Well That Seems Like A Bad Idea

I’ve been waffling back and forth on whether the US or some coalition of powers should intervene in Darfur, but this Washington Post report detailing the level of anarchy gripping the region has almost turned me into a decisive opponent of intervention:

While the government and militia attacks on straw-hut villages that defined the earlier years of the conflict continue, Darfur is now home to semi-organized crime and warlordism, with marijuana-smoking rebels, disaffected government militias and anyone else with an AK-47 taking part, according to U.N. officials.

The situation is a symptom of how fragmented the conflict has become. There were two rebel groups, but now there are dozens, some of which include Arab militiamen who once sided with the government. The founding father of the rebellion lives in Paris. And the struggle in the desert these days is less about liberating oppressed Darfurians than about acquiring the means to power: money, land, trucks.

Though there are some swaths of calm in Darfur, fighting among rebels and among Arab tribes has uprooted more than 70,000 people this year, compared with about 60,000 displaced by government attacks on villages, according to U.N. figures.

Although powerful countries such as China, which is heavily invested in Sudan’s oil, have been criticized by human rights activists for not doing more to pressure the Sudanese government to end the conflict, some analysts say the breakdown of command lines on all sides has made the situation increasingly impervious to outside influence.

It’s not at all clear that there’s a specific group that an outside force to protect, and even more importantly, a specific group to go after. Sure, we could try to beef up the AU force and protect refugees, but beyond that, it seems just about impossible to actually identify the bad guys and kill them/drive them away from the innocent people they are trying to kill. So maybe I’m not against all forms of intervention, but I’m certainly against any type of offensive intervention that tries to proactively identify the bad guys and kill them. Also, regime change in Khartoum is a horrible, horrible idea. The place seems more and more like Somalia Redux.

de Waal on JEM’s Attack on Omdurman

Generally, when you want analysis on what’s going on in Sudan, you should read Alex de Waal. So, read Alex de Waal’s post on the attack. Here’s an excerpt:

problems before the Sudanese state; it is a by-product of successive Sudanese governments’ failures to address the core issues facing the country. The current crisis is closely connected to regional events over the last 20 years. Problems like the ones in Darfur are similar to those in other marginalized regions in Sudan. People living in the peripheries of Sudan, have, as a general rule, been neglected by the government, and have huge grievances. Darfur and Kordofan in particular, are regions which have been used by political elites to produce agricultural and animal products; their people were recruited by the army and as low ranking soldiers they have fought in wars between the north and the south; in addition Darfurians/Kordofanians were used as a bridge to bring elites in the north to power during the democratic periods (especially for the rise to power of the Umma Party). All this without any significant role in the country’s governance.

Sudanese intellectuals and activists must seriously engage in an open and honest debate about why, after more than 50 years of independence from British rule, we are still unable reach a consensus on a way to govern the country that will allow all Sudanese to contribute to its social and economic development. Sudan is a massive country rich in natural resources - more than enough to accommodate all Sudanese people ten times over.

Saturday’s attack is a clear exposition of the weakness of security in Khartoum, and the vulnerability of the regime. The government has consistently portrayed itself as a security and military might. Yet forces travelled for four days across the country to arrive at the outskirts of the capital without facing any resistance! Khartoum’s credibility and image as a mighty military/security force has been dramatically shaken in the minds of the Sudanese people. The government security forces are well-oiled machine when it comes to managing ghost houses where civilians are tortured; organising plots to change neighbouring countries’ governments; or assassinating their presidents. How security chiefs allowed attacks to reach Khartoum requires much explanation. The attack also sent a clear message to political elites, that the battleground for war would no longer remain in distant places; it has moved into their own backyard. For decades they have made policies which affect millions in the peripheries without bearing direct consequences, but no longer

Is There A Principal/Agent Problem With Guerillia Fighters?

Megan McArdle has a good post elucidating the principal/agent problem as it relates to unions and workers. Although the interests of workers and unions coincide most of the time, ultimately, the principal concern of a union is the survival or the union. And it’s that interest that will always win out. I’m not trying to union bash, this is true about every type of organization - government, corporation, private charity, etc - and most interestingly, guerrilla groups.

I’m talking about the recent attack in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city, by the Darfuri rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement. Eric Reeves has a great post at TNR explaining the implications of the attack, especially how it’s likely to set back the cause of actual Darfuris, who are only going to face more repression as a result of the Sudanese government coming under threat. What’s odd about JEM’s attack is that they very likely know that their actions will result in their purported constituents - Darfuris - becoming very much worse off. Not surprisingly, according to Reeves, JEM is one of the least representative guerrilla groups and is mostly concerned with advancing its leader’s political and personal agenda.

