Diplomacy & Crisis News

To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. 

Javier Corrales spells out the true cause of Venezuela’s economic malaise — and it isn’t the oil.

Wai Moe explains why Kokang rebels are making life hard for the Burmese military and what this means for the country’s relationship with China.

Asma Ghribi reports on a new Tunisian security law that harkens back to the old dictatorship’s repressive methods.

Christian Caryl asks why, despite many years of bitter experience, we still allow genocides to happen.

Alexander Motyl argues that Kiev is better off now that Ukraine’s ruined eastern Donbass region is Russia’s responsibility.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

In a must-read essay, the Economist scrutinizes the state of democracy in the world: what has gone wrong, why, and how to fix it.

The International Crisis Group looks ahead to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 2016 presidential and legislative elections on which the political future of the country depends.

In the Daily Beast, Jamie Kirchik spares no criticism for former Florida representative Bob Wexler, who has heaped praise on Kazakhstan’s recent election (in which President Nazarbayev received 97.5 percent of the vote).

Middle East Briefing warns that the Assad regime may collapse with little warning, and calls for the international community to impose a “dis-entanglement plan” to prevent horrific bloodshed. (In the photo, rebel fighters under the Free Syrian Army take part in a military training near Aleppo.)

Bloomberg’s Kateryna Choursina, Volodymyr Verbyany, and Alex Sazonov take stock of the diminishing fortune of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whose candy company is shedding value along with the rest of Ukraine’s economy. Writing for openDemocracy, Jack Davies reports on a plague of western sex tourists taking advantage of the Ukrainian conflict to prey on vulnerable women.

Sarah Mendelson publishes a new CSIS report examining how governments attack civil society and looking at potential responses.

The Irrawaddy’s Kyaw Hsu Mon details the struggles of Burma’s private newspapers, squeezed by high production costs and competition from the state-run press.

And finally, the Syrian Observer notes that Syria and Russia have signed an agreement to “enhance cooperation in election-related expertise.”

Photo credit: BARAA AL-HALABI/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these  countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.

While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.

If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”

thousands of miles from the frigid
north, the actual decision on which country gets what slice of the Arctic will be made in midtown Manhattan by 21 geologists, geophysicists, and hydrographers who compose the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty is a sort of international constitution establishing the rights and responsibilities for the use of the world’s oceans.

Although approved in 1982, after nearly a decade of meetings and conferences, the convention did not go into force until 1994; since then, it has been what sets limits on offshore mining. The treaty also regulates a country’s exclusive economic zone—how far from its shoreline a nation can legally fish and tap the minerals under the seabed. Thus, beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit of this zone, none of the five Arctic Ocean countries has the right to touch the enormous body of mineral wealth below the ice. The treaty, however, allows any nation to lobby for up to 350 additional nautical miles, and sometimes more, if it can prove that an underwater formation is an extension of its dry landmass.

Today, nearly 170 countries have ratified or acceded to the treaty, but the United States has yet to do so. In fact, out of the five Arctic Ocean nations, the United States is the only outlier. Upon the convention’s inception, President Ronald Reagan’s administration, with its free-enterprise philosophy, could not “as a matter of principle” sign on to something that encouraged a “mixed economic system for the regulation and production of deep seabed minerals,” wrote Leigh Ratiner, one of the U.S. negotiators for the treaty, in a 1982 Foreign Affairs article. One of Reagan’s attorneys general, Edwin Meese, later went so far as to call the treaty “a direct threat to American sovereignty.” Despite its being signed later by President Bill Clinton and having the backing of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama—as well as the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Navy leaders, environmental groups, and the oil and shipping industries—
conservative Republican senators continue to argue that the agreement would somehow subjugate the U.S. military and business interests to U.N. control.

Each Arctic Ocean country, upon ratifying the convention, is allowed 10 years to present scientific proof to the commission that its continental shelf extends beyond its exclusive economic zone. In December 2014, when it became the latest to submit bathymetric, seismic, and geophysical data to the United Nations, Denmark joined Russia and Canada in the fight for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. And though this has been an expensive contest for all involved, costing each country millions of dollars, the tactics at times have been cheap, if not utterly bizarre.

The first to approach the U.N., in 2001, Russia asserted that it had ownership not only of the North Pole, but also of an area amounting to about half the Arctic. To symbolically emphasize this point six years later, a Russian submersible carrying Artur Chilingarov, an avid explorer and then deputy speaker of the Duma, planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag on the ocean floor 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole. The event triggered an outcry from Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay. “This isn’t the 15th century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’” Chilingarov shot back: “If someone doesn’t like this, let them go down themselves … and then try to put something there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The Arctic has always been Russian.” Adding to the political theater, soon after the flag-planting ceremony, the Russian air force launched cruise missiles over the Arctic as part of a military exercise.

Not to be upstaged by Moscow’s flag stunt, in December 2013, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.” But some Canadians think the prime minister has gone too far. “[N]ow Harper has become the Putin of the Arctic,” chided Heather Exner-Pirot, managing editor of Arctic Yearbook, in a 2013 blog post.

To meet its 10-year deadline, Norway filed its arguments to the U.N. in 2006, claiming that its seabed extends into both the Atlantic and the Arctic oceans in three places: the Loop Hole in the Barents Sea, the Western Nansen Basin in the Arctic Ocean, and the Banana Hole in the Norwegian Sea. But depending on the outcomes of various expeditions underway, including Kristoffersen and Tholfsen’s work on the ice floe, the country might return for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. It’s banking on some flexibility baked into the treaty: As long as a nation meets its 10-year deadline, it isn’t penalized for follow-up submissions.

When Denmark presented claims to the U.N. that the Lomonosov Ridge is the natural extension of
Greenland—a self-governing Danish territory with the nearest coastline to the North Pole—it also offered the commission evidence that now overlaps with studies presented by Russia and Canada. And this could prove to be drastically more complicated than it first might seem.

Given that the commission generally meets but twice a year, the pace at which it moves is anything but fast. For example, at the 30-year anniversary of the Law of the Sea treaty, the U.N. published a progress report stating that since the commission was formed in 1997, various countries around the globe, including those that border the Arctic, had submitted 61 claims to define new borders in the world’s oceans. However, in that same time, the commission had only managed to issue 18 sets of responses. In recent years, the 2012 report highlighted, the commission’s workload had “increased considerably,” and member countries had indicated plans for 46 future submissions.

This existing backlog does not bode well for settling matters quickly in the Arctic, especially now that those claims are becoming even more complex. Denmark seemingly attempted to reduce some of this wait time by petitioning the commission to recognize only the scientific merits of each of the country’s claims. Once these are established, according to Denmark’s submission, the Arctic nations will determine for themselves where the final boundaries will be drawn—a right allowed under the treaty.

In some ways, this tangled, bureaucratic system has worked out for the polar countries, perhaps even enabled them. Over the past few decades, they have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.

today, woven tightly into the very fabric
of Arctic life is espionage: Technicians eavesdrop on civilian, government, and military communications, radar signals, and missile tests. They also conduct surveillance photography of any military equipment, ports, or bases. In December 2014, during a news conference in Moscow, Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev, the head of Russia’s air force, noted that there had been a dramatic increase in foreign spy flights, including ones in the Arctic. “In 2014, more than 140 RC-135 flights have taken place, compared to 22 flights in 2013,” he said. But the same goes for the Russians, according to defense officials: NATO intercepted more than 100 Russian aircraft in 2014, three times more than the year before.

Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.

More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”

Eavesdropping on the Russians across the North Pole is a Canadian listening post so high in the Arctic that it’s closer to Moscow than to Ottawa. Known as Alert and located on the northeast tip of Ellesmere Island in the territory of Nunavut, it is just 500 miles from the pole and is the northernmost permanently inhabited location in the world. A welcome sign declares, “Proudly Serving Canada’s ‘Frozen Chosen.’”

There, in some of the harshest weather on Earth, staffers maintain critical antenna networks used to intercept key Russian signals containing Arctic troop movements, aircraft and submarine communications, and critical telemetry from missile tests and space shots. In recent years, as technology advanced and the Russian buildup began, Canada moved hundreds of earphone-clad operators to Leitrim, a listening post near Ottawa; at this base, several satellite dishes eavesdrop on military and commercial communications satellites.

Canada shares its intelligence from Alert and Leitrim with its close partner, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and the United States reciprocates through its Thule Air Base in western Greenland. More than 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle and more than 60 miles from the nearest Inuit village, Thule is not just one of the world’s most isolated facilities, but also one of the most highly classified. With a trio of bulbous igloo-like radomes on a wind-swept cliff about three miles from the base, personnel in a gray, windowless operations building send operational commands to more than 140 satellites in orbits from 120 miles to 24,800 miles above the planet.

Among the satellites the station controls are those that fly over Russia and its Arctic bases every 90 minutes, taking detailed photographs with cameras capable of spotting objects on Earth only a few inches long. Technicians feed directions to satellites about 20,000 times a year on average, said unit commander Austin Hood in a 2012 article in Airman, a U.S. Air Force publication. In addition, the station sends commands to many of the NSA’s eavesdropping satellites with instructions on which frequencies to monitor, such as those for telephone communications and Internet data.

in 2013, concerned about the possibility
of Russian drones in the Arctic, the Canadian government produced a classified study that explored the possibilities and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Unless “UAVs gain aerial refueling capabilities,” it reported, Russia could not spy in Canadian Arctic territory. And though Canada has orbited Radarsat-2, a synthetic-aperture radar surveillance satellite capable of seeing through clouds, in order to keep track of events and military movements (including in the Arctic), this technology apparently wasn’t stealthy enough for the country: In August 2014, defense employees began carrying out experiments to test the feasibility of developing drones for use in the Arctic.

