of weeding out the Al-Qaeda operatives.

In February 2006, a group of nine Hawiye clan militia leaders and businessmen announced the formation of the “Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism.” But within weeks, conflict broke out. Ironically, the conflict did not start as an Alliance-Islamist rivalry but as a pre-existing feud over property and control over a private seaport between two businessmen on the opposing sides. This quickly became a bigger war. In the three-month war, the Islamic front won almost every battle, and by June, they had taken over almost the entire capital. By September, they had control over areas from Puntland in the north to the Kenyan border in the south. The TFG had a hold over Baidoa and the surrounding areas. The Islamists reorganised themselves as Council of Islamic Courts (CIC).

In the first few months, the CIC did well. They managed to obtain support from the Somali diaspora, emerged as the strongest military and political force in the country and increased their financial and military resources. They also got the support of the international community, which applied pressure on the TFG to enter into a dialogue with the CIC to form a government. They managed to open the seaport after 11 years and Mogadishu’s international airport after 10 years. These were considerable achievements by the CIC,^[xvi] and caused the demoralisation of the opposing forces, including the TFG, Puntland and Somaliland. Ethiopian forces and radicalisation from within were the only dangers they faced.^[xvii]

From June 2006 to December 2006, the debate was about whether the CIC was controlled by the moderates or the hardliners. The leadership consisted of an uneasy partnership between Sheikh Sharif, a moderate, and Hassan Dahir Aweys, a hardliner. There were complications in bringing about talks between the TFG and the moderates in CIC, because both the hardliners and Ethiopia were opposed to the talks.^[xviii] Moreover, while the US insisted that they contained intelligence reports of a small number of Al-Qaeda suspects in the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombing cases being given refuge by Al-Shabaab, the CIC denied these allegations. Aweys even adopted a derisive and dismissive tone. Consequently, the US gave a green signal for the Ethiopians to attack.^[xix]

It could be said that the moderates vs. hardliners debate was a bit overplayed. Many CIC supporters insisted that Aweys had abandoned his jihadist agenda and had become a political moderate. Some Somalis also maintain that Al-Qaeda operatives were not given refuge in Somalia. However, even assuming these claims to be true, an efficient leadership attempting to bring a country out of chaos should not have taken a mocking tone to a superpower, whose intelligence units insisted that Al-Qaeda operatives were taking refuge in Somalia.^[xx]

Ethiopia Comes In

On 24 December 2006, Ethiopia launched an attack against the CIC, simultaneously in Central Somalia and in the Bay region near Bedoa. Following this, the general expectation was that the CIC would start a guerrilla war in Mogadishu. However, CIC declared its dissolution and returned most of its weapons and militia units to clan authorities, subsequently fleeing towards the southern port city of Kismayo where they decided to take a stand against the advancing Ethiopian and the TFG forces. However, the residents of Kismayo refused to allow the CIC to make use of Kismayo as a battleground.^[xxi] By June 2007, both the TFG and the CIC had hardened their positions. The former did this because they were in a winning position and the latter, because they took the stand that they would participate in talks only after the Ethiopian forces left Somalia.^[xxii]

To add to these conflicts, the US Air Force launched attacks against a retreating Islamic Courts Union (ICU) to target the Al-Qaeda militants who were allegedly being harboured by the ICU. As a result, the ICU took refuge in Eritrea. Combining forces with other opposition groups, the ICU established the Alliance for Re-Liberation of Somali (ARS) to consolidate the opposition against Ethiopian occupation.

In early 2007, a small contingent of AU peacekeepers (AMISOM) came and tried to bring about peace and protect the Transitional Federal Institutions (TFIs). However, over the next few years, attempts by Ethiopia and the TFG to impose ‘victor’s peace’ resulted in a violent resistance from a mixture of clan militia and the remnants of ICU’s military wing, Al-Shabaab. In 2007 alone, the fighting between the TFG and the insurgent group resulted in the displacement of around 700,000 people from Mogadishu. The economic foundation of the Hawiye clan weakened. The prolonged Ethiopian occupation created a lot of resistance within Somalia and the diaspora, resulting in the radicalisation of a new generation of Somalis.

When UN-mediated talks were held between the TFG and the ARS, a new and unitary TFG was established, with the possibility of a moderate Islamist government in Somalia. Abudullahi Yusuf resigned and the former Chair of the ICU, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, took over. This was an opportunity for state building, since this government had considerable support both from internal (Somalis) and external (the international community) actors. Unfortunately, just nine months later, Somalia found itself in turmoil again. Al-Shabaab denounced the Djibouti agreement as a betrayal by the ARS. Under the leadership of Ahmed Godane, widely held responsible for organising suicide bombs in Hargeiso and Bosasso in October 2008, Al-Shabaab declared its support for Al-Qaeda.^[xxiii] Ultimately, the international community backed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in 2012, who took over the presidency.^[xxiv] Currently, the Somali government is having a difficult time dealing with both Al-Shabaab and HizbulIslaami forces that control much of central Somalia.^[xxv]

The Cases of Somaliland and Puntland

Somaliland was a British protectorate for 75 years before it attained independence on 26 June 1960. Before it united voluntarily with the former Italian Somaliland to form the Somali republic, Somaliland existed as a sovereign nation.^[xxvi] Since 1991, Somaliland has existed as a de facto independent nation. It successfully rebuilt its economy and its infrastructure despite the damage due to the rebellion that forced a huge chunk of its population into Ethiopian refugee camps.^[xxvii] However, the international community has decided not to recognise Somaliland until the AU recognises it. The AU, in turn, is apprehensive that it might encourage other parts of Somalia, such as Hiranland, Jubaland, Puntland, and other regions in Africa to follow suit. Therefore, AU, too, has refused to recognise Somaliland.

Deprived of international aid and loans, Somaliland has had to operate on a tiny budget of about US $250 million. For the most part, Somaliland has survived because of its diaspora sending home some US $1 billion annually. The sceptics, who are against recognising Somaliland, cite the examples of South Sudan, which is in chaos; Eritrea, which is not doing great; and Somalia itself, which is a failed state, to justify their position and highlight the possibility that Somaliland could also end up like one of these three countries. This makes for a rash argument.

Increased aid to Somaliland following international recognition can help them handle crises, such as the drought that affected the Horn of Africa. The drought left an estimated 4.6 million people hungry. There are also reports of increase in Wahhabism, an extreme, fundamental version of Islam practiced in Somaliland. As French journalist, Robert Wim, puts it: “To refuse formal recognition to Somaliland amounts to punishing those who have been very peaceful: a very bad sign for stability in the Horn.”

The Puntland state of Somalia was created in 1998 and is located in north-eastern Somalia. It boasts a functioning state-like bureaucracy. Puntland never declared itself independent and nominally accepted the authority of TFG. It has relatively weaker government structures than Somaliland. However, it has created relative stability within its area of control.^[xxviii]As per its Constitution, Puntland is a part of the Somali state and works towards rebuilding the Somali government.^[xxix]

US Intervention

The US intervention started because of the cold war during the Siyad Barre regime, when the Soviets decided to support Ethiopia instead of Somalia. The Siyad Barre regime then began to receive support from the US. Later, after Siyad Barre, the US and the UN initiated interventions. Initially, Gen. Aidid, who was leading one of the groups, rejected the UN interventions, up until the fall of 2002. The UN Secretary General ensured that standard procedures were followed. The UN did not employ the blue helmets, since it could deploy them only after all the disputed parties accepted it. Thousands of people succumbed to starvation and disease.

In November, the US State Department proposed that a major UN battalion be sent to Somalia, which would include American troops. The Pentagon proposed a US-led coalition independent of the UN to distribute the aid, with the UN replacing the US forces after a short time. The US Acting Secretary of State, Lawrence S Eagleburger, presented the US plan and the expectation was that they would be handing over Somalia to the UN in three to four months. Boutros-Ghali, the then UN Secretary General, wanted to know what would happen after the new US President, Bill Clinton, who was supposed to take over on 20 January 1993, came to power. To this, Eagleburger replied that if Clinton was against the US forces in Somalia, then the forces would be withdrawn by 19 January. Thus, they reached an agreement. Later, the secretary-general told a delegation from Washington that he wanted the coalition to not only disarm all the Somali factions but also defuse all the mines in Somalia, most of them in the north.^[xxx]

Clinton initially favoured a quick handover to UNOSOM II. However, the focus gradually shifted to nation-building. On 22 September, the Clinton administration pressurised the UNSC to adopt Resolution 865, which effectively adopted staying and helping in “nation building,” at least until 1995. Three days later, the Somali militiamen shot down a Black Hawk Helicopter, killing three Americans. This was followed by the 3 October disaster, in which 17 Americans were killed and many more wounded in a fierce fighting in Mogadishu. One American was taken hostage and one of his deceased comrades was dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu. The administration immediately decided to double its presence in Somalia and offshore and to withdraw completely by 31 March 1994.^[xxxi]

Ethiopian Intervention

Ethiopia had its own agenda to serve. With a mostly Christian leadership and an almost 50-percent-Muslim population, Ethiopia had apprehensions of an Islamist awakening happening in their backyard. It also feared that Somalia would become a haven for Ethiopian rebels and that Somali Islamists would form an alliance with neighbouring Eritrea, who were Ethiopia’s arch rival; this would later come true. Intense battles between Islamic insurgents and Ethiopian forces killed thousands of innocent civilians. Ethiopian troops shelled entire neighbourhoods, causing the European Union (EU) to launch an investigation into war crimes. According to the UN, Ethiopia has gone as far as to use white phosphorous bombs that literally melt people.^[xxxii]Ethiopia also gave covert support to the TFG’s manipulations. As discussed earlier, there were accusations that during the formation of the TFG government in 2004, the votes of the MPs were purchased through Ethiopian money.^[xxxiii]Due to the extreme position of the hardliners in the CIC on the one hand and the Ethiopians on the other, a conflict between the CIC and the Ethiopians was the inevitable result.^[xxxiv]

The moderates vs. extremist debate in Somalia is a complex one. For example, was Aweys a hardliner? Although he has been called an extremist, he was the one who proposed including women in the advisory council. He also participated in a civil ceremony for World AIDS Day.^[xxxv]

The rhetoric that came from the CIC, especially the hardliners, did not help their cause. This included calls of ‘jihad’ against Ethiopia, appeals to the people of Ethiopia to rise up against the Meles government, claims over Somali inhabited territory in Ethiopia, forging of close links with Eritrea (Ethiopia’s biggest regional enemy),and provision of logistical support and bases to two armed insurgencies opposed to the Ethiopian government.^[xxxvi] In a last-minute deal to avoid war, there were talks between the moderates in the CIC and Ethiopia. However, this was thwarted by the hardliners.^[xxxvii]

The big question that remains unanswered is whether this invasion was necessary. First, after witnessing numerous failed administrations in Somalia, the US should have consolidated the one government that was able to set things in order (the CIC), regardless of the compromises it brought to the table. Secondly, whether Ethiopia attacked with or without the backing of the US, it is fair to assume that the US could have applied pressure and stopped Ethiopia from attacking. Finally, the Ethiopian and the TFG’s response to the Islamist groups’ attacks were ferocious. Whole neighbourhoods were shelled, claiming high casualties. In the first months of fighting, at least a thousand people died and 200,000–300,000 people were displaced. The EC gave out warnings that international humanitarian law was being violated.^[xxxviii] This invasion is what led to the evolution of Al-Shabaab into a destructive militant organisation.

Al-Shabaab and the Kenyan Intervention

Al-Shabaab emerged as the radical youth wing of the now defunct UIC, which controlled Mogadishu in 2006. There are numerous reports of foreign fighters going to Somalia to help Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab has staged numerous attacks in Kenya, the latest one being at Garissa University where 148 people died. Before that, it attacked Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre in 2013, killing at least 68 people. Although it has lost control of the cities, Al-Shabaab is still dominant and has control in rural areas. It was forced out of the capital, Mogadishu, in August 2011 and left the vital port of Kismayo in September 2012.

Al-Shabaab has imposed a strict version of Sharia in areas under its control. In a video, the former Al-Shabaab leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahari. There have also been reports that Al-Shabaab might have formed links with other extremist Islamist groups in Africa, such as the Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb based in the Sahara Desert. Al-Shabaab’s credibility took a huge knock when it rejected western food aid to combat a 2011 drought and famine.^[xxxix]

In October 2011, Kenya, too, sent its troops to Somalia. While the official reason for this was that the troops would address the kidnapping of Kenyan tourists by the Somali militants, there is another possible explanation, i.e., with the exceptions of a brief mutiny in 1964 and a failed coup in 1982, Kenya was by and large peaceful and not affected by military rule like its counterparts in Africa, such as Uganda and Nigeria.^[xl] Sending their troops to Somalia would serve as a way to test Kenyan Army resources.

Conclusion

The major threat that Somalia is facing right now is from the Al-Shabaab. Somalia’s attempt to counter the threat has had some success. However, though AMISOM has been able to pressurise and push the militants in many cases, they have not been able to completely decimate them. Al-Shabaab has, meanwhile, managed to kill hundreds of AMISOM troops and has captured three of AMISOM’s bases in the last 10 months.

AMISOM consists of 22,000 troops from five countries and 400 police officers. Counter-insurgency doctrine suggests that at least 47,000 troops are required to successfully combat Al-Shabaab in Somalia. There are other problems with AMISOM, including the frequent breakdown of command and communication. Troops often report to their home cities before checking in with command and control in Mogadishu, leading to delays and breakdowns that cost lives. There are suspicions about a few countries too, such as Ethiopia—that they want to keep Somalia weakened on a long-term basis.