So, the question becomes, how do we make guerrilla groups more accountable? I imagine that one of the main problems is that many people in the JEM are fighters first, and representatives of their people and their interests later. There are lots of way to advocate for a group of people, and even in a place as hostile as Sudan, violent resistance isn’t always the best answer. In this case, all JEM’s attack did was let the Sudanese petition the UN to condemn the attack, which they did. And now Khartoum gets an extra chance to brutalize the Darfuris.

This is reminiscent of the situation in Guatemala in the 1980s. Anthropologist David Stoll argued that the conflict was not lead by indigenous Mayans who were oppressed by the government, but instead was stoked by communist radicals who wanted to foment revolution. The government harshly cracked down on this - the communist revolutionary aspect - and then subsequently radicalized the Mayan populace and lead to the long, drawn out civil war. Stoll argues that Mayans were actually experiencing modest improvements in their well being until “the guerrillas committed the first political executions, of nonindigenous landowners, in the hope that these would galvanize Indians into joining the insurgency.” What we had in Guatemala, according to Stoll, was that the guerrillas who were supposedly “on the side” of Guatemalan peasants were more on the side of their own ideology, and the peasants were something of an afterthought - or more cynically, cannon fodder. Of course, it was these peasants that suffered the great brunt of the civil war, just as Darfuris are most likely to suffer as result of JEM’s actions.

So how are we to make guerrillas more responsive to their constituents? The usual proscriptions - more information and transparency - hardly seem feasible considering the conditions most guerrilla insurgencies operate under. If I were an enterprising political scientist or anthropologist, this would seem like a fertile area of research, Of course, if there’s any scholarship here that I’m missing - which is overwhelmingly likely - I’d love to be pointed in the direction of it.

Let’s Look at Botswana

Marian Tupy, Cato Policy Analyst, has a piece in the American lauding Botswana’s considerable economic and political progress, especially compared to its neighbor Zimbabwe.

On the economic front, Tupy is nothing but correct, Botswana has made impressive gains. It’s experienced 40 percent growth since 1966, and now has a GDP per capita of 10,813, which would put it sixth in Africa. But in literally the sentence after Tupy extols Botswana for its growth, he mentions the one fact that overshadows all or any progress that Botswana has made economically or socially - AIDS. Botswana has an infection rate of 24% and has seen its life expectancy plummet from 62 to 35 years since 1980. And although things like GDP growth, political stability and non-corrupt governance are all well and good, it’s hard to call them a victory when people are living one half as long as people in the developed West.

The second major victory Tupy hails Botswana for is political stability. Since independence in 1966, Botswana was governed by a ruler with a white wife and has thus pursued a policy of racial reconciliation. Instead of kicking out white farmers and giving their farms to cronies, Botswana generally tried to work with their 7% white minority. And Botswana also hasn’t suffered from the civil wars, coups and proliferation of warlords that many post-colonial African states have. But the flip side of “political stability” is one party, albeit democratic rule. The president after independence, Seretse Khama, served for 14 years until his death
in 1980. Since then, his Botswana Democratic Party has ruled. Tupy calls Khama’s son, Ian, taking over a sign of “Botswana’s relative comfort with racial diversity.” That’s one of way of putting it, the other way is that it’s a sign of a one party state that passes power along through families, hardly an encouraging sign for such a supposedely advanced state. In its first 42 years since independence, Botswana had three presidents, all from the same party.

One of the most striking features of Botswana’s recent parliamentary election is that even though the Botswana Democratic Party won a mere 52% of the vote, they got 44 out of the 57 seats in parliament. And although much of the results can be chalked up to the incompetence and feuding between opposition parties, it still shows that there is something of a democratic deficit in Botswana. There are also worries that Khama, who previously served in the military, has “authoritarian habits” and a general disdain for the party machinery. But these are all minor systemic worries, Botswana still has a better functioning government than most in Africa.