The response? Three months later, in November, a Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland Alaska. When completed, this base will make Russia the only country to have this technology in the Arctic skies.

Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.

“The new Marjata will be an important piece in the continuation of the Intelligence Service’s assignments in the High North,” Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen, head of the service, said in a statement. He also told a Norwegian newspaper that the Marjata’s task “will be to systematically map all military and some civilian activity in areas close to Norway.” Designed largely for eavesdropping on Russian communications and other signals, according to the Norwegian government-owned news service NRK, it will also identify things like the frequencies of Moscow’s radar systems—information that is critical in order to jam them should hostilities break out.

Beneath the Arctic ice, the United States and Russia remain adversaries, vestiges of the Cold War. Since the USS Nautilus first slid under the North Pole in 1958 and the USS Skate became the first to surface there less than a year later, U.S. submarines have completed more than 120 Arctic exercises.

With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast-
attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.

one evening in november 2014, u.s. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.

Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.

As the planes get closer, spying becomes bolder. And though this strategy might be necessary for Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway as they vie for supremacy in the new Great Game, this isn’t a strategy that is necessarily logical for the United States, a country not party to the Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Even if the Senate were to ratify the treaty, it is likely that, by the time it submits its claim to the commission, much of the icy region will be accounted for. And given the rightward turn in Congress, the odds that the treaty will be ratified during the Obama administration are slimmer than ever. In the words of one U.S. Coast Guard admiral quoted about the Arctic in a 2010 Politics Daily article, “If this were a ball game … the U.S. wouldn’t be on the field or even in the stadium.”

In the next few years, as the Arctic Ocean opens for business, American spies will still be busy feeding directions to satellites that spin over the North Pole, while the United States’ polar neighbors will be busy exploiting the resources beneath it and leading convoys through the ice in new shipping channels above it. With this kind of Arctic strategy, in other words, the United States will remain frozen in another era.

Well, that didn’t work out as expected. A voter in Wales drew a penis on his ballot during Britain’s Thursday election and it ended up counting as a vote. The depiction of the male anatomy was penciled in next to the name of a Tory candidate for Parliament, presumably as a protest, and vote counters put the ballot in Glyn Davies’ column.

“One voter decided to draw a detailed representation of a penis instead of a cross in my box on one ballot paper,” Davies told the South Wales Evening Post. “Amazingly, because it was neatly drawn within the confines of the box the returning officer deemed it a valid vote.”

Davies held his Wales seat with 45 percent of the vote.

The Tory MP thanked the anonymous penis artist for the contribution to his victory. “Not sure the artist meant it to count, but I am grateful,” Davies said, according to the Evening Post. “If I knew who it was, I would like to thank him [or her] personally.”

GEOFF CADDICK/AFP/Getty Images

You missed it? How could you? The second-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) was issued last week with much fanfare, at least at the State Department. As may befit a late second-term document and a department whose budget resources have topped off and are starting to decline, the new QDDR is pretty unambitious. Thin gruel, in fact, for the future of America’s civilian statecraft. And that might explain why it didn’t get a lot of coverage.

Some people want the QDDR to tackle big strategy issues, but it is really about reforming and strengthening the structures and processes that run America’s foreign policy. It might be nice to have a big-picture strategy document, but you can’t pull the strategy cart if you don’t have the horses.

And this QDDR is even less ambitious than the first one. It doesn’t offer the foreign-policy community the fundamental reforms it needs to recover the primacy to direct America’s strategy and deliver the goods: an integrated approach to dealing with the governance challenges around the world, strengthened security institutions subordinated to stronger governance, or even an internal strategy and resource-planning process that would enable the State Department to make the hard choices it must with inevitably constrained budgets.

QDDRs are not like QDRs — the original Quadrennial Defense Review, done at the Department of Defense (DoD) since the mid-1990s. When then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set out to produce the first QDDR, published in 2010, the goal was not to lay out a strategy for U.S. foreign policy, but to improve the capabilities of the State Department to execute that strategy.

I was pretty hard on that QDDR at the time. It did make a decent effort to clarify that the State Department is not the Defense Department, emphasizing the role the State Department should have in conflict prevention and resolution, calling for major improvements in the State Department’s planning and budgeting, and clarifying the department’s relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Although fairly unexciting, these were all good bureaucratic things to do.

But the first QDDR missed a great opportunity for fundamental change — change it might have pulled off with the star power of Clinton, which would have elevated the State Department to real foreign-policy leadership and would have eliminated some serious organizational dysfunction. It did not broaden the mission of the Foreign Service to include dealing with governance issues in other countries. It did not change training of Foreign Service officers fundamentally to provide skills in strategic planning and program development and management, and to make mid-career training and education available. It did not reform a broken architecture for security assistance at the State Department or make an effort to recapture leadership over U.S. security assistance policy from the Defense Department.

It did not end the division of planning and budgeting between a stovepipe over on the “management” side that does personnel, buildings, security, administration, and IT/communications support, and the other stovepipe over in the foreign assistance program office that plans and budgets for U.S. foreign assistance. And it did not even discuss the reality that the United States has far too many foreign assistance programs — an uncoordinated diaspora of offices and agencies scattered around the bureaucratic universe in D.C. from the Justice Department to the DoD to the Commerce Department to the Export-Import Bank to the Treasury Department and beyond, to the bewilderment of anyone the United States does business with overseas.

So I hammered away a little last year in this column after the new QDDR was launched, urging the new team to at least try to address some key institutional problems that make the State Department (and its USAID partner) dysfunctional and unable to lead U.S. foreign policy. I picked three themes: 1) make governance dilemmas in the world a core mission of U.S. foreign policy, and build the programs and training to implement that priority; 2) take civilian control of U.S. security assistance (much of it is now at DoD), and embed that effort in stronger civilian governance overall; and 3) centralize and empower a capacity at the State Department to do integrated strategic and resource planning.

It will not surprise you that this latest QDDR did not go for the gold on any of these three core problems. At best it gets a fairly weak incomplete. Secretary of State John Kerry, like his star-powered predecessor, earned few points; in the end he didn’t actually put his credibility and heft on the line to get fundamental change, a change the department needs if it is going to give reality, not talk, to its claim that it is the lead institution for U.S. foreign policy.

Make Governance a Mission and Build the Tools

Governance actually gets a lot of verbal attention in this QDDR — more rhetoric than it got in the first one, as I was reminded by several people who worked on the report. But some of that rhetoric is misleading, and some of it is even dangerous.

What’s wrong in the rhetoric? Specifically, on p.18, the QDDR says, “the movement toward accountable governance and the expansion of the global middle class are two of the most promising opportunities in recent human history.”

Unfortunately, neither statement is true. Accountable governance is not on the rise; it is being struggled for, and that struggle is failing, most notably in states like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States made a big show of promoting democracy. (And, for the record, the global income gap is widening, threatening the existence of the middle class, even in places like the United States. See Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream? or Joseph Stiglitz’s The Great Divide.)

So if the State Department is going to take the global problem of weak, ineffective, corrupt, unaccountable governance seriously, it has to start with reality, not wishful thinking. That leads me to the dangerous part. What do they mean by “governance”? The language in the QDDR is a bit slippery here, but one word keeps cropping up: “democracy.” On page 28, for example, it reads, “Democracy, accountable governance, and respect for human rights are essential for a secure, prosperous, and just world.… We are at a critical moment for democracy.” What the report is underwriting, once again, is that long, elusive, exceptionalist American project of bringing “democracy” to the world.

Thought we were over that, given, most recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, no, here it is again — the American dream abroad, at least in language terms. After years of worrying this issue, my thinking is that the United States would do pretty well (and that is hard enough) to help other governments become more efficient and effective at providing the services they use their tax money to provide, while becoming a bit less corrupt and certainly more “responsive” to their citizens (the QDDR says “accountable,” which is certainly a more realistic goal than “democratic”).

But to plant the flag in “democracy,” a thing the United States isn’t even doing well itself, sets up the State Department for something that neither it nor anyone else can do abroad — create democracies. Put that one on the shelf.

Plus, the QDDR does little to strengthen the State Department’s tool kit when it comes to governance. There is nothing here as basic as saying the department will revise the standards it uses for training and promoting Foreign Service officers to include knowledge of governance and the ways in which the United States might, at least minimally, focus its assistance agenda in that direction. Oh, there is language about USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. And if the department were really focused on governance, as I said last year, it should certainly start by making USAID fully buy that mission as a necessary precursor to successful “development.” But, there they go again; “democracy” gets the headline, not governance.

And if fragile states are part of the governance target, there is nothing new here about how to deal with that. It’s the same old, same old bureaucratic solutions, including rhetoric about the role of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), created in the last QDDR. The CSO got itself torn in two last year in a conflict, I am told, between people who wanted it to be on the front lines of fragile-state transition, with teams in the field, and people who wanted it to retreat into planning in D.C. for somebody else to act on.

The State Department’s inspector general wrote up this sad story last year. And, apparently, the latter team won, and the QDDR group did not get the memo about how CSO’s nails got clipped this April, when its missions overseas were scrapped. According to an anonymous submission to DiploPundit, one of the best trackers of the inside stories at the State Department, the CSO will be even less relevant than it was:

Yes, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) has a new mission: “CSO advances the Department of State’s understanding of how to anticipate, prevent, and respond to violent conflict through analysis and planning; monitoring, evaluation, and learning; and targeted, in-country efforts that inform U.S. government policymaking.”    Since there’s no longer any mission element about stabilization and stabilization operations, why is that being left in the Bureau’s name?

