The bigger picture - by Richard... Sunday, September 13, 2009 eureferendum.blogspot.com

The bigger picture - by Richard... Sunday, September 13, 2009    eureferendum.blogspot.com

The claque of foreign correspondent rallying to the support of Stephen Farrell over his kidnap and rescue in Afghanistan are fulsome in their praise of him – and each other. Many of them have written books displaying their prowess all with the benefit of "being there", offering their pearls of wisdom and expertise.

To a man (and woman) though, they all seem to make a mistake common to purveyors of their trade. As journalists, they share the belief that grasp of a tiny piece of the story – seen from their own limited perspectives – necessarily qualify them to hold forth on the bigger picture, and to draw conclusions from them.

What they are doing, most often, is confusing the process of reporting – writing up a coherent story on the basis of facts they have gathered – with analysis: gathering facts from diverse sources, assessing their relative merits and reliability, assembling them and, drawing conclusions and, where possible, extrapolating possible outcomes.

Although the processes seem similar, they are not. Reporters usually come to the story with a pre-conceived notion of what they want to write, and then collect "facts" to stand up the story and to illustrate it. The narrative is invariably worked out in advance. 

The analyst, however, comes from the opposite direction. When the process is done properly, there is neither narrative nor a pre-conceived idea. Instead, the facts are collected, sifted, weighed up, assembled and reviewed, from which the narrative emerges. As its best, it is a journey of discovery, with the conclusions sometimes coming as a surprise, even to their authors.

The often unrecognised difference leads to some of the underlying tensions between the "claque" who claim greater authority from their experiences of "being there" - even if they so often can only claim to have seen a small snapshot and very often do not understand the importance of what they have seen, or how it fits into the bigger picture – and the more distant observers who have a wider range of data with which to work and benefit from the detachment that only time and distance can bring.

In some respects, "being there" is a handicap to an analyst. The impressions and power of individual events overwhelm the observers, distorting their perceptions and obscuring less prominent issues that may, in fact, have greater importance. And even then, no one can "be there" in the sense that they are everywhere. They may be in the country but many events happen at a different place and time, when the "on-the-spot" observer can be tens or even hundreds of miles away.

All this serves as a weighty prelude to today's lead item in the Booker column, where Booker – without having left his study in Somerset - can pronounce with authority on events in distant Afghanistan and conclude that our intervention there is doomed.

To come to that conclusion, Booker has assembled diverse sources of information – almost none of which have been gleaned from the UK claque of foreign correspondents. These serve to illustrate a theme we have rehearsed on the blog and DOTR – that the Taleban derive much of their funding not from the oft-quoted sources, but from British and other Western taxpayers. And not only are we in large part paying for the Taleban to kill our troops, our aid programme even supplies much of the material used to make the explosives used to kill them.

A little vignette of this system, writes Booker, is the sad story of the Kajaki dam in northern Helmand. A year ago the MoD was crowing over the success of British troops in ensuring the safe delivery of a new US turbine to this Russian-built hydro-electric power station. 

More than 2,000 troops were involved in the operation, and we still guard the plant as it generates its pitifully small amount of electricity (16 megawatts). But – and this we learnt from Michael Yon and other sources (even the reviled Associated Press) - the power lines and sub-stations which feed it to several towns are controlled by the Taleban, who then charge money to customers for allowing the juice to reach them.

This has been discussed and analysed on diverse blogs but, while the MSM has offered derring-do accounts of operations in the Kajaki area, none of our ranks of gifted correspondents have seen fit to highlight what is in fact a major scandal.

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal. Embattled British troops, in a scarcely defensible outpost in Kajaki, are fighting and dying to protect an asset which provides financial resources to the enemy they are fighting.

That alone, though, is but one strand of the "bigger picture" that Booker examines. A far larger source of Taleban income, he writes, are the protection rackets by which they siphon off a significant part of the billions of dollars we and other Western countries pour into Afghanistan to keep troops supplied and to provide new infrastructure, such as schools and roads, under a multiplicity of aid programmes. 

Much of the thousands of tons of supplies needed each month by our forces, for instance, is trucked up from Pakistan by private firms contracted to the MoD. But the price we pay is inflated by as much as 20 percent to include protection money paid by contractors to the Taleban to ensure that convoys are not attacked en route. 

