Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, roughly half of Syria’s 23 million people have been made refugees. While many are in camps in neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, the majority are internally displaced people. Four years into the conflict, with 250,000 recorded deaths and counting, it should not come as a surprise that smuggling desperate people out is a thriving business.

Many of the escape routes from Syria and other trouble spots such as Somalia and Eritrea go through Libya, a country that no longer exists save on paper, since the removal of its ruthless and eccentric strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, who was defeated and executed by rebels aided by a Western-led air campaign in 2011. UNHCR data show that most people crossing the sea into southern Europe are escaping Syria, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya and their internal turmoil.
It should be obvious that the only long-term solution to the Mediterranean’s boat people is a review of the West’s longstanding policies towards those countries and their areas of conflict.

Ordinary people rarely sell all their belongings and abandon their home for a passage at sea on a leaky ship — the human wave seeking to cross the Mediterranean is escaping civil war and sectarian mayhem, failed states and a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

Addressing this crisis by solving what causes people to escape may seem costly and far-fetched. Yet, it is not at all clear that years of naval deployment in the Mediterranean, increased spending on rescue operations, transit camps, and an army of social workers and translators is cheaper than helping Syrian rebels topple President Bashar al-Assad. When destitute people arrive, they must be fed, sheltered and medically treated. Their children must be educated. They must be taught new languages, skills and social norms. It is a daunting task, costly and fraught with social hurdles and cultural barriers. Europe might not be able to cope with hundreds of thousands of refugees, on top of the legal immigration already arriving.

This is not an attempt to endorse an anti-immigration policy. Nor is it an effort to blame Western leaders for all that went wrong in Libya after their involvement in toppling Gaddafi. It is also not an attempt to pin responsibility for the Syrian tragedy on President Obama’s refusal to punish Assad for his recourse to chemical weapons, his brutal barrel bombing campaign against civilians, or the other atrocities being committed daily in Syria.

Arab societies should take primary responsibility for the rapid descent into chaos and the obscene violence unleashed against civilians across Arab lands. Equally, the West is not primarily responsible for civil war and lawlessness in the Horn of Africa.

But it was our choice to wash our hands of Syria’s civil war from the start, and Libya’s chaos within a year of Gaddafi’s downfall has not left us immune from the negative consequences of those conflicts.

Our response is a classic case of seeking to cure a brain tumour with aspirin.

Europe is understandably focused on both the political question of what immigration policy is best — including how to share the burden among member states — and the practical question of how to manage and fund the current crisis.

So far, Europe has decided to strengthen search and rescue operations at sea and try to disrupt the networks of human smugglers who profiteer from the traffic. 

There is no dispute that the socio-economic and cultural cost of such numbers of arrivals on Europe, at a time of sluggish economic growth, high unemployment and rising social tensions across the continent, may be too high to sustain. It is also understandable that many resources are devoted to saving human lives and to target those who profiteer from this staggering scale of human suffering.

But this course of action may offer temporary solutions to a problem that will continue to fester. Europe should also work with its transatlantic allies to explore how the West can help bring an end to the tragic and chaotic circumstances of these countries.

An end to Syria’s war would stem the flow of refugees and, in time, create the conditions for many of them to return home. A restoration of order under a functioning central government in Libya would also empower state institutions and functions currently lacking there — border control, combating smuggling — that are indispensable in tackling the scourge of human traffickers.
This is not a call for the West to launch a new military adventure in the Middle East and North Africa. But it is foolish to think that anything short of decisive support to Syrian rebels to defeat Assad is going to help us persuade Syrians to stay home.

Four years of Western inaction in Syria have contributed to this crisis. So has our precipitous and ill-conceived intervention in Libya, followed by an equally precipitous exit from its chaotic scene.

Restoring order, decency and, in time, prosperity to those countries seems a much better long-term policy than bickering about patrolling boats and immigration quotas.

The post End Syria’s War appeared first on Standpoint.

And how is the UK responding to the worst refugee crisis on earth? Well, it seems that the statistics are as follows: Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan have admitted three million refugees into camps. Egypt has accepted 138,000, Germany 40,000, Algeria 25,000. Sweden has taken 17,000, and even the Gaza Strip has welcomed a thousand (what’s second prize, I wonder?). Meanwhile, our sceptred isle has managed to grant visas to 90. No, not 90,000—just 90 refugees.

In fact, the UK declined to join the UN resettlement programme. Instead, we set up the Dickensian-sounding Vulnerable Person’s Relocation Scheme, from which, so far, those plucky, lucky 90 migrants have benefited. David Cameron has declared that our aid to Syria is the second highest in the world; I don’t doubt that £700 million will make a difference—if it reaches the people who need it. But does that absolve us of compassion for the persecuted victims of a needless, atrocious civil war?

Those who would close up our borders maintain that we’re already tightly squeezed. If you believe Fox News, our cities are a virtual no-go area for whites, while Farage’s blokey burbling is picking up votes from the malcontents and an uncertain election is around the corner.  After all, the Le Pen-leaning France has taken a mere 500 Syrians, and the United States, land of the free and the home of the brave, has taken only a hundred. So on what grounds should Britain offer a home to the homeless?

Fade to flashback. It’s July 1938 and even without the benefit of 24-hour news, the world is aware of Hitler’s threatening behaviour towards Jews and other minorities. The situation is more pressing and depressing every day. He has pledged to make Germany judenrein (cleansed of Jews). German Jews are wearing yellow stars and suffering pogroms. Refugees are flooding across borders and, in a flurry of conscience, President Franklin D. Roosevelt calls for a conference. It will take place at Évian-les-Bains, on Lake Geneva, with representatives from 32 countries. Although the President himself is unable to attend, nor does he send his Secretary of State, he will dispatch a trusted friend, an industrialist named Myron C. Taylor, to chair the event.

After nine days of the conference, it is apparent that no one will commit to taking in these refugees. The word “Jews” is never mentioned, nor are the Nazis called anything but the “host nation”. America refuses to increase its quota for German and Austrian immigrants. They claim that the Depression is still impacting and employment would suffer. The Central American states announce they can accept no “traders and intellectuals”. Australia explains that “we have never had a racial problem and we are not desirous to import one.” (Big sigh of relief from the Aboriginals then.) Brazil requests that every visa application is accompanied with a certificate of Christian baptism. The French lament that they are “at the extreme point of saturation”—a situation that the Vichy government will soon find a way to rectify.  And the British fear that “a sudden rush of Jewish refugees might arouse anti-Semitic feelings.”

“It is felt,” said the Evening Standard at the time, “that we hear too much about the troubles of the Jews. They shout too loudly. They make too insistent a demand upon the compassion of the world. Compassion they get—and deserve—but annoyance is apt to accompany it.” (Yeah, sorry about the annoyance, Lord Beaverbrook. We’re still annoying 70 years later, just as we were 4,000 years ago as slaves in Egypt.)

Curiously, the tiny Dominican Republic offered (admittedly in exchange for a vast pay-off) to take 100,000 Jews. Cynics maintain that the PM desired a lighter-skinned population, but still, I’m grateful for the 800 he took in before the Führer closed all the borders. Hitler himself found it “astounding” that although all these countries had severely criticised Germany for its treatment of the Jews, not one of them wanted to take them in. Nazi observers at Évian returned to Germany saying, “You can do what you like to these Jews, nobody is interested in them.”

One could argue that this disdain and chilling absence of empathy was a chief factor in the evil little psychopath’s decision to proceed with the Final Solution. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. Just to add insult to genocide, at the same time the powers-that-were in the British Mandate stopped all ships taking European refugees to Palestine. And in that same year—1938—came the Anschluss, the Munich Agreement, and Kristallnacht. In Vienna, prominent Jews were forced onto all fours to scrub the pavements with toothbrushes. Not long afterwards, Switzerland, Italy and Czechoslovakia closed their borders. It was the beginning of the end.

Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann were present at the Évian conference as Jewish observers from Palestine. “There is only one thing I hope to see before I die,” said Meir, “and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.” Weizmann added with savage irony, “The world seems to be divided into two parts: those places where Jews could not live and those places where they cannot enter.”

And now we have another butcher decimating his own people: a man who was educated in this country, whose wife attended a central London school. The most vulnerable of Assad’s victims can be saved, sustained and given new life if we stand up to the tyrant by welcoming them in. Take a sip of Evian, Mr Cameron, and issue those visas. Today.

The post Habitual Hypocrisy appeared first on Standpoint.

The scandal of Zaatari and other refugee camps and dwellings is that these vulnerable, traumatised women and girls are not being adequately protected from sexual exploitation and forced marriage by those mandated to keep them from further harm. 

Women and girls not only fear retribution by the perpetrators, but also by male members of their own families because the shame and stigma of rape falls on the victim rather than the assailant. Indeed, many families are marrying off their daughters to “protect” them from rape. Others revert to early marriage if their daughters have been sexually assaulted “to safeguard their honour”. In one extreme case a young woman was shot dead by her father when an armed group approached to prevent the “disgrace” of her being raped.

A recently published report by the International Rescue Committee found that female Syrian refugees are not safe from sexual and domestic violence in Zaatari and other camps, and that reports of forced marriage of women and girls are increasing. A child protection group found that the women and girls in the camp identified rape and kidnapping as a primary reason that families fled from Syria, but that sexual violence was rarely reported.

Sexual exploitation at Zaatari is so widespread that a number of camp inhabitants are operating informal monitoring groups and have caught out several “marriage brokers” who infiltrated the camp posing as workers. These individuals are merely escorted off the camp if reported. 

Indeed, a number of UN officials and aid workers I met at Zaatari and in other camps and settlements in Jordan and Lebanon tell me it is known that prostitution and trafficking of women, both at the border and within the camp exist, but to date no formal investigation has been commissioned into these criminal activities. 

At Zaatari crowds of desperate women and men queue for water and basic provisions, others sit on the ground staring into space. I ask Andrew Harper, chief of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Jordan, if there is concrete evidence of women and girls being sold at the borders and in the camp. “Many of the families are experiencing dire poverty,” says Harper, “so it would be no surprise if it is happening.” What is surprising is that no proper investigation into the matter has yet been carried out at Zaatari, despite local reports and official suspicion.

Women at Zaatari complain that men regularly enter the communal kitchens specifically to sexually harass lone women. Some are too afraid to use the kitchens and prefer to cook on portable gas stoves outside their tents. There are also complaints that at night the unlit latrines become sites where prostitution and sexual assault take place. Many women are too scared to use them after dark.

Jordanian police are responsible for law and order in the camp but it is apparent that there is a lack of security and that matters are out of hand. At the public security department, responsible for police, security, and law enforcement activities across Jordan, I meet Lt. Gen. Hussein al-Majali, an imposing figure resplendent in an immaculate uniform bearing numerous medals. “There are assaults, burglary, homicides in Zaatari,” admits al-Majali. “It is a town. These things happen.”

Between 200 and 250 police officers are deployed in the camp at any one time but only five officers are allocated to family protection, despite the fact that domestic violence towards women and children by male family members has been identified as a significant problem in Zaatari.

I ask al-Majali how bad the situation is for women and girls in the camp in terms of rape and sexual harassment. “There have not been any convictions for rape at all,” he tells me proudly. “We did, however have a case where a father broke his daughter’s arm, but it was resolved because it was agreed by everyone not to press charges but to keep it as a family matter.”