Security Assistance Is Still a Hot Mess

If I only got a rhetorical half-loaf on governance, what about getting the State Department’s act together on security assistance programs? They weren’t even discussed in 2010’s QDDR. They’re barely discussed in this year’s QDDR, with just a paragraph on security-sector reform and one on security-sector governance. But America’s deepest engagement in the governance of other countries is being driven by the GWOT (George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror), which has become Countering Violent Extremism. When war is the metaphor (and in Syria/Iraq, the reality), armies are the tool, and the United States is deeply engaged with the armies of the world.

America does it through security assistance and what the DoD calls “security cooperation,” or “building partner capacity.” And the country handed a lot of that task over to the Defense Department, despite decades of having budget and policy responsibility in the State Department, spending upwards of $15 billion a year doing it.

There are lots of ways the QDDR could have tackled this mess. Calling for a strategic overview of security assistance policy, for example. There has never been one, and despite the publication of a presidential policy directive in 2013 (PPD 23), there is still no coordinated strategy. Instituting a systematic evaluation of the payoff from spending more than $10 billion a year (including by the DoD) would be a good idea.

Challenging other countries to make sure accountable governance overall is part of what determines their eligibility for U.S. security assistance dollars would be a nice thing.

And frontally dealing with the reality that the Defense Department and the combatant commanders have pretty much taken control of security assistance and cooperation and it is time to return policy and budget responsibility to the civilian foreign-policy agency — well that just seems to be a bridge way too far. The paragraph in the QDDR on security-sector governance simply describes, in vague language, what the United States purports to do now; it offers nothing new. And the report even says the State Department is in charge of security assistance “with the exception of DoD SSA [security sector assistance] appropriations,” which kind of begs the issue.

Last year I wrote, “The State Department rarely takes its statutory responsibility for security assistance seriously as a core mission.” I know, from personal experience, that the people who work this issue at the department, at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (can we change that first word?), do take it seriously. The QDDR did not, and is not, going to help them much in reforming the system.

Strategy, Planning, and Budgeting Take a Hike

And how about that third priority issue for the State Department — making strategic planning a reality and tying in all the planning and budgeting so that the department actually has something we can call a respectable strategic plan?

The QDDR is pretty good about the progress made here over the past six years. There actually is a functioning foreign assistance budget process. It even includes planning at the embassies, which do integrated country strategies and pass them back to Washington, where regional bureaus do joint regional strategies and where functional bureaus (like CSO and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor) do functional strategies. And every year, the embassies and bureaus do a resource request for the next year. Under strong leadership, the State Department’s foreign assistance budget office has made a real contribution to budget planning at the department, more than I have seen in over 20 years following that process.

But, and there is a big but, the pieces are not together to do a real strategic plan at the State Department, and the QDDR does not make any progress on assembling them. For one thing, broader strategic planning, to the degree it is done, is done in that other planning office I mentioned — the management side of Foggy Bottom. This means, of course, that people, IT, communications, buildings, and, above all, personnel policy are not meshed with program planning in the foreign assistance office. Not something the Pentagon’s Programming, Planning, Budgeting, and Execution System would let happen for a nanosecond.

Do people, training, and investments in support have nothing to do with programs? Not plausible, but the new QDDR does not bite the bullet and finally create a full-service planning and budgeting office under the secretary of state. Ducked that one, again.

And while they were not at it, they also ducked the question of making that office a statutory one. Right now, the foreign assistance office just depends on the goodwill of the secretary; the next one could blow it away without any trouble, and might. And there would go all that previous progress.

Wait Until Next Year

This time around, the QDDR took a walk, by and large. It described a lot of what the State Department does now, made some of it look new, took a few small steps ahead, but punted on the big ones. Which leaves the job to the next secretary, and to the next QDDR, if it happens. If past is prologue, the next secretary of state will look at the management and planning side of Foggy Bottom and leave it to someone else while he or she flies around the world doing the “fun” stuff. And the longtime effort to reform and strengthen the State Department will be handed off again, as it has been for decades.

Photo credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In August 2013, just months after being selected to lead the Catholic Church, Pope Francis told an interviewer that the Holy See’s clergy and diplomats should be less fixated on questions of sexual morality and show greater concern for the fate of billions of people abandoned by a modern “throwaway” culture that pays little heed to the world’s poor and persecuted.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis said in the interview, in which he underscored the importance of promoting peace and tackling poverty and wealth inequality. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

The comments marked the start of a major rebranding campaign for the Catholic Church, whose image has been tarnished in recent years by the hierarchy’s failure to crack down on sexual abuse by priests and its clergy’s reputation as hard-bitten crusaders more committed to enforcing stringent moral codes than promoting peace and ministering to the world’s neediest.

Two years into his papacy, Pope Francis has also managed to successfully restore the Holy See’s reputation as an important diplomatic player. He has cultivated a personal image as peacemaker and truth-teller, brokered secret diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Cuba, and forced the world to confront uncomfortable truths, from the Armenian genocide to the deadly exodus of thousands of immigrants into Europe. He has also emerged as a powerful voice of compassion for those long living on the fringes of the church, or at least treated as second-class citizens, including the destitute, women, and openly gay Catholics.

But at U.N. headquarters, a central clearinghouse for world diplomacy and the September destination of the first papal visit since 1995, diplomats say the objectives of the Holy See have changed little under Pope Francis, and that the pope’s envoys remains very much entrenched on the front lines of the culture wars the pope himself has suggested he wants to leave behind. In debates on issues from development to poverty, the Holy See’s observer mission continues to serve primarily as a bulwark against efforts by Western governments to expand progressive policies, including sexual and reproductive rights, that have long been anathema to the church.

Archbishop Bernardito Auza, a Filipino priest Pope Francis appointed as the Vatican’s de facto ambassador  to the U.N. last year, frequently uses the U.N. pulpit to promote the church’s conservative values, denouncing abortion and efforts to restrict population growth, and decrying the rise of artificial insemination as beneath the dignity of women and men alike. “Men are human beings, not horses, and any attempt to diminish men basically to purveyors of biological material is unworthy of their dignity,” he said in a March 19 speech at the Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium at U.N. headquarters. “Children must be begotten in love, not manufactured in labs.”

U.N.-based diplomats say that the pope, as well as Auza, have outlined a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda in their public statements. But they say the message hasn’t trickled down to the Holy See’s negotiators in New York. “We have been very happy to hear some of the signals that have come from Pope Francis: He has been more progressive and indicated that he didn’t want the church to be as dogmatic as it has been,” said one Western diplomat who has negotiated with the church’s diplomats at the United Nations. “But when you look at what is happening on the ground here in New York, you don’t really see that change at all.”

A review of a confidential internal negotiating text from a recent conference on the Commission on Population and Development, obtained by Foreign Policy, show the Holy See’s negotiator working to strip out references to “reproductive rights,” which the Vatican sees as a green light for abortion, and “gender equality,” a phrase the Vatican views as an implicit endorsement of transgender rights.

“We are not sure whether [the pope] doesn’t have the influence in the organization you would hope he has, or he didn’t mean it,” the diplomat added.

Indeed, there is little doubt that Francis is already walking a delicate line between conservatives who share his predecessor’s more traditional views of gay marriage and abortion and pragmatists more amenable to softening those stances.

Defenders of the pope also say the Vatican’s diplomatic activity is by no means limited to matters of sex and reproductive rights.

Pope Francis and his U.N. envoy have taken advantage of the Catholic Church’s status as the only religion recognized as an observer state at the U.N. to promote a range of other causes, from the abolition of nuclear weapons and the fight against climate change to the protection of migrants and Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa. His role in opening the door to talks between the U.S. and Cuba stands as one of the more remarkable diplomatic achievements of the past decade.

“The word on the street is that Francis matters,” said John Allen Jr., associate editor at the Boston Globe and its Catholic coverage website Crux, and author of nine books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs. Allen said that “delegates are now constantly approached by their governments for reads on what the pope is up to.”

From Backwater to Diplomatic Hot Spot

Only four years ago, the Vatican was in danger of becoming a diplomatic backwater. Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had previously been the guardian of Catholic doctrine in the Vatican. Benedict had taken an interest in the major challenges of the day, earning the moniker of the “green pope” and playing a role in urging Iran to release 15 British sailors. But he showed less interest in diplomacy than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who has been credited with working with President Ronald Reagan to topple the Soviet Union.

In Rome, diplomats wondered aloud whether diplomatic embassies at the Vatican even made sense, recalled Allen.

In November 2011, Ireland, a major Catholic country, withdrew its ambassador from the Vatican following protests by then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who accused the Holy See of obstructing an investigation into sex abuse. Ireland claimed the decision was designed to save money, but many diplomats suspect it was a result of the sex abuse dispute.

Vatican officials feared it was the start of a diplomatic exodus from the Vatican by governments that felt embassies weren’t worth the expense given the Holy See’s diminished diplomatic profile, according to Allen.

“There was a perception during the Benedict years that the Vatican had become less relevant,” he said, noting that the church’s Vatican diplomacy has under Pope Francis evaporated such notions. “Nobody is talking about that anymore.”

In an April interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama said the United States consults “very closely” with the church about how the U.S. can help protect religious minorities in conflict areas.

Obama will meet with the pope at the White House in September, where he intends to discuss climate change and matters of “war and peace,” including in the Middle East, “where Christians have been viciously attacked,” the president said in the interview.

In a March speech at Durham University in England, Britain’s envoy to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said his “embassy, and the other 80 or so resident embassies to the Holy See from governments around the world, have never been busier, because their is a real interest in and demand for our reporting on the views of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the key issues of the day.”

