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	Make poverty political by Tash Shifrin The Guardian United Kingdom   February 15, 2006   A quarter of a million people filled the streets of Edinburgh last year to demand that the rich nations of the G8 take action to make poverty history. The demonstrators, with their placards, banners and whistles, had come on trains and coaches from all over Britain. But making their presence felt on the streets were not just political organisations and trade unions, but many of Britain"s best-known charities.   International aid and development is consistently Britain"s top charitable cause, measured by the amount of income from donors. Research from the Charities Aid Foundation shows that £625m was donated to international charities in 2003-04, well ahead of the £580m given to the next biggest cause, cancer. The same research put Oxfam and Save the Children in the top 10 fundraising charities.   Now, some of that cash is buying placards, flyers, badges and banners - and many of the donors are standing up to take a more active role in the increasingly politicised climate surrounding aid and development.   Aid has risen up the national and international policy agendas. The Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign saw Tony Blair ostentatiously sport a white wristband, while new Conservative leader David Cameron has put poverty among his six priority policy areas. Beyond the domestic arenas of Westminster and Whitehall, the summits of the World Trade Organisation, or meetings of the G8 or EU ministers have become the focus of an international social justice movement - and are met everywhere by demonstrations.   Richard Miller, director of ActionAid, says charities have been "catching the mood" of a public that is increasingly engaged in social justice issues. At Oxfam, the charity"s own figures show the scale of the huge rise in committed activism. The database of people who want to be involved in campaigning has grown from 20,000 names to 220,000 in the past four years, says campaigns director Adrian Lovett. "Half of that has come from speaking to existing donors about campaigning. It"s also been about reaching out to younger people," he says. "Previously, we perhaps had this fear that donors would be put off by our campaigning." Now, he says, Oxfam"s campaigning side is far more integrated into its work.   Marie Staunton, chief executive of children"s humanitarian agency Plan UK, agrees: "There"s been a leap in the last year in the understanding of people in the UK of development issues."   Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement - which, as an explicitly political campaign, is not a registered charity - sees the big international charities repositioning themselves as more activist bodies. He welcomes this as a "fantastic" move.   "Over the last couple of years, increasingly we"ve seen advocacy and campaigning moved out of the shadows, particularly at some of the bigger agencies," Southworth says. "One thing coming out of MPH, for the big agencies, was make campaigning legitimate - visible and legitimate within their own organisations."   The picture has changed sharply since 2004, when Sarah Lister, then of Sussex University"s Institute of Development Studies, warned in a report for the development NGOs network, Bond, that NGOs faced being "squeezed out of their niche, unable to recruit volunteers or attract as many donations" and could be "rejected by a new generation of activists as irrelevant, or part of the system they are fighting".   But the change has come as part of a longer-term trend. Staunton says agencies "can"t help being small-p political", as they move from the traditional model of a charity - "giving things out" - to the development agenda of helping people do things for themselves. "As you do that you see some of the barriers," Staunton says.   The need to tackle those barriers to development has drawn charities into greater political lobbying, Staunton believes. Plan UK, she says, takes the cue for its own advocacy and campaigning work from listening to the children and young people the charity supports.   ActionAid"s Miller says the shift towards a more political agenda began in the 1990s as charities began to pay more attention to economic justice and debt. "If you worked in a country like Zambia - I was there in the 1990s - it was impossible to move forward when so many resources were going out of the country in terms of servicing debt." In the early days, charities were not confident the public would understand the issues. But the Jubilee 2000 campaign against the burden of third-world debt was an eye-opener.   The "defining moment", he thinks, was the demonstration marking the 1998 G8 summit in Birmingham. Some 70,000 people turned out to form a human chain and demand that the G8 leaders drop the debt. The organisers were stunned by the turnout. "It took even seasoned campaigners by surprise," says Miller. "After debt, people began to say perhaps we can tackle more difficult issues, and we came together in MPH."   