Back at Zaatari I visit the sprawling school operated by UNHCR. It is midday and the boys crowd outside waiting for the girls to leave so they can begin their classes. A 15-year-old student tells me unprompted when asked about her future plans that she is “not even thinking about marriage yet” and would like to train as a pharmacist. It may not be her decision: Alexis Masciarelli of Unicef admits that there is “serious concern” about the rates of early pregnancy. “There are significant absences from school from the age of 13 upwards,” he says, adding that the organisation is “looking into the matter”. At the maternity clinic I see many pregnant teenage girls. On average, 11 babies are born in the camp every day.

Dr Shible Sahbani is humanitarian affairs specialist for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) at Zaatari, which provides support and direct services to women and their children. “In our culture women are not allowed to go outside unless accompanied by their husbands and sons,” he says.

“In Arabic culture the men have a strong role in the family, but here in the camp the male has lost his role because food is for free, and shelter is for free. He gets stressed and the result is domestic violence.”

Margherita Maglietti specialises in countering gender-based violence for UNFPA. She proudly shows me the women-only group sessions being held in a prefab on the camp; they are packed with women, many clutching babies, being encouraged to speak about difficulties they face. Incongruously, men are leading the session. I ask Maglietti if she has encountered prostitution and trafficking at Zaatari. “It is a very complex topic and we have been discussing it quite a lot. We cannot say there are confirmed cases. We do know that in situations like this survival sex is part of the scenario, so it cannot be denied.”

But the previous day I had been told by a senior law enforcement official that the main concern for police at Zaatari in relation to women and children is that prostitution is thriving on the camp, and that the authorities have “no idea” what to do about it. Indeed, sources close to the Zaatari security agencies tell me that a number of women have been targeted by pimps and traffickers in Zaatari who smuggle them out of the camp into one of the thriving brothels in Jordan’s capital, Amman.

At the urban settlement camp in Mafraq, 80 kilometres north of Amman, I am told by Rev Nour Sahawneh of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, which provides support for the Syrian refugees in the community, that most of the female refugees living there were married at 14 or 15 and are illiterate.

Polygamy as well as child marriage is common in rural Syria. In Mafraq I visit a family who fled Aleppo a year ago after their house was destroyed. The conditions in which they live are appalling. Sabine (not her real name) is 26 years old but her face and demeanour make her look much older. She has been married for seven years and has two children, aged one and two. She also helps look after the seven children her husband has with his first wife, whom he married when she was 14. “I wish I had my own house with my two children nearby,” says Sabine. “But there is no money. It hurts my heart living like this, but I have no choice.” 

Sabine cries as she shows me the kitchen in which meals are prepared for three adults and nine children. Damp penetrates the walls. There are two rooms and a washroom with a cold tap. One of the children is profoundly disabled. I learn that the first wife is pregnant again. “One of us gets pregnant at the beginning of the year and the other at the end,” Sabine says.

I travel to Lebanon to meet with aid workers and refugees from Syria to discover whether the situation for women is any different from those in Jordan. At the Danish Refugee Council offices in Zahle, project manager Ziad Kmeid tells me “it is known” that Syrian men are abusing both Syrian and Lebanese women and girls, and that child marriage is a problem. Kmeid admits that there are cases of Syrian girls being sold into marriage and prostitution at the border and taken to Saudi Arabia and other countries. Nothing so far has been done to stop this criminal activity.

Angelina Eichhorst, EU Ambassador to Lebanon, says that dealing with the aftermath of sexual violence among Syrian refugees is a “top priority for the NGOs and others dealing with the crisis”. As with Jordan, however, it is difficult to see what is being done to identify and deal with the problems.

“In order to ‘protect’ women in Lebanon some are being married off aged 14 or so to Lebanese men, often as second or third wives,” says Eichhorst. “Polygamy was a negligible practice in Lebanon before the Syrian crisis, although sexual violence was not. I am not saying early marriage is violence, though — it is not the same.”

Even government ministers admit to the widescale sexual exploitation of refugee women. Wael Abu Faour, Minister of Social Affairs, admits that crimes against women and girls are being committed in the camps and other dwellings. “Forced prostitution and child marriage is happening here, both by Syrian and Lebanese men. But how do you control it with such large numbers involved?”

Laurice Balech is a protection officer at the Danish Refugee Council in Bekaa, offering emergency assistance for refugees. Balech tells me she has heard from locals living near the refugees that some of the women are prostituted but that there is “nothing to substantiate it”.

She says: “We have cases of early marriage, in some cases of girls who are 12 and 13, but it is not really forced on them. The girls accept it. It is part of their culture.” 

Some of these girls, according to Balech, find themselves in polygamous marriages. “Polygamy is quite common in Syria. Some men have three wives. It is culturally and religiously accepted. But to have a second wife you have to have a second home. It is not possible [to be allocated two separate dwellings for one family] when you are living in a camp or urban settlement, and that is when the problems can start.”

Without doubt there are swathes of people providing life-saving emergency support to the displaced Syrians and who work under immense pressure to do so. But the violence and abuse so commonplace in the lives of Syrian women and girls is too often viewed as part of “culture” rather than crime. 

During my time in Jordan and Lebanon I met with several highly-trained specialists in the field from a variety of organisations and governments. Not one mentioned prosecution or punishment of the perpetrators of the human rights abuses of women and children. It would appear that in any crisis, women come last. The low status of women and girls within Syria and other Arab nations, and the cultural relativism practised by many of the agencies and law enforcers mandated to protect them has resulted in further abuse and violence. 

Just before leaving Zaatari I travel by coach with journalists and aid workers to the highest point of the camp and alight to take photographs. Within seconds a large group of males of all ages surround the vehicle, aggressively pushing and appearing to enjoy alleviating their boredom and frustration by jostling our group. We are ushered on to the bus by security staff and driven away while the crowd bang on the windows and try to jump on the bus, shouting and waving their fists. As we depart, it strikes me that the women and girls of Zaatari are still living in fear of the male violence that caused them to flee their homeland.

The post Women Come Last in Syrian Refugee Camps appeared first on Standpoint.

The Village Market is one of Nairobi’s most elegant shopping malls. Nestled between the jungle-like Hills of Muthaiga, an old and expensive part of town, it bustles with life on a Friday afternoon. The weekend starts early and the parking lot is full of Toyotas, Mitsubishis and Peugeots, as repairing them in the case of a breakdown is an easy DIY job. Prices in the cafés and the ice-cream parlour are high, but most of the punters are Kenyans – and not of the white or Asian variety. “Going to the shopping mall on a Friday afternoon sets a signal. I show everybody that I have made it. I can afford to pay 100 Kenya shillings (about £1) for a bottle of Coke instead of 20 bob at the kiosk down the road,” says Stella Wamuyu, before she is off to shop at Nakumatt, an African supermarket chain, which offers shampoo from Paris next to Chilean wines. Nakumatt’s business was up by $250 million in the past year.

Stella works as the manager of a luxury hotel on the island of Lamu, where she heads a team of 23. They cater to the whims of tourists paying $500 a night. Her husband lives in Nairobi together with their eldest child. He is a manager at a local foreign exchange branch and for one week a month Stella joins him in the capital. She replaced a “Mzungu”, a white man, two years ago and she relishes the opportunity. She was born one of 11 children and grew up in Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria. For her, the choice of a career in the service and hospitality industry was a natural one. Tourism contributes about ten per cent of Kenya’s annual economic output. “I started in the kitchen, ten years ago. Today, I am the manager, but I still empty a full ashtray when I see it.”

Stella leads by example, and certainly many young Kenyans would wish to follow her footsteps. Education is important here: about 85 per cent of children attend school regularly. Even in the remotest area of northern Kenya, you will see children on their way to and from school. Their shirts are spotless and their shoes, hand-me-downs from Europe, polished. You’d never guess they had just left a mud hut, in which they live without electricity and water. The number of Kenyans enrolled in colleges has doubled in the past 10 years to almost 100,000. The University of Nairobi is considered the best in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa excluded. Kenyans still hope to study abroad, but now exchanges are increasingly two-way.

Graduates seek jobs in international businesses, such as the two-year trainee-scheme that Barclays Bank offers in Kenya. Education and work allow them access to the life of their dreams: their own house, one or two cars, private education, holidays and gadgets, such as mobile phones and plasma-screen TVs. The BlackBerry remains a symbol – nobody is quite that busy yet. They will join the ranks of small-business owners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and civil servants who are fuelling a construction boom in Nairobi-600 new cinder-block condominiums, complete with landscaped gardens, gyms, pools and broadband internet. However, Kenya is still Kenya. In order to get the contract, the construction firm had to offer a large “present” to government officials – “chai”, or tea, as it is called in local slang. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. New neighbourhoods develop, such as Ngong Town, at the foot of the Ngong Hills made famous by Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. The neat red roofs of the new houses clash with lumber-yards, hairdressing salons and internet cafés, on which advertisements are painted in garish colours.

Rebecca Kinoti, a clothes and bags designer who has ten other women sewing for her, says: “If I can afford to rent, I might as well buy.” Barclays Bank is there to help people like her; it now has 32 branches in Kenya. A mortgage with Barclays ties a Kenyan customer in for 20 years at an interest rate of 15 per cent, with a 10 per cent deposit and no maximum loan limit. A lot of Kenyans have the confidence to agree to such terms. The middle classes believe in their future. Is their confidence justified? Rebecca Kinoti shrugs her shoulders. “You have to be fast in making decisions. Prices rise and life is short.” A Kenyan economist estimates that of the population of about 37 million people, about four million are middle class, earning between $2,500 (£1,700) and $40,000 (£27,000) a year.

Until the December 2007 election the middle classes were the factor that made Kenya different from other sub-Saharan African states. Kenya seemed not to be consumed by ethnic conflict. However, the election changed all that. It pitted the two major ethnic groups-Luo and Kikuyu-against each other. The mainly Luo supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement fought against the Party of National Unity, led by the ruling President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyan. The middle class, however, identify themselves as much by where they live, work and went to college as by their tribal ancestry. Stone-throwing, machete-clutching mobs with mud-smeared faces threatened to turn their lives upside down. During the violence, the middle class tried to act as an agent of peace: executives of multinational and local companies met both Kibaki and Odinga to push through a power-sharing agreement. “They just forced the government to get on with it,” says Richard Leakey, the son of the famous paleoanthropologists and head of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

The violence that tore the country apart caused almost $3.5 billion worth of damage to the Kenyan economy and growth fell to 2.1 per cent at the end of 2008, down from 6.3 per cent the year before. On the bright side, the ratings company Fitch revised its outlook on Kenya’s long-term foreign and local currency issue default ratings from “negative” to “stable”. When the World Bank recommended last October that the country seek alternative financing, the government revived a plan to sell $500 million worth of sovereign bonds. The decision should be taken before the end of the fiscal year in June, said the Economic Secretary, Geoffrey Mwau. Such a sale is in the interest of the Kenyan middle classes, who like to assume their share of responsibility in the country. When the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) offered shares to the public, they were over-subscribed by 233 per cent. Scan Group, a privately owned company which was floated on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, was over-subscribed by 521 per cent.

