Mexico’s Drug Cartels Influence Map, 2011 02/10/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global.Tags: Anonymous, Drug Cartels, Drug War, Mexico, STRATFOR
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Photo Credit: STRATFOR
THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE firm known as “STRATFOR” — Strategic Forecasting — was thrust into the attention of laymen when the loosely connected “hacktivist” collective known as Anonymous, shut down its site by way of a distributed denial-of-service attack, and subsequently exposed and compromised its list of paid-for-services clients — those who subscribe to STRATFOR’s premium intelligence products — and obtained (reportedly) unencrypted credit card information over the holidays to make several charitable donations.
However ironic the event was (perhaps the leading security company not being very secure), STRATFOR has been at the center of the for-profit security and global intelligence dissemination business for 16 years, and they have provided many of their summary findings to the public and have even been somewhat transparent and “open-source” minded — a software development principle that argues information should be free to all — with a number of their products, much like that of fellow company, RAND Corporation. At the end of last month, (January 24), STRATFOR posted its annual Mexico drug map with cursory analysis of the Mexico Drug War murder victims’ numbers, which has proven to be a thorny issue in regards to accuracy, because of the rate of the killings and the Mexican government’s inability to provide its own official numbers in a timely fashion.
As of the second-last quarter of data for 2011, STRATFOR reports a dip in the overall number of deaths, but it was not enough to produce the slightest glimmer of hope in the most rosy of analyses: From January 2011 to September 2011, 12,900 people died as a result of Mexico’s drug war. That number is less than the figure for 2010, but that clocks in at a still-ghastly 1,400 deaths per month. If that rate per the period of January 2011 to September 2011 holds for the final three months of 2011, it would result in 17,000 total drug-related murders in Mexico, for the year.
There were dips in the well-known, hard-hit cities and regions such as Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where the death toll dropped from 3,111 in 2010 to 1,955 in 2011 (for the months available), yet still, Juarez registered as the country’s deadliest city. There were also significant increases across the nation in regions such as Durango, Durango state, Matamoros Veracruz, Monterrey, Nuevo León state, Veracruz state and Tamaulipas state. The Sinaloa cartel and the Los Zetas faction, the Sinaloa’s former enforcers, have divided the nation’s regions into two respective hemispheres of influence over a turf war with the Sinaloa controlling the west and Los Zetas controlling a majority of Mexico’s eastern region.
View STRATFOR’s Mexico’s Drug Wars Map (Enlarged) [Here]
Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The ‘Paradox of Autocracy’ and the Young 12/16/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Bloomberg Business Week, Politics, The Great Recession, Youth Unemployment
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Photo Credit: Coverjunkie
IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.
During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.
The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)
I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.
By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:
For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”
Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are already wealthy.
* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.
Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.
Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]
9.11.01 | A Confirmation 09/11/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Editorial, Essay, Global.Tags: 9/11, Foreign Policy, Politics
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9.11.01 | A Confirmation
THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.
A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.
Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”
The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)
9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.
I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”
Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.
Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.
This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?
What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.
The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.
Development to Democracy 07/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Afghanistan, Democracy, Foreign Affairs Magazine, Foreign Policy, Politics
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FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out that rich countries are much more likely than poor countries to be democracies. Although this claim was contested for many years, it has held up against repeated tests. The causal direction of the relationship has also been questioned: Are rich countries more likely to be democratic because democracy makes countries rich, or is development conducive to democracy? Today, it seems clear that the causality runs mainly from economic development to democratization. During early industrialization, authoritarian states are just as likely to attain high rates of growth as are democracies. But beyond a certain level of economic development, democracy becomes increasingly likely to emerge and survive. Thus among the scores of countries that democratized around 1990, most were middle-income countries: almost all the high-income countries made the transition. Moreover, among the countries that democratized between 1970 and 1990, democracy has survived in every country that made the transition when it was at the economic level of Argentina today or higher; among the countries that made the transition when they were below this level, democracy had an average life expectancy of only eight years.
The strong correlation between development and democracy reflects the fact that economic development is conducive to democracy. The question of why, exactly, development leads to democracy has been debated intensely, but the answer is beginning to emerge. It does not result from some disembodied force that causes democratic institutions to emerge automatically when a country attains a certain level of GDP. Rather economic development brings social and political changes only when it changes people’s behavior. Consequently economic development is conducive to democracy to the extent that it , first, creates a large, educated, and articulate middle class of people who are accustomed to thinking for themselves and, second, transforms people’s values and motivations.
