China, 90s style

This may date me, but I recall a time before China was the inevitable next superpower and before anxiety at its rise colored the public discourse about it. Ah, yes, I remember it well, the mid 90s. The Soviet Union had just been buried, Europe was heading towards unification, and the US was looking at post-Tienanmen China a little askance, trying to figure out how best to deal with a country at once officially Communist but increasingly open for business. US strength was at an all time high and China, now only very poor, was then desperately impoverished - the balance of power favored the Americans, and they had a decision to make as to how they wanted to proceed.

The lines in the debate were clear - containment vs. engagement. This dichotomy was hegemonic over the discourse everywhere; it framed the debate among journalists, politicians and academics. Containment entailed one or more of the following: diplomatic isolation; military encirclement; economic restrictions (perhaps even sanctions in light of Tienanmen and Tibet); and support for dissidents and minorities. Engagement represented cooperation with the government of the People's Republic on diplomatic and security matters in the region; a softening of relations between the two countries; a studied silence on human rights and democracy issues; and, most consequently, an open economic relationship, with open trade and investment.

Interestingly, the discourse around the debate was also dominated by a hegemonic narrative - containment was the policy of nationalists and cold war relics, mainly conservative thugs like Pat Buchanan. To the extent that the Red State conservative base cared about these issues, they favored containment, as did "Reagan democrat" unionists anxious over the trade aspect. Engagement, on the other hand, was the hip, cosmopolitan thing - favored by the Washington and New York elite, it quickly dominated in the media and among academics as the policy of choice. It also had the advantage of seeming so reasonable and measured compared to the bellicosity and paranoia of containment, acknowledging that foreigners could - perhaps even should - sometimes be consulted and partnered with in foreign policy. I favored engagement instinctively and vocally, but I can be forgiven as I was fifteen. I was also hopelessly naive, and imagined the goal to be the welfare of the Chinese people who I imagined as a super-cool though incomprehensible amalgam of Charlie Chan and Bruce Lee (I grew up in a small, very white town). But apart from 15 year old provincial Canadians whose unconditional support the partisans of engagement could rely on right off the bat, more mature Americans need to be brought on board, and they were sold engagement like so: diplomatic cooperation would make the PRC government feel more secure, leading to the reduction of tensions in East Asia and a collaborative solution to regional problems (read North Korea); stepping away from containment would reduce PRC need to respond, lessing the likelihood of a Chinese military build-up; working with the PRC in multilateral forums would strengthen the US position in the UN, and improve the functioning of international organizations; and rising prosperity would create a middle class which would press for democratic reform. Never mentioned directly, but sometimes referred to obliquely (and appearing often in economic contexts) was another rationale - China was going to be big money for the smart, the ambitious, the quick-moving. It turns out that that was probably the only reason that mattered.

Of course, once the debate was framed in those terms - as a contest between status-quo cold warriors and thuggish nationalists versus right-thinking, future-embracing cosmopolitan elites - everything was over but the crying. Most favored trading status was extended to China, American businesses aggressively invested in the China trade, and - under arch-Republican George W. Bush - the People's Republic of China, a Party dictatorship where Mao appears on ALL of the money became a key member of the World Trade Organization. The effects on the global economy were epochal - American manufacturing, in crisis ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, decamped to the Pearl River basin and the environs of Shanghai, joined there very quickly by the final assembly and labor-intensive segments of Japanese and European production. The effects on the US domestic economy were varied - the move of polluting industries overseas likely contributed to the environmental improvement of the 1990s, and shareholders in firms engaged in outsourcing - together with the consultancies that facilitated the move and the financiers that underwrote them - reaped enormous windfalls. Consumers gained access to ever-cheaper mass goods, which was vitally important because they were also forced into lower-paying service industry jobs. The China trade represented a huge economic windfall which could have been distributed out to the benefit of the US as a whole. It wasn't, and instead became one of the main drivers for widening inequality.

Well, what about the other benefits of engagement? Where is the kinder, gentler People's Republic that all of that investment was supposed to by? Judged by it's own promises, the policy of engagement represents a complete failure.

1. China is militarizing anyway. Rather than trusting to economic inter-relationships to generate mutual interests with its rivals, the Chinese government is going ahead with plans to expand and modernize its military to begin to rival the United States (which, remember, has done its part by degrading its military through endless, fruitless military interventions). On top of conventional forces, the Chinese have demonstrated serious capacity for information war - their test of a satellite-killing missile in 2007 shocked the Pentagon, while their proficiency at cyber-warfare is well understood.