The middle class seems to know that the current dependence on the export of raw materials offers no future for the country. Local entrepreneurs want to diversify their industrial base and offer their products in a wider market. Remove trade barriers, harmonise trade licensing procedures, reduce time taken at border checks and improve the judiciary, and Kenyan business could supply the wider African market. This is a strategy that could be replicated in other African countries, thus creating a larger African middle class. Of course, this is much easier said than done. But how else can the creation of a larger African middle class as well as an increase in international investments be encouraged?

An important role in expanding the middle classes via investment falls to the Kenyan diaspora, whose most famous member is Barack Obama. His father, a goatherd-turned-economist, serves as an early example of how well Kenyans do when they live abroad. In the US, no other group of immigrants is as well educated. Almost a quarter of them hold post-graduate degrees, in a larger proportion than the Chinese, Hispanic or Asian immigrant communities. No other group sends so much money home, according to the Kenyan writer and academic Binyavanga Wainaina, himself a fellow of Bard College in upstate New York. The diaspora owns property, is involved in improving the Kenyan infrastructure and helps pay for the education of the younger generation. Obama has encouraged these African-Americans to boost Africa’s development, thereby helping further growth of its middle class as a backbone of society and of democracy.

Africa still only plays a modest role in global trade because of the harder facts of daily African life, such as the unreliable energy supply. “Nothing rains on your day like a power cut in the morning, when you are just about to send that important email,” says Tom Njoroge, who works for a telecoms company. Electricity blackouts are a big problem in Kenya, but there might be a solution to it. Some experts say that the relatively thin volcanic crust of the Rift Valley, which stretches down from the Red Sea to Mozambique, is ideal for geothermal power, which runs whatever the weather and emits negligible carbon. The Olkaria station outside Naivasha is a pioneer project and Kenya already used up its whole capacity before reverting to diesel generators during one of the frequent power cuts.

Before the Kenyan middle classes think global, they prefer to think African. Kenya is in a unique position. It acts as an incubator for business people for the benefit of the whole continent. In other countries, too, there are signs of hope. Kenya’s neighbour, Rwanda, and its president, Paul Kagame, are often cited as good examples for Africa’s future. In Ghana, fair and peaceful elections were held in January 2009. In Botswana, President Ian Khama is implementing careful and sensible policies. In Mali, President Amadou Toumani Touré is regarded as an able peace negotiator, as is Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete.

The Kenyan middle class need not be an exception. Perhaps in time the whole of Africa will share dreams from their fathers – dreams of prosperity, democracy and peace.

The post Dreams for their Children appeared first on Standpoint.

Dambisa Moyo: The book is actually dedicated to Peter Bauer because, unfortunately, he was ahead of his time. He saw that the world was then so obsessed with the notion of aid on the back of the success of the Marshall Plan that nobody really paid attention to what he had to say. The timing of publication is quite fortuitous. I hadn’t anticipated that we would be in the middle of a credit crisis, but I am actually quite happy that it’s coming out now, because I do think there is an opportunity for African governments to start thinking about innovating away from aid and all its ills towards other sources of development financing.

We can talk a lot about what the problems with aid are but the more important message that I hope people are left with is the idea that there are other ways that have worked across the world in delivering economic growth.

Richard Dowden: Did you look anywhere to see if aid has worked? You’re absolutely right about the Marshall Plan. That was about reconstruction – discipline, skills, everything. All they needed was the money to put the bricks back and then they could continue. But has it worked anywhere else, in Latin America or Asia?

DM: It’s probably worth clarifying what aid I’m critiquing in this book. I’m not talking about humanitarian aid. I agree that if there is a world emergency or a tragedy, whether it’s a tsunami or a Katrina or Mozambican floods, we as human beings should intervene. Nor am I talking about charitable aid-the money that goes directly towards certain projects, like girls’ education. That’s relatively small scale. Although those types of aid have problems, certainly with respect to implementation, that’s outside the scope of this book.

The book is really about a third type of aid, which is the large government-to-government flows or multilateral-to-government flows. What I am really focused on is delivering long-term sustainable growth that can meaningfully alter the number of people living in poverty in Africa. On that measure – delivering growth and reducing poverty – I would say aid has failed.

RD: The one that puzzles me, because I’m not an economist, is Ireland. I remember going to Ireland as a kid on holidays and seeing children without shoes. You know, it was really quite shockingly poor and, of course, Ireland was the butt of all the jokes. They were stupid, poor, drunken, useless and that was the Irish joke. Then, suddenly, they took off and they were the Celtic tiger. And they did it with European Union aid, which went to poor areas. So there it seems that you can do it. Nobody tells Irish jokes any more.

DM: I would consider the case of Ireland as very similar to the Marshall Plan, in the sense that the aid interventions were short, sharp and finite. The aid problem in Africa is that it’s an open-ended commitment. There is no indication at all of when this is going to cease. Nobody says, “You’ve got five years of aid and then it is over, so figure out what you are going to do.” To me, that is very different from what you had in Ireland. One of the critiques of aid that I discuss is the whole notion of disenfranchising the domestic citizenry. The problem in the African context is that the African governments become so beholden to the donors that actually there is no accountability to the domestic citizenry. That is certainly not the case with Ireland. So yes, we can pick one or two scenarios, but this is a continent of over 50 countries which has failed to maintain levels of economic growth or meaningfully reduce poverty after more than 60 years and a trillion dollars of aid.

RD: I would certainly agree with you that there is no sign anywhere in Africa that aid will actually transform an economy. But what I looked for in your book was the direct connection between aid and poverty. You showed really well that this is how much aid has gone in and this is how things have got worse – but I wanted to be absolutely sure that the aid was the real cause and not something else. That’s where I would suggest that it’s African politics that have messed it up. Everywhere I go in Africa I think, “It should be, could be, quite easily so much better.” You’ve got fantastic potential, great thirst for education, great thirst to make life better and yet somehow there’s no delivery. What I can’t work out was how aid plays a role in this that seems to prevent people just getting on with it.

DM: I do try very hard to make this connection. Maybe I could be criticised for taking very much an economics perspective on the way the world works, but, for me, the political establishment and the political system in Africa are directly artefacts of the aid model. You cannot expect there to be a system where governments are beholden or accountable to their people if they don’t need to be.

For example, if you are a government and you have as much money as you would like to maintain the military, then you don’t actually worry about being kicked out of office because the military is on your side all the time. Essentially, that is what has happened across Africa over the past 50 or 60 years. I can give you many examples of how aid comes in and supports a massive bureaucracy to work in the civil service. For example, in many African countries, it can take two years to get a licence to start a business.

RD: Is that a job-creation scheme?

DM: Absolutely. So what tends to happen is, not only does it take two years, but also there are a number of procedures – get a stamp from here, take a form there, go and meet so and so. There are layers and layers of bureaucracy, which kills off entrepreneurship, leaves people out of jobs and when a government turns around and says there are people out of work, there are no jobs and people are poor, what is the first thing that the West decides to do? Oh, we’d better give people more aid. The aid system has got people locked into this cycle, where everybody sits back and thinks there is no need to try and raise taxes because we are going to get foreign aid. Or there is no need for anybody to be entrepreneurial because there is going to be more aid. The crux of the matter is that there are no countries on earth that are growing by 10 per cent a year, as China and India have been doing for the past few years before this whole crisis, that have relied on aid. These countries have quickly weaned themselves off foreign aid. They have encouraged domestic savings, they have attracted direct foreign investment, they have fostered trade. That is really the elixir that I am proposing for Africa.

As far as I am concerned, development is very easy. Africa doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, it just needs to copy. The political system that will emerge from having a strong middle class will ensure that there are property rights. It will ensure a stable democracy that really works and will ensure that we will actually get long-term sustainable growth and participation by the local citizenry.

DJ: Richard, in your book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles you end on quite an optimistic note – you feel that Africa is at last beginning to find itself. Your perspective – less economic but more cultural, perhaps-suggests that Africa is coming out of its post-colonial nightmare and that, although there is still a preponderance of deeply undemocratic and oppressive regimes, the real monsters that we have seen in the past 50 years are becoming few and far between. There is still Mugabe and Congo is still in an appalling state and so on, but you feel that Africa has turned the corner. Why do you feel that?

RD: What I think is that the core of Africa’s problem goes back to the colonial takeover. Everything feeds back to that, in particular the loss of confidence in Africa’s own traditions. I think that colonialism in India was different: by the time the British had left, nobody knew which bits were Indian and which bits were British, because India had absorbed what it wanted from Britain. Whereas in Africa colonialism was there long enough to destroy what went before but not long enough to build something new. Africans were not allowed to lead themselves so there was no political thought and everybody really was reduced to being a peasant. The only way forward was to become like the white man and that was the aspiration. When I first went to Africa, there was this bizarre sight of people parading around in suits with briefcases and bowler hats in villages because they had got some money.

I’ve just come from Nigeria, which I visited with Chinua Achebe, the novelist. He has been saying again and again: “We have to know who we are in order to move on.”

The other key to understanding Africa was again an idea that I picked up from Achebe, which is that independence came very quickly. Nobody really expected it. There was agitation in Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, but in Nigeria there was very little indeed. In lots of countries there was none at all because people accepted things the way they were. Then suddenly they were pitched into independence when they had played no part in creating those countries. Those countries were drawn on the map in the 19th century by people who had never even been there. They sat in London, Paris or Berlin and just drew lines on maps. You had all these different people together, who often spoke completely different languages.

Achebe describes Africa at that time as a house that the white man built and then said he was going to leave. He says that the smart, the lucky, but not always the best, got there first, rushed into the house and slammed the door, and the rest have been left out in the rain. A lot of the blame for Africa’s failure can be placed on its elites who take their money out of the country. They live like exceedingly rich Europeans or Americans with flashy cars and huge houses. Their children all go to British schools and British or American universities and they have no confidence in Africa. They don’t want anything to do with it. In fact, when you drink with them, you realise that they absolutely despise other Africans, especially the poor. They have no interest in developing Africa. They are doing extremely well, as they are living off aid or whatever their income is, and the idea of bringing education or health to their population doesn’t interest them in the slightest. They are often the people that Western business deals with and Western governments deal with. They are the people getting the aid, the political support, even the military support and they are being kept in power.

If Western countries wanted to help they could start by stopping the corruption money flowing back into Britain, as we saw in the case of the two huge Kenyan thefts. With the Goldenberg scandal, it ended up being nearly $4 billion shipped out of the country, reducing Kenya’s growth rate from 4.5 per cent to less than one per cent. It all ended up in the City of London through secret offshore accounts. The present government’s inquiry has implicated the former President Daniel arap Moi and his family and cronies. If we want to help Africa we have to say to its leaders: “What are you doing with all this money? Where did you get it? You’ve stolen it.” Those are the sort of things that we can help with. With people like Moi in power, the idea that you can transform a country with aid is preposterous.

DJ: Dambisa, you actually describe Africa as a drug addict who has been addicted to aid and now has to be weaned off it. How do you do that?

DM: My preference is to do it cold turkey, as opposed to trying to drag it out. It’s been 60 years – it’s a great disaster and shame that many Asian countries were poorer than African countries in the 1970s and today they’re vying for top spots in the world economy. Where has Africa been? What’s happening? Some of the comments that Richard made are very interesting. However, I believe that if we focus on colonialism and tribalism then we’re never going to move on. The reality is, yes, there are some aspects of colonialism that didn’t work, there were boundaries that were misplaced, there’s a whole host of things that colonialism did that have not been great for Africa. However, it happened. It’s a reality. India was also colonised, there are other colonies that have broken those mental shackles.