Andrew Pendleton, senior policy officer at Christian Aid, believes the Birmingham protest was the "coming of age of the development movement". Political campaigning is crucial to meeting the charity"s aims, he says. "Our goal is not just to tackle poverty with donations. We must use a proportion to challenge the systems that we and our partners see keeping people in poverty. "That leads us down the inexorable road towards a really sophisticated understanding of economic policy, insider meetings with government officials and ministers, but also working with our supporters to complete the circle... to go out on the streets with placards and say poor countries shouldn"t be forced to repay debts left by past dictators.   The balance between insider meetings with government and more critical interventions is one the aid agencies are wrestling with. The government"s readiness to jump aboard the MPH campaign was "something everyone in MPH was bothered about", Pendleton says. Many agencies speak of the need for "critical distance" between the charities and the government - and the need to maintain the pressure to ensure that the promises made by politicians are kept. "With all that, you have to be open-eyed in making sure the rhetoric and the reality at least bear some sort of resemblance," says Oxfam"s Lovett.   Already, the NGOs are pointing out that in a deal designed to cancel £12bn of debt, Nigeria is still required to pay out £7.2bn to rich creditor nations. As part of the deal, Britain will pocket £1.7bn - twice as much as it gave in aid to the whole of Africa last year - from a country where two-thirds of the population live on less than 60 pence a day. The government should hand the money back to Nigeria, Lovett says. "But the Treasury and No. 10 are digging their heels in and insisting they won"t."   Southworth says maintaining pressure will be a key challenge for the charities. "Relations between agencies and the government are slightly more complex than before. Everyone"s feeling their way through and getting used to it," he says.   Not all international aid agencies are stepping up their political activity, however. Jean-Michel Piedagnel, director of humanitarian aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières UK, says his charity stays clear of political activity in order not to compromise humanitarian access. "It could change the perception of our independence," he says.   MSF advocates putting the responsibility back on to governments and "refuses to be co-opted as one of the political actors". The charity will not be taking on the sort of campaigning or mobilisation of supporters that many other NGOs are now involved in.   Piedagnel admits this leaves MSF in "a very lonely place", although he notes that his agency focuses on humanitarian aid rather than development issues. But he says: "I still think development NGOs have to be careful not to overstate their capacity to deal with all the world"s problems."   Other organisations have approached the question of who should tackle the world"s problems in a different way, by working much more closely with partner NGOs in the "global south", Lovett says: "In almost all our campaigning work now, we set the framework at an international level and deliver at a local level. Across the sector that"s probably the trend, too."   ActionAid has gone a step further, moving its international headquarters to Johannesburg. "We thought it was no longer acceptable to sit in London and run operations around the world," says Miller. Each of ActionAid"s country programmes will gradually become independent with its own board of trustees, he adds. It is a "clear political signal that the South should have much greater leadership and power over its own development".   This internationalisation will be the next big shift for the aid and development agencies, Miller predicts. And with it will come a new attitude, he says. "When I started, development was a bit do-goody, people who wear sandals and so on," he recalls. "Now it has entered the mainstream and it"s seen much more clearly in terms of justice, rather than charity - people claiming their rights rather than standing there with a begging bowl."
	The Caliphate Myth by Tom Porteous, William Pfaff TomPaine.com / IHT   February 13, 2006   (Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst who was formerly with the BBC and British Foreign Office. He has lived and worked in the Middle East for many years).   At a time of growing political tension between the Muslim world and the West, a new bad idea is creeping into the discourse of European and North American political leaders and is being used to justify an intensification of Western political and military intervention in the Muslim world.   Donald Rumsfeld wheeled this bad idea out at a conference on global security in Munich last week. George Bush alluded to it in his 2006 State of the Union address in January. Tony Blair and his Home Office minister, Charles Clarke, have both spoken of it in the past six months. Dick Cheney has bandied it about for even longer. The rhetoric of the new German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests she too has signed up.   The new bad idea is this: the “free West,” having defeated German Nazism and Soviet Communism, now faces a new strategic challenge from the ambition of Muslim radicals to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and impose Islamic law on half the world.   As the U.S. Defense Secretary put it at last week’s Munich conference, Islamic radicals “seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent. They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire."   Ouch! A map without borders! Is this the new WMD?   