2. China is not a regional partner. North Korea is crazier than ever - engagement with China has not succeeded in reigning in the Hermit Kingdom, which has gotten more and more bellicose through the entire period, testing nuclear weapons, selling nuclear secrets, and even firing on South Korean territory. And while China hasn't been willing or able to influence it's Korea to behave nicely, it hasn't improved relations with US allies in the region either. The relationship with Japan at an official level remains as tense as ever, while the attitude of the mainland Chinese people towards the Japanese has only hardened. After a flawed Asia cup final match in 2004, violent rioting erupted, with Chinese fans assaulting the Japanese team's bus. More recently, a Chinese fisherman refused to defer to Japanese Coast Guard vessels in disputed waters, triggering his arrest and a protracted diplomatic crisis.

3. China is as authoritarian as ever. Repressive violence in Tibet and Xinjiang is intense, sparking periodic riots and disturbances, which then trigger another round of repressive violence. The internet is censored, and government-employed internet trolls plant propaganda on message boards while harassing dissidents. The regular press is severely restricted. And they have this guy under house arrest, and wouldn't even let him pick up his Nobel prize.

In a way, the utter failure of strategic engagement to deliver on its promise (and instead transform the domestic political economy in the direction of greater instability and inequality) should discredit the policy - and those who pushed for it - in the same way that the 2008 crisis exploded neo-liberal myths about the panacea of financial deregulation. But it is never put in these terms. Why? That's a question for another post...

Obama, Libya and Jedi Mind Tricks

As a disappointed leftist, I am no fan of President Obama. I believe that his administration is captured by Wall Street interests, that he's a sucker for bipartisanship even at the cost of the progressive policy agenda, and that he's abandoned his promise to dismantle the Bush-era US security state. I read his delay on making a decision concerning Libya as another manifestation of his weaknesses - status quo bias, protracted decision making, and fear of upsetting Republicans. There was no way I saw for this President to come through with the no-fly zone that his allies, and even the Arab League, were urging. I fully expected this to be death of the Libyan opposition - and I wasn't the only one.

And then the US engineers the passage of a UN resolution mandating not just a "no-fly zone" over Libya, but "all necessary measures" to protect civilians from pro-Qaddafi forces, diplomatic language for discretionary airstrikes. It may that this is too little, too late, but airstrikes, especially in clear weather in open desert terrain, can be devastatingly effective against military forces, as the regular Iraqi army learned in both Gulf Wars. And given that Qadaffi's support in Libya is very thin and his ranks packed with opportunistic mercenaries, it's unlikely that he can absorb significant losses without a complete collapse in his authority. The authorization is a game changer, and Qaddafi knows it. This intervention is likely to tip the balance decisively to the opposition, and by waiting until the 11th hour and then over-delivering (airstrikes against Qaddafi instead of a mere no-fly zone) Obama has demonstrated that the US, despite the recent blows to its international prestige, is still a crucial power and can claim credit for an eventual opposition victory.

Darfur in Detail

In one way of thinking, Darfur amounts to just another entry on seemingly limitless list of African tragedies and disasters - it fills the gap between Rwanda and Libya (or to be more precise, between Congo I and Congo II). The scale of the violence was remarkable, yes, and the level of human suffering very great indeed, but the brutal reality is that suffering is commonplace in the world, and nowhere more so than in Africa, that most tragic of continents, the graveyard of good intentions and the place hope goes to die. If we accept this, then re-examining Darfur is a fruitless, masochistic exercise, one which will drag down our spirits at an unusually bleak period for world events, and yield few insights beyond, "yes, it is terrible when bad things happen."

I do not accept this position. While disasters are common enough, Darfur had its own characteristics, and it took place in a very specific context, one favorable to intervention. Most obviously, this was a man-made catastrophe, one with clear perpetrators, even villains, which could be confronted and stopped in order to abate the suffering (one human rights activist described the janjaweed as "a cross between the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan").