The Somali National Army (SNA), which ideally should have resolved a large chunk of problems, has its own challenges to face. It has stitched together many of Somalia’s clan-based militias, whose loyalties still lie with the clan groups rather than the central government. The international community has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in training the SNA. Yet, the training itself is a part of the problem. The EU, AU, the UAE and the US have all been part of the training. However, different instructions have been handed out from different units, leading to lack of cohesion and coordination. A possible solution is for a single country to take charge of the training. Airlift capability is also required, since its lack has resulted in taking over of AMISOM’s bases.^[xli]

The AMISOM itself has other drawbacks. For example, some of the forces, like those from Burundi, do not speak English. Very few of the troops have training on counterinsurgency techniques, and moreover, they lack coordination. There are some political sensitivities as well. Somalis see themselves as Arabs and not as Africans. Al-Shabaab can easily label Burundi, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia as Christian invaders. Somalia’s own forces, which consist of the Army, the police and the militarised intelligence services, are not paid for months, resulting in them frequently selling their weapons. These forces are also infiltrated to a huge extent by the Al-Shabaab forces.^[xlii]

Ethiopia’s forces continuously staying in Somalia caused a lot of discontentment in Somalia. There is no doubt that Ethiopia is one of the main reasons for the conflict worsening. Regarding western interventions, it should be noted that primary motivations and intentions of the US were well-meaning. Operation Restoration Hope was brought about by Bush Sr to help the thousands of Somali people suffering from starvation.

There are allegations that four major oil companies would have benefitted if Somalia stabilised after Siyad Barre fled and that this was the reason for Bush to have intervened in Somalia.^[xliii] However, even if this were true, no fault can be found with the Bush administration for having intervened to save the starving population in Somalia. Every country has real-politik ambitions. It will not be fair to single out one country for such motives.

It was only after the “Black Hawk Down” episode that the US withdrew its forces completely. This led to a further collapse of the nation and increased suffering of the Somali people. Similarly, no fault can be found with the UN interventions. One shortcoming that must be pointed out, however, is that neither the UN nor the US took steps to stop Ethiopia from its manipulating ways during the Kenyan talks held in 2002.

The CIC, when they took over, had substantial support from the Somalis inside and the diaspora. They provided an effective administration in Mogadishu and increased their financial and military resources. They also received sufficient international support that pressurised the TFG to enter into talks with them.^[xliv] Despite these positive efforts, the Salafist punishments and the implementation of the Sharia law proved to be their undoing.

US officials were deeply concerned about the safety haven that was provided for the militants and were insistent that they possessed adequate intelligence that a small number of Al-Qaeda militants/suspects in the 1998 Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings were given refuge by the Al-Shabaab militants. The CIC did not take these charges seriously.^[xlv] This careless attitude resulted in a US policy shift, with the US giving a green light to the Ethiopians to attack Somalia, which they did, resulting in the defeat of the CIC.

The civic movement Mogadishu Security and Stabilisation Plan (MSSP), which came up in 2005, was a promising movement consisting of different sections of the society, which included Hawiye warlords from the TFG government, many leading business people and civil society groups. If this movement had succeeded, Somali politics would have taken a positive turn. But the Islamists, militia leaders and the political elite worked together to bring down this disorganised civic movement, which failed to sustain the momentum it had initially gathered.^[xlvi]

Finally, the international community backed President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in 2012, hoping that he would be a change from the corrupt and inefficient governments of the past. The US re-established diplomatic ties with Somalia for the first time in 20 years, and a handful of countries including China and the UK reopened their embassies in Mogadishu. However, in 2013, the UN accused Mohamud’s regime of being highly corrupt and claimed that 80 percent of the Somali Central Bank transactions were fraudulent. In addition, power struggles and internal bickering stalled many political actions and reforms.^[xlvii]

The symptoms of a failed state, according to Rothberg, include civil wars characterised by continuous bouts of violence; disharmony/conflict between communities; loss of control over peripheral regions to out-groups; growth of criminal violence including gangs and trafficking of arms; cessation of functioning legislatures and judiciaries; informal privatisation of education, health, and other social services; corruption; loss of legitimacy; declining per capita income (GDP) with associated increase in smuggling; and the supplanting of the national currency with external money.

Charles Call says that a state can be called a failed state if it is afflicted by all the issues mentioned above. One can see that Somalia, at one point of time, was a victim of all the aforementioned problems. Rothberg goes on to say that Russia and Tajakistan have many of these characteristics but cannot be called failed states. Sri Lanka and Colombia have faced brutal conflicts but have bounced back. Charles Call goes one step further by saying that the term “failed state” should be used only to refer to wholly collapsed states. He then says that in the late 20th century, this situation prevailed only in Somalia.^[xlviii] Rothberg says that truly collapsed states are an extremely rare version of a failed state and that Somalia is an apt example of this.^[xlix]

Can interventions be blamed for Somalia’s failure? The fact is that interventions with hidden agendas did not happen exclusively in Somalia. Interventions happen throughout the world. Many countries, despite interventions, stabilise themselves. Sri Lanka is a good example. In spite of the Indian intervention, Sri Lanka managed to transition itself in a proper manner. The Ethiopians, and probably the Kenyans too, had their own agenda. As stated previously, there are charges that Ethiopia manipulated things through bribery and managed to establish a favourable TFG government.

The Ethiopian invasion of 2006 was unnecessary, avoidable and costly, especially to Somalia. Despite interventions by the US in the early 90s to save Somalis, the US, too, must share responsibility, because they could have prevented Ethiopia from invading, if they had so desired. The TFG and Ethiopia imposing victor’s peace in the aftermath of their victory over the CIC did not help things. The hardliners in the CIC are also to blame for the instances of suicide bombings, assassination attempts against top TFG leadership, and their loud rhetoric against the Ethiopians.

While there are many contributing factors leading to the failure of Somalia as a state, it has had many of opportunities to regroup. However, they failed to make use of these opportunities. What Somalia lacks is not aid from the international community. Plenty of resources—both human and financial—have been allocated to the strife-stricken country for the past many years. More than anything else, it is the lack of an honest, effective, strong, and conciliatory leadership that finally led to Somalia reaching the status of a failed state.

The international community expected a lot from President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud when he took over the reins of power in 2012. Unfortunately, there are corruption allegations against him, too—charges that he siphoned off assets that were frozen after the fall of Siyad Barre.^[l]

Somalia has to evolve into a democratic country that runs through elected governments with a federal structure, so that there is no infighting among the clans and all clans are properly represented. However, the foremost need of the hour is good governance and an honest, bold politician. Only such a leader can create conditions for democracy and federal structures. If Somalia achieves such a leadership, it may yet have the chance to get back on its feet.

About the author:
*Harish Venugopalan currently work as a Research Assistant at ORF. His area of specialization is conflict management and he is studying conflicts in Africa at the moment.

Endnotes:
^[i]Afyare Abdi Elmi, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration Identity, Political Islam and Peacebuilding (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 29.

^[ii]ibid., 29.

^[iii] Catherine Besteman, “Violent Politics and the Politics of Violence: The Dissolution of the Somali Nation-State,”American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 580–582.

^[iv]ibid., 589.

^[v] Jeffrey Clark, “Debacle in Somalia,” Foreign Affairs (1992), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/1993-02-01/debacle-somalia.

^[vi] Annabel Lee Hogg, “Timeline: Somalia, 1991-2008,” The Atlantic, December 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/12/timeline-somalia-1991-2008/307190/.

^[vii] Ken Menkhaus, “Governance without Government in Somalia Spoilers, State Building and the Politics of Coping,” International Security 31 (2006/2007): 80–81.

^[viii] Annabel Lee Hogg, “Timeline.”

^[ix] Abdi Ismail Samatar, “Ethiopian Invasion of Somalia, US Warlordism and the AU Shame,” Review of African Political Economy, 34 (2007): 156.

^[x] Ken Menkhaus, “The crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in five acts,” African Affairs, 106 (2007): 359.

^[xi]Menkhaus, Governance, 87–89.

^[xii]Samatar, Ethiopian Invasion, 156.

^[xiii]Menkhaus, “The Crisis,” 359–360.

^[xiv] Sally Healy and Mark Bradbury, “Endless war: A brief history of the Somali conflict,” Conciliation Resources, 2010, http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/endless-war-brief-history-somali-conflict.

^[xv]ibid., 364.

^[xvi] The Associated Press, “Seaport in Somalia Reopens after 11 years,” The New York Times, 24 August 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/world/africa/24somalia.html.

^[xvii]ibid., 367–370.

^[xviii]Menkhaus, op. cit., 376.

^[xix]ibid., 378.

^[xx]ibid., 375–378.

^[xxi]ibid., 381.

^[xxii]ibid., 385.

^[xxiii] Sally Healy and Mark Bradbury, op. cit.

^[xxiv] Joshua Meservey, “Somalia’s Governance Problem – How Mogadishu’s Stagnation Benefits al-Shabab,” Foreign Affairs,15 May 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2016-05-15/somalias-governance-problem.

^[xxv] Sally Healy and Mark Bradbury, op. cit.

^[xxvi] James Jeffrey, “Somaliland’s Search for Place,” Foreign Affairs, May 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2016-05-26/somalilands-search-place.

^[xxvii] James Jeffrey, “Why Somaliland now needs international recognition,” IRIN, 19 July 2016, http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2016/07/19/why-somaliland-now-needs-international-recognition.

^[xxviii]Stig Jarle Hansen, “Private Security and Local Politics in Somalia,”Review of African Political Economy 35 (2008): 585.

^[xxix] Markus V Hohne, “Political identity, emerging state structures and conflict in Northern Somalia,”The Journal of Modern African Studies, 44 (2006): 401.

^[xxx] John R Bolton, “Wrong Turn in Somalia,” Foreign Affairs, 73 (1994): 57–61.

^[xxxi]ibid., 63–65.

^[xxxii] Jeffrey Gettleman, “The Most Dangerous Place in the World, Foreign Policy,” March / April 2009, http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/30/the-most-dangerous-place-in-the-world/

^[xxxiii]Menkhaus, “The Crisis,” 360–361.

^[xxxiv]ibid., 370–372.

^[xxxv] Roland Marchal, “Somalia: A New Front Against Terrorism,” hornofafrica.ssrc.org, February 5, 2007, http://hornofafrica.ssrc.org/marchal/.

^[xxxvi]Menkhaus, op. cit., 378.

^[xxxvii]ibid., 382.

^[xxxviii]ibid., 386–387.

^[xxxix] “Who are Somalia’s al-Shabab?” BBC, 3 April 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-15336689.

^[xl] Daniel Branch, “Why Kenya invaded Somalia, The Opening of an Aggressive New Chapter,” Foreign Affairs, 15 November 2011. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2011-11-15/why-kenya-invaded-somalia.

^[xli]Meservey, op. cit.

^[xlii] Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Saving Somalia (Again) – How Reconstruction stalled and what to do about it,” Foreign Affairs,23 June 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2015-06-23/saving-somalia-again.

^[xliii] “America’s Interests in Somalia: Four major U.S. oil companies are sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions,” Global Research, 3 January 2007, http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-s-interests-in-somalia-four-major-u-s-oil-companies-are-sitting-on-a-prospective-fortune-in-exclusive-concessions/4342.

^[xliv]Menkhaus, “The Crisis,” 369–370.

^[xlv]ibid., 377.

^[xlvi]ibid., 366–367.

^[xlvii]Meservey, op. cit.

^[xlviii] Charles Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State,” Third World Quarterly, 29 (2008): 1492.

^[xlix] Robert I Rothberg, “Failed States in a World of Terror,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002, http://www.cfr.org/fragile-or-failed-states/failed-states-world-terror/p4733.

^[l] Jay Bahadur, “The President’s Bank: Corruption allegations tarnish Somalia’s brave new world,” African Arguments, 22 September 2014, http://africanarguments.org/2014/09/22/the-presidents-bank-corruption-allegations-tarnish-somalias-brave-new-world-by-jay-bahadur/.