Photo Credit: The Christian Science Monitor
SOMEONE SHOULD be talking honestly about our democratic project in Afghanistan, a time and battle tested swath of area ruled only by tribal allegiances and faith, and with a literacy rate that is not particularly buoyant for even the most mediocre of standards, which is perhaps the greatest obstacle towards starting the process of development that leads to a sustainable democracy, as pointed to in this 2009 essay by Ronald Englehart and Christian Welzel from Foreign Affairs: We just can’t reach the goal of having a stable, democratic Afghanistan, until its people find a way to develop economically from the rural agrarian and (narco-crop) society it is, to a more modern one.
Yes, there is rampant corruption starting at the very, very top of the country and which filters down through every facet of the society and economy, but the greatest challenge is not really winning the hearts and minds; it seems the greatest challenge is sparking those minds to want something more than what they have now — something they have always known — to something possibly greater but unknown and much more arduous, simply because of the learning curve involved. Until this happens, any real democracy in this mystical land is unlikely to take hold.
‘The Anderson Platoon’ 05/13/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Film, Global, Media, Politics.add a comment
COUNTER-INSURGENT WARS are as hellish as conventional ones. (Perhaps more.) Everything is much more insidious in such conflicts: the enemy is more covert, more aware and exploiting of its surroundings, and much more able and willing to use local citizens to meet its ends. The farmer by day is now a soldier at night, the young man or young woman, obedient and sensitive, is just a personal and familial vendetta and a rifle away from being dangerous. All of which is exacerbated, motivated and inflamed at times, by the mere presence of foreign soldiers in a country, and the unintended consequences of interactions between those citizens and those soldiers. And that was Vietnam.
French director, Pierre Schoendorffer — originally known for his gritty and realistic 1965, French war film on the country’s Indochina excursion, La 317e Section, (clip here), which won a Cannes Festival prize for “best screenplay” — was a war correspondent for the national television station, and was originally embedded with forces in Vietnam’s infamous Dien Bien Phu in 1954, documenting and reporting on the French Army’s struggles there. But those reels and his intended full documentary never saw the light of day, as the material was confiscated upon his surrender alongside the French Army to the Viet Cong.
Photo Credit: EBONY
Following his work with French military forces and their departure from the region, and just months after he finished La 317e Section, Schoendorffer was given a second opportunity to finish his initial 1954 project, that immersive documentary following a military infantry unit in Vietnam, which had been confiscated. Only this time, he’d be swapping the French Army for the United States Army; as the American side of the war was beginning to escalate in the wake of France’s defeat and the Second Indochina War was set to fully ignite.
From September to October of 1965, he worked in a two-man crew, on a documentary following a rather unique bunch: the U.S. Army’s 12th Calvary, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon. The group was unique, precisely because of who was leading it, a 24-year-old, black West Point graduate by the name of Joseph Anderson. For six weeks, Schoendorffer followed Anderson’s unit on seek-and-destroy missions, where soldiers would wade through the dense jungle looking for an enemy to fight, and faithfully executing the cornerstone of the United States’ Vietnam strategy. The Anderson Platoon won the 1968 Academy Award in the documentary category. It is an honest meditation on the monotony, tremulous fear and odd experience of war.
C.J. Chivers’s Tumblr: ‘The Gun’ 03/17/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Journalism, Politics.add a comment
Photo Credit: The Gun
TUMBLR. It’s a micro-blogging platform that changed everything, and “the game,” as they say, making posting text and media easier than ever before. In the ever-democratizing of the Web, where media persons become accessible citizens/commenting civilian and layman/woman/civilian become “citizen journalists,” and both are now a part of the Fourth Estate; the faintly ghosted demarcation between journalist and information consumers is now lighter and less-identifiable.
Except, most citizen journalists have yet en masse covered wars, because, well, insanity and monetary reward are sorely lacking on that point. And so, mainstream journalists are still the primary voice for our understanding conflict, but still, traditional journalism is limited by profit concerns and editorial space issues, and while many of the journos at C.J. Chivers’s New York Times employer are provided blogs to flesh-out their own stories and give their coverage even more depth, sometimes, there are still stray shots from the mind that need to be broadcasted. Much like The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Mother Jones and Newsweek, C.J. Chivers, the war correspondent, and member of the traditional news complex, has joined Tumblr to also provide depth to his coverage which spans print, online, and the New York Times‘s At War blog and a companion Twitter feed.
Chivers has used his Tumblr account as both a personal advertisement for his eponymous book, The Gun — seriously, you gotta move units when you have a book; not even kidding — to producing content for it as another outlet for his coverage of the still-going war in Afghanistan and the newer one in Libya. Recently, Chivers posted on the Ghanzi Province Taliban, and some captured photos reflecting this branch’s use of children for propaganda, and which may also imply their use in actual combat, which isn’t unfounded, and has been the case in every recent modern war there in the region.