Back to economics: Tupy claims that much of Botswana’s growth is due to pursuing liberal economic policies like lowish personal income taxes, low corporate taxes and trade liberalization. But despite this liberal agenda, Botswana is still, according to an analysis done by the Institute for Security Studies, an African think tank, an “essentially mixed economy.” A huge part of this mixture is the diamond industry, which is the main source of Botswana wealth. Tupy doesn’t mention diamonds once, despite the fact that some 70 percent of the diamond’s industry’s profits go to the government and that 85 percent of its exports are diamonds¹. And, in opposition to what most economists and especially Cato-types recommend, Botswana largest diamond company, Debswama, is 50% controlled by the government. In fact, when you look at diamonds, Botswana appears to be a much more “normal” resource-rich developing world country. And although it seems to have avoided the corruption that the Dutch Disease brings, it’s still largely overdependent on the value of one resource. This is part of the largest problem in Botswana’s political economy: unemployment,. In 2006, unemployment was 24%. This can be expected from a resource dependent country, because extraction, especially as it becomes more mechanized, doesn’t provide all that many jobs. Botswana also has a relatively high Gini coefficient of 60. Although inequality doesn’t seem like a huge concern considering the bottom line economic growth Botswana has experienced, it is still a country which has a huge number of very poor people, meaning that income inequality can be deadly when 61% of the population lives on less than 2 dollars a day.

It’s hard to say that Botswana is a model for African countries. It is more of a model for resource-rich African countries. Because it has mostly managed to avoid the resource curse, and because of a strong, unified government which tampered down any conflict over its diamonds, it has experienced amazing growth. But it’s unclear how much of that growth can be attributed to good policy which can then be replicated across Africa, and how much of it can be attributed to having lots of diamonds. As always in development economics, it’s complicated.

1 - “The Political Economy of Botswana’s Public Sector Management Reforms” Motsomi Morobela, http://globalization.icaap.org/content/special/Marobela.html

South Africa and the World Cup

Jamie Kirchick argues that because South Africa isn’t taking a hard enough stance against Robert Mugabe, the international community should consider either a boycott or “independent organizations and individual players–[should] begin a public debate about the suitability of South Africa as a host for the World Cup.”

When you think about it, if merely not opposing a brutal dictator was enough to deny a country the opportunity to host a major sporting event, or at least to talk about doing so, the rest of our Olympics and World Cups would be in Northern Europe, which would make the Summer games a dicey proposition. Kirchick doesn’t make such  a silly argument, however, and instead insists that if South Africa wanted to, they could oust Mugabe:

South Africa’s and Zimbabwe’s histories are closely intertwined. In the 1830s, Zulu tribesmen trekked north and settled in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland. Then it was settlers from the Cape who subdued the Matabeles and founded the Rhodesian colony. To this day, landlocked Zimbabwe relies on South African ports and, more important, energy supplies–such as electricity, which South Africa provides to Zimbabwe at a 36 percent discount. It is no stretch to say that South Africa could force regime change in Zimbabwe overnight.

Indeed, there is a precedent for this, back when South Africa was ruled by a white minority government and Zimbabwe was Rhodesia. In the late 1970s, reading the writing on the wall, apartheid prime minister B.J. Vorster cut off military and economic aid to Rhodesia’s leader, Ian Smith, and told him to accept some form of majority rule. Without the backing of apartheid South Africa, a white-ruled Rhodesia couldn’t stand, and a power-sharing agreement between blacks and whites soon followed in what became Zimbabwe.

Today the situation is no different. Without the support of South Africa, the continent’s economic powerhouse, Mugabe could not hold onto power.

I doubt that this is actually true. It’s not like Zimbabwe’s economy hasn’t gone from bad to worse to historically horrendous, and Mugabe’s hold on power looks as strong as ever. If Mugabe could portray the entire world, and especially South Africa, has aligned against him, he might even be able to consolidate power. There’s also the humanitarian costs to consider if South Africa were to be cut off from Zimbabwe. Surely Kirchick would argue that a. fuel and food doesn’t actually get to the people and b. it can’t get much worse for those in Zimbabwe. Although it’s certainly true that Zimbabweans are hardly well fed, it’s also not a certain proposition that cutting off Mugabe will release Zimbabwe from his shackles or improve the humanitarian situation. Ultimately, we need to pursue some sort of negotiated step-down or power sharing agreement, otherwise a wrenching transition war will only make things worse for Zimbabwe.

On the issue of discussing a boycott for South Africa, I’m conflicted. Sure, they’ve been shameful on Zimbabwe, but at what point will “international civil society organizations” have waisted their opportunities to use sporting events as a time to protest? If China doesn’t meaningfully change their behavior (which is much worse than South Africa’s) is Mbeki supposed to take any hypothetical protests seriously?

Justice in Zimbabwe?

