The dark side

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The dark side

Behind the razzmatazz of the Peking Olympics, there is a darker picture, redolent of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where the country was starved of food, fuel and power simply to keep the Games going.

This was covered by Christopher Booker in his seminal book called the Games War, to which he referred in one of hisrecent columns, pointing out the uncanny parallels between then and now.

So it is that The Daily Telegraph(business section) is reporting that China's industrial heartland is facing crippling power shortages, with more than a dozen provinces already rationing electricity. The country is suffering from its biggest power crisis since 2004, when a 40-gigawatt shortfall left three quarters of China in the dark.

The proximate cause is a shortage of coal – an issue we rehearsed extensivelyin February - then noting how Chinese pressure on the global market was driving up prices to record levels. More to the point, the actual cause is a highly regulated internal market which caps the prices of coal and electricity, making it difficult for companies to invest in new capacity – on top of a creaking infrastructure, leaving a shortage of rail transport to deliver coal where it is needed.

Anyhow, so serious has the situation become in China now that, in order to keep the lights burning in Peking, and the television cameras rolling, that other areas are being starved of power.

In the northern province of Shanxi - produces nearly one tenth of China's aluminium and a fifth of its steel - the population of almost 34m people is having to contend with regular blackouts and metal producers are having to curb production. The local administration has forecast a five gigawatt shortage this summer and put its industry on strict rations.

In Shandong province, the government has moved stockpiles of coal to Peking to ensure power supplies in the capital. As a result, the amount of power available to businesses in Shandong has fallen by around a third in August, leading some factories to run assembly lines at night or to shut parts of their plants.

Nor can this be dismissed as a little local difficulty. The Chinese government has responded by imposing a tariff on coal exports which, according to the Indian Financial Express is driving up prices and putting even more pressure on global supplies.

The metal industries are going to be particularly hard hit as China exports nearly half of the world's metallurgical coke. Furthermore, it China has set an export quota of 12.01 million tons this year, and had already exported 8.3 million tons in the first seven months of 2008. Export prices are thus expected to hit $1,000 a ton, up from $700 currently. 

As to coal supplies generally, India will be a key factor in the increasing global competition for energy supplies. The Indian coal industry is the fourth largest in terms of coal reserves and third largest in terms of coal production in the world. The country, however, faces huge deficit of coal. Coal requirement electricity generation is expected to grow ten percent this year and demand for both thermal and coking coal may rise to 1.87 billion tonne a year by 2026.

As supplies from China tighten, India can be expected to look elsewhere for its supplies and, as we pointed out earlier, it is bidding against the UK (and Germany) for South African coal, on which we are currently dependent for much of our electricity generation.

Nor can we rely on cheap gas to make up our shortfall. Today's news of a leak in a North Sea pipeline, in the Norwegian gas field, has triggered a 15 percent hike in UK wholesale gas prices, pointing up the fragility in supply, a situation made worse by Russia's adventures in Georgia.

On this, The Times quotes David Hunter, an analyst from McKinnon & Clarke, the energy consultancy. He says, "Gas available to export from Norway to countries including the UK will be cut significantly and, without adequate storage, the UK will be left to negotiate with Russia and the Far East for supplies or risk running low on energy."

That brings us back full circle. With supply difficulties in China, and India sucking in imports, there are going to be no easy options for the UK, which is going to have to pay through the nose to ensure continuity of its own supplies. 

For this who are watching and marvelling at the performance of the athletes, therefore, the message is to enjoy it while you can. The reckoning, as always, will come later … we are heading in the same direction as the divers.

COMMENT THREAD

Last year was different

Last year I wrote about the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia under the title "Then again, somethings have changed". The Russian military were blustering but it looked like they could do nothing about an actual invasion of any East European country and might, therefore, be too smart to try.

This year, the fortieth anniversary was marked early, thanks to our friends in the Russian military who have decided to take their August holiday in Georgia, an independent democracy on their border. Have things changed back to their normal Russian/Soviet state of affairs?

In some ways yes. Unable to control its neighbours, Russia like a schoolyard bully, prefers to hit out, particularly if that neighbour is smaller and weaker. But is it in a position to sustain a lengthy military occupation and extend it to the other recalcitrant neighbours? That I think is more questionable. Russia is relying on the supineness of the West that will simply acknowledge an updated version of the "Brezhnev doctrine," now called the Putin doctrine. But the underpinning of strength is not there. This is Russia's tragedy far more than anybody else's even if at the moment it is hard to feel sympathetic.

Charge of the Light Brigade

Canadian researcher David Long writes forEmbassy – Canada's foreign policy newsletter – this month, on the vexed question of "The EU in Afghanistan". This is particularly topical, given the recent attack on French troops.

The Afghanistan mission, he says, combines military intervention, state building, and democratisation in a narco-state at war with itself - one that has historically been a graveyard of empires. In this troubled environment, the states of the European Union have proceeded in a manner resembling the blunders commemorated at another time in Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

He continues:

The European nations' involvement is shaped by their participation in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force operation. Though 25 of 27 European Union nations are engaged in the mission, the reality is that only a few European states have significant numbers of troops in Afghanistan and even fewer (two to be exact, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands) are in the main combat zone in the south, even after the much heralded French deployment into the east of the country. No wonder some laugh that ISAF actually stands for I Saw Americans Fight.

European engagement is circumscribed by caveats and conditions on the location and role of deployments. These are meant to placate restive domestic audiences who fail to see the value of the mission. But the caveats are not simply the result of cowardice or craven caving to populist pacifism. They are the product of strategic and diplomatic calculation. Hesitations over NATO's first combat mission outside Europe highlight the fact that the vision of global NATO has never been a unanimous position of the member states.