Other countries have sought to leverage the Pope’s charisma and influence to advance their interests. A spokesman for Israel’s foreign minister, for example, said his government is looking to expand relations with the Vatican to collaborate on countering radical Islam.

“We would like to further upgrade our relations with the Vatican, and start a broader and more significant dialogue on issues of mutual concern such as the fate of Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa and the rise of radical Islam,” Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman told FP. “As part of this dialogue, we would like to see an official visit of top Vatican officials in Israel.”

The Israeli officials remarks follows a round of high profile Middle East diplomacy by Pope Francis, who traveled to the region early on in his papacy and invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel’s then President Shimon Peres to Rome to pray together for peace in the Middle East. The symbolic meeting was followed by the launch of Israel’s military incursion into Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge. But it highlighted Pope Francis’ commitment to engaging in even the most controversial political and military crises.

“It’s the Same Hardline”

Pope Francis intends to highlight his diplomatic ambitions in a high-profile trip next September to the United Nations, where he will address the U.N. General Assembly at a Summit on Sustainable Development, which will endorse a new set of 17 development goals, known as the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. He will also back as many as 169 more detailed targets that can be met by 2030, including the eradication of poverty and hunger, increase opportunities for the education of children and women, and the promotion of economic growth that is environmentally sustainable.

The visit aims to underscore the church’s commitment to addressing “poverty and social justice” and drawing attention to the international community’s responsibility to uphold “religious freedom” and defend minorities from persecution, Auza said in an interview with the Deseret News previewing the pope’s visit

“In the Middle East, the United Nations has been in a sense powerless, it has not been able to find a way how to stop bloodshed and persecutions, especially against Christians and minorities,” he said.

Behind the scenes most of the Holy See’s diplomatic influence has been mustered to advance the Vatican’s position in supporting a traditional view of the human family that leaves little room for gays.  During negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, the Holy See has largely devoted its energies to pushing back on efforts by Western government to expanding reproductive rights and the protections afforded women, girls, and gays. “They are focused on very few issues; the only time you hear about them in negotiations is on issues relating to abortion, women’s rights, the family,” said a European diplomat. “I really haven’t encountered them on any other issues in last years.”

A second Western diplomat who has negotiated across the table from the Catholic Church’s diplomats for years said the Vatican’s traditional negotiating positions and policy preferences haven’t changed under Francis.

“The new pope he has a different outlook on the world, which could really launch the [Catholic Church] in a whole different type of dialogue at the U.N.,” the diplomat said. “But they don’t do that. Not much has changed when you get into the negotiating room. It’s the same hardline.”

Last month, the Holy See’s diplomats continued it push to restrict sexual rights in negotiations before the Commission on the Status of Women. “The one thing they tried to do was insert the word “fundamental” before any mention of the human rights of women and girls,” recalled Shannon Kowalski of the International Women’s Health Coalition. “In their minds, this would potentially exclude reproductive rights, sexual rights or other human rights that have not been explicitly agreed in U.N. treaties. They also opposed reference to the role of women’s organizations or feminist organizations in advancing gender equality.”

In a separate debate last year on the Sustainable Development Goals, a centerpiece of the pope’s diplomatic priorities at the United Nations, Francis’s representative expressed concern that the negotiations were heading towards perilous moral waters.

“For a large number of countries, ‘reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights agenda infringes on their national sovereignty in the politically and morally fraught questions of abortion,” Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Holy See’s former nuncio at U.N. headquarters, said last May in a statement on one of the SDG’s goals.

Two months later, the Holy See issued a statement indicating that they could only partially join the consensus on the final document to be endorsed by world leaders because it included references to phrases like “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” and “family planning.”

Vatican diplomats also sought to restrict sex education to youngsters, saying the “primary responsibility lies with parents,” a provision that would restrict minor’s access to sex education.  Finally, the Holy See’s delegation pointed out that it understands any reference to the word “gender” in a final document to mean “male or female” only, a move aimed at heading off any language affording rights to gays or transgender people that don’t identify themselves in traditional sexual roles.

They also denounced violence and discrimination against women and girls, forced marriage, and reinforced the church’s commitment to achieve equal access to education and employment opportunity, and address of unpaid care work.

Kowalski, of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said that while Pope Francis has projected a more progressive image, she has seen no evidence in a shift in the Holy See’s policies at the United Nations.

“We have really seen a continuation of business as usual,” said Sharon Kowalski. “We always saw them honing in on language about sexual rights. There have been a lot of proposed goals on poverty eradication and on reducing equality and the Holy See hasn’t said anything. They have been quiet.”

Hanging With Ban Ki-Moon

Many diplomats say it is misleading to judge the pope’s diplomatic outreach on the basis of what his envoys do at the United Nations. Most of the serious diplomatic outreach takes place in the Vatican, they say, not in the corridors of the United Nations.

One western diplomat recalled a recent meeting between an envoy from his government and high-level Vatican diplomats eager to protect Christians. During the meeting, church officials raised a broad range of concerns, from the stalled Middle East peace process to the Iranian nuclear deal to the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa.

“On the protection of Christians they asked us to be open and upfront and to name the issue as a problem,” according to the diplomat. They also urged the governments to be careful not to inadvertently “contribute to the further exodus of Christians” from Iraq and Syria through overly generous immigration policies. “The main message was ‘the Christians need to return. They belong there,'” the diplomat recalled.

The deadly exodus of migrants who leave North Africa and attempt to make it to Europe is a top diplomatic priority for Francis and his diplomats. The Vatican routinely scolds European envoys traveling through Rome about their failure to do more to to address the problem. Rome’s message is a blunt one: “The Mediterranean should not become a cemetery and the Europeans have a common responsibility to do something about it,” said one European diplomat.

Francis’s personal outreach to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been particularly active. Last month, Francis hosted Ban at the Vatican for a discussion about climate change and the fate of the African and Middle Eastern refugees risking their lives on deadly boat trips in search of a better future in Europe. “They are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war. They were looking for a better life,” Francis told thousands of followers during April 19 prayers in St. Peter’s Square. Next month, the pope plans to issue his first papal encyclical on the impact climate change inflicts on the world’s poorest.

Behind closed doors at the Vatican, the Pope assured Ban of his commitment to fighting climate change. But the discussions soon veered off onto other topics, including the link between migration and human trafficking and the need to tackle the root cause of poverty and inequality. They also touched on nuclear disarmament, the conflict in South Sudan, and the role that sports can play in promoting peace. “It was a really wide ranging discussion; I think there is now wider common ground bet the U.N. agenda and the pope’s agenda,” according to a senior U.N. diplomat. “I think [Pope Francis’s] heart is in the U.N. agenda.”

Francis invited Ban to the Vatican shortly after he was appointed pope, and they have met at least once every year. Last year, the U.N. held its annual meeting of heads of U.N. agencies in Rome, a gathering that brought together more than 40 of the U.N.’s top officials. The pope went around the room to shake each and chat with each of the participants.

Those early meetings led to collaboration between Jeffrey Sachs, a senior adviser to the U.N. chief on sustainable development and the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Religions for Peace.  On April 28, they organized an interfaith conference entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity.”

A statement underscored the role of mankind has played in causing global warming and called on wealthy nations to underwrite the costs of developing countries trying to respond to the devastating impact of climate change. “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity,” it stated.

“If the pope is involved it increases the outreach,” said Janos Pasztor, a senior advisor to the U.N. chief on global warming, noting that Ban and Francis have agreed to join together in raising public awareness of climate change. “The pope is the number one potential mobilizer in the world; he speaks to 1.2 billion Catholics, plus a lot of other people.”

Who Am I to Judge?

Francis has also raised hopes that his papacy that would strike a dramatically different approach to gays than his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who once signed a Vatican letter asserting that homosexuality is “an objective disorder” that reflects a “strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil.”

Francis has spoken compassionately about gays, suggesting the church would be accepting of them. In February, the Vatican for the first time granted VIP seats to the New Ways Ministry, a group of visiting gay and lesbian Catholics, to a weekly audience with the pope at St. Peter’s Square.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?,” he said in an August 2013 interview.” Last October, the Vatican issued a report indicating that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian Church.”

The pope’s remarks were embraced as the dawn of a more compassionate church that would focus on the matters that affect all humanity.  But on the eve of the pope’s upcoming visit to the United Nations, advocates for gays, women and other marginalized groups have been disappointed on that front, saying the Holy See’s diplomats have invested most of their diplomatic resources into leading a cultural war.

In an early test of the Vatican’s tolerance for homosexuality, France selected in January an openly gay diplomat, Laurent Stefanini, to serve as its envoy to the Vatican.  Paris has yet to hear back, though the pope invited Stefanini, a Catholic who had served at the Vatican for four years, to prayer.

“The Vatican’s refusal to acknowledge his credentials was a slap,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of Dignity USA, an organization of gay and lesbian Catholics. Duddy-Burke initially welcomed the Vatican’s stance on gays in the church as an “undeniable breakthrough.” Now, she said, she has situated herself in the “wanting to be hopeful but still skeptical camp” about the Pope’s outreach to gays and others.  “It totally gives lie to the sense that gay people are welcome in the Church.”

The Vatican’s views on homosexuality reveals a deep seated anxiety about the way that U.N. bureaucrats and Western governments have framed international discussion on development and concerns about efforts to control population.

Those concerns were heightened in debates on population and women’s rights in the mid-1990s in Cairo and Beijing, which fueled calls for universal access to reproductive health services and family planning information by 2015.

The Vatican’s principle preoccupation is less about sex than about what it views as the emergence of radical new definition of gender, which see human beings, not simply as men and women, but as individuals who can determine their own sexual identity control their natural reproductive cycle.