Jamie Kirchick says that if it’s indeed true that Mugabe has vacated the presidency and fled to Malaysia, the “international community”should not settle for letting him pull an Idi Amin and go into exile, and should instead prosecute him in the ICC/the Hague.  While it would be nice to see someone as downright malicious as Mugabe to be prosecuted and punished, ultimatley, our real concern shouldn’t be with some platonic ideal of “justice” but instead the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe.  And if righteously insisting that we prosecute Mugabe prevents him from turning over power and/or makes the transition more violent and less stable, than it’s unclear what we gain from just putting him through a trial of some sorts.

Do We Need An Obama Doctrine?

Spencer Ackerman’s article on the “Obama Doctrine” is quite good at exploring what actually makes Obama different and gets at why I think Obama is a much better candidate than Clinton on the one area where the President has the most power to implement policy. But, and this may be the only time ever, I have to agree with Michael Goldfarb that Obama’s idea of “dignity promotion” and using development to drain the swamp for terrorism is a little shallow and misguided:

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I’m all for promoting “dignity” and economic development. I want more foreign aid, smarter spending on health care initiatives in the developing world and have us not deploy democracy promotion solely aginst regimes I don’t like. But the idea that addressing the issues of poverty and disease have much to do with terrorism is, sadly, just substituting the Bush Doctrine for the Obama Doctrine. Let me explain.

The connection between poverty - like, dire, one dollar a day, lethal poverty - and terrorism does not exist. Most anti-American terrorists come from middle class, professional, educated backgrounds. Hell, they are disproportionally engineers. Goldfarb is right to point out that if poverty was the root cause of terrorism, we’d see more terrorists from Burkino Faso and Congo. But no, we see them from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world. The idea that Africa is the next breeding ground for terrorism and anti Americanism, while a well intentioned way to get us to pay attention to a place where millions die of poverty and preventable diseases, is misguided. All the operational problems that plague terrorists groups today - funding, logistics, evading detection, law enforcement at the borders - would be well magnified for any hypothetical African terrorists. But even as I’m writing this, I’m still a little shocked that I have to disprove that there are really any substantial national security threats emanating from Africa. Unless Obama sees China’s resource competition as anything worth orienting our foreign policy around, then I do not really know what Scott Gration is getting at when he says:

“Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I’m concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years.”

Sure, this will be a big problem for Africa, and since I’m a cosmopolitan utilitarian, I think the US should do something smart to help out, but to say that we ought to shift our foreign policy to deal with this challenge doesn’t make much sense. All the factors that brewed in the Middle East to create the threat of terrorism - history of imperialism, support for dictatorial regimes, frustrated opportunities for educated people, lots of money sloshing around, Salafi extremism - just aren’t present in Africa. To date, most of our military interventions there have just been failed attempts at extending the War on Terror to the Horn, just look at our boondoggle in Somalia.

But I’m not surprised that a team who wants to “end the mindset that brought us to war” is endorsing this type of development-cum-anti terrorism strategy. Because what I really think is that Obama ought to do is end the war on terror as some grand ideological/foreign policy project and pay attention to other pressing foreign policy issues - nonproliferation or public health in Africa. But we can’t do that in America, and much of our foreign policy apparatus is based around there being grand unifying themes for a presidency.

So when Obama wants to address these really substantial foreign policy issues, like disease and poverty in Africa, he can’t just say “we have to move because millions of people are dying,” instead, he has to say “these millions of poor people dying because they are poor is a threat to us.” It may well be true that the only way to mobilize around these types of issues is to “securitize” them and frame them in the context of a security/foreign policy, but there are worries that this could lead our military, diplomatic and foreign policy pros to not focus on issues in which they have real expertise, like nonproliferation, while at the same time confusing what should be humanitarianism with implementing the foreign policy goals of the US.

If Obama really wanted a paradigm shift in how we view foreign policy, he wouldn’t replace the Bush Doctrine with the Obama Doctrine, but instead question why we need to have such overarching foreign policy visions or doctrines in the first place. Good old liberal internationalism supplemented with an appreciation for counterinsurgency and humanitarianism would do just fine, thank you very much.

PS - This does not represent the entirety of my thought on the Obama foreign policy or this article. More is surely forthcoming as the election plays out.

What Is the UN?

A big mistake that many people make when analyzing the UN is to assume that it is more than the sum-total of its actor states.  While in some organizational respects - like with WHO or some some agency like that, there is a meaningful “UN” apart from the states - when it comes to stuff like peacekeeping operations and anything that requires large expenditures and/or lots of manpower, you have to look to the states.  That’s why Marty Peretz’s post castigating the UN for failure in Sudan isn’t all that informative for telling us who, exactly, isn’t shouldering their burden to the end the conflict:

Khartoum is the proximate culprit. But, frankly, the United Nations is the  underlying enabler. It purports to be able and willing to stop genocide in  Darfur and what will probably turn out to be a genocide in the south. If  only…Yes, it is always “if only.”  If only the there were peacekeepers  and more — let’s be frank — non-African peacekeepers.  If only China would  help. The Times instructs the “major players — including Europe and Sudan’s Arab allies…[to] make clear that Khartoum will pay a stiff price if it attacks the South.” This is crap: no one will pay any price.