Further, those responsible for the violence and atrocities, unlike Arab dictators further north, were declared enemies of the West and especially of the United States. The government of Sudan was - still is - an official state sponsor of terror, and an unofficial posterboy for repressive and evil government even among the right-thinking international elite. Khartoum was not a key regional ally, and the oil they sold they sold to the Chinese, so their leverage over the West was minimal. Stepping back from geopolitics, the internal politics in the West were also uniquely favorable. The United States especially had gone through painful soul-searching about the failure to prevent the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, culminating in public lamentations by responsible figures, "never again" studies of genocide, and an increased sense of moral responsibility. When news broke of the devastation taking place in Darfur - remember, the violence consisted primarily of horse- and camel-mounted janjaweed irregulars storming into defenseless villages, raping the women, killing everything and then burning what was left - public opinion was primed for outrage, and activists responded with commitment, energy and imagination. The outrage was only fanned further by the odious justification for the violence - janjaweed figures claimed racial superiority as Arabs over the Africans they persecuted, which justified any action to clear the area of its traditional inhabitants. On top of the usual celebrity interventions (notable for the high-wattage of the stars involved), new media were exploited to the maximum, with awareness-raising flash games, facebook groups and internet-savvy NGOs. Old media was invested as well - I personally remember watching MTVU at the gym in 2006/2007, and seeing Darfur-related programming in heavy rotation, several times an hour. This exposure had an effect - campus mobilization was real, and ubiquitous. Darfur became a cause celebre, which had not happened with Rwanda, the Congo or any other African crisis since Apartheid in South Africa.

It was perhaps all the more demoralizing then when all of that effort yielded paltry results. Western governments did more or less nothing - there was a great deal of hand-wringing, pressure on African states to send peacekeepers, and ultimately an International Criminal Court indictment against Sudanese leaders, including President Omar al-Bashir. The effect on events on the ground was - and is - negligible. As a sop to foreign pressure, the Khartoum government entered into a peace process with rebel groups inside Darfur in 2007, a process which has dragged on to this day with no improvement in the behavior of the central government. While the level of violence has decline since its peak in 2007/2008 (though recently the situation is worsening again), analysts argue that this is an indication of the efficacy of the ethnic cleansing - few villages remain to pillage, with survivors huddling in refugee camps. These camps themselves are not fully secure, but since they are nominally guaranteed by the central government (whose agents likely shakedown refugees and siphon off food and aid materials) they are generally avoided by the janjaweed, who prefer easier pickings. The most damning development of all is perhaps the permanence of the refugee camps - the refugees unwillingness to return to their former lands speaks volumes about their perception of the dangers outside.

So there you have it - the mobilization against the genocide in Darfur was the largest and most media savvy in decades, and it failed to motivate foreign intervention or change Sudanese government behavior. And if the international community failed in Darfur, how can we expect it to succeed anywhere else?

A Description of Harms - Bad Kings

Conflict, especially the kind of protracted violence that afflicts the countries from the last post suffer, is likely the most destructive experience a society can undergo. However, systematic, brutalized oppression can be just as bad, indeed it can be thought of as a type of conflict, just one less visible, moving at a different rate. The end of Communism was thought to represent the beginning of an age of democratic expansion and consolidation, and the Arab Spring suggests that progress in that direction is possible. But authoritarian systems have strengthened themselves in some places, and reemerged in others, and now we can reckon the number of human lives lived under oppression in the billions, and the worst offenders include some of the greatest powers.

1. North Korea

George Orwell's 1984 gets invoked by everyone against anyone else they don't like. Republicans refer to Democrats as Big Brother, Apple users call Microsoft Big Brother, spoiled teenagers call their parents Big Brother, and each hyperbole reduces what should be a deadly serious accusation to a mere cliche. This is a pity, because there actually exists a place that bears comparison to the dystopian nightmare of 1984, North Korea, where reality may have even surpassed fiction. The cult of personality around Kim Jong Il - a pompadoured gnome with a flair for jumpsuits and designer sunglasses - has no rival. Not Big Brother, he's the Dear Leader of the North Koreans, who name flowers in his honor. The concentration camp system is extensive enough to have captured between 150,000 and 200,000 political prisoners. The regime is paranoid enough to have created a North Korean-only internet and to restrict ownership of bicycles, and repressive enough to banish the sick and elderly from Pyongyang (so as not to mar the perfection of the capital). The economic system of juche (self-reliance) is dysfunctional enough to create perpetual food shortages and famine on a large enough scale that US intelligence agencies measure the dead through smoke emissions from crematoria. There are only two things in abundant supply in North Korea - propaganda, creating a nation brainwashed to the point of delusion, and cheap alcohol, turning that nation into alcoholics. The existence of North Korea alone challenges faith in the existence of a benevolent god.