The At War blog also published a companion post, about an engagement in January during which three Taliban fighters were killed, and then a pre-teen or early teenaged boy tried to retrieve a dead Talib’s rifle, and was killed, too. Among the captured photographs were the three above, not of teenagers but of very young children in an assortment of martial poses. These images, reminiscent of the pageantry sometimes seen in propaganda from various Palestinian groups, are unusual for Afghanistan. Child soldiering, by its broadest definition, has been common in Afghanistan for decades. But photographs of children this young under arms are not part of the usual Taliban pablum. The boy who tried to pick up the dropped rifle and flee, and these much younger boys copping fighter stances, offer much to think about.
Read more from The Gun [Here]
On ‘Collapse’ 12/28/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Media, Politics.add a comment
COLLAPSE is a screed dedicated to our collective stead; a rant on where humanity lies now, in the cross-hairs. A coda for all, on just how perilous these time of ours are: What with failing governments and the beholden life we live, more so than ever, to systems and the untrustworthy who run them, the swaths of the greedy and the powerful who dominate us beyond our sights, with seemingly no salve from the pain created by their efforts, incompetence, indifference and stubbornness to adapt.
To the pessimistic and cynical among us, Collapse will be a full-on confirmation of the belief that the globe is inching closer to, or is now past the point of the moral justifications for its saving. And beyond that, a realization that it is at a critical “doom point,” [I'm attempting a neologism]; a moment where the recognition of a coming human global catastrophe — in this case, the result of the failings of the international banking economy and the lack of safe and sustainable energy resources — and attempts to stave it off, are looking less reasonable and likely ineffective.
The pessimists (and political realists) see this now in the degradation of the environment, in our always stalled and frustrated search for clean energy technology that would provide security for us all; the rising food prices, and multiplying fiscal concerns that have wrapped around us like a boa constrictor, with the throttling beginning and perhaps irreversible.
Collapse and its discourse — the entwine of many failing things — places the crux of its story on the down trend of the world systems we so depend on and their interconnectedness, but primarily it looks at our petroleum dependency and the idea of “peak oil.” Peak oil theory is based on the research of Berkeley professor Marion K. Hubbert, who once worked for the United States Geological Survey, Shell Oil and the Board of Economic Warfare, and who also taught at Columbia and Stanford.
Hubbert’s contention was that since oil is a finite thing, its distribution must look like a Bell curve, where there is a maximum amount of oil to be extracted in the world — based on his projections that would be reached at some point in the 1960s or 1970s — and once that maximum limit is reached, oil production would begin to decline exponentially, until there was no more. This is known as “Hubbert’s Peak” or “Hubbert’s Curve.” And the implications of it for an overpopulated planet where almost everything runs on oil becomes rather dire, because there are now more consumers than before and oil resources are gobbled up even swifter than once projected, which would mean that the life we know is close to being no longer. Hubbert’s theory and “peak oil” have been part of “Doom’s Day” prognosticators’ plot-line and conspiracy theorists’ discussions for decades, but that doesn’t mean it should be scoffed at, since it is well-accepted in science circles.
Collapse‘s interview subject, Michael Ruppert, which the documentary solely revolves around in an Errol Morris style, believes in peak oil. What’s important about Ruppert is that he claims to have former ties to the national security apparatus, by way of his father, and he has worked as an L.A.P.D. officer and investigative journalist; his Web site and newsletter were subscribed to by members of Congress, and he has also written for the the Los Angeles Times. Ruppert thinks that he is found evidence that peak oil isn’t just a theory; it’s very real, and that we’ve reached “Hubbert’s Peak,” and are now in the midst of a process of tremendous, catastrophic decline. And while we are not at the tipping point for the chaos, he warns that when oil becomes far too pricey to pay for, our stability and global security will rapidly fall by the wayside.
The problem for the skeptics who see this film and notice Ruppert’s possible emotional instability, if not mental instability, which is perhaps because of his belief and constantly ignored warnings, is that it does seem to be beyond plausible that we are now in the midst of this kind of collapse; when considering all the apparent evidence. (Industrialization is now more than a century old, so resources have to be in decline, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is generally secretive about its production capabilities and there are not just more cars, but more energy-dependent everything, and all of which run on oil.)
The film resonates in the mind, and at our emotional core, because of a number of things, from: the heroin pumped national psyche of America, mired in malaise, but also the doldrums of much of the globe; with all of us depressingly fatigued by wars; by historic monetary crises, and in America, by the increasing cost of life and the three decades of stagnant wages and the confounding explanations of already complex systems of economic manipulation, constantly being given out by officials. We just don’t understand why what used to work, isn’t working anymore.