African countries have now been independent for some 50 years, how long are we going to stand around and say it’s because of colonialism? It’s time to move on.

My parents are from two different tribes who were the first two black Zambians to go abroad to get an education and to get degrees at the University of Zambia. They returned home very committed, they wanted to see their continent thrive. It’s been a failure. They don’t want to live abroad, they want to live in Africa. Yes, the African elite are a problem but I’m glad that Richard made the point that the elite have their snouts in the trough of aid. If you don’t have the aid, then they will actually care more about health care, about generating jobs and showing that they live in an environment where there’s no political stability. If you remove that aid then you could conceive of a situation where everyone has an equal shot at rising to the top, and you will see meaningful shifts out of poverty. Africa will always have a colonial history, Africa will always be made up of diverse populations. If we sit here and say, “Well, that’s really the problem”, and that we don’t really think we can get around it, that’s very pessimistic. As an African who hopes to have children one day, I’m worried that they will be in an environment where the world looks at Africa and continues to think of it as a place that can never develop because of colonialism and tribalism, and can never break out of those cycles.

RD: I’m glad that you said, “We have to move on.” As an outsider, I can’t really say that, that’s for Africans to say. But I think one of the problems is that Africa’s just not violent enough, that all the demands should be coming from below: “Where’s our health service? Where’s our education?” Africa’s so passive in some ways. When they do have terrible wars they fight on an ethnic not a social basis. You need a French Revolution.

DM: I think that it’s ultimately fear. In the book I talk about that Tiananmen Square picture in 1989, with the Chinese man standing in front of the massive tank. That level of defiance is something that you rarely see. The life that many Africans lead is under a veil of fear because who’s to say that somebody won’t walk into your house and shoot you because you spoke out against the government? Who’s to say that your family won’t disappear because you’ve objected to the government’s corruption? These are not tales from my imagination. These are actually things that have happened in Africa. If you get rid of the aid then people can say: “Actually, my government’s not working for me, I’m going to remove them.” That’s how the rest of the world works, by and large.

RD: As we saw, I think, in Ghana. The Ghanaian election was fantastic because you could see that there were areas that had voted one way and they’d had a period of terrific growth, apparently, but they said, “No, we’ve had enough of that.” And they voted in the opposition – amazing.

DM: Absolutely, but Ghana is a very good example of a country that is really struggling and I hope that they continue down the path to wean themselves off aid. I know, from somebody who will remain nameless, but who is very senior in the Ghanaian government, that when they decided they were going to go to the capital markets to issue a bond and raise money through international investors, the multinational institutions were vehemently against it. They said: “Why are you doing this? It’s cheaper for you to borrow from us. This is ridiculous. You’re going to have problems.” The Ghanaians said: “Absolutely not. Longer term, it’s better for us to have much more transparency since national markets are going to bring in more forms of direct investment if people internationally know more about Ghana.” And what did they do? They went straight to the capital markets and issued a $750 million dollar bond.

RD: It was over-subscribed.

DM: Absolutely, by multiples and that’s a fantastic story. Is it perfect? No. Are they going to have challenges? Of course they are. But what an amazing thing for them to actually stand up and say, “You know, we understand that you’ve got this other model but we don’t think it’s worked. We’re going to follow South Africa and Botswana. They don’t rely on aid and guess what? For some reason they have lower poverty levels and they’ve got more economic growth, so maybe their model’s much better than what we’ve been doing.”

RD: The second half of your book, where you explain how African development could be funded, was clearly written before the great credit crash. Am I right? Until recently Africa was ignored by the markets. It was just too dangerous. But then investors were looking for more and more adventurous places, so suddenly they got into Africa and did very nicely. But that money has dried up now, hasn’t it?

DM: If you look at traditional investors in Europe and the US, yes, there are clearly challenges going on. I wouldn’t say it’s dried up, I’d say there are a lot of people sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to come back. Most of the discussions I’ve had with people who are potential investors in Africa, or even globally, are more interested in timing than in whether or not they’re going to invest. They’re sitting on piles of cash, they’re definitely going to come back to the market. So in this type of an environment, what should African countries be doing? What I would argue is that they should be fostering alliances with other countries, non-traditional investors that actually do have money. China has four trillion dollars in foreign reserves. They have seven per cent arable land and 1.3 billion people to feed. Why is Africa wasting its time in Doha, in the World Trade Organisation, round number x, instead of really fostering its relationship with countries that need African food and that are very interested in actually buying African produce? That’s what the Africans should be doing. They should be trying to court and to foster alliances with places like India who do have money and I believe really understand African risks, perhaps in a much more sophisticated way. Western investors have always had a donor-recipient relationship with Africa, whereas the Chinese don’t come to Africa for free. They want something in return. So there’s this whole business culture, entrepreneurial culture that has emerged, which I think is really important.

RD: Yes, Africa’s got what China wants and the Chinese have got the money to pay for it. At that level, it’s brilliant. But because they only deal government-to-government, the Chinese are even more supportive of those elites and bad governments and they don’t believe in accountability, or transparency, or democracy even. They’re not going to criticise Africa for not being democratic because they’re not democratic themselves. At that level, it’s really, really bad. We know they pay considerable amounts in bribes to ministers and others to get what they want and they don’t support an accountable, transparent system, so in the governance department they’re pretty bad news.

DM: I always find it quite, even very, funny that people in the West, but in the Western media in particular, are very critical of China in Africa, particularly on the issue of corruption, and yet some of Africa’s biggest kleptocrats and corrupt individuals have reigned in Africa during the West’s supremacy, the aid supremacy. And a lot of them have now passed on, but the Idi Amins of this world, the Mobutu Sese Sekos, the Bokassas-they’re almost mythical figures.

RD: Sure, that was then, that was the Cold War, you didn’t care what the guy did.

DM: It’s still happening.

RD: Is that right? I don’t want to speak for the British government – as you know I’m pretty critical of them – but they would say: “Now we know how to do aid properly and we no longer support those sort of dictators. We promote democracy, transparency, accountability.”

DM: So why, may I ask, would Britain and America continue to give money to
Mugabe?

RD: Well, I don’t think they do.

DM: They absolutely do, they absolutely do, and besides, they maintain diplomatic ties.

RD: They maintain diplomatic ties but I don’t think that they support him financially.

DM: I have statistics from the Department for International Development that they have provided…

RD: Well, they do provide aid to the people and sometimes the government tries to interfere with that but I don’t think they would want Mugabe to remain in power. I think if they could find a way of getting rid of him, they would do it.

DM: Well, my view is, he comes to Rome, he travels wherever he wants. I was in New York for the UN meetings in September, he was there. He was in Rome for the Pope’s funeral, he was at the FAO meetings last year, I mean personally.

DJ: You do make the point that Zimbabwe received $300 million in aid, just in 2006.

DM: Yes, but I think the more fundamental problem with respect to the Chinese is that if African policy-makers were beholden to African citizens, they would not tolerate an environment where the Chinese can come in and bring in their own people to be employed.

RD: Exactly, but I mean that’s what the Chinese do, they do secret deals with the bosses and they don’t encourage any accountability from Africans.

DM: The reason I’m more sympathetic to the Chinese model is because as an African you can see a road that has been built by the Chinese, there’s a bridge, people have jobs because of the Chinese. The Pew surveys which were done out of the US, they went to about 15 countries in Africa and they surveyed Africans. What do you think about the Chinese being here? Better or worse economically for you? Who do you think is better, the Americans or the Chinese? Consistently, contrary to media reports, Africans – whether they’re in Ethiopia, Ghana or Zambia – said they preferred the Chinese.

RD: What’s wonderful about the Chinese – and here I would completely agree with you – is that when they go to Africa they live with Africans, they don’t require 4x4s and air-conditioned houses, they just live as ordinary people and they don’t have that poisonous colonial relationship and they treat Africans fairly straightforwardly and equally. I think that’s really, really good. But how is it that they are already, in Zambia and lots of other places, doing jobs that Africans should be doing? They’re running little shops, they’re starting to cultivate little plots of land.

DM: Absolutely, but, again, this whole aid dependency model creates a situation where Africans just sit there and have somebody else come in. This whole notion of foreigners coming into Africa and setting up businesses and being part of the mercantile or the middle class, it’s not a new story, the Indians have done it for a long time, the Lebanese in West Africa are very well known. It is a great tragedy and I do in that sense defer to your point about the culture but Africa is suffering from a very serious PR problem. When you think of Africa, you think of what I call the four horsemen of Africa’s apocalypse: you think of poverty, you think of war, you think of corruption and you think of disease. That is what people think of Africa and until people start to think, “Wow, this is actually a place to go and invest, there’s an opportunity to go and meet Africans who are interesting, who want the same things that – guess what? – we all want.” Until we change that fundamental model we are being asked to raise African children in an environment where they are constantly being told they can’t do something. They’re poor, they’re dirty, they’re not smart, they’re beggars and they’re always going to be at the bottom.

RD: I’m glad you said the model because so many people talk about the image and they attack journalists for reporting famines, or wars, or whatever, which is their job. No, the word for what Africa needs is “reputation”.

DM: Exactly.

RD: And that’s where Ghana was really good because they said, “We’ve got to establish a reputation for being able to pay back.” And that’s what so many African countries don’t even think about, their reputation. I’ve just come from Nigeria, a country that really doesn’t reflect on how the world sees it, or what to do about it.

DM: And this is important. I don’t want to overstep and speak on behalf of Africa, but one would hope that Africa and Africans want to be equal participants on the global stage. Right now, that’s not the case. Africa is considered a secondary citizen, a drag on economic growth, on the world economy and everybody else is shooting off into five, six to ten per cent economic growth rates. Africa’s sheering off into, in some cases, negative growth, it’s contracting. So how do you get to the place where Africans can walk into a room and they’re equally respected as business partners? They’re not going to get to that point if they continue to depend on aid, where you’re constantly with a begging bowl. Places like India and China – they still have an enormous part of their population living in poverty, and yet nobody feels sorry for the Chinese, nobody feels sorry for India. We treat them as equal partners on the global stage. We want to hear what they have to say. That’s because they aren’t sitting there, waiting for a big cheque to come in from abroad.

DJ: Is part of the problem that Western politicians still see aid as a sort of badge of their own moral superiority? So for example, if you want to get elected here in Britain or in America, you boast about how much aid you’re sending to Africa. George W. Bush, even, boasted about how much aid he was pouring in, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown do exactly the same – no one gets elected by saying “I’m going to cut all the aid to Africa”, that would be a very unpopular thing to say.

RD: But I think there’s going to be a sudden tipping point, because this aid is being wasted, and suddenly one day somebody – maybe it’s Dambisa – is going to say, “The emperor has no clothes. This ain’t working.”

DM: I don’t know if I’m the person.