It is true that many Islamist groups, including terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, say they would like to see the reunification of the Muslim world under one political leadership. They also frame this in terms of the re-establishment of the political institution which unified the Muslim world in the first few centuries of Islam: the caliphate.   But does this make it sensible, wise or proportionate for the leaders of the most formidable military alliance in the history of the world to base their strategic posture for the early 21st century on the invocation of an Al Qaeda or Iranian run, “terrorist caliphate” stretching half way around the globe?   No, it does not. And here’s why.   First, the evidence that Al Qaeda or any similar organization is in a position to re-create and control a caliphate is entirely non-existent. The only country where Al Qaeda was able to gain any kind of territorial foothold was in parts of Afghanistan. Even there, they were dependent on the goodwill of local leaders, the Taliban, who had only come to power after Afghanistan had been reduced to ground zero by the combined policies of the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War and subsequent international neglect.   In Iraq, where the U.S. military invasion and occupation has created another opportunity for Al Qaeda, Bush’s claim that Al Qaeda would take over the country in the event of a U.S. military withdrawal is nonsense. Al Qaeda has the same chance of imposing its political authority in Iraq as the U.S. does: nil.   As for Iran, in the 25 years since the Islamic revolution, Tehran has been unable to export its Shi’ite version of Islamist rule to any other Muslim state, in part because most other Muslim states are dominated by Sunnis. In fact, revolutionary Iran long ago gave up efforts to export its ideology to the wider Muslim world and has concentrated instead on cultivating its influence among Shi’ite sectarian groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.   The second reason why raising the specter of a resurgent caliphate is foolish is that it plays into the hands of groups like Al Qaeda who claim the “war on terror” is an assault on Islam itself. Where, one wonders, have all those millions of dollars put aside by Washington and London for public diplomacy in the Muslim world gone? It surely would not have cost much to find out that, so far from being seen as a totalitarian tyranny, the early Muslim caliphate is highly venerated by most Muslims as a golden age of Islam. Comparing it to the Third Reich is therefore not a good way of winning friends and influencing people in the Muslim world.   The third problem with the caliphate idea is that it has led Western politicians to prepare for and fight the wrong kind of conflict. Al Qaeda is a non-state terrorist organization that presents a complex of threats to western interests, some quite serious but none existential. Its main resource lies not in controlling territory or armies but in its symbolic and ideological influence among young and alienated Muslims. This influence is directly proportionate to the degree to which such Muslims sense they and their religion are oppressed and attacked by the West.   The main policies of the U.S. and its allies since 9/11 have been to fight Al Qaeda as though it was a conventional territorial enemy. This has involved massive projection of military force throughout the Muslim world—from "North Africa to Southeast Asia,” to borrow Rumsfeld’s words—including two outright military invasions and occupations, a continuing buildup of Israeli military power, and now the threat of military strikes against Iran. But because the enemy is not a conventional one, these interventions have quickly degenerated into crude counterinsurgency operations involving the use of torture, prolonged detention without trials and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians.   The chronic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the occupied territories, the successes of Islamist political parties in elections in several Muslim countries and, to some extent, the furore over the Danish cartoons, all demonstrate how counterproductive and ill-judged these policies are. Among other impacts in the Muslim world, they are boosting the influence of Al Qaeda and other forms of Islamist radicalism, fostering anti-Western sentiment, undermining secular reformist trends and destabilizing states.   If Western leaders’ apparent obsession with the notion that the West faces a real threat from an emergent extremist caliphate is so foolish, why do they use it?   Three answers come to mind. First, whether they really believe in the threat or not, it is a convenient cover for their signal and deepening failure in the “war on terror.” By raising the menacing specter of another evil empire, Western leaders seem to be saying to their publics that the failures in Iraq , Afghanistan and elsewhere have nothing to do with their own shortcomings, lack of imagination or ideological blindness, but with the very terribleness of the threat we are facing.   Second, the notion that the West faces the extraordinary threat of an evil caliphate provides an excuse for avoiding the very real and difficult problems that the West does need to face in relation to the Muslim world, problems which the West is so far either unwilling or unable to address seriously. These include the need to engage with political Islam and undercut the appeal of extremists, to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, to help stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan and to prevent other states going the same way.   