Only the member states who share the American vision of NATO as a global security actor have deployed to fight the Taliban-led insurgency in the south. Both the so-called Old and New Europe have doubts about the global agenda.

Old Europe is largely happy to reserve NATO as the guarantor of European security through the provision of territorial defence.

Meanwhile, New Europe, not long liberated from Soviet clutches, still fears Russian interference and prefers NATO's anti-Russian focus be maintained. Given recent developments in Georgia, who can blame them?

All the while, as Afghanistan has increasingly negative connotations among European publics comparing it to the fighting in Iraq, for European leaders a major distraction has been Kosovo, a simmering crisis seen as in the EU's backyard rather than far from home.

European policy is plagued by jurisdictional jealousies: some prefer more EU and less NATO, others the member states rather than an EU mission, and still others the Big Four leading policy. Even the EU's collective intervention is shaped by its internal schisms.

While the Commission allocates billions of euros to a variety of development, humanitarian and other rebuilding projects, its mandate in the provision of non-military aspects of security assistance overlaps with the role of the Council's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. The EU's special representative in Afghanistan is supposed to bring cohesion to all this and in effect provide "one-stop shopping" regarding EU policies.

This is a tall order for recently appointed, Ettore Francesco Sequi, an Italian diplomat. The failed EU Constitution and its successor, the Reform Treaty, were supposed to rationalize the EU's foreign policy instruments and decision-making.

Don't hold your breath.

Where bold moves have indeed been taken by the Europeans, such as attempts to bring warring factions together, they have been rebuffed by the Afghan government (and EU diplomats expelled from the country) or have run afoul of contradictory policies preferred by the United States, for instance, over whether to legalize or destroy local poppy cultivation. The steady — a cynic might say glacial — development of the European security and defence policy has been given a fillip with EUPOL as it trains Afghan police as part of its civilian crisis management dimension.

But this project depends on the preservation of a security environment and an uncorrupted culture of governance in which these police and justice officials can go about their business.

But the ultimate conundrum in Afghanistan is the mismatch of the intervention with its goal. The European engagement is a charge of the Lite Brigade because it follows the pattern outlined in Michael Ignatieff's polemic Empire Lite.

Unlike military engagements and imperial conquests of the past, today's interventions are conducted in the long shadow of mass democracy. This means that deployments need to be justified at home, defended before a domestic audience. It also means that the "host" or target state is to be rendered democratic in some way, despite the fact that this is achieved paradoxically through the instrument of alien military force. The EU's involvement maps on to Ignatieff's critique of post-cold war peacekeeping and peace enforcement as imperial ventures in disguise, as was the case in the trusteeship over Kosovo.

Today's interventions are not about conquest as an end in itself, but as a means to another end (democracy) through short-term, low-level military engagement.

As a consequence, what is at stake is not military victory or defeat. To neutralise Afghanistan as a potential future threat to the West is to stabilise it by irreversibly changing it. This is a politico-strategic outcome rather than a military one, achievable only over the course of generations. The EU's Light Brigade intervention can only be minuscule and temporary by comparison.

So where was the strategic calculation regarding the EU's intervention in Afghanistan? And what sort of government bleats to its allies that it needs help in a region that it deliberately chose to engage in?

The marked lack of strategic wisdom is a result of hubris and an interventionist culture that is prevalent across the Western world. In essence, interventionism is the unexamined belief that some action on our part is better than none, even in affairs we don't understand, in regions where we don't have reach and our interests are unclear, and in conflicts that any realistic assessment would indicate are unlikely to be remedied given the resources available for an international military intervention.

This is an interesting perspective. There is a lot I would disagree with, but I really can't improve the last paragraph.

COMMENT THREAD

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Charity money goes astray - dog bites man

Let us face it the EU is not the only organization that plays silly-bugger games with other people’s money, channelling it, wittingly or otherwise, to terrorist organizations. I rarely read the Daily Mail (make that almost never) and have to find out about stories in that rag newspaper from various blogs, British or American.

So this story comes with gratitude to the indefatigable Michelle Malkin (how does she do it?). The Daily Mail reports that £20,000 of the money raised by the BBC through its Children in Need appeal went to Leeds Community School in Beeston.

Along with £230,000 from Leeds city council, it was spent on the school and the adjoining Iqra bookshop, which was run by the bombers and became the place they hatched their plans.

Both Children in Need and the council were led to believe they were funding educational work for children.

But, according to Martin Gilbertson, who worked at the bookshop and the community centre, the funds went on propaganda.

"They blamed everything on the Jewish conspiracy, they hated Western culture it was like living with jihad on a daily basis" he said.

The bookshop was run by Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Hanweer of 7/7 bombing fame. They and Khalid Khaliq, jailed this year for terrorism offences, were trustees of the Beeston Iqra charity.

This raises various questions, not least that of why people give money to charities through the BBC or any other media outlet. How can you possibly tell what the money goes on?

Going on from there we have the problem of the Children in Need and Leeds City Council repeating like blessed baa-lambs the mantra of ignorance. They just didn’t know. They gave the money to a registered children’s charity who, they assumed on some basis unknown to the rest of mankind, would spend it wisely. Would it not be a good idea if you are disbursing large amounts of other people’s money to check out what that dosh is being spent on?

Come to think of it, would it not be a good idea to define what is a sensible way for a children’s charity to spend money? After all, why exactly did that school, presumably in receipt of large amounts of taxpayers' money anyway, need extra help from a charity? Why was money given to the bookshop in any event but, especially, why was it given without anybody checking out its stock?

And so on, and so on. One could list questions indefinitely. But the top question will be: what exactly is the purpose of that egregious quango, the Charity Commission?

[Michelle Malkin says that the Children in Need teddy bear is crying out for a clever bit of photoshopping. If anybody is prepared to work on it, I shall post it .]