RD: I just think there will be a sudden tipping point, and I’m afraid of that. I never knew Peter Bauer, but there was that feeling at that time, when Mrs Thatcher made him a peer. It was: “We don’t have any responsibility for these people, it’s their problem, and they should sort it out.” And what I find difficult in all of this is that there is a great tradition in Britain, in Europe, for helping “the poor”, and it’s a very Christian thing, and I think it’s a good thing for human beings to feel like that, when they turn on their televisions and they see somebody starving, and somebody says, “Can you raise some money to save them?”, they say yes and they want to give some money to save them. I not only understand that, I think that’s really good, and the trouble is, if you just say, “Aid is really bad”, then people will just become completely immune to the bad stuff that’s going on. But there is something you can do about it.

DM: That’s a very important point, because I’m not saying that Africa should be left alone to solve its own problems. We are part of a global society, and what I’m saying is that we all need each other. We breathe the same air. If we let Africa continue to spiral down into this abyss, or if we allow too many unemployed youths in Africa, who will then get involved in terrorist attacks, or if we ignore rampant diseases that start to spread globally – those are not things that are necessarily confined just to Africa, so that you can say, “Oh well, we don’t really care.” We are part of a global community. What I’m recommending in the book is, “Yes, we want Western help, but not through aid.” There are other ways to intervene, there are other ways in which Africa can be helped and supported on its agenda to become part of the global society. So I’m not saying, “Read my book and don’t ever help Africa again, let them get by on their own.” I’ve given examples of how governments can get involved through increasing trade. If the Western markets don’t want to trade with Africa for reasons of protecting their own markets, Africa should focus on China and India. Let’s make environments in Africa conducive to attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) from Western markets, but also from the rest of the world. Things like the capital markets, issuing debt in the capital market, which offers an amazing chance to showcase a country, and also provides transparency and accountability. Those are things governments should and can do. On the individual level, you and I, trade and FDI and capital markets might seem very lofty, but rather than sitting here and watching another Africa campaign and feeling sorry for it, go on to things like Kiva, which is a fantastic organisation. You lend money to African entrepreneurs who are starting businesses, who are looking for capital. It’s a fantastic programme. You can lend as little as $25 to a woman in Kenya who is making clothes, or a man who’s got a chicken farm in Zambia, and so on. They post reports on what the challenges have been, and how they’re growing. That acts as a direct way of providing support, and really being part of the development process, which is more credible than aid. I think there’s been one default since they started Kiva. That’s really much more useful in the longer term.

DJ: Africa’s problems, though, sometimes seem so vast that they’re intractable. Aids, for example, has dominated the lives of not one but many countries. Civil war has become endemic in large parts of Africa. Simply leaving African governments to solve their own problems seems to people in the West to be inhuman and unlikely to work. So how do you persuade people that actually they’re doing more harm than good by pumping in aid?

DM: Well, I would say – look at the past 60 years. Africa is worse off than it was before. A trillion dollars spent in 60 years and Africa’s gone into reverse. Africa’s life expectancy – in my own country, Zambia, it’s 37. You look at education: literacy levels are down. You look at infrastructure: falling apart. So if you want to become passionate about really doing something for the continent, let’s look at the figures and say: are we really helping?

RD: Do you think then that in 2005, when Tony Blair did the Commission for Africa, and got the G8 to sign up to doubling aid to Africa, that was actually the easy option? The really difficult one would have been to sort out the trade barriers. I know Bono and Geldof support all of this, but their song should not have been more aid, but more trade.

DM: Absolutely. And look, again I put my economics hat on and so maybe my view is quite cynical, but I believe in rational actors, and you look at Western governments – it’s in their interest to keep the barriers up. Why? Because first of all, God forbid, if there’s World War Three, does Britain really want to be relying on Zambia for food? No, probably not, it would be better to have some British farmers.

In addition, the British voter is most likely to say: “Hang on a second, my uncle Robert who lives in Oxfordshire, you want him to be out of a job because of some Zambian I don’t know? No.” So again, governments are behaving as rational actors, and that’s fine. All I’m saying is that African governments should understand that, and not waste their resources trying to push an agenda of trade.

Now, that doesn’t mean that Britain can’t do anything to help Africa, of course, it can help to get African countries to come to the capital markets – Britain has done it over so many years.

They know how to go to the capital markets, how do you speak to investors and get more money to come in? They can talk about foreign direct investment, how do you get the Confederation of British Industry to get involved? Why don’t we try to get British businesses to go and invest in Africa? Africa is right next door, there are countries that speak English, what’s the problem? Why is that agenda not being pushed? Why are we always in default mode to fall into “Let’s discuss aid some more.” That’s really the issue. I look at things like G8 meetings as lost opportunities, to really say, “You know what? We’re not going to get rid of aid immediately, but we’re really here to try to come up with a package, a new package to get Africa to participate in the world debate.” And that’s really what this book is about.

DJ: Richard, you end on a rather optimistic note, with a wonderful description of a funeral, which as you say brings together Christianity, which is a European phenomenon, and very African ideas-but on the other hand, a radical form of Islam seems to be on the march in large parts of Africa, and that’s a huge problem, isn’t it?

RD: It was a funeral at which a real, old-fashioned Catholic Mass was interspersed with traditional rituals to install the son of the man who died as the heir to the family. It was very moving but also funny, because many of them had forgotten the words of the rituals, they had to be guided through them, and mobile phones went off in the middle of it all. It was a wonderful mix of ancient and modern, but everybody was very relaxed about it. And I know that would not have happened 30 years ago. They would have said, “That stuff may go on, but we do not do it in public, and we certainly don’t do it in the middle of a Catholic Mass.” And that reconciliation is really important for Africa.

DJ: Dambisa, what’s the single most important message that you would like to get out to Western readers? How can they avoid doing more harm than good?

DM: The message would be aid is not working, but the good news is that there is another way. You can go on the internet tonight and start to give money towards entrepreneurship.

DJ: So it’s better to do that than give money to charity.

DM: That would be my view. You give jobs, people have jobs, they can send their kids to school, they can provide better healthcare to their children.

DJ: Isn’t this a slight threat to the NGOs? Are they part of the problem or part of the solution?

DM: What is it that we are trying to do here? Are we trying to help Africa get to its feet or are we just trying to perpetuate an industry where people are really poor?

RD: With the NGOs, there are some good, some bad, on the ground. They are quite local in that way. But they have become far too dependent on government aid donors. Sometimes, more than 50 per cent of their budgets come from DFID or other state agencies, which makes them beholden to the whole government strategy. A friend of mine tried to write a mission statement for the NGO he headed, stating: “Our aim is our own abolition.” My friend had to leave fairly quickly, after a huge row. The response was: no, they were not going to make that their mission statement.

DM: That mission statement would have been brilliant, actually.

The post Helping Africa Break Free appeared first on Standpoint.

The director, Havana Marking, takes an irreverent look at the collision between feminism and fundamentalism and paints a surprisingly light-hearted portrait of the country that will be the Obama administration’s most serious foreign policy problem.

“Our movie is a revelation, not a revolution,” insists producer Jahid Mohseni, and he’s right. It pulls aside the veil of war to reveal the witty, engaging, sometimes hilarious inner world of Afghan society.

Guns and Taliban are scarce in this film, a sharp contrast to the grim machinery of destruction I’ve been watching from choppers and armoured 4x4s on my visits to Afghanistan over the last few years. Instead, Star is all about pop music and twenty-something singers trying to make it big. Like Slumdog Millionaire, which swept the screen awards, Star is set in a TV game-show format. Both films feature gritty third world settings, sympathetic characters and the deft handiwork of quirky British directors. And both films hit hot-button issues with a hammer.

The film spotlights the ethnic fault lines that fracture Afghanistan as deeply as caste divides India. Star also causes major heartburn for the mullahs. Hold on to your turbans. As the film warns early on, “Music was considered disrespectful by the Mujahideen and sacrilegious by the Taliban.” Havana Marking says that she handled the risks of threats of violence and kidnapping “with spontaneity and energy in our on-site filming” – evident to the viewer – and also with armed guards, unusual equipment for documentary film-makers.

The film follows four top song contestants chasing a $5,000 (£3,500) prize while being voted on by the Afghan public via cellphone text messages. Rafi Nabzaada is a Tajik heart-throb, from Mazar-i-Sharif in the North. Handsome, dark and grinning, he could fit into any teen boy band. Lema Sahar is a Pashtun woman from Kandahar – a composed, wary singer beneath her veil and conservative silk garb. Hameed Sakhizada is the ethnic Hazara guy, a classical musician turned pop singer. Setara Hussainzada is a Herati, brassy and brave, uncowed by the mullahs and even a public denunciation by the Herati warlord Ismael Khan. Marking’s camera follows Setara on a trip home after she’s voted off the stage, right into her family compound on a dusty Herat side street, where it captures a teary, emotional reunion with her family on film – something no male director could have achieved.

Voting is a novel notion in Afghanistan. The Afghans pay to vote for their favourites – the cost-per-call of 10 cents (6p) is serious money for people with an average annual income of $400 (£280). Larger-scale organised political activity also emerged during the song competition. Marking’s camera follows the four stars around the country as they “campaign” like politicians. Their fellow ethnics (Tajik, Pashtun or Hazara) line up behind them in the campaigns, but the film shows the stars trying hard to appeal across ethnic lines, like politicians striving to attract the median vote after locking in their base. President Hamid Karzai and his rivals are shuffling the same ethnic cards in the run-up to September’s scheduled election.

“One result of Star is that the primary ethnic identifier will become less and less relevant over time” in music and politics, predicts co-producer Saad Mohseni. Samuel Huntington said this was the way it was supposed to work in his 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, but Huntington probably didn’t have a pop song contest in mind.

Political scientists know that national identity is forged by a shared sense of community and choice, captured in the phrase “Imagined Community”, from Benedict Anderson’s seminal book. Anderson theorised that otherwise unconnected citizens reading about the same events in newspapers is what creates national identity, and hence nations. TV shows are an even hotter crucible for creating a national imagined community, especially in a young country like Afghanistan with a 28 per cent literacy rate.

Demographics are the other driver of political change. In a country with 60 per cent of the population under 20 and a median age of 17, Afghan Star engages big segments of Afghanistan in a new collective exercise of choice. “Star is a way for younger Afghans to change the way we do politics in Afghanistan,” says Jahid Mohseni. “Until now, it’s been the older generations who have been saying what’s right and wrong in terms of social conduct.”

The Mohseni brothers are young high-octane Afghan entrepreneurs who built Tolo TV into Afghanistan’s dominant network with pizzazz and slick programming. Their dubbed Indian soaps deeply annoyed Islamists who took offence at the sight of unveiled females, and then mobilised the government to ban dancing on TV. The sight of an unveiled Setara grooving around the stage while singing her final number on the show – a very modest prance by Western standards – further scandalised the clerical ulama.

“Singing was frowned upon as a profession in traditional Afghanistan,” says Saad, “So we wanted to make it more acceptable. We also wanted to ‘home grow’ some talent and entertainment.”

As sheer entertainment, the warbling Afghan pop songs may not jump to the top of the iTunes charts tomorrow, but most have a foot-tapping rhythm line, as the tabla drums in the soundtrack drive the movie insistently forward. Star‘s Dari and Pashtun ballads have their roots in classic Persian poetry, usually love songs, many surprisingly sensual. In her final number, Setara belts out an evocative lyric, “The bend of your eyebrow is like the sting of a scorpion” – probably not the favourite line of Taliban chief Mullah Omar in his hidden mountain lair. He could well have been listening. After one competitive round, Lema coyly observes: “I’m a Pashtun and the Taliban are Pashtun too. I’m sure some of them are voting for me.”