Well, it’s not like the United Nations has a standing army that they can deploy at will to hot-spots.  And when we look at the process that UNAMID  force on the ground in Sudan has had to go through to arm itself, we see a reluctance among member states - not the UN itself - to give the mission what it needs to succeed, namely big ticket items like helicopters and Armored Personnel Carriers.  This isn’t the UN being feckless, it’s a combination of big-state thriftiness and Sudan’s constant hampering of the peacekeeping force.   The situation is Darfur is beyond complicated, and it’s not clear if a military intervention is the best option, but it’s beyond just simply blaming “the UN.”

Scoring Points With The Lives of Millions of Africans

Development, and specifically foreign aid, is a perplexing, bewildering topic that, under a certain utilitarian criterion, is the most important issue in the world. That’s why I get disappointed when I read articles like Michael Knox Beran’s recent anti-Jeffrey Sachs screed in City Journal. While Beran is right on the big picture - ultimately it’s the development of functional markets with solid legal protections for their operating that reduces poverty - his treatment of those who want a more active governmental and foreign role in development is downright childish. It basically functions as “nyah nyah nyah, foreign aid has been tried for 50 years, and still millions of Africans are trapped in poverty, nyah nyah nyah.” Maybe it’s just my liberal inclinations, but the issues of development and aid are just too damn important for conservatives and free marketers to come in with just bleating about Hayek while scorning most active efforts to actually alleviate the symptoms of extreme poverty. Take this bit, for instance:

Like earlier practitioners of paternalist charity, today’s Africrats propose policies that treat the material effects of Africa’s problems—disease, dirty water, hunger—not their underlying causes, which the West, too, once struggled with. For thousands of years, high rates of death from infectious diseases were the norm throughout the world. Before the twentieth century, Western parents expected to lose at least one of their children to illnesses that are preventable today. Not until late in the nineteenth century did the White House itself have clean water; in 1862, Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died of typhoid, likely contracted from the mansion’s tainted plumbing. Hunger, too, once darkened what is now the prosperous world, though so effectively has the problem been solved that countries like the United States face a looming obesity crisis.

How did today’s prosperous nations create the embarrassment of riches that they now enjoy? No benign magician descended, à la Jeffrey Sachs, on London or Washington to shower its inhabitants with money. Instead, the rich nations developed laws and freedoms that enabled people to take their futures into their own hands. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has argued in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, the world’s poorest countries remain poor in part because they lack legal protections—property rights foremost among them—that enable people in the West to tap the potential of “dead” capital and invest it in wealth-generating enterprises.

Beran is right, the West didn’t get rid of the scrooge of massive, public pestilence until it got wealthy, and it’s likely that Africa will only truly be out of its public health hell when it’s richer, but what Beran’s trite historical example ignores is that today, part of the world has eliminated malaria, decreasing AIDS spreads and access to clean water. Another section of the world, has hundreds of millions without these basic health goods. This circumstance implies that there’s something that the rich part of the world, the Industrialized North, can do for the developing South. Sure, it seems like a Sisyphean task to eliminate malaria or various water borne diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa, but can Beran think of another thing to do?

Beran provides all sorts of examples of how food aid is bad, and while he distorts history to fit his ideological vision, he’s right, food aid is problematic because it can be easily manipulated and re-directed by corrupt leaders for their political ends and Africa actually has pretty decent food-production capabilites. The case for public health assistance is much different. Africa doesn’t have great malaria drugs or bed nets or DDT capabilites, there’s a certain level of western knowledge and expertise that probably can be exported out, and since it’s hard to spin out a scenario like Ethiopia in the 1980s, where Geldofian food aid was mainly used as a political weapon by the dictatorship, where water purification plants or bed nets are used to entrench corrupt leadership, it’s probably worth it to have signifigant investments in improving the public health capability of the poorest parts of Africa.