2. Zimbabwe

Among historians, political scientists and other academics, the ability for individuals - even political leaders - to meaningful alter great events is a perennial topic of debate, with much greater importance given to structural forces or the balance of power than the will of even strong leaders. Zimbabwe is perhaps the great case for the influence of leaders - it's far from certain that with any other leader Zimbabwe would achieve prosperity, development and democracy, but it can be safely reasoned that without Mugabe it would not have degenerated into the inflation-wracked backwater it is today. With fertile soil, abundant water and a wealth of natural resources, Zimbabwe has boundless economic potential, but through an economic policy best described as "scare whitey and print money" Mugabe's regime has driven tens of thousands into economic exile (first expropriated whites by plane, then desperate blacks on foot) and destroyed the savings of the citizenry through hyper-inflation. Not content to wreck the economy, Mugabe clings to power through naked political repression and the silencing of the press. Strangely, the economic situation has gotten bad enough so that it is now impossible to calculate how bad it is - Zimbabwe's chief statistician has given up calculating the inflation rate, citing a shortage of goods to price and a shortage of digits on government computers.

3. Burma

The regimes in North Korea and Zimbabwe both claim some sort of ideological justifications for their oppression and incompetence, Korean Stalinism in one case and anti-colonialism in the other. The junta ruling Burma has the odd distinction of approaching frankness in the utter venality and moral bankruptcy of their rule - they are in it for themselves, and can't be bothered to pretend otherwise. This does not, of course, change the fact of grinding oppression in the country, but maybe it shapes its character - consider the 800,000 Burmese believed to be put to forced labor for the benefit of the regime, or the creepy advertising campaigns pimping out the country's women and girls in order to bring in tourist dollars. Add to this routine violence between the central government and ethnic militias in the interior and the prospects for the country's future become even bleaker.

4. Russia

The first three entries in my list, though downright hellish in the oppression, injustice and material misery they impose on their people, are all distant, relatively small, and remote. It's easy to dismiss them as pockets of dysfunction in a world otherwise tending towards more open and accountable government, throwbacks limited in their influence on global affairs, certainly incapable of shaping future events. This is reassuring, perhaps it is even true. Russia, however, is a big fish, a former superpower and certainly still a great power, which makes up for its relative oppression deficit vis-a-vis the top three with global reach and world-historical significance. Though the old totalitarian system is truly gone, the new system overseen by Vladimir Putin, the wildly popular Prime Minister/Dictator and his handpicked President/Sidekick Dmitry Medvedev is a harsh and repressive one. Democratic reforms from the immediate post-Soviet period have been rolled back, and a new apparatus of repression and control - mostly informal rather than governmental - has been put in its place. Power has been centralized into the President's office (he appoints regional officials directly who were formerly elected locally and enjoys almost unlimited legislative power through a docile, rubber-stamp Duma), with the security services deploying covert force in pursuit of the elite's economic goals. The political opposition has been harassed and ridiculed into irrelevance, while journalists who criticize the regime are routinely assassinated. The most terrifying aspect of Russian authoritarianism is not its repressiveness - compared to Burma, let alone North Korea, it comes off as downright benign - but its dynamism. The economy has been buoyant, the regime genuinely popular and the government decently effective in coping with crises and emergencies. While dissidents have used the internet to evade censorship, authorities have likewise taken advantage of new technologies to expand propaganda and surveillance. Dictatorship in Russia is no throwback - it's built for the future.

5. The People's Republic of China

In short, this is Russia but much worse. The spectacular growth of the Chinese economy has propelled the nation from a Maoist backwater at the edge of subsistence to everyone's favorite for top dog in the New World Order. Growth was supposed to spur the creation of a middle class, which was then supposed to pressure the regime into democratic reform, and thus take care of the political discomfort of having the new global boss be a nominally Communist police state. That didn't happen, and now the new global boss is a nominally Communist police state which infiltrates and censors the internet (when it isn't trying to build a China-only version it can control), holds democracy activists in house arrest and prevents them for picking up their Nobel peace prizes, exploits prison labor on a massive scale and aggressively colonizes Tibet and Xinjiang with ethnic Han Chinese. As in Russia, this is a dynamic, modern authoritarianism adept at both delivering improving economic conditions to keep the mass of its populace satisfied while ruthlessly suppressing any dissent against its self-serving rule.