References:

1. Besteman, Catherine. “Violent Politics and the Politics of Violence: The Dissolution of the Somali Nation-State.”American Ethnologies 1996. 579–596.
2. Bolton, John R. “Wrong Turn in Somalia.” Foreign Affairs 1994. 56–66.
3. Call, Charles. “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State.’” Third World Quarterly 2008. 1491–1507.
4. Elmi, Afyare Abdi. Understanding the Somalia Conflagration, Identity, political Islam and Peacebuilding. London: Pluto Press, 2010.
5. Gettleman, Jeffrey. “The Most Dangerous Place in the World.” Foreign Policy. 60–69.
6. Hansen, StigJarle. “Private Security and Local Politics in Somalia.” Review of African Political Economy 2008. 585–598.
7. Hohne, Markus V. “Political identity, emerging state structures and conflict in Northern Somalia.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 2006. 397–414.
8. Samatar, Abdi Ismail. “Ethiopian Invasion of Somalia, US Warlordism and the AU Shame.” Review of African Political Economy 2007. 155–165.
9. Menkhaus, Ken. “The crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in five acts.” African Affairs 2007. 357–390.
10. Menkhaus, Ken. “Governance without Government in Somalia Spoilers, State Building and the Politics of Coping.” International Security 2006/2007. 74–106.
11. Bahadur, Jay. “The President’s Bank: corruption allegations tarnish Somalia’s brave new world.” African Arguments. 22 September 2014. http://africanarguments.org/2014/09/22/the-presidents-bank-corruption-allegations-tarnish-somalias-brave-new-world-by-jay-bahadur/.
12. Branch, Daniel. “Why Kenya invaded Somalia: The Opening of an Aggressive New Chapter.” ForeignAffairs. 15 November 2011. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2011-11-15/why-kenya-invaded-somalia.
13. Clark, Jeffrey. “Debacle in Somalia.” Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/1993-02-01/debacle-somalia.
14. Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Saving Somalia (Again) – How Reconstruction stalled and what to do about it.” Foreign Affairs. 23 June 2015. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2015-06-23/saving-somalia-again.
15. Healy, Sally and Bradbury, Mark. “Endless war: a brief history of the Somali conflict.” Conciliation Resources. 2010. http://www.c-r.org/accord-article/endless-war-brief-history-somali-conflict.
16. Hogg, Annabel Lee. “Timeline: Somalia, 1991-2008.” The Atlantic.December 2008. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/12/timeline-somalia-1991-2008/307190/.
17. Jeffrey, James. “Somaliland’s Search for Place.” Foreign Affairs. May 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2016-05-26/somalilands-search-place.
18. Jeffrey, James. “Why Somaliland now needs international recognition.” IRIN. 19 July 2016. http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2016/07/19/why-somaliland-now-needs-international-recognition.
19. Marchal, Roland. “Somalia: A New Front Against Terrorism.” hornofafrica.org.5February 2007. http://hornofafrica.ssrc.org/marchal/
20. Meservey, Joshua. “Somalia’s Governance Problem – How Mogadishu’s Stagnation Benefits al-Shabab.” Foreign Affairs. 15 May 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/2016-05-15/somalias-governance-problem.
21. Rothberg, Robert I. “Failed States in a World of Terror.” Foreign Affairs. http://www.cfr.org/fragile-or-failed-states/failed-states-world-terror/p4733.
22. “America’s Interests in Somalia: Four major U.S. oil companies are sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions.” Global Research. 3 January 2007.http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-s-interests-in-somalia-four-major-u-s-oil-companies-are-sitting-on-a-prospective-fortune-in-exclusive-concessions/4342.
23. “Who are Somalia’s al-Shabab?” BBC. 3April 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-15336689.
24. “Seaport in Somalia Reopens after 11 years.” The New York Times.24 August 2006.http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/world/africa/24somalia.html.

The Aegean theater of the Antique Greece was the place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there.

Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives. It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the Antique state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning,  according to Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic in his luminary book of 2013, ‘Is There Life After Facebook? – Geopolitics of Technology’.

Indeed, why do we constantly ignore massive and sustain harvesting of our personal data from the social networks, medical records, pay-cards, internet and smart phones as well as its commercialization and monetization for dubious ends and disturbing futures.

Professor Bajrektarevic predicts and warns: “If humans hardly ever question fetishisation of their own McFB way of life, or oppose the (self-) trivialization, why then is the subsequent brutalization a surprise to them?”

Thus, should we be really surprised with the Brexit vote, with the results of the US elections, and with the forthcoming massive wins of the right-wing parties all over Europe? Putin is behind it — how easy, and how misleading a self-denial.

Here is a story based on facts, if we are only interested to really grasp the Matrix world.

The Iron Cage We Constructed Ourselves

On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old researcher had come to give a lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) about the dangers of Big Data and the digital revolution. Kosinski gives regular lectures on this topic all over the world. He is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. When he turned on the TV that morning, he saw that the bombshell had exploded: contrary to forecasts by all leading statisticians, Donald J. Trump had been elected president of the United States.

For a long time, Kosinski watched the Trump victory celebrations and the results coming in from each state. He had a hunch that the outcome of the election might have something to do with his research. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned off the TV.

On the same day, a then little-known British company based in London sent out a press release: “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win,” Alexander James Ashburner Nix was quoted as saying. Nix is British, 41 years old, and CEO of Cambridge Analytica. He is always immaculately turned out in tailor-made suits and designer glasses, with his wavy blonde hair combed back from his forehead. His company wasn’t just integral to Trump’s online campaign, but to the UK’s Brexit campaign as well.

Of these three players—reflective Kosinski, carefully groomed Nix and grinning Trump—one of them enabled the digital revolution, one of them executed it and one of them benefited from it.

How dangerous is big data?

Anyone who has not spent the last five years living on another planet will be familiar with the term Big Data. Big Data means, in essence, that everything we do, both on and offline, leaves digital traces. Every purchase we make with our cards, every search we type into Google, every movement we make when our mobile phone is in our pocket, every “like” is stored. Especially every “like.” For a long time, it was not entirely clear what use this data could have—except, perhaps, that we might find ads for high blood pressure remedies just after we’ve Googled “reduce blood pressure.”

On November 9, it became clear that maybe much more is possible. The company behind Trump’s online campaign—the same company that had worked for Leave.EU in the very early stages of its “Brexit” campaign—was a Big Data company: Cambridge Analytica.

To understand the outcome of the election—and how political communication might work in the future—we need to begin with a strange incident at Cambridge University in 2014, at Kosinski’s Psychometrics Center.

Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?).

Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The “Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire.

Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw when his life took a new direction in 2008. He was accepted by Cambridge University to do his PhD at the Psychometrics Centre, one of the oldest institutions of this kind worldwide. Kosinski joined fellow student David Stillwell (now a lecturer at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge) about a year after Stillwell had launched a little Facebook application in the days when the platform had not yet become the behemoth it is today. Their MyPersonality app enabled users to fill out different psychometric questionnaires, including a handful of psychological questions from the Big Five personality questionnaire (“I panic easily,” “I contradict others”). Based on the evaluation, users received a “personality profile”—individual Big Five values—and could opt-in to share their Facebook profile data with the researchers.

Kosinski had expected a few dozen college friends to fill in the questionnaire, but before long, hundreds, thousands, then millions of people had revealed their innermost convictions. Suddenly, the two doctoral candidates owned the largest dataset combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected.

The approach that Kosinski and his colleagues developed over the next few years was actually quite simple. First, they provided test subjects with a questionnaire in the form of an online quiz. From their responses, the psychologists calculated the personal Big Five values of respondents. Kosinski’s team then compared the results with all sorts of other online data from the subjects: what they “liked,” shared or posted on Facebook, or what gender, age, place of residence they specified, for example. This enabled the researchers to connect the dots and make correlations.

Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone’s parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves. On the day that Kosinski published these findings, he received two phone calls. The threat of a lawsuit and a job offer. Both from Facebook.

Only weeks later Facebook “likes” became private by default. Before that, the default setting was that anyone on the internet could see your “likes.” But this was no obstacle to data collectors: while Kosinski always asked for the consent of Facebook users, many apps and online quizzes today require access to private data as a precondition for taking personality tests. (Anybody who wants to evaluate themselves based on their Facebook “likes” can do so on Kosinski’s website, and then compare their results to those of a classic Ocean questionnaire, like that of the Cambridge Psychometrics Center.)

But it was not just about “likes” or even Facebook: Kosinski and his team could now ascribe Big Five values based purely on how many profile pictures a person has on Facebook, or how many contacts they have (a good indicator of extraversion). But we also reveal something about ourselves even when we’re not online. For example, the motion sensor on our phone reveals how quickly we move and how far we travel (this correlates with emotional instability). Our smartphone, Kosinski concluded, is a vast psychological questionnaire that we are constantly filling out, both consciously and unconsciously.

Above all, however—and this is key—it also works in reverse: not only can psychological profiles be created from your data, but your data can also be used the other way round to search for specific profiles: all anxious fathers, all angry introverts, for example—or maybe even all undecided Democrats? Essentially, what Kosinski had invented was sort of a people search engine. He started to recognize the potential—but also the inherent danger—of his work.

To him, the internet was a gift from heaven. What he really wanted was to give something back, to share. Data can be copied, so why shouldn’t everyone benefit from it? It was the spirit of Millenials, entire new generation, the beginning of a new era that transcended the limitations of the physical world. But what would happen, wondered Kosinski, if someone abused his people search engine to manipulate people? He began to add warnings to most of his scientific work. His approach, he warned, “could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” But no one seemed to grasp what he meant.

Around this time, in early 2014, Kosinski was approached by a young assistant professor in the psychology department called Aleksandr Kogan. He said he was inquiring on behalf of a company that was interested in Kosinski’s method, and wanted to access the MyPersonality database. Kogan wasn’t at liberty to reveal for what purpose; he was bound to secrecy.

At first, Kosinski and his team considered this offer, as it would mean a great deal of money for the institute, but then he hesitated. Finally, Kosinski remembers, Kogan revealed the name of the company: SCL, or Strategic Communication Laboratories. Kosinski Googled the company: “[We are] the premier election management agency,” says the company’s website. SCL provides marketing based on psychological modeling. One of its core focuses: Influencing elections. Influencing elections? Perturbed, Kosinski clicked through the pages. What kind of company was this? And what were these people planning?

What Kosinski did not know at the time: SCL is the parent of a group of companies. Who exactly owns SCL and its diverse branches is unclear, thanks to a convoluted corporate structure, the type seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some of the SCL offshoots have been involved in elections from Ukraine to Nigeria, helped the Nepalese monarch against the Maoists, whereas others have developed methods to influence Eastern Euripean and Afghan citizens for NATO. And, in 2013, SCL spun off a new company to participate in US elections: Cambridge Analytica.

Kosinski knew nothing about all this, but he had a bad feeling. “The whole thing started to stink,” he recalls. On further investigation, he discovered that Aleksandr Kogan had secretly registered a company doing business with SCL. According to a December 2015 report in the Guardian and to internal company documents given to Das Magazin, it emerges that SCL learned about Kosinski’s method from Kogan.

Kosinski came to suspect that Kogan’s company might have reproduced the Facebook “Likes”-based Big Five measurement tool in order to sell it to this election-influencing firm. He immediately broke off contact with Kogan and informed the director of the institute, sparking a complicated conflict within the university. The institute was worried about its reputation. Aleksandr Kogan then moved to Singapore, married, and changed his name to Dr. Spectre. Michal Kosinski finished his PhD, got a job offer from Stanford and moved to the US.

Mr. Brexit

All was quiet for about a year. Then, in November 2015, the more radical of the two Brexit campaigns, “Leave.EU,” supported by Nigel Farage, announced that it had commissioned a Big Data company to support its online campaign: Cambridge Analytica. The company’s core strength: innovative political marketing—microtargeting—by measuring people’s personality from their digital footprints, based on the OCEAN model.

Now Kosinski received emails asking what he had to do with it—the words Cambridge, personality, and analytics immediately made many people think of Kosinski. It was the first time he had heard of the company, which borrowed its name, it said, from its first employees, researchers from the university. Horrified, he looked at the website. Was his methodology being used on a grand scale for political purposes?

After the Brexit result, friends and acquaintances wrote to him: Just look at what you’ve done. Everywhere he went, Kosinski had to explain that he had nothing to do with this company. (It remains unclear how deeply Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Brexit campaign. Cambridge Analytica would not discuss such questions.)

For a few months, things are relatively quiet. Then, on September 19, 2016, just over a month before the US elections, the guitar riffs of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” fill the dark-blue hall of New York’s Grand Hyatt hotel. The Concordia Summit is a kind of World Economic Forum in miniature. Decision-makers from all over the world have been invited, among them Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann. “Please welcome to the stage Alexander Nix, chief executive officer of Cambridge Analytica,” a smooth female voice announces. A slim man in a dark suit walks onto the stage. A hush falls. Many in attendance know that this is Trump’s new digital strategy man. (A video of the presentation was posted on YouTube.)

A few weeks earlier, Trump had tweeted, somewhat cryptically, “Soon you’ll be calling me Mr. Brexit.” Political observers had indeed noticed some striking similarities between Trump’s agenda and that of the right-wing Brexit movement. But few had noticed the connection with Trump’s recent hiring of a marketing company named Cambridge Analytica.

Up to this point, Trump’s digital campaign had consisted of more or less one person: Brad Parscale, a marketing entrepreneur and failed start-up founder who created a rudimentary website for Trump for $1,500. The 70-year-old Trump is not digitally savvy—there isn’t even a computer on his office desk. Trump doesn’t do emails, his personal assistant once revealed. She herself talked him into having a smartphone, from which he now tweets incessantly.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, relied heavily on the legacy of the first “social-media president,” Barack Obama. She had the address lists of the Democratic Party, worked with cutting-edge big data analysts from BlueLabs and received support from Google and DreamWorks. When it was announced in June 2016 that Trump had hired Cambridge Analytica, the establishment in Washington just turned up their noses. Foreign dudes in tailor-made suits who don’t understand the country and its people? Seriously?

“It is my privilege to speak to you today about the power of Big Data and psychographics in the electoral process.” The logo of Cambridge Analytica— a brain composed of network nodes, like a map, appears behind Alexander Nix. “Only 18 months ago, Senator Cruz was one of the less popular candidates,” explains the blonde man in a cut-glass British accent, which puts Americans on edge the same way that a standard German accent can unsettle Swiss people. “Less than 40 percent of the population had heard of him,” another slide says. Cambridge Analytica had become involved in the US election campaign almost two years earlier, initially as a consultant for Republicans Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. Cruz—and later Trump—was funded primarily by the secretive US software billionaire Robert Mercer who, along with his daughter Rebekah, is reported to be the largest investor in Cambridge Analytica.

“So how did he do this?” Up to now, explains Nix, election campaigns have been organized based on demographic concepts. “A really ridiculous idea. The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender—or all African Americans because of their race.” What Nix meant is that while other campaigners so far have relied on demographics, Cambridge Analytica was using psychometrics.

Though this might be true, Cambridge Analytica’s role within Cruz’s campaign isn’t undisputed. In December 2015 the Cruz team credited their rising success to psychological use of data and analytics. In Advertising Age, a political client said the embedded Cambridge staff was “like an extra wheel,” but found their core product, Cambridge’s voter data modeling, still “excellent.” The campaign would pay the company at least $5.8 million to help identify voters in the Iowa caucuses, which Cruz won, before dropping out of the race in May.