This has been rehearsed by local sources, not least here, with sums mentioned of up to £350 for each supply truck, to allow safe passage.

Although occasionally mentioned in passing by our ranks of gifted correspondents, none have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal. 

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal. In order to supply British troops, at the end of a long and fragile logistics train, the British government is paying huge sums to the enemy which our troops are fighting, just so that they will allow through the supplies which our troops need to survive.

Then, from the US Time magazine, Booker picks up the detail of how reconstruction money is skimmed off to pay the Taleban not to destroy projects, thus funding the bombs and weapons that are used to kill British troops. He quotes Maj-Gen Michael Flynn, a senior intelligence officer with ISAF, saying there is now "more money going into the pockets of local leaders (of the insurgency) from [these] criminal activities than there is from narcotics". 

And while this information was freely published in a US magazine, of our ranks of gifted correspondents, none have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal. And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal.

Then Booker picks up the fact that US and UK aid agencies are supplying thousands of tons of free fertiliser to Afghan famers, the very material which the Taleban are using to make bombs with which to kill British soldiers. Yet this information comes not from our ranks of gifted correspondents, none of whom have ever sought to make a big issue of what is in fact a major scandal.

And any which way you put it, this is a major scandal, that British and US taxpayers are subsidising the materials used by the Taleban to kill and maim our troops.

Furthermore, having not reported any of the items in isolation – with any degree of emphasis (or at all) – none of our ranks of gifted correspondents have put these disparate issues together – the essence of analysis. But, if you do, we find that the Taleban is drawing healthy amounts of finance from electricity, from our supply chain and from the reconstruction programme, topped up with free supplies of material that they can use for their bombs.

But it does not stop there. Much has been made of the opium control programme but Booker picks up on the scarce-reported fact that the price (and availability) of opium is linked to the price of wheat. When the price of wheat is high, opium production falls off, which means that British interests are best served by keeping the price of wheat high.

But, with an unerring instinct for doing the wrong things, our government is using our money to give free wheat seed to Afghan farmers, the effect of which will be to drive down the price of wheat and thus increase opium production. 

The one consolation – and it is a poor one – is that this makes very little difference to the finances of local insurgents (although the high-level Taleban do benefit). They levy "taxes" on whatever crops the farmers grow, whether it is wheat or opium – a process facilitated by the British Army which spends so much of its time and resource on aimless patrolling and next to no resource on targeting the extortion rackets.

Putting all that together is part of the process of analysis. You don't have to "be there", to do it – and its is interesting that none of those brilliant reporters who have so famously been there, and thus pronounce their superiority, have thought to do this simple exercise. 

Yet it is the analysis which allows the conclusions, and which gives them their authority. Finance is the lifeblood of any insurgency and, to crack it, you have to deal with the source. Further, there are few better ways of winning the "hearts and minds" of the local population than to bear down on extortion rackets. On the other hand, failure to do so will weaken any counter-insurgency effort.

Thus, as long as the British and other western taxpayers are being forced to subsidise the Taleban to kill and maim British soldiers, and supply them the materials to make their bombs, and then to undermine the opium control programme, our intervention in Afghanistan is indeed doomed. And the more money we throw at the problem, the worse it will get.

It would thus be so refreshing if our journalistic claque could crawl out of their comfort zone and look at the bigger picture. They need to stop bleating about needing "more resources" in Afghanistan. We are already giving the Taleban far too much money. We should not be agitating to give them more.

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A triumph for propaganda - by Richard... Saturday, September 12, 2009

Front page of The Independent today proclaims: "A triumph for man, a disaster for mankind", heralding the completion of what it claims to be "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage."

"It is an epic moment," says the paper, "but also a vivid sign of climate change in the Arctic." The picture caption reinforces the point, telling us: "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage, a fabled Arctic Sea route that links the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific far more directly than the usual southerly cargo route."

And none of this is true. It could not be further from the truth – it is a complete and utter distortion, a fabrication, a lie. An Englishman's Castle sussed it, by the simple expedient of looking up Wikipedia

But there is much, much more to it than that. Writes Independent hack Tony Paterson, in Berlin, "It has been one of the elusive goals of seafaring nations almost since the beginnings of waterborne trade, but for nearly 500 years the idea has been dismissed as an impossible dream. Now, as a result of global warming, the dream is about to come true."