6. Saudi Arabia

I was originally going to reserve Saudi Arabia for my list of honorable mentions, but their willingness - their insistence, in fact - on sending troops into Bahrain to quash the democratic protests there reminded me how much there was to hate about Saudi. The monarchy - obscenely wealthy, parasitically unproductive, lavishly luxurious and economically predatory - manages to combine a public commitment to a neo-medieval version of Islam with private debaucheries straight out of celebrity rehab. They have used their country's wealth to purchase and import a consumer economy modeled on the strip malls and gated communities of white Texas, and the juxtaposition of that with the coercive application of their brand of religion creates a cross between an Islamic version of Medieval Times and the most depressing shopping mall in your suburb, only with public executions. The level of sexual repression created by the strictly enforced segregation of the sexes (at least outside of the pleasure palaces of the Saudi family) has warped the sensibilities of the younger generation, leading to sister-swapping and desperation homosexuality (which is, of course, punishable by death). Not content with psychologically destroying their own people, the Saudis meddle internationally wherever Muslims can be found, sponsoring violence in the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, not to mention using their wealth and clout as the holders of Mecca and Medina to twist global Islam in the direction of their perverse Wahhabi sect. Given the internal freedom bought them by their great wealth and security provided by their chummy relationship with the US, the Saudis could have chosen any social and economic model for their country. That they have ended up with this makes it clear that while they might not be the most repressive regime on this list, nor perhaps the most dangerous, they are the most gratuitous in their evil.

Honorable Mentions:

Iran, Syria and Algeria could all qualify with their mixture of nationalist paranoia and militarism. Similarly Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Oman all represent vile combinations of the excesses of royal dictatorship with petro-capitalism. Likewise, virtually any Central Asian republic - all of the 'stans - are dismal dictatorships run by egomaniacal crooks. Ditto Belarus and Moldova, which seems to be some kind of gangster co-op. And certainly Africa has more dictators than I care to dwell on , including the warscape of Sudan.

A Description of Harms - War and Rumors of War

Until it was displaced by the massive earthquake in Japan, the big story concerned the revolt in Libya which is shaping up to become a protracted, back-and-forth civil war. It's recent vintage and spectacular beginning as the most violent flare up in the Arab Spring made it the current War to Watch. But what about all the past Wars to Watch? Here's a summary of current, ongoing conflicts (inter-state wars, civil wars, violent insurgencies and I'm including states-in-anarchy), some of which will seem very familiar:

Africa

1. Darfur

The brutality and scale of violence against civilians - in this case African villagers barely eking out subsistence to begin with - briefly made this conflict a cause celebre on campuses throughout the West. However, not even Angelina Jolie's moving op-ed piece in the Washington Post (February 2007) could halt the violence, which continues off and on until today.

2. Chad

One side effect of war is more war - the fighting in Darfur produced over two million refugees, many of whom sought sanctuary across the border in neighboring Chad. The influx of refugees disrupted the fragile government of dictator Idriss Deby, provoking an East-West (and tribe-on-tribe) violent power struggle that has persisted since 2005. For those keeping score at home, this is the 4th Chadian Civil War since the country gained independence. In 1965. Incidentally, the bulk of the African mercenaries Qaddafi is using to fight the Libyan civil war come out of Chad.

3. Congo - Kinshasa

Just as Darfur triggered the war in Chad, the Rwandan genocides in 1994 led to the conflict in the Congo, triggered by Rwandan intervention in favor of Laurent Kabila, a Congolese rebel leader. His march on Kinshasa in 1996 brought down the Zairian state, and the country has been in conflict ever since. A weak transitional government is nominally in control of Kinshasa and the west, but the mineral rich interior and strategically valuable east remain battlegrounds for multi-sided conflict between militias, military units loyal to rogue generals, bandits... basically anyone who put together a soccer team and get their hands on some used AK-47s is in this. The war is unspeakably barbarous - rape (of women, children, men) is routine, increasing the spread of AIDS; the scale of suffering is staggering, with over 5 million dead through violence, disease and famine; and the superstitiousness of the guerrillas spread the practice of pygmy cannibalism, in which the pygmy peoples living in Congolese forests are killed and eaten in the belief that this confers magical properties.

4. Uganda (and region)

The Lord's Resistance Army of northern Uganda (although they have ranged into South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Congo - Kinshasa) is implausibly diabolical. Their leader, Joseph Kony, is a mystic who channels spirits that serve as the military and political leadership of his group, and claims to be able to cure AIDS through ablution. They recruit through child abduction, turning boys into child soldiers hopped up on drugs and girls into sexual property that redistributed at the leader's whim. Their favored targets are undefended villages, where they typically kill everyone by machete, in order to save ammunition. And they've been doing damage since 1987.