Nix clicks to the next slide: five different faces, each face corresponding to a personality profile. It is the Big Five or OCEAN Model. “At Cambridge,” he said, “we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The hall is captivated. According to Nix, the success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing is based on a combination of three elements: behavioral science using the OCEAN Model, Big Data analysis, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertising, aligned as accurately as possible to the personality of an individual consumer.

Nix candidly explains how his company does this. First, Cambridge Analytica buys personal data from a range of different sources, like land registries, automotive data, shopping data, bonus cards, club memberships, what magazines you read, what churches you attend. Nix displays the logos of globally active data brokers like Acxiom and Experian—in the US, almost all personal data is for sale. For example, if you want to know where Jewish women live, you can simply buy this information, phone numbers included.

Now Cambridge Analytica aggregates this data with the electoral rolls of the Republican party and online data and calculates a Big Five personality profile. Digital footprints suddenly become real people with fears, needs, interests, and residential addresses.

The methodology looks quite similar to the one that Michal Kosinski once developed. Cambridge Analytica also uses, Nix told us, “surveys on social media” and Facebook data. And the company does exactly what Kosinski warned of: “We have profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America—220 million people,” Nix boasts.

He opens the screenshot. “This is a data dashboard that we prepared for the Cruz campaign.” A digital control center appears. On the left are diagrams; on the right, a map of Iowa, where Cruz won a surprisingly large number of votes in the primary. And on the map, there are hundreds of thousands of small red and blue dots. Nix narrows down the criteria: “Republicans”—the blue dots disappear; “not yet convinced”—more dots disappear; “male”, and so on. Finally, only one name remains, including age, address, interests, personality and political inclination. How does Cambridge Analytica now target this person with an appropriate political message?

Nix shows how psychographically categorized voters can be differently addressed, based on the example of gun rights, the 2nd Amendment: “For a highly neurotic and conscientious audience the threat of a burglary—and the insurance policy of a gun.” An image on the left shows the hand of an intruder smashing a window. The right side shows a man and a child standing in a field at sunset, both holding guns, clearly shooting ducks: “Conversely, for a closed and agreeable audience. People who care about tradition, and habits, and family.”

How to keep Clinton voters away from the ballot box

Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016.

“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

Nix finishes his lecture at the Concordia Summit by stating that traditional blanket advertising is dead. “My children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication.” And before leaving the stage, he announced that since Cruz had left the race, the company was helping one of the remaining presidential candidates.

Just how precisely the American population was being targeted by Trump’s digital troops at that moment was not visible, because they attacked less on mainstream TV and more with personalized messages on social media or digital TV. And while the Clinton team thought it was in the lead, based on demographic projections, Bloomberg journalist Sasha Issenberg was surprised to note on a visit to San Antonio—where Trump’s digital campaign was based—that a “second headquarters” was being created. The embedded Cambridge Analytica team, apparently only a dozen people, received $100,000 from Trump in July, $250,000 in August, and $5 million in September. According to Nix, the company earned over $15 million overall. (The company is incorporated in the US, where laws regarding the release of personal data are more lax than in European Union countries. Whereas European privacy laws require a person to “opt in” to a release of data, those in the US permit data to be released unless a user “opts out.”)

The measures were radical: From July 2016, Trump’s canvassers were provided with an app with which they could identify the political views and personality types of the inhabitants of a house. It was the same app provider used by Brexit campaigners. Trump’s people only rang at the doors of houses that the app rated as receptive to his messages. The canvassers came prepared with guidelines for conversations tailored to the personality type of the resident. In turn, the canvassers fed the reactions into the app, and the new data flowed back to the dashboards of the Trump campaign.

Again, this is nothing new. The Democrats did similar things, but there is no evidence that they relied on psychometric profiling. Cambridge Analytica, however, divided the US population into 32 personality types, and focused on just 17 states. And just as Kosinski had established that men who like MAC cosmetics are slightly more likely to be gay, the company discovered that a preference for cars made in the US was a great indication of a potential Trump voter. Among other things, these findings now showed Trump which messages worked best and where. The decision to focus on Michigan and Wisconsin in the final weeks of the campaign was made on the basis of data analysis. The candidate became the instrument for implementing a big data model.

What’s Next?

But to what extent did psychometric methods influence the outcome of the election? When asked, Cambridge Analytica was unwilling to provide any proof of the effectiveness of its campaign. And it is quite possible that the question is impossible to answer.

And yet there are clues: There is the fact of the surprising rise of Ted Cruz during the primaries. Also there was an increased number of voters in rural areas. There was the decline in the number of African-American early votes. The fact that Trump spent so little money may also be explained by the effectiveness of personality-based advertising. As does the fact that he invested far more in digital than TV campaigning compared to Hillary Clinton. Facebook proved to be the ultimate weapon and the best election campaigner, as Nix explained, and as comments by several core Trump campaigners demonstrate.

Many voices have claimed that the statisticians lost the election because their predictions were so off the mark. But what if statisticians in fact helped win the election—but only those who were using the new method? It is an irony of history that Trump, who often grumbled about scientific research, used a highly scientific approach in his campaign.

Another big winner is Cambridge Analytica. Its board member Steve Bannon, former executive chair of the right-wing online newspaper Breitbart News, has been appointed as Donald Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. Whilst Cambridge Analytica is not willing to comment on alleged ongoing talks with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, Alexander Nix claims that he is building up his client base worldwide, and that he has received inquiries from Switzerland, Germany, and Australia. His company is currently touring European conferences showcasing their success in the United States. This year three core countries of the EU are facing elections with resurgent populist parties: France, Holland and Germany. The electoral successes come at an opportune time, as the company is readying for a push into commercial advertising.

********

Kosinski has observed all of this from his office at Stanford. Following the US election, the university is in turmoil. Kosinski is responding to developments with the sharpest weapon available to a researcher: a scientific analysis. Together with his research colleague Sandra Matz, he has conducted a series of tests, which will soon be published. The initial results are alarming: The study shows the effectiveness of personality targeting by showing that marketers can attract up to 63 percent more clicks and up to 1,400 more conversions in real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook when matching products and marketing messages to consumers’ personality characteristics. They further demonstrate the scalability of personality targeting by showing that the majority of Facebook Pages promoting products or brands are affected by personality and that large numbers of consumers can be accurately targeted based on a single Facebook Page.

In a statement after the German publication of this article, a Cambridge Analytica spokesperson said, “Cambridge Analytica does not use data from Facebook. It has had no dealings with Dr. Michal Kosinski. It does not subcontract research. It does not use the same methodology. Psychographics was hardly used at all. Cambridge Analytica did not engage in efforts to discourage any Americans from casting their vote in the presidential election. Its efforts were solely directed towards increasing the number of voters in the election.”

The world has been turned upside down. Great Britain is leaving the EU, Donald Trump is president of the United States of America. And in Stanford, Kosinski, who wanted to warn against the danger of using psychological targeting in a political setting, is once again receiving accusatory emails. “No,” says Kosinski, quietly and shaking his head. “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.”

*About authors:
Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus are investigative journalists attached to the Swiss-based Das Magazin specialized journal. The original text appeared in the late December edition under the title: “I only showed that the bomb exists” (Ich habe nur gezeigt, dass es die Bombe gibt). This, English translation, is based on the subsequent January version, first published by the Motherboard magazine (titled: The Data That Turned the World Upside

Drought dramatically increases the severity of West Nile virus epidemics in the United States, although populations affected by large outbreaks acquire immunity that limits the size of subsequent epidemics, according to a study led by UC Santa Cruz researchers.

The study, published February 8 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, involved researchers from UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, and the New York State Department of Health. They analyzed 15 years of data on human West Nile virus infections from across the United States and found that epidemics were much larger in drought years and in regions that had not suffered large epidemics in the past.

“We found that drought was the dominant weather variable correlated with the size of West Nile virus epidemics,” said first author Sara Paull, who led the study as a post-doctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and is now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

West Nile virus was introduced into North America in 1999 and has caused yearly epidemics each summer since. The intensity of these epidemics, however, has varied enormously. In some years, there were only a few hundred severe human cases nationally, whereas in each of three years (2002, 2003, and 2012), approximately 3,000 people suffered brain-damaging meningitis or encephalitis, and almost 300 died. The variation at the state level has been even higher, with yearly case numbers varying 50-fold from year to year, on average. The causes of this enormous variation were unknown and had led scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to suggest that predicting the size of future epidemics was difficult or impossible.

In the new study, Paull and Marm Kilpatrick, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, analyzed patterns in the number of severe West Nile virus infections each year in each state and nationally. They examined a number of weather variables, including summer temperature, precipitation, winter severity, and drought. They also tested a long-standing hypothesis that the disease shows a wave-like pattern in causing large outbreaks in the first year and few cases subsequently due to a build-up of immunity in bird populations, which are the main hosts for the virus.

“We found strong evidence that in some regions the spread of West Nile virus was indeed wave-like, with large outbreaks followed by fewer cases,” Paull said. “However, our analyses indicated that human immunity–not just bird immunity–played a large part in the decrease in human cases by reducing the number of people susceptible to the disease.”

Kilpatrick said the links with drought were unexpected. In collaboration with Dr. Laura Kramer from the New York State Department of Health, his lab had developed a very careful method of mapping the influence of temperature on the biology of both the virus and the three different mosquitoes that are most important in transmitting the virus.

“We thought epidemics would coincide with the most ideal temperatures for transmission,” Kilpatrick said. “Instead, we found that the severity of drought was far more important nationally, and drought appeared to be a key driver in the majority of individual states as well.”

It’s not yet clear how drought increases transmission of the virus, he said. Data from Colorado indicate that drought increases the fraction mosquitoes infected with West Nile virus, but not the abundance of mosquitoes. Drought might affect transmission between mosquitoes and birds by stressing birds or changing where they congregate.

With the help of climatologists Dan Horton and Noah Diffenbaugh at Stanford University, Paull used the links between drought, immunity, and West Nile virus to project the impacts of climate change on future epidemics. Over the next three decades, drought is projected to increase in many regions across the United States due to increased temperatures, despite increases in precipitation in some of the same areas.

Model projections indicated that increased drought could double the size of future West Nile virus epidemics, but that outbreaks would be limited to regions that have yet to sustain large numbers of cases. These findings provide a tool to help guide public health efforts to regions most likely to experience future epidemics.

Strong updrafts — currents of rising air — in severe thunderstorms are a prerequisite for hail formation. The width of these updrafts may be an indicator of an increased hail threat, according to Penn State meteorologists.

“Hail can have significant socioeconomic effects on communities,” said Matt Kumjian, assistant professor of meteorology and atmospheric science in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences who has been investigating environmental factors that lead to enhanced hail production.

According to the insurance industry, hailstorms in the United States account for more than $1 billion in damage annually, wreaking havoc on homes, businesses, automobiles, aircraft and agriculture. Recently, these damage totals have increased as people move into hail-prone regions. On April 12, 2016, a supercell storm devastated the San Antonio metropolitan area with large hail, producing approximately $1.36 billion in damage.

“It’s important for meteorologists to understand what contributes to hail formation and hail growth so that we can predict which storms might pose a more dangerous hail threat,” said Kumjian. “This would allow us to potentially mitigate the risk of these storms.”

New research that Kumjian and Eli Dennis, graduate student in meteorology, published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, suggests that changes in environmental vertical wind shear influence the growth of “significant” hail — bigger than two inches in diameter. Vertical wind shear is the variation in wind speed or direction from the bottom to the top of a layer in the atmosphere. The greater the difference in speed and/or directionality, the greater the shear.

Hail forms when small particles like frozen raindrops — hail embryos — are ingested into a storm’s updraft. Once they rise in the updraft, the embryos grow as additional liquid water freezes onto them.

As the hailstones become larger, they require stronger updrafts to support their weight. If the updraft is too weak, the hailstones will fall out of the storm and down to the ground.

“Stronger updrafts allow for the hail to become much bigger in size,” Kumjian said. “However, there’s more to the story. The storm’s structure is perhaps a more important determinant of hail production, but how the environment alters the structures conducive to hail growth and pathways that embryos may take is uncertain.”

Previous research into how environmental factors affect hail formation is limited, so Kumjian took a different approach.

“We decided to focus just on environmental wind shear’s role in hail production, because that’s something that nobody has ever done,” Kumjian explained. “We thought there might be a link to be found.”

Kumjian’s team conducted its research by using computer simulations to create supercell storms and adjust the amount of wind shear in the storms’ environments.

“Our software allows us to create the ideal conditions for supercell storms,” he said. “From there, we can change wind shear to see the effects on hail growth in each case.”

Kumjian’s research turned out to be successful in understanding what contributes to hail formation.

“By increasing the magnitude of the wind shear in the environment, we found that there is a statistically significant change in the amount of hail that’s produced, even with the same updraft strength,” he said. “The key factor was that updrafts were broader in cases with increased shear, leading to a larger volume of the storm that was favorable for hail growth.”

Kumjian’s research could prove to be crucial in forecasting which storms are most likely to have hail that could be damaging to people and their property. However, he wants to analyze the outcomes of changing other variables within the storms before jumping to any conclusions.

“Our initial results have been very encouraging, and I think we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to hail growth research,” said Kumjian. “I’m excited to see where we go from here.”

By Beatriz Becerra Basterrechea*

(EurActiv) — For years, the stupidest thing a candidate standing for election could do was speak about Europe. Any junior communications advisor would tell you this. It made no difference if you explained that global problems needed global solutions or that European legislation limited national governments’ capacity to act. The advisor would retort that no one understood this. And if you evoked the shattered Europe of 1945 to illustrate the historical meaning of the Union, he would say with exasperation, “People don’t want you to tell them about the past, they’re only interested in their problems in the here-and-now.”