And then there is the depressing lack of faith in the people who run our governments now, which wants its own special direct-line connection to the warnings in Collapse to be made; a confidence which began to be chipped away through the many high-profile scandals and abuses of power from Nixon on, and which point to the documentary’s “truthfulness” in some way, because it’s focus is a man who is now screaming “fire!” in the movie theater, to use a mixed metaphor, and many of us feel his exact way. And yet much of the political environment is still tangled in trivial battles about culture and personal “morality.” While these multiple issues of governance have no direct connection to the ideas presented in Collapse, we secretly desire and produce their conflation.
And so Collapse strikes a chord, because we all look around and see or believe that no one is doing a real thing about the decay we do see, nor can they. (And so are we wrong?) There is no immediate imperative for the world to get together and solve such big issues as the ones that face humanity in energy (and finance), possibly because the human brain is geared towards dealing in immediacy and the consequences of these issues might not be seen for a generation — much like the very connected issue of climate change — which is just enough time for humans to look past them.
But our need for a narrative to confirm that this is no longer our imaginations: We are now, as a fact, worse off than we thought we ever could be at this time, and sooner than we thought; is bolstered by this film. The problem is, despite the documentary’s paranoia (and odd character study of its interview subject), and even much of our own beliefs, it seems less like a confirmation, than getting what we wished for, and now regretting it. The evidence in Collapse, even to the skeptical mind, should be the greatest red flag of all, because if we do not begin to even accept the idea that we might be in a real bad way; then there is nothing to stop us from letting things become tragically worse. It is a warning, telling us that our time here is finite, but no one is necessarily listening.
Our Next-Door Narco Wars 12/09/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics.add a comment
Photo Credit: The New York Review of Books
I GREW UP in the Los Angeles area, in the capital city of a next-door-to-L.A. county, and the main culprit city, which helped it lead the nation in per capita murders for a span of years, and not just because it was the largest city in the largest county (by size) in the nation, but primarily because of the gang violence that was, in part, fueled by hard times, the city’s drug trade and the revolving door of criminal enterprises between it and Los Angeles.
So when I think back on my upbringing compared to my peers at university, or most of the people I know, I realize that I come from a dramatically different environment and outlook, despite being just as middle class as them; simply because the kids I played basketball with at school, my friends, part of my immigrant family’s struggles with drugs and violence, or the areas I traversed when I first started driving and hanging out after class, were these very blocks where much of this city’s violence occurred. And in that small way, I became part of a larger social theory.
In African-American studies there is a notion known as “linked fate”: the premise that blacks, no matter how much they are physically separated from the “underclass” — this term is fraught with negative connotations to me — of their population, are always connected psychically, psychologically and socially to it; and thus never truly finding a cover from the buffeting of the life outside the middle class, lower middle class and even working class, and particularly knowing that its lot is in some way forever associated to those who are not as fortunate as them. It’s a rather dramatic realization, if one thinks about it, because most social and ethnic groups operate on some level of class divisions that allow for their distancing from typical, categorical lumping, but it’s argued that this is less so for African-Americans for a number of reasons. (Like, say, perhaps, racial profiling providing a reminder, or being just a generation removed from a hard-scrabble life.)
And for Los Angeles, Mexico and the southern border cities of America, my personal story and the social theory of “linked fate” are being played out quite well. Los Angeles, San Diego and all of the conglomeration of areas of California known as the Southland, and the many towns in Arizona and Texas, are never too far removed from the narco-terror problems of Mexico and all of Mexico’s population. No matter the city and its affluence; they are never disconnected from the realities of the ever-gripping hand of the illegal drug trade and its unbridled force of violence and the vortex of lives it enraptures.
It is estimated that 28,000 people have died on the streets of the nation since 2006, the year Felipe Calderon was elected, as a result of the drug trade and perhaps the “drug state.” (The country relies heavily on its receipts from the drug trade, as the cash flow is undoubtedly welcome in a nation with very few employment prospects.) That number of 28,000 is gruesome in and of itself, but it does not take into account just how violent life there is. Surely, the “others” who have been forgotten are the ones who have been raped or kidnapped in the nation, just because of the wanton lawlessness and rule of the drug cartels who hold elements in the government, police and army, it seems. Nor does the estimated figure project those killed across the borders in any of the towns in America from California to Arizona, Texas and the rest of the American southwest, which happen to be perfectly logical points of entry for smuggling operations.