Arabia (and the war on terror)

1. Iraq

The big story for much of the 2000s, the war in Iraq has gone on long enough to fatigue even the most patient observer. And it has gotten less bloody, with fewer fatalities, lower US troop levels and less visible operations. But it's far from over - in January, two US soldiers were killed by the Iraqis they were supposed to be training, bomb attacks continue throughout the country, and the political situation remains unresolved. On top of the post-conflict difficulties, the Arab Spring has created a new source of instability, with mass mobilization against the fragile al Maliki government and provincial officials.

2. Afghanistan

Now the longest war in US history, the operation has devolved into a quagmire bogging down US forces indefinitely with no signs of progress and no prospect of a conclusion. The situation has degenerated so badly that Canadian forces are considering using armed militias - the same people responsible for the devastating civil war that brought the Taliban to power - for stability operations in the restive south, and the US forces have ended up killing the cousin and political ally of the very ruler they installed to run the country, and who has ended up turning it from a devastated blastscape to a $40 billion per year devastated blastscape.

3. Pakistan

As everyone predicted, the Afghanistan conflict has sucked in vast swathes of northern Pakistan and mobilized anti-Western forces into attacks on any members of the political elite pursuing moderate or liberal policies. On the upside, the conflict has finally allowed us to achieve a sci-fi milestone - now we get to watch remote-controlled flying robots kill with impunity from the skies, terminator style. A fragile state even at the best of times, between pressure from the Taliban, pressure from the US, a powerful military increasingly growing rogue and permanent economic and social crises, it remains to be seen how much longer Pakistan can resist turning into Afghanistan with cricket.

4. Yemen

Even before the Arab Spring reached Sanaa, Yemen was experiencing serious unrest. There is a Shi'a insurgency in the north (which spilled over into Saudi Arabian in 2010). There is a regional insurgency in the south. Al Qaeda groups - and anti-Al Qaeda US operatives - are running around killing each other everywhere. The central government relies on tribal allies, not regular security forces, to maintain its rule. Modern government - not this particular government, but the structure and operation of modern political authority as an institution - is on its last legs in Yemen, and this country is rapidly heading to Mad Max country.

5. Israel-Palestine

Yes, this is still going on. No, it's not getting any better.

6. Libya

Qaddafi has managed to reverse the momentum of the opposition and push their forces back towards Benghazi. It is unclear how this will develop - the French have recognized the opposition government, and have a track record in the region that suggests and appetite for meddling. On the other hand, the US has made defeatist noises about the revolt and the rebel's pleas for a no-fly zone have so far fallen on deaf ears. This may be over in a week, with victory for either side a possibility, or I may be including this conflict the next time I make another catalog of horrors.

The Americas

1. Mexico

Unlike many of the other countries on this list, Mexico is in many ways a functional, modern state. Poor compared to its norther neighbor, it's comfortably middle income by global standards, and boasts all of the trappings of modern civilization - sound infrastructure, increasingly free elections, a functional though imperfect economy. But even such a country is not immune from massive violence and instability. The remarkably thing is that the source is not a political movement, a separatist group or even a terrorist network, but simply ruthless and well organized criminal syndicates. Conservative President Felipe Calderon made waging a war on drugs one of his campaign promises, and drugs responded with a full-scale offensive, pushing the government and the police out of large swathes of territory, especially in the crucial border zone around the US. The victory of the cartels has been so complete that newspapers have declared unconditional surrender, and ballads are commissioned by capos recounting their bloody exploits on Mexican radio. Police and military units are considered to be pawns of cartels, if not mini-cartels in their own rights, and any victories against criminal groups are chalked up to the sub rosa maneuverings of other criminal groups. Also, someone - either connected to the cartels or the government, either way protected by the police - has been ritually murdering dozens of young women around Juarez.

2. Colombia

On the other end of the cocaine pipeline, Colombia has been fighting against an insurgency by the unfortunately acronymed FARC, nominally Marxist guerrillas who control the north and the east of the country. They've lost a number of fighters and leaders over the last few years, but continue to hold territory, kidnap victims (especially foreigners) for ransom, and set off car bombs in population centers.