For the truth (Wikipedia apart), let us see what the Russians say about this "impossible dream". More correctly known as the Northern Sea Route (NSR), they tell us that the NSR is Russia's main national transport line in the Arctic.

It has been commercially exploited since 1935 when four cargo motor ships passed through the route during a single navigation season. In 1936, warships of the Baltic Fleet successfully arrived in the Far East. Russia, we are told, has invested enormous material and human resources in exploring and equipping this route. Powerful icebreakers and icebreaking cargo ships have been constructed, navigational and hydrometeorological systems established. And furthermore, up until the end of the 80s, the Arctic transportation system was self-supporting. The volume of sea traffic reached 7 million tons in 1987.

The record tells us that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union - for reasons entirely related to ice conditions and entirely to do with the breakdown of the route infrastructure - shipping along the route diminished but, we learn, between 1993 - 1997 the volume of sea cargo along the NSR was still 150 - 200 thousand tons a year. A new post-Soviet peak was established in 1993 when 15 Russian ships with 210 thousand tons of transit goods passed along the route. By then, there were even tourist trips.

Also, eight ships carrying metals, fertilizers and timber travelled from ports in Russia, Latvia, Sweden and Finland to China, Japan, and Thailand. Seven ships from China carried oilcake, bauxite, magnetite and other operating supplies to Holland, England, Ireland, Germany, and Spain.

So, how did the newspaper and its fellow travellers, such as the BBC, get it so wrong?

For the genesis of error, we need to look to the hype at the start of this "epic moment", which involved two German-owned vessels, Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight (pictured). Amongst the first conveying the misinformation was this, at the end of July, telling us that the the transit of these ships would be "the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage."

In August, though, Reuters was more circumspect, although it did lay the beginnings of the false trail, announcing: "Climate change opens Arctic route for German ships."

"The melting of Arctic ice as a result of climate change has made it possible to send Beluga's multi-purpose heavy lift ships along the legendary Northeast Passage," we were informed, the agency citing as its source the chief executive of the Beluga Group, Niels Stolberg.

Now, Stolberg is something of a devotee of the climate change religion, not least because he is at the forefront of fuel-saving developments, pioneered in the name of saving the planet. One of those is the "Sky Sail" – an enormous "kite-like sail" that was recently fitted to one of Stolberg's ships, funded, one discovers by the EU as part of its "Life" programme on climate change, to the tune of €1.2 million.

Enthusiast for the new religion he might be, even Stolberg back in August did not make the bold claims that are being made now. He told Reuters that this was the first "non-Russian commercial vessel" cleared by the Russians through the route. That much was possibly true, but – as we know – there had over the years been substantial Russian commercial traffic. Thus did Reuterstalk about German ships. In other words, this was a "first", but only for German, as opposed to Russian ships.

By today, however, this has morphed into the Independent legend, that, "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage ... Explorers throughout history have tried, and failed; some have died in the attempt," it warbles.

In support of this fantasy, both the Independent and the BBC cite the 1553 expedition by Sir Hugh Willoughby, who died attempting to find the route. But neither of them tells us that the route was successfully navigated in 1879 by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld who took his ship, the SS Vega, all the way through the passage from Europe to the Bering Strait.

As to the current ice conditions which allowed the Beluga ships transit, the National Snow and Ice Data Center gives the overview: It tells us:

Sea ice extent averaged over the month of August 2009 was 6.26 million square kilometers (2.42 million square miles). This is 900,000 square kilometers (350,000 square miles) above the record low for the month, which occurred in August 2007, 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) above August 2008, and just below the August 2005 value of 6.30 million square kilometers (2.43 million square miles). Arctic sea ice extent for August 2009 was 1.41 million square kilometers (540,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

And conditions, it seems, were marginal. The two Beluga vessels had to be accompanied by at least one Russian nuclear ice-breaker during the whole of the trip. The two ships "encountered snow, fog, ice floes, and treacherous icebergs which showed only about one meter of their huge underwater volume on the sea's surface." Passing the northernmost point, the Vilkizi Strait on the tip of Siberia, half of the sea's surface was covered with pack ice and the captains of both vessels had to call Russian ice pilots on board to shepherd them through.