For the Church, this represents an affront by liberals and feminists to the natural biological order and the traditional family, headed by a man and woman, and contributes to homosexuality, abortion and the erosion of the family.

Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican launched an inquiry into the largest the Leadership Conference of Women Religious on the ground for promoting “radical feminism” themes incompatible with the Catholic faith. They were cited for straying from church doctrine on issues like birth control and an all-male priesthood and scolded for devoting too much time to tending the on poverty and economic inequality while remaining  silent about abortion and same-sex marriage. Last month, the Vatican reached a settlement with the nuns that effectively ended the stand off.

Pope Francis “hasn’t changed the church’s position on abortion or gay marriage but his attitude is everybody already knows where the church stands on that,” said Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest who serves as a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “We don’t have to beat a dead horse.”

The Pope is Not Waiving the White Flag in the Culture Wars

Other observers say Pope Francis is facing a difficult balancing act, and that some may have had unrealizable expectations on liberal causes, including gay rights and abortion.

“The Catholic Church has always been pro-life and also in favor of peace and justice, and this is true of Pope Francis,” according to Allen. “The fact that he probably speaks more about the poor and migrants and the environment than pro-life matters is not intended to get the Vatican out of the pro-life game.”

The Catholic hierarchy is largely divided into camps: the theologians, who ascribe to a pure reading of church doctrine, and the diplomats, who think the church should be more focused on matters of peace and justice. For now, the diplomats are in ascendance at the Vatican, but the pope has had to assure the theologians that he is not rewriting church doctrine. Last August, Francis visited a so-called cemetery for “abortion victims” outside of Seoul South, Korea, to underscore the church opposition to abortion. Francis has “to convince the pro-life contingent in the church that he is not their enemy,” said Allen. “And he has done stuff to make clear he is not waiving the white flag in the culture wars.”

Photo by Vatican Pool/Getty Images

 

You know all those “salute to the troops” stuff thrown up on football scoreboards? It turns out that the NFL charges for at least some of them. And we’re the chumps footing the bill.

No, this is not from the Duffel Blog or Onion. Christopher Baxter of NJ.com

reports that the Pentagon, which is begging Congress for big bucks, actually paid NFL teams $5.4 million of your hard-earned money.

For example, the Jets were paid nearly $400,000 for several promotions, including, according to the contract, “A videoboard feature – Hometown Hero. For each of their 8 home game [sic], the Jets will recognize 1-2 NJARNG Soldiers as Home Town Heroes. Their picture will be displayed on the videoboard, their name will be announced over the loud speaker, and they will be allowed to watch the game, along with 3 friends or family members, from the Coaches Club.”

This is one of the crassest manipulations of patriotism I have ever seen. As a friend points out, it makes the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk look prescient but way too gentle.

(HT to JH)

Seymour Hersh says that pretty much everything written about the killing of bin Laden is wrong. Here is his account. Lots of anonymous sources, but good questions raised. In a nutshell, he says that Pakistani officials told the U.S. where bin Laden was, and that they allowed the incursion of American aircraft into their airspace. He also says there is no evidence that bin Laden actually was buried at sea.

A friend asks, Who benefits from Hersh’s version? The answer is, on more than one account, that the Pakistani military does. That is, Hershs’ retired officials are stating that 1. Pakistan did indeed help the U.S. get bin Laden, and 2. That Pakistan’s air defenses are better than they appear, so India shouldn’t get any ideas. The friend also notes that there have been a whole bunch of accounts of how bin Laden was found and killed, and that these accounts have been very consistent. Americans are not good at maintaining official fictions.

The Washington Post ’s Erin Cunningham tweets, “Easy for Pakistani officials to claim after the fact that they knew of the bin Laden raid. Not sure how that’s proof of anything. Also clear he [Hersh] hasn’t read Joby Warrick’s deeply reported book ‘Triple Agent,’ released July 2011.” More here.

Bottom line: I am inclined to doubt the assertions of the Hersh article. I wonder if that it is why it appeared in a British publication, rather than the New Yorker, for which he often writes.

Quote of the day: Hersh is quoted by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn as saying that, “Pakistan has a good army, not a bad army, but the cover story made it look bad.” He also asserted, incorrectly, that Pakistan is a “total ally” of the United States. Hmm.

Wikimedia Commons/Institute for Policy Studies 

It is a long article, but after a few paragraphs you will know if you need to read it.

Wikimedia Commons; Warner Bros.

Afghanistan

19 kidnapped Hazara passengers released

Nineteen passengers who were kidnapped by militants from a bus in February in southern Afghanistan were released on Monday (BBC, Pajhwok, AP). The passengers on the bus — all from the minority Hazara community — were abducted while traveling home from working in Iran. Assadullah Kakar, who was one of the negotiators working to secure the release of the passengers, told BBC that the 19 passengers were released in exchange for 22 children of the families of insurgents from Uzbekistan who were being held in government prisons. However, Pajhwok Afghan News reported that the passengers were exchanged for 28 Taliban prisoners who were in government custody. It is unclear what militant group kidnapped the group of passengers; some reports say the Taliban is responsible while others suggest the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is to blame.

Taliban attack second bus in a week

A suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Afghan government employees in Kabul on Sunday, killing three people (Reuters). The attack was the second in just a week in the same area of the capital. The bus was carrying mostly employees from the attorney general’s office who were returning home from work. Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the attack. Last Monday, another suicide bomber targeted a bus in the same area, killing one person and wounding 15 others.

Pakistan

Author says Pakistan knew about bin Laden raid

In a story published in the London Review of Books on Sunday, Seymour Hersh wrote that Pakistan not only knew about the U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, but that they led the United States to him in the first place (LRB). Hersh contends that the idea that the Pakistan Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) were not told about the raid in advance is false and that “the White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll.” Hersh asserts that a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached the CIA’s station chief at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 2010 and offered to lead them to bin Laden, starting an investigation and eventual cooperation with Pakistan’s Army and the ISI (Dawn).

The White House position remains that the Pakistani Army and ISI were never informed of the U.S. mission. Others also dispute the evidence Hersh uses to support his claim. Bonus Read: “Was the bin Laden killing story a lie?” Peter Bergen (CNN).

PM, Army Chief to visit Kabul

Prime Minister Nawaz Shairf and Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif, along with a high-level delegation, will visit Afghanistan on Tuesday (ET, Dawn). The Express Tribune reports that three major issues will be discussed during the visit: negotiations with the Afghan Taliban, the allegations of India’s spy agency presence in Afghanistan, and Pakistani military operation Zarb-e-Azb against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups. The trip tomorrow will be Sharif’s second visit to Afghanistan and the first after the installation of the National Unity Government in Kabul.

India

Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister acquitted in corruption case

Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the former chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and a former movie star, was cleared of all charges by the Karnataka High Court in a 19-year old corruption case. Jayalalithaa had been convicted and jailed last year for holding 530 million rupees ($8.7 million) in unaccounted cash and other assets, but she appealed, and the verdict has been overturned (The Times of India, The Hindu, NDTV). Current Chief Minister O Panneerselvam, who had been hand-picked by Jayalalithaa to succeed her after her conviction, is expected to resign, paving the way for Jayalalithaa to return to her post as early as May 17. Jayalalithaa is also expected to resume leadership of the AIADMK party, which holds the third largest number of seats in the lower house of India’s parliament (Reuters). Subramanian Swamy, one of the petitioners in the case and a leader of the rival BJP, expressed surprise and announced his plans to appeal the decision.

Government seeks to protect rights of adopted daughters

The Indian government has proposed a change to the British-era Registration Act of 1908 that would protect the right to inherit property for adopted daughters. While a 2005 amendment changed the interpretation of the law to include daughters, the proposed change would make that inclusion explicit. “Since 2005, daughters have equal rights over property. This could make sure than an adopted girl is not left out as an heir. It is an important step to bring into practice the amended law of 2005,” said Ram Singh, an associate professor at the Delhi School of Economics (The Economic Times, The Times of India).

India’s lion population on the rise

India’s lion population has increased by 27 percent since 2010, according to the 2015 lion census conducted by the Gir Forest National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary (BBC). The number of lions has gone up from 411 in 2010 to 523 in 2015, according to the census, which was conducted by 2,500 officials and volunteers. In an encouraging sign, the number of lion cubs has been increasing as well as the overall population (The Indian Express). Gir Forest in the state of Gujarat is the only home to wild Asiatic lions.

— Udit Banerjea and Emily Schneider

Edited by Peter Bergen

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

By Paul McLeary and Ariel Robinson

Bring in the drones. In January 2014, the United States sent 14 unarmed ScanEagle drones to Iraq as a part of a larger weapons deal to assist then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in quelling what was then seen as a rekindled Sunni rebellion in western Iraq.

We haven’t heard much about those birds since the initial announcement was made, but last week, on May 7, the Defense Department said that Iraq had completed the $10 million deal with the Washington-state based ScanEagle maker Insitu Inc. to operate the drones, along with providing enough maintenance personnel to support the “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services program and force protection services for the government of Iraq,” at Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad.

The ScanEagle has been a workhorse for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The five-foot long, 30-40 lb. drone is capable of staying aloft for 24 hours at a time.

In other ScanEagle news, does anyone else wonder what happened to the 12 ScanEagle and NightEagle drones that the Yemeni government bought in September 2014? Some $500 million worth of U.S. military equipment was lost earlier this year when Houthi rebels took over a series of military bases there, but we haven’t heard many details.

Standing room only. It wasn’t the greatest view, but the steps of the River Entrance at the Pentagon was a nice little spot to watch the 70 WWII-era planes fly over Washington last Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII. A good chunk of the press corps and a few hundred other Pentagon staffers shuffled out of the building around lunchtime to see the show, and we found ourselves standing just a few steps down from Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who was safely ensconced in the shade while we worked on a “good base tan” to start beach season.

