Articles tagged with: Afghanistan
The New York Review of Books has an absolutely wonderful feature on what is at stake in the US presidential election. Fourteen leading thinkers give their views.
Darryl Pinckney is amongst those who see parallels between Barack Obama’s campaign and Robert Kennedy’s bid in 1968. “Kennedy was on his was to the nomination and if he had survived the country could have taken a different path. This election has the same feeling, the sense that we are at a fork in the road, and must go one way or the other”.
[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=H6xyhBMMFlY]
“Obama is forty-seven years old; McCain is seventy-two, old enough to be Obama’s father”, notes Russell Baker. “In classical mythology the son must kill the father to allow for the earth’s renewal”. So Obama represents, to mix the metaphors of Pinckney and Baker, the fork in the road for the earth’s renewal. And it is, indeed, the earth’s renewal, not simply America’s. This is in spite of the fact that, as Timothy Garton Ash observes, “many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don’t they understand? This is our election. The world’s election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do”.
Garton Ash speculates that “somewhere around 2000 may be marked by future historians as the zenith of American power” and he is certainly right that the two terms of President George W. Bush have seen “a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States”. Nonetheless, this is the world’s election because the world still hankers after a US that they feel they can work productively with in tackling “issues that matter – climate change, an unraveling economy, entitlement spending, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, countering terrorism without destroying civil liberties, and ‘cultural’ issues such as welfare, affirmative action, and abortion”.
Some of these issues listed by Andrew Delbanco clearly have more of a domestic flavour than others but the world realises that none of them have consequences which are entirely confined to America’s borders. This is where the mind-set of the world very much is and Ronald Dworkin looks forward to “radical change in the mind-set of Americans, who should understand that we are no longer law-givers dictating to the world but partners who must accept compromise and risk as others do”. The world desperately still wants to have the US as a partner but may abandon this as a possibility if America chooses the fork in the road represented by McCain.
The consequences of this eventuality are as truly fearful as the possibilities opened up by a President Obama are wonderful. Thus, I endorse the conclusion of Dworkin. “We Americans can do something great in November. Or we can do something absolutely terrible”.
Paul Collier’s the Bottom Billion is a hard hitting and sobering analysis of development – and seems all the more so in view of recent tragic events in Afghanistan.
Collier begins by setting out the issue that his book addresses. “For forty years the development challenge has been a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people. The Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations, which are designed to track development progress through 2015, encapsulate this thinking. By 2015, however, it will be apparent that this way of conceptualizing development has become outdated. Most of the five billion, about 80 percent, live in countries that are indeed developing, often at amazing speed. The real challenge of development is that there is a group of countries at the bottom that are falling behind, often falling apart”.
These countries form the bottom billion and Collier argues that the development industry has a vested interested in avoiding a re-prioritisation upon these countries. “Development biz is run by aid agencies and the companies that get the contracts for their projects. They will fight this thesis with the tenacity of bureaucracies endangered, because they like things the way they are. A definition of development that encompasses five billion people gives them license to be everywhere, or more honestly, everywhere but the bottom billion. At the bottom, conditions are rather rough. Every development agency has difficulty getting its staff to serve in Chad and Laos; the glamour postings are for countries such as Brazil and China. The World Bank has large offices in every major middle-income country but not a single person resident in the Central African Republic. So don’t expect the development biz to refocus voluntarily”.
But in an ever more globalised and interconnected world this refocusing is in the best interests of both the developed and the developing worlds. While the development biz is entitled to look to politicians for the resources required for security, politicians should increasingly put pressure on the development biz to refocus upon places like Afghanistan. This would amount to the development biz thinking the unthinkable. But for politicians to deliver their side of the bargain with the development biz in Afghanistan (i.e. security) may require them to also think the unthinkable in several senses.
First, some NATO members are plainly not pulling their weight - expect a President Obama to make this point strongly. Second, we should stop conflating and pushing together Al-Qaeda (which is broadly a non-Afghan beast) and the Taliban (which is very much of Afghanistan) and start picking apart whatever ties bind Al-Qaeda and the Taliban – and these ties are much weaker than is often presumed. Recent talks in Saudi Arabia between the Karzai government and the Taliban are a step towards this, which should be encouraged. Third, much of Afghanistan only enjoys comparative advantage in poppy. The current position and policies of the NATO countries on this crop are a self-defeating negation of this reality, which lines the pockets of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, makes illegal the best route out of poverty for many ordinary Afghans and does nothing to correct the global shortage in opiate-based painkillers. All of this could be addressed by one simple policy change: create a legal market for poppy with the Afghan farmers on one side and the NATO states on the other.