The problem, beyond the most obvious one of how to stop it and prevent it, is how to report it and help others understand its dimensions and scope? With numbers this large and swelling, with violence so absurd that it seems to be a play on a grind-house film (without the sense of humor), how do journalists tell the gruesome, rough-hewn reality without producing disinterest or indifference? Nikolas Kristof at the New York Times once pointed out that in reporting the problems of Darfur, he had to being to personalize the coverage, focusing on individuals within the conflict and how it was personally affecting their lives; else the sheer numbers would produce an abstraction in the mind of his readers.
We, the people in charge of telling the story, know far too little ourselves about a clandestine upstart society we long viewed as marginal, and what little we know cannot be explained in print media’s standard eight hundred words or less (or broadcast’s two minutes or under). And the story, like the murders, is endlessly repetitive and confusing: there are the double-barreled family names, the shifting alliances, the double-crossing army generals, the capo betrayed by a close associate who is in turn killed by another betrayer in a small town with an impossible name, followed by another capo with a double-barreled last name who is betrayed by a high-ranking army officer who is killed in turn. The absence of understanding of these surface narratives is what keeps the story static, and readers feeling impotent. Enough time has passed, though, since the beginning of the drug war nightmare that there is now a little perspective on the problem. Academics on both sides of the border have been busy writing, and so have the journalists with the most experience. Thanks to their efforts, we can now begin to place some of the better-known traffickers in their proper landscape.
“The Murderers of Mexico,” The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books has an interesting piece on this problem now being ironed-out. As the writer of the piece explained, covering the problems in Mexico is not easy, because of the culture involved: what with the “double-barrelled names” running into each other; the limited time or space to cover the ever-depressing and nuance-needed reporting now, the numbers, the reasons behind the strategic killings, and even how the more random happened, and so on. For years, everyone who could and had the ample courage needed to do so reported on the problems of the Mexican drug trade, but maybe were ill-equipped to do so. And the drug trade and its terrorists’ ways had to have had a chilling effect for even some of the most hardened and experienced. Journalists are intimidated, killed and so forth. Not to mention, the heinous acts of the cartels alone — even without their targeting of journalists — would scare any normal person without icy nerves and an iron stomach. And if these stories were never reported or accurately reported, the political pressure on both sides of the border is somewhat lessened. And so, it is necessary to praise these most undaunted of journalists, who cover the problem now, with great ability.
But moreover, it isn’t just a matter of if the reporting itself is accurate and able to fish out the truth from the convulsion of the details, coming from even those with experience: those reporters who are not struggling with the similar and double-barreled names, the myriad family connections and networks spread across the country and on both sides of the borders, or the weird ritual practices of the killings by some in the cartels, their own mythologies and so on, but also how the narrative is framed. This is not just a problem for Mexico, it is a problem for us, or perhaps more precisely, a problem that is the result of us. For all of the Minute Men Project volunteer sentinels and anti-Mexican rhetoric spewers of the fringe right, they miss the point. This is not about culture, this is about money for both sides of the fence, from the way we Draconianly handle drug offenses for a prison-industrial complex, to Mexico’s healthy economic gains from the drug trade, to the resources our government spends on drug interdiction and the war, that keeps people employed, and probably a host of things I’ve yet to think about .
As most right-wing politicos and a sundry of economists often go to the well of “letting the market being the judge, jury and advocate” for any number of things; if the politicians and policy-makers ever applied such a capitalist model to the drug-enforcement problems of Mexico, they’d be far from wrong. Because the fact of the matter is, if there were no American demand or even a somehow diminished demand for illicit drugs (maybe through de-criminalization and the legalization of some drugs to place better governmental controls and truly focus on prevention), and if our policy makers were more honest about our need to treat and rehabilitate our nation of abusers, as purely a matter of long-term solutions to an ever-expanded, profligate, hopeless “War on Drugs,” then we’d do all of us and our neighbors to the south a great deal of service.
The simple lack of collaboration between our two nations, engulfed in this battle against the cartels with no regard for anything, with each side of the divide looking at the other with plenty of glint-eyed blame, and the Mexican government, for the most part afraid to respond to the cartels, has only made the situation worse, since we are incoherently addressing a rather complex problem. As seen in “The Murderers of Mexico” and the Mexican army’s own fear and reticence to respond to the grotesque massacre of 72 migrants for no clear reason on August 23, of this year, just 100 miles away from their base, by the “Zetas,” a muscle group and franchise employed by trafficking cartels, after hours of a heated affair; the authority of Mexico on this matter has been lost altogether, and the drug cartels now run the nation with carte blanche, able to murder in slews in now even the most absurdly asinine way, doing so just because, with no relevance to their operation, just force of habit.
Read The New York Review of Books, “The Murderers of Mexico” [Here]