Beran also has an irritatingly triumphant view with evidence that foreign aid has often gone to bad regimes:

The cycle is vicious. The aid that ends up in corrupt rulers’ bank accounts enables them to stifle both free markets and the political and legal reforms that free markets need to operate efficiently. A recent Heritage Foundation study found that, of the 70 least-free countries on earth, nearly half have received U.S. foreign aid for more than three decades. The result is more poverty, more aid money, and more corruption. In Zimbabwe, for example, foreign aid enabled strongman Robert Mugabe to destroy property rights, introduce a command economy, and create a kleptocracy where the inflation rate recently reached 11,000 percent. Once southern Africa’s breadbasket, Zimbabwe now depends on subsidies to feed its people.

This is a bogus point for two reasons. The most obvious is that foreign aid, especially during the cold war (which was at its highest point “three decades” ago) was not all about helping those countries who could use it the best, it was often about buying support so that it wouldn’t go to the Russians.  The second point is almost blindingly obvious - of course the poorest countries get aid!  This is just representative of the type of myopia that these anti-aid critics like Beran so commonly display.  To them, the fact that foreign aid hasn’t resulted in massive successes on the same proportion of its large scale is a sign that we should probably just give up on the entire idea of helping the developing world.  Yet, it’s these same critics who tell us why foreign aid won’t work.  What Beran ignores is that there is a strong possibility that some aid has worked, and that not all aid is the top-down, centralized, buerecratic, egotistical mess he depicts.

Look at, for example, the Green Revolution.  Normal Borlaug’s project was as top-down and centralized as you could get.  He developed breeds of seeds and grain that were then exported to Mexico, India and Pakistan.   He also received signifigant western philanthropic funding.  And look what he achieved — he probably saved tens if not hundreds of millions of lives by making India agriculturally self sufficient.  Or the eradication of smallpox.  Even in the Horn of Africa, there was intense disease surveillance and immunization efforts - the type of interventions that Beran would probably call “paternalistic” -  and smallpox was eliminated by 1980.  Did these efforts result in economic growth — well in India they probably did — but the point is that foreign aid, when done well in the public health and education sector, has the potential to save millions of lives, which should hardly be scoffed at.  There are definitely problems with bad aid, aid dependence, propping up bad regimes, and sensible aid advocates and development specialists are very aware.  It’s no coincidence that while Beran is criticizing a model of aid that hasn’t been all that popular since at least the 1970s, there has been a proliferation of smaller scale, narrowly focused and even randomly tested aids.  Beran’s criticisms seem rather lame when looking at the Millennium Challenge Account, which puts better governance at the forefront, or the MIT Poverty Lab, which does randomized trials to see if aid projects actually work.

Beran’s seriousness is  again rendered questionable because he, unlike most development economists, actually thinks that “stop giving aid and privatize everything” is a real development strategy.  It isn’t.  There’s a reason the Washington Consensus is basically in tatters, and that’s because real development situations are complicated and a wide range of policy interventions can work in any given context.  But I seriously doubt whether Beran cares about what the best strategy is to address the most daunting challenge, by a sheer utilitarian calculation, of our times: extreme poverty.  Instead, he seems more interested in insulting the motives of foreign aid advocates and seriously distorting the record of foreign aid not so much to open up intellectual space for alternatives to aid, but instead to score ideological points.  Not a very useful exercise, if you ask me.

The Teddy Bear Named Muhammad

President Bashir has pardoned the infamous British teddy bear teacher, Gillian Gibbons, after increasing international and British pressure.  Of course, it’s bizarre and backwards to put someone in jail, even for 15 days, for naming a classroom teddy bear Muhammad.  And it’s even more barbaric for there to be a  constituency demanding a harsher punishment likes lashes or a longer  jail term.  But shouldn’t a Western, female teacher in a conservative Muslim country know a little more about the culture she’s working in? Another thing that was strange about the story was that the students overwhelmingly selected Muhammad as the name of the teddy bear, which seems to indicate that this is more like parents freaking out about reading JD Salinger x 1000.  But we should all just be happy for Gibbons that her insane ordeal is over.

Confounding Variables

I’ll just say that, contra Sullivan, I can think of at least 25 very good explanations for Africa’s lack of internet infrastructure than hereditary differences in intelligence.  Sullivan appears to have, for the moment, gone off the deep end and is now  writing posts praising James Watson and titling them “The Darker Continent” just to piss people like me off.