I wonder what these advisors would think of Emmanuel Macron, France’s man of the moment. An independent candidate in the Presidential elections, Macron talks about Europe with all the groups that he meets, including students at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where he gave a lecture in perfect English in early January. Marine Le Pen then attacked him for speaking in a foreign language to a foreign audience. “Poor France,” she lamented. This is more than anecdotal. Macron is not the first politician to have given the EU a prominent position in his message: the National Front has been doing this for decades.

Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage also do this. We have paid very dearly for ignoring them in the belief that they would not amount to much. But Brexit has happened and Donald Trump has been elected. The dismantling of the EU is a viable anti-political project. Nationalist populism has succeeded in imposing its narrative. And while most of Europe’s politicians and commentators remain trapped in old habits, Macron has understood that it’s time to take up the challenge. “Do you, the people, want to talk about Europe, globalisation and nationalism?” Well, let’s do it then. In French and in English.

An expert in Hegel after graduating in philosophy, a pianist with six years of music school, an investment banker with a solid grounding in mathematics, an inspector of finances trained at the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, minister of economy under President François Hollande, married to his former teacher (19 years his senior), Emmanuel Macron can say, before reaching 40, that he has lived. He has the sort of cosmopolitan profile that makes populists very nervous (speaking English, in Germany!) He cannot be said to have been a lamb reared in the fold of any party or trade union. He has no mortgages and has received a broad and varied education.

A few months ago, shortly after Brexit, Macron left the government and went it alone. He set up his their own electoral platform ‘En Marche !’ (On the Move) and quickly gained the support of thousands of French people, showing that there was, and remains, a rational, accessible and emotional message for those who wish to see constructive change and an updating of what has made Europe the best place in the world to live. The opinion polls currently give him 20% of the vote and climbing, tied with François Fillon (candidate for the right-wing Republican party) and catching up with Le Pen (National Front). The nomination of the very left-wing Benoît Hamon as Socialist Party candidate could benefit him. The polls also say that that if he can get through to the second round he would beat both Fillon and Le Pen.

The Front National leader said some time ago that the division between right and left has lost importance. Macron agrees, but that’s as far as comparisons between them can go. He’s taken up the challenge and understands that new rules apply. Others can go on criticising themselves, stressing the harm done by the Commission, the exasperating coldness of the Brussels bureaucrats and the lack of a response to the crisis. The populists and nationalists are rallying around our self-criticism, planting their flag and building a beachhead.

Have you been paying attention to them lately? Trump, Farage and Le Pen go on about freedom until the cows come home. They have made the word their own while we were busy with self-criticism. It’s time we accepted that the rules have changed, looked them in the eye and showed them up. Freedom? Europe is freedom. And prosperity. This is what Macron is arguing.

The results of recent elections have brought us back to the old debate between emotion and reason. It is very comfortable to think of Trump’s election or Brexit as victories of emotion. The evidence shows that there is no clear dividing line between the two. We need to act and to feel and appeal to emotion. But we need to do this from the starting point of reason and truth. Macron has shown that it is possible. Self-criticism? Yes of course, but it should also be positive.

People remember stories. There are few stories more exciting than the construction of Europe, the history of a shattered continent that put aside its ancestral differences to rise again, to give the world an example of solidarity and cooperation. Let us say that Europe is the best place in the world to live, because of its combination of freedom, prosperity and economic security, which has no equal anywhere in the world. We, the Europeans, built all of this. Should we not feel justifiably proud?

Traditional parties have shown they are unable to fight the populists. Their strategy has been to appropriate parts of their message and proposals. On the right Sarkozy stood in the Gaullist primaries on a platform mimicking Le Pen; on the left, Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour leader, has embraced Brexit and adopted an anti-immigrant message. Podemos and Syriza stand with the far right in glorifying old-fashioned national sovereignty. Macron, however, recently pointed out that the only effective sovereignty in today’s world is European sovereignty; that is an open, inclusive and tolerant society.

And now that the nationalist-populist vote has become a reality and gained in strength it has taken form, opening up the possibility of a European counter-attack. Now that Europe can no longer be taken for granted it is time to defend it with something more than bureaucratic jargon. Now is the time — as Donald Tusk, President of the European Council just mentioned — to show our democratic and civic pride in the most worthy political project ever known, and to project it into the future as a way to give confidence to a European public in need of reassurances.

Macron winning the French presidency would be more than just a breath of fresh air for the European Union: it would an undeniable victory of Enlightenment values against the populist threat. To be clear, this is why Emmanuel Macron is the anti-Trump.

*Beatriz Becerra is an independent Spanish MEP in the liberal ALDE group.

By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — The EU’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, will travel to Washington later this week to “identify common ground” with the new administration, following a series of disputes between US President Donald Trump and Europe.

Mogherini announced on Monday (6 February) that she would start a two-week period of meetings in the US and Europe with senior members of Trump’s team.

She explained that her agenda is being finalised and would include visits to the White House and Congress on Thursday and Friday (9-10 February).

Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos will also travel to Washington on Wednesday (8 February) to meet US Homeland Security Secretary, John Kelly.

The EU foreign policy chief confirmed that she would meet with Trump’s inner circle. Her agenda at the White House would include Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, and Jared Kusher, his son-in-law and one of his closest aides.

She expected to meet with her US counterpart, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Defense, retired general James Mattis either in Washington or in Europe, as they would visit the continent later this month.

US Vice-President Mike Pence will also visit the EU institutions after he attends the Munich Security Conference (17-19 February).

Mogherini gave special “value” to Pence’s visit as she commented that it represents “a very important political signal” coming from the new US government.

These signals are badly welcome by the Europeans, given the decline in transatlantic amity since Trump won the elections last November.

Against the backdrop of Europe’s disunity over current challenges (migration, economic policy…) and the future of the union, Trump is trying to exploit its differences, in order to weaken the bloc’s influence in the world affairs, to make “America great again” as he promised in his campaign, experts warned.

America, Russia and China are working to weaken Europe because “if Europe unites, in the long term, it will become the most important world power,” said French writer and economist Jacques Attali.

During her visit, Mogherini is expected to go through “the old list of files”, including the fight against climate change, Syria, Libya, Ukraine or the Middle East Process, to find where views converge.

But the list of grievances and complaints is long, requiring an arduous effort to clean the air and repair the transatlantic bond.

Exiting the EU: Trump was an ardent supporter of the UK’s breakup with the EU, as he became a ‘brother in arms’ with Brexit champion Nigel Farage. In an interview before he took office, he said that the UK was “doing great” leaving the EU.

Moreover, Trump’s aides asked EU officials over the phone who will be the next member state to leave the EU, as outgoing US ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner told reporters.

End of the euro: Brexiteer professor Ted Malloch, Trump’s expected choice to become ambassador to the EU, said that the euro was a currency “not only in demise but has a real problem” and therefore it could collapse in 18 months, if not before.

Trade and currency wars: Trump’s aversion to trade deals forced Europeans to put the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership “in the freezer”, confessed Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström.

But his advisors’ rhetoric escalated as the head of his new National Trade Council, Peter Navarro, accused Germany of having a “grossly undervalued” the currency to gain a trade surplus over the US.

“We are not currency manipulators,” said ECB President Mario Draghi in the European Parliament on Monday (6 February). He recalled that in its latest report to Congress last October, the US Treasury concluded that Germany does not manipulate its currency.

A trojan horse? As the Greek bailout programme is coming to a boil again, Trump’s team eyes the eurozone’s Achilles heel as an opportunity to destabilise European economies.

Malloch said in an interview with Bloomberg that “I think there is probably a very strong reason for Greece moving away from the euro.”

This opinion shared is by his boss. “Greece should get out of the euro and go back to their own currency. They are just wasting time,” Trump tweeted in October 2012.

More recently, his head of cabinet, Reince Priebus, whose mother is from Lesbos (Greece) said that the new administration will make the US great again first, “and then we are going to go out there and help Greece”.

These views could further complicate the third review of the Greek rescue programme.

The IMF board split this week over its participation in the bailout package, as the fund insists on debt relief to bring the Greek economy to a sustainable path.

The US is the fund’s largest shareholder, and holds veto powers to block any involvement in the bailout programme.

German officials insisted that the IMF involvement was a must, otherwise the whole rescue package could derail and Greece could be forced to exit the euro.

America first: As part of the financial deregulation package issued last Friday (3 February), Trump included an order to “advance American interests in international financial regulatory negotiations.” This nationalist approach would hamper the international efforts led by the Europeans to adopt a new set of international rules to strengthen the financial oversight (Basel IV).

Moreover, Trump aims at dismantling the regulatory framework set up after the financial meltdown in 2007-2008 to control Wall Street (Dodd-Frank).

Draghi warned against any deregulatory attempt. After recalling that cheap money and light regulation were the cause behind the crisis, he said that “the last thing” the international system needs is deregulation.

But former Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics during the Obama Administration, ‘Wally’ Adeyemo, explained that these changes promised by Trump would come “far slower” and would be “less dramatic” than people expect.

During a lunch debate in Brussels on Tuesday (7 February), he pointed out the difficulties that any change would face in the Congress. Any amendment to the financial legislation would need eight votes from the Democrats in the Senate.

More difficult would be to undo the Volcker rule that prohibits banks from conducting certain investment activities. Adeyemo said that it took years to agree on this rule since it required the approval of five regulatory agencies. Therefore, any change would also take years, as it would need the same approval.

Le Pen of France, like Trump, capitalizes on discontent over the establishment, job and cultural insecurity.

By François Godement*

If you asked a Wisconsin farmer why he voted for Donald Trump when his great-grandparents supported Senator Robert La Follette, a maverick progressive, he might not have an answer. If you asked a French voter from the wider suburbs what he might have in common with a Wisconsin farmer, he would give a bewildered laugh.

Yet there is a link between the upsurge for Trump, which surprised even the Republican establishment, and the tide of French voters for the National Front and its vocal candidate, Marine Le Pen, who just launched her raucous campaign. Each combines disaffection from the established parties – all liars, damn liars – a sense of dispossession where one cannot separate economic and job safety issues from wider cultural insecurity, which leads to a reversal of attitude towards newcomers and foreigners. Voters come from both the right and left.

The reversal towards foreigners is particularly telling. France alone in Europe shares a unique characteristic with the United States: It has long been an immigrant country. Every other European nation saw large waves of emigration from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. Millions of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, North Africans and Western Africans came to France in the heyday of economic growth, and while there was friction, xenophobic groups were not a significant force. In fact, the strongest discrimination targeted competitors from within – antisemitism defined the French far right more than xenophobia in the pre-WW2 era. Republicanism was the functional equivalent of “In God we trust,” also serving to paper over obvious inequalities and common prejudice.

Post-war, immigration turned to non-European newcomers. Still French speaking for the most part, and despite of racism, they gradually integrated in what was, until a decade ago, the world’s most functional melting pot, as measured, for example, by the rate of intermarriage. Two events tipped the balance: a generous policy adopted in the late 1970s, allowing family relatives to join immigrants already in place, at the same time that unemployment rates began an inexorable rise. The French-born children of the previous generation of immigrants are not integrating and often revert to imagined communities from their countries of origin. The simultaneous shift of policy from integration to multiculturalism transformed into a political disaster. Never mind what is really responsible, whether the rise of militant Islam, which reduces intercommunity exchanges and marital unions, or mass unemployment, now at 10 percent and reaching 50 percent in the most disaffected neighborhoods. Communitarianism and destitute ghettos are worse in the United States, but fear pervades France too: Marseille’s roughly 30 violent murders per year are talked about as much as Chicago’s 700 victims.

This suggests that France could be sensitive to the Trump vote effect. Here is a brash celebrity from New York who battles the status quo with plebeian appeal, whose money largely originated in the building industry – the brick and mortar economy. In France, too, there is widespread suspicion, especially in “la France périphérique” of the “elites”: journalists, who rate even lower than politicians in opinion polls, high civil servants with their revolving door from politics to large companies and finance. A major issue for the less educated French is what jobs and acquired benefits they might keep as the digital economy takes control. Here is a politician who talks about “us and them,” what the elites like to call a nativist. The United States and France share similar feelings of dispossession: It may be economic, the fear of “falling” or “déclinisme” is widespread.  It may be based on tensions about identity, with Mexican immigrants and the language issue, the few but conspicuous Muslim immigrants, viewed as threats. In France, with the largest percentage of Muslims of all EU countries except Bulgaria, the prospect of another wave of Muslim newcomers, combined with an immediate terrorist threat, has tipped public opinion against immigration.

But there are also great differences. In the United States, the wage decline of blue-collar as well as many white collar employees is as undeniable as the record-breaking surge of a small class collecting the benefits of globalization. In France, wages have continued to rise, and an extensive tax system targets the rich. A majority of Americans still rejects universal health care, but the French seem ready to go to the barricades if it is withdrawn for French citizens – they are less touchy about foreign residents. The Christian right exists in France, but has less influence than in the United States. Part of the radical right in the United States rejects the federal government, while this is almost unknown in France. In the United States, the 65+ age group voted predominantly for Trump, and the Democrats still hold on to the youth vote. In France, the National Front is the leading party among young voters, while retirees still vote for traditional conservative parties.