Carter actually stood just a few feet behind a small group of reporters — we’ve discovered over the past three months that he certainly doesn’t like standing in front of us — while his chief of staff Eric Fanning (until recently the Undersecretary of the Air Force) was out in his shirtsleeves chatting up a group of Air Force officers. The scene made us a little regretful that we’re not up to date on the full list on Air Force one- and two-star generals, since there were lots of brass from the air service milling about, unencumbered by their staffs.

We also had a front row seat for the Curtis Helldiver that had to peel off and make an emergency landing at National Airport. It flew almost right over the Pentagon on its safe descent on to the runway. No one was hurt, thankfully.

Who’s on first? On Sunday, The New York Times’ Helene Cooper reported that Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz would not attend the much-hyped Gulf Cooperation Council meeting that President Barack Obama is hosting at Camp David this week, in a move being seen as a snub to the Obama administration.

Just wanted to point out that FP’s own John Hudson reported last Thursday that  “a U.S. official told Foreign Policy the White House had not yet confirmed the attendance of a number of key officials in the GCC — a union that includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar.”

The weekend’s over and it’s time once again to start getting your daily fill of the mayhem and destruction — and occasional tentative stabs at hope and understanding — that our fellow human beings inflict on one another. Too dark? Let me know at paul.mcleary@foreignpolicy.com or on Twitter: @paulmcleary

Think Tanked

At 9:00 a.m. at the Brookings Institution, the shop’s Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow, Center for Middle East Policy talks “The future of Iraq: A conversation with Sunni leaders,” with Rafi al-Issawi, former Iraqi deputy prime minister and minister of finance, and Atheel al-Nujayfi, Governor of Ninewah Province. At 10:00 a.m. at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright and Sean O’Keefe, former administrator of NASA, talk about “U.S. Strategy for Civil and Military Space.” And then at 10:30 a.m., The Center for Cyber & Homeland Security at the George Washington University hosts the “State of the Cybersecurity Union,” with Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency.

Counterterrorism

The Daily Beast’s Jamie Dettmer reports from Turkey that he’s hearing Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “has been moved from Iraq to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the terror army’s de facto capital, amid tight security two months after sustaining serious shrapnel wounds leaving his spine damaged and his left leg immobile, say jihadist defectors.”

“Those guys are badass,” a U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber crew member recently told U.S. News & World Report’s Paul D. Shinkman about Kurdish fighters in the Syrian city of Kobani. Shinkman took a trip down to Dyess Air Force Base in Texas to talk to B-1 crews recently back from bombing runs over Syria, with one officer telling him that the Syria mission “gave us a recharge on the whole conflict, even in Afghanistan…we weren’t in a rut – we were still executing missions, but there was something different this time.”

AFP reports that “the global terrorist threat has entered a ‘new phase,’ where media-savvy Islamist extremists are successfully drawing lone wolf attackers to their cause, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security [Jeh Johnson] warned Sunday.”

This was echoed by Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) who told CNN, “the combination of those two groups [Al Qaeda and ISIL] — their appeal to the lone wolfs and we see them acting in Belgium and in France and in Canada and the United States, so the threat factors and the nature of the threats are far more complicated and far more serious today than on September 12, 2001.”

Europe

Norway’s modernization plans for its defense forces have been making waves these last few weeks. Over the weekend, Defense News’ Vago Muradian spoke with Norway’s chief of defense, Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanse, about a recently released report detailing the Norwegian military’s capabilities and weaknesses.

In Macedonia on Sunday, eight policemen and 14 gunmen were killed in an attack that authorities say was led by five Kosovars who were members of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, the BBC reports. More than 30 Macedonians and one Albanian were involved in the attack that left more than 37 additional officers wounded. “It’s total destruction,” one Macedonian is quoted as saying.

Last month, roughly 40 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo took over a police station, demanding the creation of an Albanian state within Macedonia. Tensions have been running high since an uprising in 2001.

Yemen

The Los Angeles Times’ Zaid Al-Alayaa and Patrick J. Mcdonnell report that Yemeni rebels have agreed to a five-day, humanitarian cease-fire proposed by the Saudis.

Nigeria

A gunmen opened fire outside the College of Administrative and Business Studies in Potiskum, Yobe state, Nigeria, the AFP reports, killing 12. The shooter blew himself up when he ran out of ammunition, but there were no additional casualties.

Egypt

Egyptian presidential spokesman Alaa Yousef said on Saturday that “Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed as firm relations between Cairo and Moscow, expressing his country’s support for Egypt,” according to Egypt’s State Information Service. During a meeting between Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the two leaders discussed bolstering their “already strong ties,” and “other issues of common concern.”  During the visit to Moscow, Sisi also met with his Vietnamese counterpart Truong Tan Sang.

The business of defense

“In the span of just a few weeks, a flurry of orders has reset the global fighter market,” writes Defense News in what’s bylined as a “staff report.” Since mid-February, Egypt, India, and Qatar all announced that they were planning to buy dozens of French-made Dassault Rafale fighter planes. In April, the United Arab Emirates said it was restarting talks with Dassault about the Rafale. Then, just last week it leaked that Kuwait was on the verge of buying up to 40 Boeing-made F/A-18 E and F Super Hornet strike fighters from the United States. “It’s a shocking amount of activity for a fighter market that often sees just one or two procurements a year globally, and one analysts say is being driven by world events,” in the Middle East, the story says.

One more thing

Finally, we know that it’s Seymour Hersh, but his new story in the London Review of Books about all of the lies behind the official narrative(s) of the bin Laden raid is a good read. Take it as you will.

 

 

Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi movement, which have been fighting for nearly two months, have reached a plan for a five-day ceasefire, set to begin on Tuesday. A Houthi official posted on social media that they will accept the ceasefire if it proves to be “real and serious.” The pause will allow the delivery of critical humanitarian aid, but it is unclear whether the agreement will hold as neither side has strong control of its forces. In the meantime, though, Saudi airstrikes have continued, including strikes targeting the estate of ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh and more than a dozen Houthi leaders. Houthi forces have reportedly claimed responsibility for shooting down a Moroccan F-16 participating in the Saudi bombing campaign.

The United Nations has expressed its support for the planned pause in the conflict, but chafed at Saudi Arabia’s insistence on mediating humanitarian aid. U.N. policy states that the delivery of humanitarian aid should not be governed by a belligerent in a conflict. “The active engagement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is appreciated,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Johannes Van Der Klaauw said. “However, in all crises, the emergency relief coordinator is mandated to lead the coordination of international relief activities and emergency response.” Some humanitarian organizations said they did not think sufficient aid could be delivered in five days to alleviate crises that include medicine, food, water, and fuel shortages.

Assad Regime Arrests Intel Chief for Coup Plot

The Assad regime has placed Ali Mamlouk, head of the country’s National Security Bureau, under house arrest amid accusations that he was plotting a coup. Mamlouk was reportedly communicating with Turkish intelligence to try to arrange the return of Rifaat al-Assad, who has lived abroad since plotting to overthrow his brother Hafez in the 1980s. Last month, two other security chiefs were taken out of power in mysterious circumstances: Gen. Rafiq Shehadeh, head of military intelligence, was fired after his supporters attacked and killed Rustum Ghazaleh, the head of the Political Security Directorate. The internal conflict is said to be a reaction to overbearing Iranian influence on the regime.

Headlines

• The Saudi government confirmed that King Salman will not attend the Gulf summit hosted by President Obama at Camp David this week and will send Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his stead; other Gulf nations will also be sending diplomatic delegations instead of their monarchs.

 

• Libyan forces attacked a Turkish cargo ship carrying construction materials; Libyan officials said the ship was approaching rebel-held Derna, violating an embargo of the city, while Turkish officials say it was trying to reach Tobruk.

 

• European Union efforts to establish a quota system to distribute the burden of resettling migrants transiting the Mediterranean to Europe from North Africa have run into opposition from Slovakia and Estonia, possibly blocking its approval.

 

• Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davetoglu crossed into Syria to visit the tomb of Suleyman Shah, a figure from early Ottoman history, and said the Turkish flag “will fly over Suleyman Shah forever,” drawing criticism from the Assad regime for “a clear aggression.”

 

• An Egyptian court has sentenced ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons to three years in prison on corruption charges, reaffirming a previous ruling; Mubarak was previously acquitted of murder charges for deaths during the 2011 uprising against his rule.

-J. Dana Stuster

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images

Cette recension d’ouvrage est issue de Politique étrangère (1/2015). Camille Vaziaga propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Boris Beaude, Les fins d’internet  (Limoges, FYP Éditions, 2014, 96 pages).

Dans l’ouvrage de Boris Beaude, chercheur au laboratoire Chôros de l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, « les fins d’internet » désignent aussi bien les finalités qui ont conduit à la naissance de l’internet comme réseau ouvert et décentralisé, que la mise à mort de ses fondements sous la pression de sa commercialisation, des failles sécuritaires et de la régulation étatique.

À sa création, l’internet porte en lui les attentes de chercheurs qui perçoivent la Seconde Guerre mondiale comme le résultat, pour partie, d’un système de communication inefficient. Le nouveau réseau devait alors dépasser la territorialité des nationalismes, garantir la transparence des échanges et établir la liberté d’expression comme valeur commune dans le monde. La participation, l’indépendance et la transparence sont trois conditions nécessaires à la constitution de l’internet comme espace de liberté d’expression et de contribution à l’intelligence collective. Or ces conditions ne peuvent être remplies à l’heure où le réseau se privatise, où les collaborations répondent davantage à des enjeux professionnels qu’individuels et où des algorithmes aux formules mathématiques tenues secrètes organisent l’espace informationnel.