Third, in the febrile post-9/11 political atmosphere of the West, the exaggeration of the threat from Islam has in different ways (immigration, terrorism, values) come to be exploited by political entrepreneurs as a crucial means of winning political power, extending state control over scared citizens, and justifying the massive projection of military power abroad. So the notion of a threatening Islamic caliphate may be not such a bad idea after all. It’s just not true.   Paris. February 10, 2006   A "Long War" designed to perpetuate itself, by William Pfaff. (International Herald Tribune)   The U.S. Defense Department and the White House have decided that the United States is now conducting "the Long War" rather than what previously was known as the War against Terror, then as the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, and briefly - as one revealing Pentagon study described it - a war against "the Universal Adversary."   President George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address last month that the aim of his administration is to defeat radical Islam. This was a preposterous statement. Shortly afterward, radical Islam began burning embassies from Afghanistan and Indonesia to Damascus and Beirut. The United States is not going to defeat that.   There are a great many dismaying aspects of Bush"s Washington, but nothing more so than this combination of the unachievable with the hortatory in giving a name and purpose to the military campaigns that already have the U.S. Army and Marine Corps near exhaustion, and a major part of the world in turmoil.   It is customary, politically desirable and morally indispensable to say seriously what a war is about, if only so that the public will know when it is over; when the declared and undeclared measures of exception that have accompanied it, justifying suspension of civil liberties, illegal practices and defiance of international law and convention, will be lifted; and when the killing may be expected to stop.   What was originally to be a matter of quick and exemplary revenge, with lightning attacks and acclaimed victories, has now become, we are told, the long war whose end cannot be foreseen. The citizen is implicitly told to expect the current suspension of constitutional norms, disregard for justice, and defiance of limits on presidential power as traditionally construed, to continue indefinitely. We are in a new age, America"s leaders say. The Democratic opposition seems to agree.   What started as the war against terror, proclaimed by the president to Congress in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, has undergone a metamorphosis. The initial interpretation was that the people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks and other terrorist outrages against Americans and their interests would be discovered, defeated and killed or brought to justice.   Surely that is what most Americans thought when the search began for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and members of Al Qaeda. Today bin Laden and Mullah Omar are somewhere in Waziristan, in Pakistan"s tribal areas, tracked by the CIA and Pakistani soldiers (with different degrees of enthusiasm). There is an insurrection in Iraq, which had nothing to do with Al Qaeda when it started, but from which Al Qaeda and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi now draw global publicity.   Elsewhere, violent and alienated members of the Muslim diaspora in Europe claim the brand-identification of Al Qaeda to dramatize their own exploits, as do discontented sons of the Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern elites.   Yet even if you include the 9/11 casualties, the number of Americans killed by international terrorists since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting them) is about the same as that killed by lightning - or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts.   "In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States" wrote John Mueller of Ohio State University in last autumn"s issue of the authoritative American journal Terrorism and Political Violence.   As Mueller concedes, there is a definitional issue: Few insurgents in Iraq are internationals; most are homegrown. And if aspirant terrorists in London or Paris had nuclear bombs, the numbers would become rather different.   Nonetheless, a phenomenon that is scattered, limited and under control, and inevitably transient, has been conflated by Washington with something that is huge and very serious: the desperation among the Muslim masses that is directed indiscriminately against Western nations, which are held responsible for Islamic society"s backwardness, poverty and exploitation.   Al Qaeda and individual international terrorists are the object of worldwide intelligence and police operations. They are a marginal phenomenon. The Bush administration"s conflation of them with the social upheaval in their world is exploited to perpetuate changes in American society that provide a much more sinister threat to democracy than anything ever dreamed by Osama bin Laden. The radical threat to the United States is at home.
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