The real political crux is that it’s hard to find someone as different from Donald Trump as Marine Le Pen. The family business she inherited is a political party, the Front National with a structure of top-down and personal leadership, exclusions and elaborate united front tactics. While Trump may have taken a leaf from Bernie Sanders, a Democratic challenger to Hillary Clinton, he admires entrepreneurs and business people, naming more billionaires to cabinet positions than any of his predecessors. Marine Le Pen, instead, has an economic program that seems a resurrection of the old 1970s French Communist platform with systematic opposition to bankers, Europe and any economic reform. Her first motto for the coming campaign – “La France apaisée,” France appeased – borrowed from an old François Mitterrand slogan, not exactly words for a revolutionary upsurge or to “make France great again.” She manages a smiling media presence that often disarms criticism while Trump seems to revel in polarizing hyperboles. In short, Le Pen has all the trappings of a highly professional politician – and is sometimes criticized as such by more radical members of her own party.

More fundamentally, in France it is the political left that is exploding under the weight of contradictions. While the officially designated candidate comes from the left wing of the Socialist party, he is overtaken by two other candidates running outside the party, one even more to his left, the other claiming to be “neither right nor left.” The conventional right by and large kept its unity. In the United States, the Republicans may have won an unexpected majority, but they are divided as they have never been in their history with Trump upending his share of bedrock Republican principles.

For now, Marine Le Pen, the far right candidate, leads the polls for the first turn of the election. The same polls indicate that she would be defeated by a wide margin in the second round by Emmanuel Macron, the newcomer who is “neither left nor right,” and more narrowly by François Fillon, the conservative candidate who is hit by a financial issue.

It may turn out that the rocky start of the Trump years becomes a deterrent for voters in France and Europe. If France’s political right – which has conducted a successful primary – failed to draw voters away from the National Front, it would not be because Le Pen has successfully symbolized anger and discontent, but because she has reassured voters beyond her camp. Her public footprint of the last two years has been designed to show her as a reasonable and acceptable candidate, up to and including some wobbling on leaving the euro.

Were she to succeed, still possible at present, she would be constrained by such political requirements. She could simply not carry out what was once the crux of her program – leaving the euro and the EU. The immediate shock would be in terms of dealing with immigration from outside Europe – that is an area where both the traditional right and Socialist government of François Holland have undergone profound change.

Whatever superficial similarity there might be between the movements of Trump and Le Pen, their rise in power would produce very different results.

*François Godement is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Asia & China program and a senior policy fellow. He is a non-resident senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, and an outside consultant for the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His last published book is Contemporary China: Between Mao and Market, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

By Baisali Mohanty

In 2017, fully-fledged membership for India of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a most-sought-after pronouncement on which it has eagerly set its eyes, could be disappointed.

Wading through multiple negotiations and diplomatic transitions, India was granted a unique ‘clean waiver’ from the NSG in 2008—only through diplomatic bargaining by the United States with the 48-country cartel. A slew of trade deals followed for nuclear exports between India and some member-states, including the US, the UK and Australia.

As the US drifts from its pre-existing foreign policy stance, however, its role as a ‘moderator’ between India and the NSG is shadowed with inflating uncertainty. The American world view under the new president, Donald Trump, may undergo unforeseeable shifts, including vis-a-vis US ties with China and Pakistan. And any change in Sino-US dynamics which renders China more susceptible to threats—in physical or institutional terms—will have repercussions for India’s NSG game-plan.

In just the first week after his inauguration, Trump’s executive orders reflected his leit motif of engaging China from strength and recalibrating—or at least revisiting—US strategic flanks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the simmering situation in Tibet and China’s claim over Taiwan. Against such an uncertain backdrop, the extent to which the US will readily sponsor India’s NSG agenda has to be thoroughly reconsidered.

The diplomatic trade-offs which the US secured with reluctant partners—such as China, New Zealand and Ireland—for India’s eventual NSG entree were tenuous. Orchestrated by the previous Republican administration of George W Bush, the proposal had secured support from France, Russia and the UK. The aim was to achieve a concession from the NSG on the mandatory criteria of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), with full-scope safeguards as a condition of export. It took repeated redrafts by the US for the India-specific waiver to be accepted.

With the rejection of the first draft, the US circulated an amended version which, though it imposed strict conditions on India’s entry into the elite club, readily dismissed the option of ‘immediate termination’ of the waiver should India avow nuclear-weapons testing (Horsburgh, 2015). After two successive failures, the US presented a final draft geared to addressing the concerns of reluctant NSG members. In this the focus shifted to the ‘energy needs of India, integrity of the non-proliferation regime, safeguards, and export controls’ as the objective of the waiver (Horsburgh, 2015: 49). The final draft still proffered the desired ‘clean and unconditional’ waiver which placed no, or minimal, compulsions, on India (ET, 2008).

As can be surmised from the relentless US efforts, India’s NSG waiver was crucial to its strategic and status interests. A pro-waiver diplomat was spotted conceding that ‘the process was an incredibly complicated political and technological negotiation’. Wikileaks also revealed that it was ‘intense US pressure which involved oversight phone calls to presidents and prime ministers of holdout countries’ that such a waiver outsmarted potential rebelling voices. US officials were quoted as saying that the then secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, made at least two dozen calls to numerous allies to ease the path for the India-specific waiver.

As the US barreled against sturdy opposition, most remarkable was China’s. At the outset, China plotted to coalesce dissenting voices—the smaller European nations among others. But overwhelming US persuasion soon meant Chinese maneuvering ran aground. The ultimate stratagem then for China—still today its plausible alternative—was a criteria-based membership. This was promulgated in strong support of China’s all-weather friend Pakistan.

The US went out of its way, however, to exercise intense persuasion on China, including personal calls from Bush to Hu Jintao, the then Chinese president. Surprisingly, China decided to allow the waiver to pass in absentia. With Barack Obama now in the White House, the US circulated a proposal for India’s NSG membership, ‘Food for Thought’. Yet residual opposition from China meant India’s NSG accession was not concluded.

Against such an historical trajectory, Indian expectations of eventual full membership of the NSG, facilitated by the US, might be high. But amid the current geopolitical churning, Trump’s China policy will have spillovers on the extent to which the US anchors India’s NSG journey. While Sino-US ties have confronted tougher times, even as Obama openly challenged China’s aggressive stance over the South China sea or the TPP, Trump’s fired-up strokes might unsettle any Indo-US rapport at the NSG.

The new administration has decided to dig up longstanding issues on Taiwan and Tibet, on which China has been irritable and uncompromising. Trump’s call on the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, juxtaposed with a question-mark against the ‘one-China’ policy under which Beijing lays claim to the island, and his subsequent declaration of US withdrawal from the TPP brings contrasting signals to the table. If the former signified US intervention on the Taiwanese-nationalist side, the latter would open up space for greater Chinese involvement in the regional economic arena.

In relation to Trump’s US, India might, some suggest, feel morally obliged to take sides which resonate with its ‘identity’ in the international realm—its insistence on humanitarian policies for, and non-violent approach to, international conflict resolution. Christened as a ‘natural partner’ of the US, India has to give due regard to its stances but,India also has to exercise caution in the region and the wider hemisphere.

A US adamant on locking horns with China could incite tremors in the NSG problematic for India. It becomes highly unlikely, then, that the US would go the extra mile to secure NSG membership. Further, a scuffle with China could bring the US to confront a precarious and more volatile Pakistan. And this would signal trouble for a resilient India in its backyard. Hence, it serves well for India to build upon moderate policy options towards China and the US.

A persistent irritant is the threat perception in Sino-Indian partnership, relating moreover to status concerns in the regional biosphere. Having invested enormous resources on major security issues with China, India has entered a status dilemma with Beijing. As Wohlforth suggests, status (as opposed to security) dilemmas are prevalent where systemic factors provide maximum opportunity for strategic uncertainty and misperception. Status, as conceived here, is formed by socially constructed identities and values in the domestic as well as the international realm.

While India perceives China as a threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity, China’s threat perception of India is in relation to its growing proximity to the US and its regional standing. As Basrur reckons, India is seen as a ‘reluctant hegemon’ by China, while India’s perception of China has changed over time, from a regional hegemon to a ‘strong competitor’. The need of the hour for India is to formulate better stances which allow the Sino-Indian status dilemma to subside—whereas if India were further to approach the US viewpoint it could be exacerbated.

This stems not just from a defensive standpoint, but with a view to associating with Chinese policies whenever the potential arises. And amid China’s ebbing economic condition Indian markets can bring an opportunity: with its infrastructure deficit, India can provide the shoulder Chinese traders can rest upon. As rightly noted in the international relations domain, a state cannot choose its neighbours but it can decide its friends.

In this geopolitical climate India has a pivotal role to play in the region, requiring steady advancement towards China on mutually beneficial grounds. For India to pursue its NSG agenda, China’s reluctance needs to be adequately addressed , while at the same time ensuring the US is equally motivated to go the distance.

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post and is reprinted with permission.

By Alison Siskin*

On January 27, 2017, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) entitled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorists Entry Into the United States.” Invoking Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) §212(f), the President barred citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days, with limited exceptions for those traveling on diplomatic and certain other types of visas.

The action has given rise to the question of how these seven countries were selected.

The EO does not specifically mention the seven countries. Instead, the EO suspends the entry of aliens from the countries referenced in INA §217(a)(12), which details certain persons who are restricted from traveling to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). The VWP allows nationals from 38 countries, many of which are in Europe, to enter the United States as temporary visitors (nonimmigrants) for business or pleasure without first obtaining a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad. Temporary visitors for business or pleasure from non-VWP countries must obtain a visa from Department of State (DOS) officers at a consular post abroad before coming to the United States.

Visa Waiver Program Travel Restrictions

The VWP travel restrictions under INA §217(a)(12) were enacted as part of the FY2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act (P.L. 114-113), which was signed into law on December 18, 2015. They originated in H.R. 158, the Visa Waiver Program Improvement Act of 2015, which was passed by the House on December 8, 2015, by a vote of 407 to 19. H.R. 158, as passed by the House, was included as Title II of P.L. 114-113.

Among other things, the new INA §217(a)(12) changed who may travel to and enter the United States under the VWP. It prohibits people who were present in certain countries on or after March 1, 2011, with limited exceptions, from traveling under the VWP. In addition, the provision makes anyone who is a dual national of a VWP country and one of these specified countries generally ineligible to travel under the VWP.

INA §217(a)(12) specifies that the countries that trigger the prohibitions are

• Iraq and Syria. Congress specified these two countries in the legislation.
• “[A] country that is designated, at the time the alien applies for admission, by the Secretary of State under section 4605(j) of title 50 (as continued in effect under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)), section 2780 of title 22, section 2371 of title 22, or any other provision of law, as a country, the government of which has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism.” Currently, the countries so designated are Iran, Sudan, and Syria.
• Any other country or area of concern designated as such by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The criteria to make the determination include whether the presence of a foreign national in that area or country increases the likelihood that the foreign national is a credible threat to U.S. national security, whether a foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence in the area or country, and whether the country or area is deemed a safe haven for terrorists. On February 18, 2016, DHS designated Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as countries or areas of concern under INA §217(a)(12).

Notably, INA §217(a)(12) does not bar anyone from traveling or being admitted to the United States. Rather, it makes certain people ineligible to travel to the United States under the VWP based on their past or current presence in or citizenship of certain countries.

Although such persons are ineligible to travel under the VWP they may, like citizens of non-VWP countries, apply for a visa and if it is approved, in absence of the EO bar, travel to the United States.

Two men, aged 25 and 27, of Moroccan nationality, in Badalona (Barcelona), were arrested for their alleged involvement in jihadi indoctrination and recruitment.

As a result of the arrests, the Guardia Civil are searching their homes with the aim of gathering evidence of their intense activity online and on the social media, where they maintained numerous contacts with individuals, both in Spain and abroad, according to the Spanish government.

The Spanish government said that the detainees were particularly vigilant with regard to security; they were permanently in contact and shared content over the Internet using secure means. Their concern for security could be clearly observed through their use of a high number of phone lines, some of which were probably obtained using fake identities.

As a result of their activity spreading jihadi ideals over the Internet, the detainees had managed to recruit several other individuals who they had convinced to travel to conflict zones to join terrorist groups operating there. The members of the dismantled terrorist cell had also made it patently clear through the social media, on many occasions, that they were willing to join up to the ranks of the Islamic State (DAESH) in Syria.

Furthermore, the two detainees – members of a stable cell that provided support to the terrorist group DAESH – had collaborated in financing the group through criminal activities related to drug trafficking and financial offences, according to the Spanish government.

Since 2015, the year in which the Ministry of Home Affairs raised the Counter-Terrorism Alert Level to level 4 (Spanish acronym: NAA-4), the law enforcement agencies have arrested a total of 185 Jihadist terrorists.

By Jeffrey Dean McCoy*

Should the United States continue to support the Palestinian Authority Security Force (PASF)? To the Western observer, the current violence in Jerusalem is but another iteration of the intractable conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

To the average American, the term Palestinian is often synonymous with a masked Arab hurling a rock at the ubiquitous Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The reality on the ground is, of course, far more complex. Unknown to most is the fact that during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, the West Bank was quiet and stable.

In fact, since 2009 the PASF has received silent, grudging approval of its performance in the West Bank by Western leadership.1 The success of the PASF, like that of many nascent security forces supported by the United States, can be short-lived, especially in light of recent attacks by both Palestinians and Israelis. However, PASF performance has shown that it is a capable security force that is worthy of Israeli partnership, Palestinian trust, and further U.S. support.

To substantiate this position, the development of the PASF will be briefly examined and set against its unique organization. Both its history and its distinct structure allow it to maintain order within the West Bank. The PASF will face challenges to further development if any success in a two-state solution is reached, but it remains the best hope for legitimate security for the Palestinian people.

Development

The growth of the Palestinian Authority Security Force is not well understood and is often wrapped in misconceptions about regional actors. Development of the PASF began after the September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, which followed the end of the First Intifada.2 Substantial donor support was used to transform the bodyguards and security personnel of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader, Yasser Arafat, into an initial security force that swelled under Arafat’s leadership.3 His involvement in the security force, however, caused Western leaders to question the PLO’s dedication to achieving peace with Israel.