Les organisations privées ne sont pas les seules à mettre à mal la liberté d’expression sur le web, entendue ici dans une acception héritée des Lumières. Le discours libertaire porté par les pionniers de l’internet est, par nature, incompatible avec la notion d’État-nation et les enjeux sécuritaires de ces derniers. De ce fait, le réseau est devenu un espace régulé et surveillé sous des formes variant en fonction des cultures nationales. L’Iran construit son intranet tandis que la National Security Agency (NSA) américaine généralise au monde entier ses pratiques de surveillance. Pour Beaude, qui travaille depuis plusieurs décennies sur les relations de causalité entre espace et politique, cette hétérogénéité trouve une traduction dans la géographie même de l’espace internet. Conçu à l’origine comme décentralisé, celui-ci subit aujourd’hui une « hypercentralité ». Là encore, celle-ci est le résultat tant des organisations privées que des États.

D’une part les entreprises ont su détourner la gratuité favorisée par le fonctionnement même de l’internet : contre le service gratuit, l’internaute accepte de livrer ses informations personnelles et devient lui-même le produit vendu aux annonceurs. Les firmes du secteur cherchent désormais à monopoliser le plus grand espace, en imposant à l’utilisateur le choix par défaut d’un logiciel ou d’une application, en limitant l’interopérabilité des services, ou encore en diversifiant leurs activités pour capter tous les segments de la chaîne de valeur et de nouveaux créneaux commerciaux. L’utopie de déterritorialisation et de décentralisation portée par l’internet se heurte également au repli des États qui constatent la vulnérabilité de leurs données en ligne et la domination américaine. Pour l’auteur, ces deux facteurs conduisent au retour d’une certaine forme d’impérialisme et génèrent donc une méfiance des États entre eux, en contradiction même avec l’universalité à laquelle aspirait le réseau.

En conclusion, Beaude évoque la dérive d’un internet neutre vers un internet neutralisé, et invite les États-nations et les organisations privées, soit tous les acteurs qui se sont emparés du réseau, à initier un grand débat autour des enjeux politiques de « ce seul lien que l’humanité ait en commun ».

S’abonner à Politique étrangère.

(Own report) - Saturday's crash of an Airbus A400M transporter near Seville, Spain, has put a damper on Germany's ambitions of developing autonomous global military intervention capabilities. The military transport plane had been destined to replace the German Bundeswehr's current Transall airlifters, designed in the 1960s for relatively short-ranged European combat scenarios, therefore hardly applicable for global warfare assignments of the future. With years of delay and numerous technical problems, Saturday's crash means another delay for the German Air Force's conversion to the A400M. It is, nevertheless, still unclear whether the plane can cover all the functions, it was supposed to fulfill. Paris is already considering the purchase of US transporters. Should this happen, German-European ambitions of becoming completely autonomous in their global military interventions would be confronted with a new set of problems. In any case, for the time being the Bundeswehr will remain dependent upon Russian support for transporting their combat material to their theaters of mission. Last December, a contract to this effect, reached in 2006 with a Russian-Ukrainian joint venture, was renewed. The contract stipulates the conditions for use of the Russian-made Antonov Transporter carriers for relocating German combat material.

On interroge souvent les relations entre scène théâtrale et scène politique en se penchant sur les politiques culturelles, mais plus rarement sur les nouvelles formes artistiques qu'elles produisent. Prolongeant la réflexion de Gérard Noiriel sur la fonction du théâtre dans les sociétés contemporaines (...) / Algérie, France, Art, Culture, Histoire, Théâtre - 2015/05

Deux frères sont prisonniers d'un puits de terre, au cœur d'une forêt, et tentent de s'en échapper. Il y a le Petit et le Grand, l'aîné, qui ouvre le récit : « Impossible de sortir on dirait, dit-il. Puis il ajoute : mais on sortira. » Une volonté de surmonter l'insurmontable, comme un écho aux derniers (...) / Espagne, Alimentation, Culture, Faim, Langue, Littérature, Fiction, Environnement - 2015/05

All over the world, people are forgetting to call their mothers on this second Sunday of May. Get on that, if you live in one of the dozens of countries celebrating Mother’s Day on May 10 this year. In Brazil, Dia das Mães is an unusually big deal. Families gather for celebrations and meals. The retail sector sees a spike in business topped only by Christmas. And thousands of prisoners are released temporarily so that they can go home to visit the women who raised them.

Prisoners in Brazil who demonstrate good behavior and meet other requirements are allowed to take five breaks from prison per year: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, Christmas, and one additional, flexible day. During the Christmas furlough two years ago, 47,531 inmates across Brazil left prison on temporary release. Some 2,400 never bothered to return. The Department of Corrections in São Paulo did not respond immediately to questions regarding the size of this year’s mass furlough.

More than 550,000 Brazilians are behind bars — the fourth largest prison population in the world, after the United States, China, and Russia. By most measures, Brazil’s prisons are in horrid shape, plagued by severe overcrowding and rampant violence. In 2013, nearly 60 inmates were murdered — in a single prison. An investigation uncovered that gang leaders were systematically raping inmate’s wives during conjugal visits there as well. In another facility, three prisoners were beheaded during a riot. And beneath the searing horrors that make international headlines, ordinary prisoners face terrible miscarriages of justice, often waiting for years in overcrowded group cells just to stand trial. While spared some of the violence male inmates face, women prisoners also contend with harsh conditions of confinement and abusive treatment, according to Human Rights Watch.

Despite the high rate of escape — which could be reduced through electronic monitoring, according to InSight Crime — the furlough program has substantial benefits: It helps inmates remain engaged with their communities and families, and helps them reintegrate more easily after release. It also leads to a spike in lawbreaking: A 2015 report by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security reported “notable increases” in crime during holidays Brazil — attributable in part to the “liberal system of prison furloughs.”

“Many people in Brazil believe that inmates must suffer, enduring hunger and depravity,” Euza Beloti, a psychologist, told the New York Times in March. “This thinking bolsters a system where prisoners return to society more violent than when they entered prison.”

The furlough system encourages a more progressive approach. And not all furloughs mark traditional, wholesome occasions like Mother’s Day. A new, experimental program has begun granting furloughs for another reason: Rituals deep in the jungle during which inmates consume ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen. “Each experience helps me communicate with my victim to beg for forgiveness,” Celmiro de Almeida, a homicide convict who has taken the drug nearly 20 times since going to prison, told the Times.

No word on how his mom feels about this method of rehabilitation. Call your mother!

Mario Tama/Getty Images

WARSAW — On Feb. 14, Magdalena Ogórek, a left-wing candidate in Poland’s presidential race, said if she were elected, she “would pick up the phone to call the Russian president” to normalize relations between Moscow and Warsaw. As it happens, it’s an unlikely scenario: The 36-year-old historian and TV personality is polling just 3 percent. But her comment sparked the question every candidate has now had to think about in the run up to the May 10 presidential election: Would you call Vladimir Putin?

The incumbent, President Bronislaw Komorowski, dismissed it outright. “If someone thinks that peace in Europe depends on a phone call, then they’re a bit out of touch with reality,” he said in a television interview. But that didn’t stop his main rival, Andrzej Duda, from releasing a campaign video showing a snoring Komorowski being woken in the night to take a phone call from Moscow. The clip ends with the words: “Do you want to continue worrying who will answer the phone?”

Foreign policy concerns — far beyond phone calls to the Kremlin — have been more prominent in this Polish election than previous ones, says Marcin Zaborowski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM). According to a recent poll, Poles consider security the most important topic in the presidential campaign. The spotlight has been on the conflict in Ukraine and its implications for Poland and the region.

Eleven candidates, ranging from anti-clerical left to the monarchist far-right, are running for president. But there is a broad consensus between the two main candidates, Komorowski and Duda: Poland must take a hard line toward Russia and keep up support for the embattled government in Kiev, acting as its advocate in the European Union.

Where there is discord is over the details. “Disagreements tend to focus on who is the most competent to achieve those objectives and the best way to achieve them,” says Aleks Szczerbiak, a professor at the University of Sussex, who writes a blog on Polish politics. Komorowski wants Poland in the “European mainstream,” working closely with Germany and others. In contrast, Duda is calling for a more independent Polish foreign policy that steers its Western allies and not the other way around, Szczerbiak adds.

Komorowski, who served as defense minister from 2000 to 2001 and, as president, serves as the commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, has presented himself as the only candidate capable of guaranteeing Poland’s security. NATO and its eastern flank need to be strengthened, he says. And he’s clear that Poland should take its own defense seriously. He recently announced two major arms purchases — Raytheon Patriot missiles from the United States, and 50 French Airbus Group helicopters — as part of Poland’s program to modernize its army.

Poland also needs to encourage Ukraine’s westward course, says Komorowski, who believes a stable, democratic, European Ukraine is vital to Poland’s security. “The Western world must understand that it will not be safe until Ukraine is safe,” he said in speech at the Ukrainian parliament in April, the first by a Polish president since 1997. Earlier this year, Komorowski stated that Poland was ready to sell weapons to Ukraine.

But if the incumbent sounds hawkish, his challenger, who is currently polling at around 30 percent is even more so. On international affairs, Komorowski and the current government are “flowing in the mainstream,” Duda said in a briefing on Feb. 18. There, the 42-year-old lawyer from Krakow said he believes that “this is not a sovereign policy,” because it means that “someone else is creating that current.” Poland, he added, should be the one to “create that current.”