As in Slumdog, the game show format nicely lends itself to the classical film plot flow of hero begins quest, hero encounters adversity, hero finally triumphs. Marking lets the singers do the talking, acting and singing with just enough superimposed text to clue the viewers into Afghanistan’s bloody history without banging them over the head with it. “Viewers are drawn into a compelling story about real people in a real country,” says media executive Jason Hirschorn, CEO of Slingblade Media, who was wowed by the première. “The history and the war stuff are introduced gradually and skilfully.” Some viewers were taken aback by the opening shot of a blind boy chanting an Afghan melody, but the tone is otherwise light-hearted; the grimmer overtones are folded in later by the visual narrative, not by a narrator.

The movie was based on a third TV season of the show. The fourth is currently being filmed in Kabul, on a brightly lit stage erected inside the Markopolo Wedding Hall. The Markopolo lights up like a Christmas tree at night, a rare glimpse of gaiety in a sombre war-worn capital with little electricity and frequent blackouts. As we drove past the building on a chilly evening, my otherwise laconic Blackwater guards gestured at the Markopolo through the bullet-proof windshield: “They got more lightbulbs in that ‘polo building than any place in this whole damn country.”

I recall being struck by that brief glimpse of normality, thinking how appealing it would have been to drop by the Markopolo rather than my usual Kabul digs in the fortress-like US embassy or the military’s Camp Eggers – the target of a deadly suicide bomb attack that killed one American soldier and wounded six others.

The big networks and movie studios were on the prowl at Sundance, and several have indicated serious interest in bidding on Afghan Star, particularly after it garnered the two festival awards. “This movie could be a real winner,” says Tom Freston, the MTV founder who, as head of Viacom, plucked Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth from obscurity and helped it win an Oscar. “The social impact of Afghanistan’s media explosion has been overlooked by journalists and policy-makers. I think Afghan Star lights up the whole country and perfectly captures, not just the power of music, but the deep yearning for normalcy and joy among the people.”

If Freston is right and Star‘s awards enable it to break out of the crowded field of documentaries, it will energise the debate over the war in Afghanistan, just as the US and Nato allies are debating the size of their commitment and the effectiveness of their strategy. European publics are tired of the place: a recent FT poll showed a clear majority in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain believe their government should not send more forces to Afghanistan, even if pressed to do so by President Obama. Star may provide a timely antidote to “donor fatigue” by putting a human face on the travails and talents of the Afghan people.

One viewer buttonholed Daoud Siddique, Star‘s host, after the première as the excited crowd spilled out into Park City’s freezing night air. “My son is serving in the US Army in Afghanistan,” he said. “I feel better about what we’re doing over there having watched your movie.” When Afghan Star reaches TV stations and cinemas in the rest of the world, a lot of people may feel the same way.

The post Park City, Utah: Movie that Pulls Aside the Veil appeared first on Standpoint.

Elvis committed a fatal error when failing to apply this foolproof rule, thus forever limiting his legacy to the narrow confines of King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. And to think that he could have been a patron of the Master’s Course in Humanitarian and Development Practice at Oxford Brookes University, like Annie.

As Fran Healy, the frontman of the quite-famous-for-a-bit indie band Travis, said, “People forget that we have the power and not the politicians.” (I must have forgotten that when I mistakenly found myself looking at the Government’s policy ideas, rather than McFly’s.) But Annie never forgets. It’s good that the Gaza conflict emerged and inspired her to exercise her political power. (What do you mean, she can’t have real political authority without a mandate? What’s a mandate if it’s not four Best British Female Artist awards at the Brits?) Clooney and Angelina are hogging the Darfur crisis, Bono and Geldof have Third World Debt covered (nearly, any minute now), and now she’s got her own mini-project of Middle-Eastern policy-making.

Maybe Elvis just didn’t have Annie’s insightfulness. Maybe it didn’t occur to him that war could be tough. Or maybe he thought the issue was more complicated than that, and that commenting on it would put him in a position of responsibility.

But if so, then he really wouldn’t have understood the “What Would Annie Say?” rule in the first place – the point is that none of these considerations matters. Just say what you feel, there’s no need to think about it. Because if there’s one thing that most endangers the “Annie” rule, it’s reasoning.

The post Annie v. Elvis appeared first on Standpoint.

Already, passing through the town of Mardan just a couple of hours earlier, we had skirted the immediate aftermath of a suicide attack that had killed seven people, most of them policemen. Our four-vehicle convoy was tiny. Most of the soldiers in it were returning from leave and appeared to be unarmed. Now, as this device detonated barely ten metres in front of us, immediately shrouding our escort vehicle in a wall of smoke and dust, halting in the middle of an ambush-ripe bend seemed insane, offering us as an easy target for follow-up fire.

“Go,” we yelled at the man. So the soldier went – springing nimbly from his driver’s door and running from sight. We gawped at each other for a while in the quietness that followed, as dumbfounded by our rude abandonment as we were by the bomb. But there was no follow-up fire. Through the smoke, one by one, bug-eyed with shock, the soldiers from the escort vehicle ran back past us. Perfectly sited, the roadside bomb had been miraculously badly angled, throwing most of its shrapnel payload skywards. A hapless civilian motorcyclist, passing in the other direction, was the only casualty. Eventually, as the smoke cleared and groups of silent, inscrutable villagers appeared from the fields to stare at us, our driver returned. He rolled a quick joint, murmured “Bismillah” rather sheepishly, then retook his seat and turned the ignition.

We proceeded towards Bajaur at speed in a cloud of hash. Daylight slipped to dusk. The track narrowed at every turn. Artillery rumbled ahead. The war already seemed way too schizoid. It seemed a spectacularly bad moment to get stoned.

There is a long queue of players jostling to criticise Pakistan, to chide and chastise its security forces over their failure to deal with the militant threat based on its soil. At best, its detractors accuse Pakistan of incompetence and denial. At worst, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, stands blamed for direct collusion with militant groups.

Gordon Brown was at it in December. “The time has come for action not words,” he demanded, standing beside Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at a press conference in Islamabad in the diplomatic aftermath of the Mumbai attacks which had left at least 170 people dead, including three British citizens.

But huddled against the whip of the winter wind in their positions in Bajaur, the remote tribal agency abutting Afghanistan, Pakistani soldiers may be forgiven for wondering what more Britain expects of them in the wake of Mr Brown’s remarks.

For if blood were proof enough then they have already offered ample evidence of their commitment to the fight against militancy. Sometimes out-gunned, often out-manoeuvred, in three months of fighting with the Taliban there last autumn along a stretch of road just eight miles long, more than 80 soldiers were killed and another 300 wounded. A further 20 are missing, presumed dead. In turn, Pakistani officers claimed to have slain at least 1,500 militants of a force they estimated to be over 3,000 strong.

“We are not afraid of these sacrifices,” a colonel’s wife told me at the hospital bedside of her husband, wounded in Bajaur. “I believe he has done a noble job for his country and religion and I am proud of him.” The colonel had lost a leg to shrapnel and been shot twice. His battalion had begun their attack at 6am on a September day. Their objective looked small, just a few mud-walled compounds. Little more than three hours later, seven of his soldiers were dead, 27 wounded. The card at his bedside, made by his two children, had “Our Hero” crayoned on its front.

No lack of commitment there. It could have been Selly Oak, Birmingham.

In Bajaur, I found Pakistan’s 26th Brigade catching its breath before pushing northwards up two key valleys still held by the Taliban. Despite the earlier intensity of the action, its enemy was still in ample evidence. The valley on either side of the key eight-mile route rattled with gunfire. Tanks and mortars engaged targets sometimes barely a hundred metres from the road while a gunship strafed Taliban positions on a slope in the middle ground.

Geared for a conventional war with India, the soldiers had found the experience of fighting heavily-armed insurgents through the labyrinths of tunnels, trenches and gullies which lined the main road vexing and costly.

“They have the spirit of the vulture,” one colonel remarked of his foe, using words similar to the written record left by veterans of frontier wars a century ago. “As soon as they see a moment of weakness or isolation, they will swarm in to feast on it. If you are strong and can throw them back, in no time they disperse and disappear. It doesn’t mean they have gone though. They are still out there, waiting.”

A Pakistani soldier on patrol in Bajaur

So were these soldiers, part of an army that in the last six years has lost up to 1,500 men fighting militants, really just pawns to the dual agenda of a government which sacrifices them on one hand while fostering the militancy on the other? At the heart of the riddle, encompassed in a swathe of mountains, wilderness and Pashtun tribes once all too familiar to British soldiers in the days of the Indian Empire, lie Pakistan’s seven notorious tribal agencies – Bajaur, South and North Waziristan, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram. Described today by Britain and America as the primary source of impending international terrorist attacks, and the scene of repeated Hellfire strikes by US Predator drones, these federally administered tribal agencies are known better by the acronym Fata.

The roots of Fata’s current heart of darkness status are manifold and long precede the very existence of Pakistan. Some lie among the weeds in the “Foreigners’ Graveyard” in Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) that adjoins Fata, where faded headstones offer tantalising glimpses of the British army’s past involvement in the same valleys where Pakistani forces fight now. The inscriptions suggest the soldiers’ women and children perished of cholera and dysentery. The men died “on active service”, “in an engagement with hill tribes”, were “struck down by the hand of an assassin”, or were “shot dead by a fanatic”.

Many are aware of the British empire’s fractious involvement with India’s north-west frontier, immortalised by Kipling among others, which then as now served as a strategic buffer space between powers. Few realise that the fighting between British troops and the Pashtun tribes continued until partition, independence and the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and that Britain’s most intensive counter-insurgency campaign of the 20th century was fought against the Faqir of Ipi in North Waziristan between 1936-1947, just one among many frontier wars. (The British never caught him. Evading both foreign troops and later Pakistani soldiers, the Faqir died at liberty in 1960. Osama bin Laden take note.)

Yet the British left more of a legacy on the frontier than the untended graves of long-dead soldiers. In an effort to establish a mechanism of control between their authority and the wayward tribes, they introduced the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in 1901. It was both a punitive and administrative measure. In each agency local “maliks”, hereditary British appointees, acted as middlemen between their tribes and a political agent, who in turn reported to Peshawar. While allowing the Pashtun tribes a wide degree of autonomy, exempting them from tax and the power of the central judiciary, the FCR also allowed for the collective punishment of unruly tribes by fines, blockade and the seizure of their land and possessions. Individuals could be transported or imprisoned without trial, and houses suspected of sheltering criminals destroyed. By any modern standard the law was a gross violation of human rights.