The majority of the PASF was incapacitated following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, which resulted in decreased donor aid and the destruction of much of its infrastructure.4 The death of Arafat in November 2004 and the ascension of Mahmud Abbas as his replacement established the conditions for rebuilding a more enduring Palestinian security organization. Supported by the “Quartet” powers (the United States, European Union [EU], United Nations, and Russia), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 announced the creation of the office of the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which would oversee the rebuilding of the PASF into a multi-branch security force as a part of the so-called Roadmap to Peace to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.5

The difficulty of implementation and complexity of the environment increased after Hamas won the Gaza Strip election in January 2006, and its subsequent forceful takeover from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in 2007. This development would effectively split the Palestinians into the Fatah-ruled West Bank and Hamas-led Gaza Strip.6

Organization

The PASF is organized into four main services, each with a separate and distinct mission, with other supporting elements of various sizes and capabilities, including an extensive intelligence apparatus. Integral to this architecture is the founding principle that the PASF was created with full transparency to Israel and coordinated by, with, and through the USSC.

The four basic services are the Presidential Guard (PG), responsible for the security of the Palestinian president; National Security Force (NSF), which provides area security and support to the Palestinian Civil Police; Palestinian Civil Police (PCP); and Civil Defense (CD) directorate, which provides basic firefighting and emergency response throughout the West Bank.7

The PG was the first service to be trained extensively by the USSC and is seen as the most skilled and most loyal element of the PASF. The PG highlighted its capabilities during the May 2014 visit of Pope Francis to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, providing close-in, vehicle, and route protection. The NSF is broadly organized into nine numbered special battalions that allow for a battalion in each of the West Bank governorates, as well as a battalion to deploy as necessary for emergencies or coverage during training. (Force coverage excludes East Jerusalem, with smaller, company-sized elements in the less-populated governorates, such as Tubas in the northern part of the West Bank.)

The NSF provides direct support to its PCP counterparts, who are conventionally deployed throughout the West Bank in various police stations and centers in generally company-size units. The NSF resembles a national guard force with no arrest authority. It can react quickly to control riots and establish checkpoints in support of PCP operations or response to emergencies. The PCP are trained in a Western European police style of law enforcement and perform much like an average police force. Although they have made strides in their professionalism and training as of late, they continue to be woefully under-resourced in radios, vehicles, and other basic equipment items when compared with their PG and NSF counterparts. As with many security forces, PASF interoperability is heavily reliant on the personal relationships of the various commanders.

Opportunities and Challenges

The PASF has attained a level of professionalism and ability sufficient to maintain the security environment in the West Bank. This statement could be viewed as a mediocre assessment of its abilities, but it is in fact a huge accomplishment given the challenging environment in which it operates. The PASF is placed between an aggressive IDF and a continuously angry Palestinian populace and must make both sides happy.

Of all the security forces trained by the United States, the PASF is the most cosmopolitan in experience, having been trained in a variety of locales. Its members operate with the most to prove. Although basic coordination takes place with the IDF, joint patrolling has been discontinued since the Second Intifada.8 In keeping the West Bank at a low boil, the PASF is often vilified by fellow Palestinians as “Israeli sub-contractors for security.”9

In fact, most violence occurs at Palestinian and Israeli seam areas such as settlements, where the IDF maintains responsibility. Frustratingly, these attacks often support the narrative for unilateral Israeli action in the West Bank. Although unsophisticated by modern security or police standards, the PASF operates in and among the Palestinian people and is a significant line of defense against extremism and terrorist threats to the region. PASF training continues to evolve, with an assessment that its members are ready to move beyond the basic skills and training provided in the past to more specialized and joint training that allows for significant skill improvement in lower level PASF leaders and interservice cooperation.10 In addition, a robust training program is gaining traction with support from the Italian Carabinieri, which provides the “best fit” for the gendarmerie police and security skills that support the PASF situation and ability.11

There has been a concerted effort by the USSC to improve both PASF interservice cooperation and the professionalism of its force, but its leadership is resistant; they falsely perceive that the degradation in the standing of the individual services would impact the sharing of donor funding.12 With an extremely top-heavy rank structure, the PASF must make strides in the institutional training of the junior enlisted members and focus on a multi-service officer training program. This is hard to initiate, as there currently is no Palestinian minister of security or commander of the PASF. This vacancy gives the PG and NSF commanders nearly unfettered communication directly to President Abbas.

Few in the PASF leadership, however, would be willing to support the surrender of access and influence to the Palestinian Authority leadership. Lastly, if a two-state solution is to be achieved, the IDF and police must openly improve their cooperation with their PASF counterparts and curb their unilateral activities within the West Bank areas.

The PASF deserves a future. It is a proven and capable security force that succeeds in spite of its extraordinarily challenging mission. With improved cooperation with the IDF and continued support from the USSC, as well as training that continues to address leader, joint, and institutional capacity, the PASF will provide the security environment that is necessary to enable the breathing room for a legitimate peace process in Israel and the West Bank. Given the volatile political and social environment, Israel should embrace the PASF as a legitimate partner for peace, and the West should continue to support the ongoing professionalization of this key contributor to Arab-Israeli peace.

About the author:
*Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Dean McCoy, USA, wrote this article while a student at the U.S. Army War College. It won the Strategy Article category of the 2016 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Essay Competition

Source:
This article was published in the Joint Force Quarterly 84, which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes:
1 Alaa Tartir, “The Evolution and Reform of Palestinian Security Forces 1993–2013,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4, no. 1 (2015), 1–20.

2 Brynjar Lia, Building Arafat’s Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement (Reading, United Kingdom: Ithaca Press, 2007), 25.

3 Roland Friedrich and Arnold Luethold, eds., Entry-Points to Palestinian Security Sector Reform (Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2007), 20.

4 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 7th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 492–494.

5 Jim Zanotti, U.S. Security Assistance to the Palestinian Authority, R40664 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2010), 1.

6 Smith, 511.

7 Ibid.

8 Terry Wolff, “District Coordination Office and Liaison Workshop,” briefing notes, NATO School, November 23, 2014.

9 Tartir, 12.

10 John Kenkel, “USSC Training, Education and Leader Development 101 Brief,” USSC briefing slides, August 19, 2015.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

By Jonathan Power*

So what does President Donald Trump think about NATO? Twice during his campaign he rubbished it publically, saying it was “obsolete”. Yet early February when he met the UK’s prime minister, Therese May, it was all hunky dory. He told her he supported NATO 100%.

There are some – a few – influential people who have argued that NATO is indeed obsolete. One of these was William Pfaff, the late, much esteemed, columnist for the International Herald Tribune. Another is Paul Hockenos who set out his views in a seminal article in World Policy Journal. Their words fell on deaf ears.

President George H.W. Bush saw it differently and wanted to see the Soviet Union more involved in NATO’s day-to-day work. President Bill Clinton had another agenda – and one that turned out to be a dangerous one, triggering over time Russia’s present day hostility towards the West – to expand NATO, incorporating one by one Russia’s former east European allies. His successors continued that approach with Barack Obama at one time raising a red rag to a bull by calling for the entry into NATO of Ukraine and Georgia

NATO’s job, as the British secretary-general, Lord Ismay, said in 1967 was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. It certainly had success with the latter two.

To some extent it did find a role after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. It led humanitarian interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and against Serbia in 1999. In 2003 it deployed its troops into Afghanistan. At one time the NATO-led force rose to 40,000 for 40 countries, including all 27 of the NATO allies.

Nevertheless, there are some of us who don’t see these as great successes. A majority of historians who have examined the evidence are convinced that Stalin had no intention of invading Western Europe. The Second World War was won, the Soviet Union had a ring of friends around its borders, and Germany was divided. The allies had been an invaluable help-mate during it and it did not feel threatened by its former comrades-in-arms.

So often overlooked is that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Germany and lost by far the most fighting men and civilians. Thorough searches by Western historians through the Soviet archives – they were opened during the years of President Boris Yeltsin – have revealed that Moscow had no plans to invade Europe.

Today, despite its deployments in the former ex-Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, NATO is not a truly multilateral institution of equals. The Europeans do not initiate military action (with the exception of Libya that led to the overthrow and killing of President Muammar Gadhafi). It is the Americans who do that and the Europeans, whatever their reservations, invariably follow.

Moreover, obeying America rather than following their own convictions in ex-Yugoslavia, they did not seek UN Security Council permission, and then are angry that Russia follows suit with its grabbing of Crimea.

NATO has no relevance to the problems that truly occupy Europe today. Its hands are tied in Ukraine; it has nothing to contribute to the massive refugee crisis; it cannot help deal with the fact, as a Europe Union study concluded, that there will be an increase in tensions over declining water supplies in the Middle East that will affect Europe’s security and economic interests; nor can it do anything to contribute to the fight against global warming, in the long-run the most severe threat that confronts humanity.

When it comes to the “war on terrorism” there is little that NATO can do as a combined action force. At home each government deals with the issue itself. In the fight against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq the Americans, British, French and Russia battle them in their own way.

In Afghanistan the NATO troops are losing territory to the Taliban year by year and the poppy crop provides ever more heroin to subvert Europe and Asia. It is difficult to believe that otherwise sensible men and women in NATO countries believe they should have stayed on in Afghanistan after their original target – Al Qaeda, as the source of the terrorist act against New York’s World Trade Centre – was driven out of Afghanistan and dealt a severe body blow.

This was not in their UN mandate and it has led to America’s longest war with no end in sight. It is a fruitless cause and the defeat of the Taliban by these means should never have been attempted. NATO countries should have limited themselves to building schools, hospitals, clinics, water supplies, sanitation systems and roads.

The EU should take over most of NATO’s role: doing more of what it has done in Georgia and stabilizing the Balkans, making use of its massive “soft power”, and thus undergirding world security. Yes, President Trump, NATO is obsolete! [IDN-INPS – 07 February 2017]

For 17 years Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune. He has forwarded this and his previous Viewpoints for publication in IDN-INPS. Copyright: Jonathan Power.

By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir*

During the past few months I interviewed scores of Turkish citizens who escaped from Turkey following the unsuccessful military coup, fearing for their lives. Many of them left their families behind, terrified of what to expect next. Although it has the potential of becoming a major player on the global stage, Turkey’s brilliant prospects are being squandered because of President Erdogan’s insatiable lust for power. He has used an iron fist to take whatever measure, however corrupt, to manipulate the rules and undermine the basic tenets of Turkey’s democracy—freedom and human rights.

I have been puzzled for some time as to why Erdogan decided a few years ago to go on a rampage to systematically reverse the huge social, political, and judiciary progress he himself successfully championed. Had he guarded these reforms and protected human rights, he would have realized his dream of rising to the stature of Turkey’s revered founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

He has been serving first as prime minister and now president for 15 years. Nevertheless, his hunger for absolute power seems to have no limits, prompting him to take extraordinary and systematic measures to neutralize any source that challenges him, including the judiciary, press, opposition parties, military, and academia. He uses scare tactics to silence his detractors, and provides economic assistance and other incentives to his cronies to ensure their continuing support while playing his political opponents against one another to reap every ounce of advantage. Most recently, he pressed the parliament to amend the constitution to codify his dictatorial powers, which will allow him to serve two more terms ending in 2029.

Following the unsuccessful June 2016 coup, 3,228 prosecutors in the civil and administrative jurisdiction (including 518 judges) were relocated, reshuffled, or demoted from their positions. Furthermore, 88,000 policemen, journalists, educators, and other officials have been detained, and 43,000 arrested. In July 2016, the parliament approved a bill allowing Erdogan to appoint a quarter of the judges at the Council of State, and new judicial appointments will be carried out by the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), which is under the jurisdiction of the Justice Ministry and by extension his own control.

Many attorneys were charged with belonging to the Gulen movement, which is deemed to be the sworn enemy of Erdogan, either through direct association or by having the most tenuous of ties. A lawyer who had an 18-year career in Kayseri had to flee Turkey because he and his law partners were representing schools connected to the Gulen movement. Due to that association, they were deemed suspicious by state authorities, despite the fact that the lawyers themselves were unaffiliated in any way with Gulen. Scores of lawyers were arrested and labeled as Gulenist just for having a common encrypted messaging app (i.e. WhatsApp) on their phones.

For Erdogan, the coup attempt was a “gift from God” that gave him the license to purge any individual or organization perceived to be his foe, particularly when his popularity was waning.

The thousands of officials who were arbitrarily removed have not been replaced, leading to obstructions in the legal process. Moreover, attorneys who have been arrested have been unable to obtain legal representation, as any potential lawyer would subsequently be accused of association with the Gulen movement, thus opposing the state itself.

Given the history of military coups, Erdogan decided to emasculate the military by discharging nearly 3,000 officers and issuing a decree that enabled his government to issue direct orders to the heads of all military branches over the head of the chief of the general staff. In addition, in August 2016 he appointed the deputy prime ministers and the ministers of justice, interior, and foreign affairs to participate in the Supreme Military Council (SMC), which decides on promotions of generals and other issues related to the Turkish military.

Immediately following the military coup he enacted a state of emergency that allows the government to rule by decree and fire public employees at will. Security officials, terrorism suspects, and other alleged ‘enemies of the state’ can be detained for up to 30 days without charge, and the state is under no obligation to put them on trial. There are also allegations of torture and abuse of prisoners.  In January 2017, the emergency law was extended again for three months.

To stifle his political opponents, in May 2016 he pressed the Turkish parliament to approve a bill stripping MPs of immunity from prosecution. This was widely perceived as an assault against minority Kurdish MPs who could be linked by the government to ‘terror activities’ and subjected to prosecution.