Nevertheless, the story is just what the warmists wanted. Says Melanie Duchin, Arctic Expedition leader on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, "This is further proof that climate change is happening now." Predictably, she then adds that the development put greater pressure on world leaders to agree a major emissions cut at their Copenhagen meeting in December. "This is not a cause for celebration but cause for immediate action," she declared.

Interestingly, the BBC is now downplaying the hype, referring only to "German ships", and admitting that the route has been "passable without ice breakers in 2005", neglecting to tell us that this journey required substantial assistance from ice breakers. So much for global warming.

Not from The Independent though are we allowed to know the truth. Its editorialproclaims that, "One hundred years ago, the news of a ship successfully traversing the treacherous North-east Passage would have prompted popular celebrations and wild enthusiasm." Yet, despite the feat of the Vega in 1879, this is now "a confirmation of just how rapidly and dangerously our climate is changing."

There are lies, damn lies, and then there is The Independent.

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On not playing nicely with other children - by Helen...

It is the perennial cry of all parents to their recalcitrant children: why can't you play nicely with other children. I, too, heard it in my childhood but not nearly as often as I do now. Either I was a nicer child than adult or, much more likely, my parents were far too sensible to keep saying something as patently silly as that. The disadvantage of having had intelligent parents is that nobody quite lives up to that in later life. Ah well!

The problem with playing nicely with other children is that they might not be playing games you want to get involved in or, even more importantly, they might not be playing according to the rules you know or the ones you have all agreed on.

All this is a preliminary to an elaboration of my posting about the Taxpayers' Alliance yesterday. As ever, it has caused a certain amount of harrumping, though not on the part of the TPA. They don't read this blog, knowing full well that only some children need to be played with nicely.

First of all, I should point out that it is unfair to blame the Boss for that posting. It was not his, though he did not disagree with the gist of it. His style of writing is very different from mine as anyone who reads the blog and not the forum knows.

Secondly, I am just a little tired (and so is the Boss) of being lectured about the need to work with all allies whatever their hue is and to stop breaking up the eurosceptic alliance.

With respect, we have been in this game long enough to know which children are worth playing with and which are going to change the rules as soon as they have been agreed.

Point number one: not every organization that calls itself eurosceptic is that, even though the BBC appears to believe that the Conservative Party, as led by the Boy-King, is frighteningly eurosceptic. It is not. And neither are its various front organizations such as Open Europe or the Taxpayers' Alliance.

Point number two is that it is very hard to define what eurosceptic means to various people and organizations. Therefore, it makes precious little sense to insist that all those who call themselves that are fighting for the same cause. How do I know what half these people are fighting for? They say they want to see a reformed EU or a different relationship between the UK and other members or a democratic EU. 

In all fairness, I have to believe that they mean that bilge. I know that it is bilge because I have actually read the treaties and various agreements and they tell me that none of that is achievable. Therefore, fighting for it is not only a waste of time but a pernicious waste of time as it takes away attention from the fight we should be engaging in.

Following on from there, one has to admit that people who engage in this pernicious waste of time are making it very hard for real eurosceptics to start working on what really matters: how do we break up this nasty corrupt organization and what do we do afterwards. 

By making this hard they are, in fact, playing into the hands of the enemy who are delighted to see eurosceptic money, time and effort going into fruitless discussions about possible reform or formation of different links. They can use that time to push through even more nasty legislation that cannot be reversed. Ergo, people who make that possible for our enemies are not really our allies or anywhere near being our friends. QED, as we used to say in my youth when geometry was still taught in schools.

Take the TPA's campaign to tell people how much money we are wasting on the EU, how corrupt its servants are and how expensive and harmful the CAP and CFP are. Very useful to bring it to people's attention, of course. The only problem is that the expense and corruption of the EU are the only things that have been well known and completely accepted by most people in this country, even by those who see nothing wrong with the project.

The problem lies in trying to explain other aspects of our membership of the EU and how we can change the situation though, one must admit, a surprising number of people outside the charmed political circle have grasped the basic point: it does not matter who we vote for as they do not decide on anything for this country.