But it still exists today, little changed in form since it was drawn up over a century ago, source of a growing sense of injustice and abandonment in the tribal agencies. Moreover, Pakistan’s Political Parties Act has never been extended to Fata’s 3.6 million residents, leaving them unable to form their own political parties. Though technically able to vote in national elections they remain effectively sidelined from Pakistan’s greater political structure, second-class citizens in a nation that is nominally their own, still reliant on a decrepit system of maliks and political agents. The knock-on effect to development has been predictable. It is the most economically disadvantaged area of Pakistan; 60 per cent of Fata’s population live below the national poverty line. Four out of five are unemployed; fewer than 18 per cent are literate; schools, roads, doctors and health clinics are rarities. “The people of Fata are victims, not perpetrators,” explained Afrasiyab Khattak, president of the progressive Awami National Party in Peshawar. “They face a triple jeopardy. They groan under a colonial system devised in the 19th century – the FCR. They have lost all types of state protection and don’t have hospitals or schools. And every state intervention in Fata is military: missiles, air strikes, heavy artillery. For any meaningful move to peace and stability there must be a plan for Fata and an end to its isolation.”

While once the maliks and political agents could offer money to the tribes as incentives for co-operation, their fiscal power has been swamped by the black cash of recent history. In the 1970s, burgeoning poppy cultivation sucked in drug money. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan drew in millions of American dollars for Fata-based mujahideen groups opposed to the occupation. A new generation of foreign fighters backed by cash-rich Islamic donors abroad has further undermined the government’s writ, along with the latest outpouring of drug money from Afghanistan. Other than heroin smuggling and militancy, opportunity is thin. Fertilised through bombing and abandonment, small wonder Fata has become a militant playground.

Coffins for sale near a refugee camp in Peshawar

Sickened by the corruption and inefficiency of local authorities, some impoverished Pashtun villagers see the Taliban as Islamic Robin Hoods. In a Maoist-style template, the majority of local Taliban commanders are themselves drawn from the lower levels of Pashtun rural society, and have made efforts to redress the grievances of farming communities by solving the land disputes and blood feuds which blight the region.

“He is a respected figure among us,” a teacher from Bajaur explained to me of Maulawi Faqir Mohammed, Bajaur’s principal Taliban commander. “People know him as a thorough gentleman. The Taliban never harmed the masses in Bajaur. Before the army operation, the Taliban had bought a degree of peace and stability there.”

Sections of Fata’s youth have also rallied around the militancy’s flag. With little other employment opportunity, born to an era of conflict, familiar with bombing and drone strikes, raised by illiterate fathers who fought a jihad in Afghanistan, they are natural Taliban fodder. Bajaur’s political agent, Shafirullah Wazir, described the Taliban training camp at Badon, one of several in the agency, as a centre “for every youth who wanted a radio, a motorbike and a gun”.

Yet Pakistan’s military and government seem manifestly opposed to any serious reform of the FCR. Some claim that the law is still an effective method of controlling the tribes, and that any form of development must first be preceded by an improvement in the security situation.

“The FCR is the best law,” stated Brigadier Mahmoud Shah, former government secretary to Fata, at his Peshawar office. “It makes the tribe responsible for maintaining law and order, not individuals. All punishments are awarded against the tribe. You can blockade them, deny them passports or ID cards. It is better to have a bad law than no law. How can you develop places you cannot even go to? It is like giving cake to a starving man.”

Others suggest that there is a more sinister agenda afoot, and claim that Fata has been deliberately crippled so as to preserve it as a specimen jar of militancy for the very sake of attracting US military funding.

There has certainly been no lack of American money thrown at Pakistan. Overall, official figures state that the US gave Islamabad $10 billion in aid between 2002-2007. Yet in Fata 96 per cent of American aid has gone to the military. Most of this has been spent through “Coalition Support Funds”, which reimburses the Pakistani army for operations it conducts against insurgents. Opaque and unaccountable, these funds have given many Pakistanis the impression that their soldiers have become little more than a mercenary force fighting someone else’s war. Of the American aid that has so far been devoted to Fata, only one per cent has been spent on development assistance.

Young members of an internally displaced family from Bajaur at a UN-sponsored camp in Peshawar

Obama’s election victory offers Fata some degree of hope and may end the American funding humbug. Vice-President Joseph Biden has been a long-term critic of Bush’s policy in Pakistan, and was co-sponsor of last year’s (2008) Enhanced Participation with Pakistan Act. When passed by Congress, the Act will give Pakistan $7.5 billion in non-military assistance over the next five years and is regarded as the vanguard of a new approach in a more holistic strategy to deal with the country’s militancy.

Meanwhile, however, America has failed to achieve a single security-related objective in Fata, and the militancy there has instead spread, utilising terror in its purest essence.

Words such as “savagery” fall far short in describing the video footage and photographs showing the fate of eight Shia lorry drivers captured by the Taliban in Fata’s Kurram agency on 19 July 2008. Having first been put on trial at a Taliban court, the men were dismembered one by one, apparently with a band saw.

“We had someone there who witnessed it,” said Ali Aqbar Turi, a local Shia leader, as we examined the evidence in Peshawar. “They were alive as it was done. A father and son were among the victims. They started with the arms, then the legs and heads, and said things like ‘Huh, how do you like the taste of that?’ as they did it. There were people standing around filming it.” Wrestling with a momentary wave of nausea in the airless room, I saw nothing in the images to dispute his claims. Piled together were eight torsos, eight severed heads, eight pairs of legs and arms. Some of the faces had been mutilated, but all were identifiable. The wounds seemed surgical, so precise they could have been the work of a butcher.

In another Taliban video, this time shot in Waziristan, I saw four boys who looked too young even to be teenagers stand behind a captured Pakistani NCO, Lance-Corporal Hussain. Three carried Kalashnikovs, one brandished a knife. All had koranic inscriptions wrapped around their foreheads. They pushed the captive soldier to the ground and sawed off his head. One boy then held it up to the camera. Next they turned in file and marched away.

Worst of all, they were expressionless throughout.

Terror has become both means and ends in Fata. In suicide bombings the militants believe they have found a strategic weapon to take on the state, while beheadings are a successful tactic in terrorising the local Fata population into submission. Some 200 maliks have been executed by the Taliban in Fata since 2004, along with an unknown number of minor officials, alleged government collaborators and Nato spies, teachers and tribesmen unwilling to submit to the Taliban.

In a typical example told to me by a resident from the Mohmand agency, who like so many witnesses I spoke to was too frightened to be named, the Taliban tried to arrest “Yusuf”, the leader of an armed group of non-aligned tribesmen, in a village there in the autumn of 2007. There was a shoot-out and three Taliban were killed. Yusuf and his group fled their village and were pursued. They were surrounded and six shot dead, including Yusuf. Another eight were captured. The next day the Taliban summoned 4,000 men from the district to attend the funeral prayers for their own dead at Yusuf’s village. The eight prisoners were beheaded before the crowd. The bodies were left in the open for three days before relatives were allowed to bury them.

“That was the turning point for Mohmand,” the man told me. “After that no one challenged the Taliban.”

But if the militants are linked by an ability to capitalise on local disaffection and a willingness to use terror at its extreme, the wider threat they pose is an issue so divisive that it seems set to ensure their survival.

“The UK’s core objective is not about tribal militants in Fata,” a British diplomat told me in Islamabad in autumn 2008. “It is to eliminate the safe haven there for violent extremists planning to attack the UK.” Yet Brown’s comments in Pakistan in December suggest the UK is equally keen to eliminate safe havens for terrorists planning attacks not just on the UK but on Britain’s regional allies too.

The militants’ elimination would be easier if there were only a single foe, a single extremist group with a single objective, instead of the kaleidoscopic mix that exists in Fata today. The very definition of “enemy” differs in the eye of each national beholder and it is difficult to segregate those with a localised agenda from those with regional and international aims.

Guns are easily available in Peshawar

The Taliban are nominally Fata’s militant kingpins. They are in turn divided between the Pakistani Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP), commanded by Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, and the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar remains the generic spiritual leader of both groups. However, seasoned regional officials and soldiers insist that Mullah Omar’s Quetta-based headquarters has been sidelined. They say that the dominant force in the Taliban now is the group based at Miranshah in Fata’s North Waziristan, led by the Afghan Sirajuddin Haqqani. Some government officials go so far as to claim that Haqqani has united all of Fata’s militants under the umbrella of an “Islamic Emirate of Waziristan”. “The emirate co-ordinates them all,” a leading Pakistani politician told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Haqqani acts as the link man between al-Qaeda, the ISI, the Afghan Taliban and Baitullah [Mehsud]. They have some differences. But they co-ordinate. Basically the emirate runs the war.”

Linked by a desire to be able to pursue their fundamentalist Islamic ideology free of censure, militants share common ground in wishing to see Nato leave Afghanistan and the Pakistani army withdraw from Fata. Further than this, the aspirations of different militant groupings vary hugely. Some seek to overthrow the Pakistani government, others to fight a regional jihad. But in Fata the average TTP gunslinger probably has political horizons no further than those of his own tribal area.

In this light, though an attractive proposition for those seeking to make sense of the militancy, the emirate concept appears trite and simplistic. Given the Pashtun tribes’ historical tradition of internecine conflict, the idea of any monolithic form of resistance or objective tests credibility, and the Pakistani army is quick to denounce the theory, describing the militants as a loosely connected grouping of “miscreants”. “Each has its own vested interests built up by criminals and small-time hoods who have tried to legitimise themselves under a single platform,” Major General Tariq Khan, commander of the army’s operation in Bajaur, told me. “Some are affiliated to the TTP, which hires guns to smaller groups. But I see no coherent strategy in any of the groups.”

Western diplomats agree with him. But further accord quickly diverges. America is happy to use its Predators to strike at al-Qaeda cells in Fata as part of a target list of militant commanders such as Mullah Nazir and Bahadur Gul, who are believed responsible for sending insurgents across the border into Afghanistan. But these commanders in turn are left to their own devices by the Pakistani army, which does not view them as directly hostile to the country’s own interests.

Conversely, the US has so far refrained from hitting TTP elements who restrict their activity solely to Pakistan. Pakistani security officials told me that on several occasions they had passed on the location of Baitullah Mehsud to the Americans, hoping he would be killed by a Predator, to no avail.

Disagreement over the definition of a common enemy in Fata is further reflected in the mirrored accusations over the issue of safe havens. Nato has consistently blamed Pakistan for knowingly allowing insurgents sanctuary in the tribal areas. Pakistani officers counter that they face increasing attack from Afghani Taliban crossing the border from areas patrolled by Nato. In Bajaur, one senior Pakistani officer described a column of nearly 1,000 insurgents, commanded by the Afghan Zia-ur-Rahman, infiltrating from the Afghan province of Kunar to assault his men. “It’s not black and white – it’s grey,” explained Brigadier Abid Mumtaz, commander of the 26th Brigade in Bajaur, who in 2004 was based in Bagram, Afghanistan, as a Pakistani liaison officer with Nato. “I’ve seen it both ways. They come across this side and that – both sides.”

The picture is further clouded by the presence of other militant groups in Fata that utilise the lawless space provided by the TTP’s ascendancy, but have agendas of their own as well as those they share with the Taliban.

Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) is a case in point. Allegedly responsible for the Mumbai attacks last December, last year it was also implicated in a large night assault launched from Bajaur last year on an American post in Afghanistan in which nine US soldiers were killed.

Formed in 1989, the LeT was originally funded and trained by the ISI to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan before being later reorganised for action against the Indians in Kashmir. Western and Indian intelligence agencies believe that the LeT is publicly fronted by Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity organisation involved in relief work. A proscribed terrorist organisation in the US, JuD is viewed with special concern by Britain, which regards its expansive network of offices and camps as a portal for young British Kashmiris wishing to join al-Qaeda.