China, Sudan and a Pony

Gordan Chang is indignant at the thought of Chinese peacekeepers in Sudan. He notes, correctly, that China has very close ties to the government in Khartoum. The basic exchange is that China gives Sudan infrastructure investment and weapons, and get oil in exchange. It seems natural to complain that a peacekeeping force with a substantial Chinese contingent isn’t a peacekeeping force at all. Unfortunately for Chang, there simply isn’t any other way to go. For better or for worse, Sudan gets to set the terms of any UN presence within its borders. The only non-western states they’ll tolerate are Pakistan and China. If you want the operation to have competent engineers acceptable to Sudan, than China is the only way to go. Fulminating against the “Chinese going there wearing the blue berets and scarves of the United Nations” isn’t very productive. If you want a standard UN PKO going on in Sudan, this is how it’s going to be.

Ian Smith

The former leader of Rhodesia, the one who hated black people so much that he declared independence from the British Commonwealth to continue white supremacist rule, has finally died.  It’s Zimbabwe’s great tragedy that when reading Ian Smith’s obituary, it’s hard to outline how exactly he was substantially worse than Mugabe. It’s also true that Smith was a uniquely awful white ruler, who managed to ramp up the repressive racism while other states were decolonizing.  All in all, it’s just tragic for the people of Zimbabwe that they had to suffer through two of Africa’s worst leaders in succession.

On another note , it wouldn’t surprise me if the National Review had a symposium celebrating him, like they did with a certain other horrible leader.

Pessimisitic Bias and Thanksgiving

While violence, pestilence and global poverty seem to be intractable problems, there’s some long term reasons to be optimistic.  One is that the UN massively overstated HIV rates by some 7 million, which may bode ill for the survey techniques,  but is still good news.  The second, or actually the second through sixth, are from Foreign Policy’s editors:

1. Safest year for air travel ever

2. Lower Child mortality

3. Fewer wars

4. Less extreme poverty

5. Improved life expectancy

What’s interesting about this type of data is that there seems to be very little use for it.  Is it useful to know that extreme poverty is lower, largely due to Chinese economic growth?  While that news is very good, there’s very little incentive to go shouting from the rooftops about massive improvements in living conditions and life expectancy when some 985 million still live on less than a dollar a day. One of the great things about Gregory Clark’s research is that it solidifies just how much we’ve improved, with the exception of the bottom billion, living standards.  From the Stone Age to 1800, he argues, life expectancy and living standards weren’t much improved, or were even getting worse.  Just look at where we are now.  Yet, our psychology and institutions can’t seem to recognize this miracle.

Since I’ve only lived since 1990, I can easily bemoan the fate of the bottom billion, or those lives lost in Iraq — when, in fact, wartime causality rates are relatively low and worldwide poverty has never been lower.  If you look at the Nobel Peace Prize, the winners have largely been those who’ve forestalled, or tried to, political violence.  Of all the winners, it’s Norman Borlaug who can claim to have actually saved the most lives, especially compared to Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, the Quakers and most other winners.  Of course, Deng Xiaoping, who one could argue is largely responsible for the two out of the five trends FP identified, was never recognized by the Nobel committee.  Since we seem designed to not recognize how exceptional our lives are, maybe just on Thanksgiving we should reflect on how good most of us really have it.

People Who Deserve More Prominence: Alex De Waal Edition

There are few writers who I trust more to be intelligent, provocative and generally correct than Alex de Waal. Since the late 80s, he’s been writing about the intersection of conflict, environmental degradation, famine and disease (mostly) in East Africa. His doctoral thesis, published in 1985, was on famine in Darfur. His work is especially useful in blasting Western misconceptions about Africa, namely how people actually experienced and oftentimes survived famine in a way Bob Geldof would not recognize. He recalls a perhaps imaginary model of an intellectual — he has never held an academic appointment, instead he has spent much of his time in Africa-related activism and research on the ground.

Specifically, his work on Darfur has been my guide to an oftentimes bewildering conflict. His pieces in the London Review of Books have punctured the simplistic calls for intervention that dominate so much of our discourse about the conflict. His Logos essay, “Is It Too Late for Darfur?” is as good a history of the conflict as I’ve read. His Newsweek debate with John Prendergast is exceptionally heated, but he comes off very well. It’s nice that after so much time in the trenches of activism and research, Harvard has given him a gig at their Global Equity Initiative. His Harvard bio is here. His blog “Understanding Darfur” “Making Sense of Darfur” for the Social Science Research Council is here.

Why Dishonest Altruism is Necessary

Daniel Larison flags George Will’s column of questions for Obama to come back to a favorite theme of his, that the material conditions and day-to-day security of the world’s poorest really has nothing to do with the national security of the United States, or as Larison puts it in a post from April, “[Obama] seems to have no sense of proportion of what constitutes a particularly dire threat and what poses a more long-term, manageable danger; diseased Indonesian chickens and loose Russian nukes seem to worry him equally.”