To codify the president’s absolute powers, Erdogan moved (with the support of his AK party) to change the president from a primarily ceremonial role to the sole executive head of state, and eliminate the Prime Minister position. The new constitution will also give the president power to enact some laws by decree, appoint judges and ministers, create at least one vice-president post, and increase the number of MPs to 600 from 550. In addition, it lowers the minimum age for lawmakers from 25 to 18, which will secure the political support of the next generation.

This is a move that constitutional law professor Ergun Özbudun, who was asked by Erdogan in 2007 to draw up a constitution, criticized, saying: “A democratic presidential system has checks and balances – this would be one-man rule.”

Most importantly, as a devout Muslim he skillfully uses Islam as a tool to further promote his political ambition without the need to produce any evidence for the correctness of his political agenda. When Erdogan became mayor of Istanbul in 1994, he stood as a candidate for the pro-Islamist Welfare Party. He went to jail for 4 months in 1999 for religious incitement after he publicly read a nationalist poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

The number of mosques has grown from 60,000 in 1987 to more than 85,000 in 2015. Recently, a slew of government initiatives has pushed Islam deeper into Turkey’s secular education system. Examples include a plan to build mosques in 80 different state universities and convert one Istanbul University into an Islamic studies center. In December 2015, “a government-backed education council recommended extending compulsory religious classes to all primary school pupils, as well as adding an extra hour of obligatory religious classes for all high school students.”

The climate in Turkey is such that even an insolent reference to Erdogan is grounds for criminal charges; over 2,000 have been indicted under such laws. Widespread phone tapping is no longer a secret, leading to fears of expressing oneself truthfully in phone conversations. To be sure, ordinary Turks do not discuss politics in public and refrain from criticizing government officials, fearing that a secret agent may be listening to the conversation. There is only one opposition television station left operating and one such newspaper (Cumhuriyet), but almost half of the newspaper’s reporters, columnists, and executives have nonetheless been jailed.

I have tremendous admiration for the Turkish peoples’ creativity, resourcefulness, and determination to make Turkey a thriving democracy, but they are polarized between the secular and Islamic worlds—conditions in which Erdogan can further capitalize on his authoritarian political agenda.

Perhaps it’s time for the Turkish people to rise and demand the restoration of the country’s democratic principles—the same principles that made Erdogan the most revered leader during his first 10 years in power and that could have made him the new Atatürk of the Turkish people.

*Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of TransConflict.

Our collective failure to reverse inequality is at the heart of a global malaise, from populism to climate change, argue experts in The BMJ today.

Professors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson at the University of York, say societies with bigger income differences tend to have poorer physical and mental health, more illicit drug use and more obesity. More unequal societies are also marked by more violence, weaker community life and less trust.

Other global risks stemming from inequality range from ‘fiscal crises’ to ‘profound social instability’, ‘increasing polarisation of societies’ and ‘increasing national sentiment’ and even ‘changing climate’ and a ‘degrading environment’ because of the ways in which inequality drives consumerism and over-consumption, they add.

Yet, despite decades of research showing that we need to tackle the structural determinants of health if we want to reduce health inequalities, this has not happened and health inequalities have not diminished, they write.

“In many cities in the UK and USA, for example, we continue to see life expectancy gaps of 5 to 10 years and occasionally of 15 to 20 years between the richest and poorest areas.”

They believe that the long term failure, even of ostensibly progressive governments, to tackle these glaring injustices is perhaps one of the reasons why public opinion has swung so strongly away from the established political parties.

And they warn that the public’s sense of being left behind “will only be exacerbated by the negative health effects of austerity, which are starting to emerge in our health statistics.”

They point out that during the last generation, economic growth ceased to improve health, happiness and the quality of life in rich countries. “Now, more than ever, we need an inspiring vision of a future capable of creating more equal societies that increase sustainable wellbeing for all of us and for the planet,” they conclude.

Chinese netizens have expressed outrage over a Christian theme park allegedly sponsored by local authorities in Changsha, in central China’s Hunan province.

The government should not encourage religious activities in a secular country that separates religion and politics, the Hindustan Times website reported them as saying.

The park in Changsha Xingsha Ecological Park, which covers about 150,000 square meters, is the largest Christian theme park in central and south China, Global Times said citing a local TV station report.

A Christian Church and Bible institute were built in the park, Chen Zhi, president of the Christian Council of Hunan Province, was quoted as saying by the TV station. The church will open in June 2017, said the report.

Netizens expressed their anger after learning local authorities subsidized the project.

A user on Sina Weibo — China’s Twitter — said the government should be alert to the penetration of religious ideas that contradict China’s mainstream ideology, which might pose a threat to political security.

Another Weibo user named “Sanxiaren” said Hunan is the birthplace of Chairman Mao Zedong and a sacred place like this would never tolerate the overflowing of religion.

A report released during the 9th National Chinese Christian Congress in 2013 showed that more than 2.4 million Protestants were baptized in China from 2007-12, with experts saying that more people are turning to religion for help and spiritual consolation.

The threat posed by salafi-jihadists in Southeast Asia remains high. Various groups affiliated to transnational terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State, which share a common ideology, are likely to merge to form a mega-jihadist grouping.

By Bilveer Singh PhD*

The security threat posed by salafi-jihadists to Southeast Asia remains high. There are various groups in the region that are affiliated to transnational terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), which share a common ideology of establishing a global Caliphate or political order.

There are also leaders who have moved from Al Qaeda affiliates such as the Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf Group to Islamic State in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, which is the epicentre of IS in the region even though its regional operational base is presently in southern Philippines.

Significance of Al Qaeda and IS-linked Groups

The view that the IS has replaced Al Qaeda as a sustained threat in Southeast Asia is a misreading. IS is a serious threat to regional and global security, with an identifiable leader who proclaims himself as the Caliph of the global Muslim community; IS also has ample resources as it continues to control swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, although its territories have shrunk. However, it is not the only threat.

Just as in South Asia, from Pakistan to Bangladesh, Southeast Asia is being threatened by a dual terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda and IS, which can have a number of consequences for regional security.

First, there is the situation of flux as to which jihadi group is the key terrorist threat in the region. Given the porosity of groups and free movement of jihadist personalities between them, the jihadist network in Southeast Asia constitutes a greater threat than individual jihadist groups, whether ISIS or AQ.

Hence, in Southeast Asia, they would include pro-Al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Bakar Bashir, Aman Abdurrahman and Isnilon Hapilon who have declared allegiance to IS, thereby temporarily weakening some pro-Al Qaeda groups.

Yet as IS is under military pressure in Syria and Iraq, there is the possibility that it may also be weakened, and its power and influence outside the Middle East reduced. This is already evident in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the pro-Al Qaeda Taliban has been able to capture more territories and launch attacks against government forces and pro-IS groups. This weakening could pave the way for the different groups to come together in service of a common mission.

Possible Merger of Jihadi Groups?

As both Al Qaeda and IS share many ideological beliefs, including common enemies, there is the possibility that they may merge and morph into a single mega jihadi group. Just as the Mujahidins fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s evolved into Al Qaeda in the 1990s, which spun off IS, there is nothing to stop the two groups from merging into a single force.

While personality clashes and differences in strategy have militated against cooperation, this may not be a permanent state of affairs. To survive and remain relevant, they may have to collaborate, especially if President Trump pursues his promise to work with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to exterminate Al Qaeda and IS in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Such tactical or strategic cooperation between Al Qaeda and IS will further undermine global security, including in Southeast Asia. We can expect increased attacks worldwide, including in Southeast Asia, where Al Qaeda and IS have an operational presence. Even during the massive demonstrations against the current Jakarta governor in November and December 2016 for alleged blasphemy, both pro-Al Qaeda and IS groups worked together to successfully pressure the Indonesian government to prosecute the governor.

Even though the last bombing linked to an Al Qaeda group in Indonesia took place in 2009, this does not mean that groups associated with it in the region are dormant. The death in March 2015 of a JI member, Ridwan Jibril, in Syria while fighting for Jabhat al-Nusra – a pro-Al Qaeda organisation – was indicative of the continued active presence of pro-Al Qaeda jihadists in the region.

Neo-JI?

Groups such as JI, Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia, KOMPAK, Jamaah Ansharusy Syari’ah and Ring Banten in Indonesia, the KMM in Malaysia, and the Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines have been greatly weakened by security operations or shifting allegiance.

While this is so, many pro-Al Qaeda groups remain in the region, especially in Indonesia. The key pro-Al Qaeda leaders in Indonesia include Abu Rusydan, Abu Tholut, Zarkasih, Abu Jibril, Abdul Rahim Bashir, Mochammad Achwan, Abu Dujana, Umar Patek and Irfan Awwas.

In fact, the former Emir of JI, Abu Rusydan, has publicly stated that his organisation is presently in the phase of í’dad, namely, preparation for jihad. The notion of a new Jemaah Islamiyah, referred to by analysts as neo-JI, has been dismissed by these leaders who still viewed the PUPJI, JI’s constitution, as the key strategic guide of the group.

Islamic State-linked Groups

Since 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the formation of IS, many groups in the region have sworn allegiance to him and IS. There are three key indicators of the existence of groups supporting IS in Southeast Asia:

The first is the existence of Southeast Asian fighters organised under the Katibah Nusantara in Syria and Iraq under the leadership of its Emir, Bahrumsyah. The second is the presence of Katibah Muhajirin fighters in southern Philippines, mostly from Indonesia. The third and most important is the appointment of Isnilon Hapilon, the former commander of the Abu Sayyaf Group, as the Emir of Wilayah Philippines based in Mindanao. Hapilon has been attracting regional jihadists, including Rohingya and Uighurs; he was reportedly injured in a military operation in January 2017.

There are many pro-IS groups in the region today. In Indonesia, for instance, this would include Mujahidin Indonesia Timur, Mujahidin Indonesia Barat and Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, not to mention groups fighting in Syria under Katibah Nusantara and Katibah Mujahirin. More than 260 IS supporters have also been detained in Malaysia.

In an environment of growing radicalisation, the likelihood of both Al Qaeda and IS-linked groups proliferating and growing in influence is very high. For instance, in the face of the weakening sway of the two key Islamic social organisations in Indonesia, namely, Nahdlaltul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, there will be more opportunities for radical groups to become influential, as was evident in the massive demonstrations in Jakarta in December 2016. This signalled not only the growing societal radicalisation and influence of Al Qaeda and IS-linked groups in Indonesia.

*Bilveer Singh PhD is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security, at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Nandan Unnikrishnan

US-Russia relations have been on a downward spiral since the 2008 Georgian war with Russia. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s acerbic remarks on the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections added to the downward momentum. The Ukraine crisis in 2014 saw relations plummet further. The current nadir was reached after WikiLeaks made public the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). An official inquiry report, ordered by Barack Obama, even if based on specious inferences, indicted Russia in the hacking. However, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the US Presidentship has given rise to speculation that Washington’s ties with Moscow will improve. a development that will have significant implications for India.

Supporters of this view cite Trump’s yearning, expressed in campaign speeches, to collaborate with Moscow to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Daesh, his stated inclination to consider withdrawal of sanctions against Russia in return for cooperation on nuclear weapons reduction, and a lukewarm approach to NATO and other allies if they do not pay more for US security guarantees as reasons for relations improving between the White House and Kremlin.

Their opponents argue that the situation on the ground is too complex to be encapsulated in a few campaign speeches. They say that Trump will soon find out that Russian interests run contrary to US interests because, fundamentally, Moscow is opposed to a US-led world order based on Western liberal values. Therefore, goes their narrative, be it West Asia or Europe, there are limits to US cooperation with Russia.

That the truth, as usual, is somewhere in between was indicated in the first formal, almost one-hour long, conversation between Trump and President Vladimir Putin last week. Trump’s desire to reduce US military involvement around the globe is likely to see some cooperation — direct or indirect — in Syria. The complication here is that one of Russia’s allies in Syria is Iran, a country that Trump views as the prime destabiliser in West Asia. On the other hand, Turkey — a NATO member — has already signed on attempts to stabilise Syria along with Russia and Iran. This may be a precursor of how cooperation against the Daesh will unfold. This cooperation could also extend to Afghanistan — a possibility that should pique India’s interest. In Europe, the circumstances for greater cooperation exist but the atmospherics may limit the scope of this collaboration. All the countries, except Ukraine, participating in the sanctions imposed on Russia after the 2014 crisis are in favour of easing the sanctions, particularly since the sanctions haven’t had any demonstrable effect. The Minsk agreement is a road map for stabilising the situation in Ukraine that is acceptable to all parties. The sticking point is Crimea, which; as everyone agrees, Russia is not going to give up. The solution could probably be to place it on the backburner and invoke the US approach to the Baltics after World War II. Then the US refused to recognise the Baltics as part of the USSR, but continued dealing with the Kremlin.

The problem is that this may be perceived as a victory for Putin, something the Europeans would be loath to accept. Therefore, any chance of the sanctions against Russia being lifted and Moscow making concessions elsewhere, would depend on Trump finding a way to finesse this dilemma between reality and perception. US-Russia ties will also greatly depend on Trump’s ability to resist efforts to circumscribe his manoeuvrability and overcome the resistance of the foreign policy establishment, including his closest advisors, majority of the members of the Congress, and many vocal opinion makers.

Also, Russia is not seeking a deal with the US at any cost. Russia seeks a multi-polar world with no clear hegemon. It will not accept a deal that undermines that strategic goal.

As for India’s policy makers, an improvement of US-Russia relations, in their view, should increase Delhi’s space to improve relations with both. An added bonus would be, in their eyes, it also keeps Russia from getting into a bear hug with China.

This article originally appeared in DNA.