Duda wants Poland to be “the regional leader of a bloc of post-communist states trying to persuade the Western powers to adopt a more robust response to Russian expansionism,” says Szczerbiak. In this way, his vision resembles that of the late Lech Kaczynski, Komorowski’s predecessor, who died in a plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, in 2010.

The only other contender with double-digit ratings on the eve of the election is Pawel Kukiz, a rock musician, running as an independent. “We should act within the framework of the [NATO] Alliance, but not step ahead of the line,” he said in a television interview on March 8. Poland can send Ukraine humanitarian aid, as well as bulletproof vests — but “no Kalashnikovs.”

Meanwhile, several minor candidates are calling for a more conciliatory attitude towards Russia. Ogórek, who first raised the idea of calling Putin, said at her campaign launch on Feb. 14 that Poland “cannot afford to have the Russian media defining us as Russia’s enemy No. 1.” The agrarian candidate, Adam Jarubas, has drawn attention to the plight of Polish farmers in the wake of Moscow’s ban on Polish agricultural products last summer, which has cost the country at least $550 million, according to government estimates. “We must view the economic dimension of [Poland’s relations with Russia] cooly,” he said at a talk on foreign policy in Warsaw on April 20.

These candidates are a reminder that not all Poles are delighted with Warsaw’s current support for Kiev. But, with each carrying less than 5 percent in polls, they are not serious contenders for the presidency.

Indeed, it’s re-election for Komorowski that still looks the most likely. The timing may work to his advantage: The election comes two days after the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe on May 8. Poland decided to shun the “Victory Day” parade in Moscow and held its own events on May 7 in Gdansk, attended by several leaders from the region, including Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko. These were preceded by a conference on the legacy of World War II that featured international historians — a deliberate contrast to the display of military might planned for Red Square. “Let us remember that the military demonstration [in Moscow on May 9] is not about history, but about today and the future,” Komorowski said ahead of the anniversary.

These commemorative events, in which Komorowski played a leading role, gave him a last minute chance to show that he is taking Poland’s security seriously, emphasizing parallels between the international situation seven decades ago and now, which adds credibility to his campaign’s security theme.

That may not be enough to give the incumbent the outright majority he’d need to avoid a runoff, where he’ll likely face Duda — and win. But even in the case of the unlikely, the Polish president won’t be dialing the Kremlin any time in the near future.

JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

GLASGOW — In Glasgow, there is hoary political cliché: voters would elect a monkey wearing a red Labour rosette, such is the party’s dominance in Scotland’s largest city. After Thursday, those lazy assumptions are gone forever.

The political earthquake that hit Scotland in the early hours of Friday morning was not unexpected. For months, opinion polls had predicted that the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) was set for a sweeping victory in the general election, winning almost every seat in Scotland. And yet, when the results finally arrived, the impact was no less jarring. Overnight, Scotland’s political landscape has been razed, with potentially seismic long-term repercussions for the whole of the United Kingdom.

Thursdays’ vote represented a seismic change from more than a decade of minimal change in Scotland at U.K. general elections. In 2010, not a single one of the 59 Westminster seats in Scotland changed hands. The SNP, which went into the election with six seats, now holds 56. The nationalists’ previous best general election return was 11, in 1974.

Stories of improbable victories abound: In Glasgow North East, for example, Willie Bain, who was thought to hold the safest seat in the west of Scotland, lost his Labour seat by a margin of 58.1 percent to 33.7 percent – the swing of almost 40 per cent from the 2010 election, setting a U.K. record for volatility. Similar figures were recorded across Scotland: In Coatbridge, for example, the sitting Labour MP, in office since 1982, was swept from power by a swing of more than 36 percent to the SNP. In Paisley, Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander was defeated by a 20-year-old who has yet to sit her finals at university. In the Highlands, the SNP’s Drew Hendry solidly beat Danny Alexander who had been Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the treasury in the coalition government at Westminster.

Labour lost all but one of the 41 seats it took in 2010. The party, founded by a Scot, Keir Hardie, and effectively forged as a political force in the heartlands of industrial Scotland, could struggle to regain power again.

The SNP’s general election victory was widely welcomed on the streets of Glasgow Friday. The SNP had never won a general election seat in Scotland’s largest city before, though the city voted for independence. Now, all seven Glasgow MPs are Scottish nationalist. Aiden, 25, who works in a coffee shop and had voted nationalist for the first time, was “delighted with the result,” he said. “We need a change and that’s what this is.”

On Thursday night at a sports arena in Glasgow’s East End, ashen-faced Labour activists stood solemnly watching the returning officer on stage announce the results of each of the seven seats in the city. All fell to the Scottish nationalists, with huge swings away from Labour incumbents. “We are in different territory,” Frank McAveety, a former Labour member of the Scottish Parliament and sitting councilor told me as he stood watching the returning officer declare yet another SNP victory. Labour, he said, did not offer Scottish voters a clear narrative. “We need to find a way that we are telling the story of Scotland’s future.”

But Labour’s problems in Scotland run too deep to be resolved with simply a more compelling story. The party has long dominated Scottish politics — especially at the local level, Labour has controlled Glasgow city council for all but four years since 1952. But in recent years, Labour has looked increasingly lethargic and out of touch. The party’s share of the U.K. general election vote remained strong until Thursday – it won over 40 per cent in 2010 – but Labour lost control of the devolved Scottish parliament in 2007, and was badly beaten in the 2011 Scottish elections.

Lacking resources and active members, Labour often struggled to compete with the SNP on the ground during this general election campaign. Even in Labour held seats the party was often thin on the ground, forced to reply on mailshots and phone calls to get their message across. Meanwhile, the SNP has been buoyed with the youthful vivacity of over 75,000 new members — and pre-election polls suggested that more than 70 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted SNP — since last year’s independence referendum.

The euphoria that spread among SNP supporters on Thursday night as seat after seat turned the party’s distinctive shade of canary yellow has been tempered in recent days by the wider U.K. picture: The Conservatives – widely loathed in Scotland – won an unexpected majority. Blamed for the de-industrialization that still scars much of urban Scotland, the Tories remain unpopular in much of Scotland. Many Scots are wary of another Tory administration. Thursday was the Conservatives worst ever performance north of the border, even though the party’s sole Scottish Conservative MP, David Mundell, held his seat in the Scottish Borders.

David Cameron’s success raises difficult questions for the super-charged Scottish nationalist cohort at Westminster. Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s leader, has said she will not work with the Tories, potentially leaving the phalanx of new SNP MPs effectively impotent on the backbenches. There is precedent for this in Scottish politics: During the 1980s and 1990s, the large Labour delegations Scotland sent down to London were effectively frozen out of power during almost two decades of Conservative rule. This fed demands for a local parliament that reflected Scotland’s more left wing electoral preferences.

If the new SNP intake does find itself without influence in the House they could propose another option: leaving Westminster, and the United Kingdom, altogether. Certainly the fact that Scotland has once again voted left – this time for the SNP – and has found itself governed once more by the right could add more pressure for another referendum on independence.

But Thursday’s result does not charge the basic arithmetic of independence. A majority of Scots would still vote to stay in the union, despite the ringing endorsement handed to the SNP. Sturgeon will not hold another referendum until she and her party are confident of victory.

But a psychological blow has been struck to the three-centuries-old union with England. This general election campaign has done more harm to the union than last year’s referendum: Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives’ strategy of depicting the SNP as nefarious separatists that would hold a Labour government to “ransom” was brutally efficient in key English marginal seats, but has damaged cross-border relations.

Whether Cameron is willing, or able, to find a new accommodation with Scottish nationalists is unclear – although without one, the union looks increasingly doomed.

On Friday, Cameron said he would fulfill pledges for greater devolution – that is more powers for the Scottish Parliament. But any such deal would be contingent on restricting the rights of non-English MPs in the House of Commons to vote on issues that only affected England. In exchange for dropping their opposition to this, Scottish nationalists could be offered full control over tax and spend.

Such a piecemeal approach to constitutional reform, however, is part of the reason the U.K. is threatened with disintegration. Devolution has been a largely ad hoc reaction to demands for self-government, often designed in line with the interests of major U.K. political parties rather than voting publics in the devolved regions. A fully fledged constitutional convention to discuss a new arrangement for governing across the U.K., possibly under a federal system, might solve these issues but “looks as far off as ever,” said Michael Keating, professor of politics at the University of Aberdeen.

Regardless of what happens in Westminster, the SNP look set to consolidate their power in Edinburgh, a city far more central to their eventual goals – that is, independence. If there is to be another referendum, the nationalists will need to win another majority in Scottish parliamentary elections, slated to take place next May.

Their chances are looking bright. On Friday, at a press conference Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was defiant, telling journalists that his party would “bounce back” from its most disastrous performance in history. But with just a single seat in Westminster and their lowest poll ratings in decades, Labour is a long, long way off regaining its mantle as the party of Scotland.

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images

En 1999, Wang Bing, photographe chinois de 32 ans, décide de se lancer seul, sans autorisation officielle et sans moyens autres que la minicaméra numérique qu'il a empruntée, dans un tournage de plusieurs années. Il filme les ouvriers abandonnés dans leurs ateliers fermés, victimes du démantèlement (...) / Chine, Art, Cinéma, Culture, Société - 2015/05

Les quatre millions d'électeurs écossais doivent décider le 18 septembre s'ils veulent quitter le Royaume-Uni. Depuis 1979, les nationalistes ne cessent de progresser, mais leur projet demeure ambigu. / Royaume-Uni, Élections, Nationalisme, Parti politique, Politique, Socialisme, Autodétermination (...) / Royaume-Uni, Élections, Nationalisme, Parti politique, Politique, Socialisme, Autodétermination des peuples, Ecosse - 2014/09