Asia

1. India

India, the billion-man tiger economy with its tech companies and expansive cultural reach, seems like an anomaly on this list - the stories we get tend to be optimistic about its future, celebratory sometimes, even a little anxious at the rapid ascent of this future super power - but the truth of the matter is that this is still a desperately poor, brittle country beset by conflict internal and external. If you follow developments on the subcontinent, you may think that it's the tense stand-off with Pakistan and it's periodic eruptions into spectacular terrorist or conventional military attacks that puts India in this company. Or you may think that this is due to the strife in Kashmir, whose population has never fully accepted Indian rule, and chafes under a corrupt and sometimes brutal occupational authority. You'd be right, but you'd also be missing the big one - since 1967 the Naxalites, a Marxist-inspired alliance between tribal groups and the rural poor, have prosecuted a violent, large scale insurgency against the Indian government across a large swathe of territory (the so-called "red corridor," reaching north-west from central India) and turning much of the forested interior into a no-go region for police and government forces. This year is shaping up to be particularly bloody as government forces are planning a large-scale offensive to destroy the rebels and open up the region for economic development.

Anarchy

The conflicts above fit into a conventional definition of war or insurgency - two or more sides, relatively organized and disciplined, struggling for political domination of a territory. Some conflicts have a different, more terrifying character. Without any actor or alliance of actors controlling a region, there is no limit on who can commit violence, and force is contained not by law but by greater force. The closest I've come to experiencing this first hand is a midnight viewing of Mad Max - that's the closest I want to come.

1. Haiti

From its very beginnings, when Napoleon's forces smashed the first black republic, things haven't really gone Haiti's way. Before the 2010 earthquake government was tenuous, with gang control over Port-au-Prince only curtailed thanks to heavy urban fighting done by the UN. The earthquake shattered state institutions, and they have never been reestablished. Gangs and criminals run the capital and other cities, and what remains of the government structure is shot through with corruption and abuse. Extreme poverty - meaning poverty up the limits of survival - has shred social cohesion to the point where getting by means every man for himself. NGOS provide a lifeline keeping regular Haitians alive, but nothing is bringing back the state or rebuilding the country.

2. Somalia

Ah, Somalia, the gold standard for the end of the world. How is it that everyone has normalized the situation there, in which marauding bands of teenagers with assault rifles represent established authority, each section of Mogadishu boasts its own warlord, and the number one national industry is piracy? Currently there are at least two well-organized break-away republics on Somali territory, no government in Mogadishu, and no prospect of a return to regular political life. Anarchy is the new normal - perhaps that's why we're all used to it.

Honorable Mentions:

I have tried to limit myself to the most active and large-scale conflicts going on (saving less instabilities for another post), but there are a few other cases that would fit in here that should be mentioned in passing. Cambodia and Thailand are facing off over border disputes, with occasional lethal flare ups. The Korean War, frozen since the 1953 armistice, erupted briefly into a shooting match two months ago. Venezuela and Colombia have in the past year mobilized forces along their common border. Ethnic militias, poppy growers and break-away regions run most of interior Burma.

A Description of Harms - Introduction

The Dismal Catalog

This blog will mostly deal with terrible things. The reason for this is simple - I want to understand the world, and explain it to you, and in this world the most serious and important developments are usually terrible ones. But before I talk about the new that is bad, I want to have some clarity on the terrible things that are going on right now but that don't rise to the level of news not because of insufficient seriousness or insufficient importance, but because they have been going on long enough to become dull. So what follows are lists, more or less, detailing the devastation that we just take for granted. The plan for the series is as follows:

War and Rumors of War - Ongoing wars, large-scale insurgencies and collapsed states

Bad Kings - Totalitarian states, police states and particularly important oppressive dictatorships

Houses of Cards - Political systems in turmoil

Houses of Cards II - Economies in turmoil

Mother Nature will kill us all - Ecological catastrophes

Civilization, such as it is, is in a precarious situation. I don't know if we can get out of it, I don't know if there is a solution. I do know that if the goal is some kind of peace and progress, it won't come about from muddling through, but will require that the real, existing problems be deliberately addressed. This series is not about the solutions - it just describes the problems.

Introduction

Gentle Reader,

Welcome!

There are many sources of news online. This is not one of them. My posts will consist of my ideas, my comments and my interpretations of political, economic and security affairs. The abundance of information available and the complex interconnectedness among events makes making sense of news - let alone coming to a sound understanding of the world - a daunting task for anyone. This is my attempt to reach that understanding, and get kudos or corrections as appropriate.

Enjoy.

MM