So why do these people keep treading water? Part of it is a reluctance to find out what has gone on before they came on the scene and decided to own the subject. I have, I believe, mentioned this before in connection with various organizations.

There is, however, a more serious problem and it is why these children are not really that much fun to play with. Their idea of what the game should be about is different from ours. By keeping the discussion on the expense – a necessary but not sole part of it – they prevent any movement forward, which, if it happened, would show up their own and the Conservative Party's credentials as eurosceptics.

By focusing on the expense they can imply that there is a possibility of change and reform (or even hope and change) if only people vote Conservative. This did not quite work in the European elections but might in the General. Then, of course, we shall find that nothing much has changed and the Conservatives are no more able to solve the problems than Labour. But it will be too late: we shall have lost more precious time, fossicking with unimportant issues that are being foisted on the political discourse by those faux eurosceptics we are told to ally ourselves with.

So you see, I do not want to play nicely with those other children because they are not playing the game we agreed to play. They are very nice children and we shall all get on very well when we sit down to have our jelly and ice cream but we shall never play the same game or agree on the rules.

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Silence not an option - by Richard...

The Times is putting out a story this morning that the Conservative leadership is "backtracking on spending commitments for Britain's Armed Forces and could yet shelve plans to replace Trident."

The trouble with these sort of stories – this one by Tom Baldwin – is that you really do not know whether this is for real, or whether this is the Tory party testing the water in order to gauge public reaction.

What is becoming very clear is that the Tories are all over the place when it comes to defence. Only last year – and for some time before that – Liam Fox was pledging that the three main "big ticket" defence projects would be carried over. These were the Trident programme, the navy's carriers and the army's FRES programme. And then there was talk of increasing the size of the army.

Although commonly cited as costing £5 billion, the carrier programme is more like £20 billion if you include the aircraft and infrastructure costs. This with FRES at £16 billion and Trident puts the commitment close to £60 billion, tying up the procurement budget for many years to come.

Now, it seems, the Tory hierarchy are not quite so sure, and – we are told – are relying of their commitment to a strategic defence review (SDR) to hold off having to make any firm commitments. But then, if the Party is really testing the water, and the public reaction to any cutbacks is hostile, they have a problem. 

The "big ticket" programmes, for all their eye-watering costs, are only part of the equation. The accumulation of small and medium projects – not least the MARS replenishment fleet replacement for the navy, the A400M air transports for the RAF and the Future Lynx programme for the army all add up to a tidy penny.

Then there remains more than a little strategic confusion. Fox, in a recent speech was anxious to talk up the Russian threat, with reminders of that country's "re-armament" programme. 

This threat, we have considered to be somewhat overstated, especially when Putin had to call on elite troops from the Moscow region to overpower Georgia last year. And a recent report on the state of Russian defence industries lends credence to the view that the Bear is no longer a significant conventional military threat.

That Fox seems to feel the need to talk it up suggests that he is listening very closely to the UK defence industry, which would much prefer spending on conventional capabilities to deal with inter-state wars, rather than see the focus on counter-insurgency, from which there are lean pickings for domestic producers. But then, with Charles Guthrie advising the Tory team, this is only to be expected.

The Tories could, of course, put the speculation to bed by declaring their hand now – making it clear that the UK can no longer afford to finance a military capable of autonomous action in a high-intensity inter-state war. This, though, would need a further declaration of where Britain sees itself in future conflicts, how it would manage its alliances and what precise capabilities it deems essential.

These grown-up questions, however, demand a level of clarity and – to an extent – political courage, which has not yet been apparent from the Tory opposition. And while deferring decisions until after the election may seem an easy way out, events seem to be forcing the pace. 

And then, of course, there is the Irish referendum on the horizon. If the Irish fail to deliver a "no" vote and the "colleagues" gets their treaty ratified, the EU military ambitions will climb higher up the political agenda – with profound spending implications.

Having made a meal of attacking Labour on its defence credentials, the electorate may be in the mood to demand something a little more substantive from the Tories than the fare on offer, especially if there is an undeclared agenda to cut spending or, even worse, an intention to buy in to the EU's martial ambitions.

Silence on these issues would appear no longer to be a credible option.