“These training camps pose a real threat to the UK,” a diplomat explained. “Which is why Britain is asking for them to be closed down. The chief worry is that young British radicals travel to Pakistan, connect into Pakistani Kashmir and may gain some training there. They are then passed on to facilitation camps in Waziristan or Bajaur. Some then reappear in the UK. Others stay on in the tribal areas planning attack operations on the UK.”

A mosque in Peshawar

When I met two JuD officials in a walled rose garden in Peshawar last October, I expected to get a glib resumé of the humanitarian work which it indisputably conducts, famously having aided survivors of Pakistan’s massive 2005 earthquake long before government agencies arrived on the scene.

So I was surprised when Atiq ur-Rahman, a Pakistani who admitted to having joined a militant group in Afghanistan in 1989 before transferring to JuD, launched into a diatribe against the West. He went on to expand the vision of a global Islamic Caliphate as an ultimate utopia for world peace.

“We don’t like democracy. Our struggle is to establish an Islamic Caliphate throughout the world. Whichever force tries to resist it shall be shattered,” he told me, before handing me a copy of Why We Are Performing Jihad, JuD’s militant manifesto, to further his case. During a follow-up visit to Friday prayers at the group’s madrassa (religious school) in Peshawar, the mullah there eulogised Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, invited worshippers to “carry on beating America in the language they understand”, before calling for a collection to fund the jihad. It was so flagrant it was almost embarrassing.

Yet despite international pressure to close down JuD offices in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan has so far side-stepped the issue, unwilling to antagonise JuD’s powerful domestic following or lose its strategic value in the struggle with the old enemy, India.

When America’s military golden boy, General David Petraeus, took over the US Central Command – responsible for US operations in the Middle East and Central Asia – last autumn he was already speaking of his intention to ask Pakistan to reassess its threat prioritisation. Arguing that war between Pakistan and India served neither country’s interests, he was keen to have Pakistan shift the focus of its security efforts to Fata so as to unify the divided American and Pakistani aims. Barack Obama was singing from the same hymn sheet.

Next came the Mumbai attacks, a strategic counter-move by militants in response to the American plan which has succeeded, in the short term at least, in increasing tensions between the neighbours at the expense of Pakistan’s commitment to Fata.

Whatever the final implications of Mumbai, Petraeus is likely to find that the fundamental stumbling block to his plan lies in Pakistan’s perceptions of Western involvement in Afghanistan. Pakistani generals are convinced, based on historical precedent, that the presence of foreign troops there will be transient. They regard the vacuum left by the West’s inevitable withdrawal from Afghanistan as a vital arena in which to jockey with India, a country as key to the Pakistani military psyche as the Turks are to the Serbs and the Israelis to the Palestinians.

This fear, comprehensive enough in a country that has largely defined itself through its enmity with India, causes Pakistan’s military to cling to its concept of Afghanistan as a place of “strategic depth” for its long-term interests, hence past overt support of the Taliban, among others, and the lingering accusations that elements of the ISI continue to support some militant groups as a safeguard for the future.

In Peshawar, I met a former Guantánamo inmate who insisted that during interrogation by the ISI after his arrest in 2001 he had been given a simple choice by his captors.

“They told me ‘Go to fight in Afghanistan or we will hand you over to the Americans’,” the man reported. “I met many other prisoners who were given the same option.” He had balked at joining the new wave of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan so was handed to the CIA and sent to Guantánamo.

Pakistan’s military chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, has recently concurred with US demands to clean up the ISI with a purge of maverick elements. But years of Islamification in Pakistan during the ’70s and ’80s under Pakistan’s then dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, led to the involvement of swathes of the nation’s officers corps in Tablighi Jamaat, the cult-like Islamic proselytising movement.

This in turn created masonic-like cells within the military espousing their own unilateral agenda, an opaque inheritance that is difficult to break and, when suitable, easy to deny.

“I just don’t get the ISI,” a US intelligence officer remarked to me on the Afghan border overlooking North Waziristan 18 months ago. “I’ve been in Afghanistan for a couple of years. I’ve worked directly with ISI officers. They’ve given me invaluable help. But I’ve PUC’d [arrested] ISI officers too.”

Baffled? It is a compartmentalised game in which few players can discern clear direction; a war run by egoistical charioteers each at the mercy of unbroken teams of horses. Only a long and enduring haul combining the most skilled regional diplomacy, careful incentives and judicious pressure can succeed in having Pakistan and the West find common ground in Fata.

Meanwhile, criticism alone is unlikely to achieve quick reward. Western leaders wishing to throw stones at Islamabad should first remember that they do so in the glass house of their own policy in Afghanistan which itself, having poisoned the well with corruption, hypocrisy and sectarianism, is hardly a byword for cohesion and transparency.

“What can we do?” one refugee from Bajaur remarked miserably to my interpreter, having traipsed across the mountains with his family to flee the fighting. “We are trapped between the paradise and the dollar.”

A Peshwari walks past a poster for the film The Drinker in the city’s Qisa Khan market

The post Blown Up in Bin Laden Country appeared first on Standpoint.

The travel-writer William Dalrymple used the pages of the Observer the Sunday after Mumbai to explain that the perpetrators of the attacks (still, then, unidentified) were “furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively”.

On CNN, within hours of the attacks, the Huffington Post‘s contributor Deepak Chopra said they were the result of the Iraq war and “our foreign policies”. Out to the extreme margins, the UK Muslim Public Affairs Committee declared: “Western (often Zionist lobby driven) foreign policy is the root cause of why these young men are taking up arms.”

For those of us who note that the terrorists of Mumbai went out of their way to target not only Americans and Brits but also a Jewish centre, the driving force behind these – and jihadi attacks stretching back decades – is perfectly clear. You’d have to be a Channel 4 newsreader or the New York Times to so repeatedly refuse to listen to the terrorists’ own reasons for doing what they do – to pretend they do not commit their acts of terror in order to satiate their infidel-hatred, imperial ambitions and caliphate-nostalgia.

Islamic fundamentalism has a propulsion quite of its own. Is our foreign policy a factor? An aggravating one, yes – in that anything we do aggravates them. But let’s go all the way. Let’s forget the indignity – not to mention long-term risk – of nation-states having their foreign policy dictated by whichever group is most violent. Let’s pretend it really is all about our foreign policy.

So what do we do?

First, America and her allies would have to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. In Afghanistan, this would lead, within months, to the overthrow of the democratically-elected Karzai government. Those who couldn’t flee would be dealt with in the traditional Afghan way. Though there would be no official handover (no foreign body would be willing to enter the country), Afghanistan would be unofficially handed back to the Taliban and warlords. The girls’ schools would finally be closed but the training camps could reopen.

In Iraq, the democratically-elected government, now in control of the majority of the provinces, would have to fight a renewed insurgency. Security would be sustained for a while. But once coalition troops withdrew from the most dangerous areas, there would be not just a new assertiveness from the Sunnis, but a counter power-grab from Iranian-sponsored forces in the south. The government would put up a considerable political and military fight, but as violence against the Sunni minority increased, their representatives would pull out. Unstopped by American and other coalition sacrifices, Iraq should be able to be back to a post-Samarrah situation by mid-2009 with a full-scale civil war following shortly. With the Shia finally getting an unfettered opportunity to end their Sunni problem, and Saudi and other forces poised nervously on the borders, the Armageddon scenario for Iraq could finally occur.

Having already withdrawn from the now-thriving Gaza, the Israeli government could attempt other successful retreats in the coming months. Once empty, the Shebaa farms could be fought over by Lebanon and Syria. A judenrein Palestinian state could be created in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas’s government would topple to a Hamas coup as swiftly and bloodily as Fatah was toppled in Gaza. Jordan would see its worst-scenario emerge, with a Hamas-controlled state ready to foment similar trouble inside the country.

Elsewhere, the referendum wishes of the people of East Timor could be overturned and the jihadists’ gripes be satiated by the return of the country to Indonesian control.

This could be a first wave. Perhaps then we could deal with the older grudges, beginning with a demand at the UN that Spain give up the lower part of the country it has occupied since 1492.

America, Britain and Israel would be blamed for the all the resulting fatalities, including the Muslim-on-Muslim violence. Given time, there would be the inevitable calls to intervene and stop real, rather than imagined, genocides. As with the Balkans in the 1990s, if we failed to stop such outrages we would be blamed for not stopping them. And would deserve to be attacked anew.

I hope I don’t have to continue this droll playlist. Those who use terrorists as mouthpieces for their own prejudices and give terrorists excuses they never asked for should be treated with contempt. Or at least they should be asked the follow-on question.

Let’s say it is about foreign policy. So what?

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But despite this influx of aid, HIV prevalence in Zambia has barely decreased. There is also a less obvious set of victims for whom little is done. These are the one million children, out of a total population of only 11 million, who have lost one or both parents.

Cecily’s Fund was set up to change this. It is named after Cecily Eastwood, who died in a road accident in 1997, aged 19, while in Zambia working as a volunteer for Aids orphans. Instead of flowers at the funeral, her parents, Basil and Alison Eastwood, asked for donations to her cause.

Visiting Zambia six months later, they saw how many children had benefited from the £6,000 raised, and felt they had no choice but to continue with the work. In 1998, they founded Cecily’s Fund. Its aim is simple: to help children made vulnerable by HIV to finish school. It pays for their school fees, uniforms and books, which altogether costs £50 per child per year.

This is cheap, straightforward and has a big impact. Not only are the lives of individual children transformed, but intervention breaks a peculiarly vicious cycle. Children of Aids sufferers often drop out of school to care for younger siblings or sick parents. They are likely to live in poverty, or to be involved in drugs or prostitution, and so to get infected with HIV themselves. And, as Mr Eastwood points out, “Education itself is increasingly seen as the best defence against Aids.” Children who finish school are more likely to know how to avoid infection, and have a lifestyle in which they can. The enormous task of caring for the infected, however important, does little to help children who have already lost their parents.

Cecily’s Fund’s aims and strategy are narrow and low-tech. It works in only two places in Zambia, in the towns of Kitwe and Lusaka. Last year, it helped 7,228 children to stay in education, as well as supporting a smaller number through teacher-training college and funding a primary school.

In the past decade it has helped more than 10,000 children to finish school, most of whom would otherwise be in a desperate situation.

It uses well-established local organisations to carry out its projects, and builds on structures that are already in place. It prides itself on accountability: its representatives visit Zambia several times a year to go through the books of its partner organisations and get feedback from the children it helps.

As well as changing orphans’ lives, this could have broader effects. Mr Eastwood argues that “good governance in a country must come from the bottom up, rather than being imposed from the top down”.

Organisations with high standards of accountability can change business practices from the grass-roots, setting a standard of transparency, rather than waiting for government to do it.

Cecily’s Fund is committed to supporting all its children until they finish school. This means it has obligations stretching ten years into the future. Mr Eastwood says that Cecily’s Fund will keep doing what it’s doing as long as there are children who need it. He, however, has decided to step down as chairman this year.

Until 2003, the charity consisted only of himself, his wife and its trustees, but now there are three full-time and three part-time members of staff. He is leaving to let it develop further, from a small, family-run charity, to something that will last and grow.

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