Well, Daniel, I agree.  The million or more deaths from Malaria each year, millions of people infected by preventable water borne diseases and the approximately one billion people in extreme poverty doesn’t negatively impact our national security, strictly defined, as much as say the ungoverned tribal regions of Western Pakistan being lousy with Taliban and Al-Qaida.  And, if you talk privately to most people who say that extreme poverty of “tropical diseases” are threats to America’s national security, they’ll –after enough drinks — probably admit that they’re playing fast and loose with what “national security” means.  The reason people do this, however, is that America tends to act in the international arena when it thinks that the action will make us safer — and when we do act, we act big.  This is why NGOs, activist and academics in work in the areas of development and international public health have re-tuned their message — governments are more likely to listen if you’re presenting something that’s not just killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but is a threat to the US.

The Life Expectancy Miracle (Sorta)

Tyler Cowen links to this interesting paper by Charles Kenny, touting the “life expectancy miracles” of the last 50-100 years, especially in areas that we generally think are underdeveloped:

Between 1962 and 2002, life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48 to 69 years – each calendar year that passed added more than six months to average life expectancy in the region…It was the strongest performance of any region in the World. Aver annual life expectancy growth over the 1962-2002 period was .9 percent in MENA compared to .85% in second place South Asia, .72 percent in East Asia, .53 percent in Latin America, .28 in Sub-Saharan Africa and .17 in Eastern Europe and Central Asia….The Gambia, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Libya were all in the top ten gainers in life expectancy, 1962-2002.

I’d argue that life expectancy is a decidedly poor frame to judge comparable development. First of all, it is possible for countries to make huge advances in life expectancy (like the countries Kenny talks about) relatively easily. Wider availability of vaccines and antibiotics will cause life expectancy jumps of around 20-30 years, (usually from averages of around 40 up to 60 or 70). Of course, in some places - like parts of Sub-Saharan Africa - the jump hasn’t been made, but at least we know how to make it. This is roughly similar to how third world countries oftentimes have the highest economic growth rates in the world - because they have such a small base to build on, that any expansion is relatively very large. The marginal difficulty/cost of increasing life expectancy from 40-50 is much, much less

The second reason life expectancy isn’t a great development metric, especially at the Yemen-Gambia level, is that many countries have the very similar life expectancies as other countries that are much more developed. Let’s look for example at the United States, in 2000, the US average life expectancy was 77.1 years. Other countries in the 70s are Costa Rica (75.8), the Bahamas (71.1), Bosnia (71.1), Cuba (76.2), Malaysia (70.8), and Libya (75.5). It would be absurd to say that Costa Rica or Libya’s development outcomes are comparable to the United States. People in the United States are richer, freer (positively speaking) and in general have the capability to live a more fulfilling life. So sure, life expectancy gains are impressive, but all they really say is that a country isn’t enmeshed in an AIDS epidemic or haunted by infectious diseases that are easily treated or prevented most other places in the world.

Anarchy in Somalia

In an otherwise somewhat interesting Cato Unbound piece on stateless governance, Peter Lesson makes a pretty baffling claim about Somalia:

Should we conclude from Somalia’s stateless improvement that it is a nice place to live? Of course not. But Somalia’s pre- and post-government performance highlights an important point about the desirability of anarchy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is simply not true that any government is always superior to no government. If state predation goes unchecked, government may not only fail to add to social welfare, but can actually reduce welfare below its level under statelessness. Such was the case with Somalia’s government, which did more harm to its citizens than good.

While it may be true that welfare has gone up after the formal government left, it seems pretty silly to talk about Somali governance without mentioning the Union of Islamic Courts and the recent Ethiopian invasion.  All of what I read on Somalia seemed to indicate that the UIC was able to gain power there because of their ability to bring peace to the warring factions and have a monopoly on violence throughout much of the country.  So while some economic development may have occurred that would have otherwise been hindered by a misguided socialist/authoritarian regime, the lack of a government allowed a sharia enforcing group of radical Islamists to fill the vacuum, as Eliza Griswold puts it:

Somalis backed the UIC less for religious reasons than because, for the first time in almost two decades, Mogadishu wasn’t a free-fire zone.

Due to the UIC’s excesses, Somalia got invaded by Ethiopia and now is in the midst of a military occupation and fierce insurgency.  So while all of that may be technically the fault of governments (Ethiopia, UIC, Somalia provisional government) the fact that anarchy invited all of this conflict to occur seems to be a fairly significant detail to gloss over when discusses the fruits of stateless governance, especially when you’re one large scale example is Somalia.