Smart Crop is an imagecache action that crops based on entropy, which produces more pleasing results when cropping to a fixed aspect (for example it can help prevent cutting of people's heads when cropping a portrait to a square).

Enables a period of time to be set to throttle how often a password reminder email can be sent to each user.

This can be used to prevent a user being sent multiple password reminders by a malicious visitor that knows their username.

• Initial development - BrightTALK

• Developed by Henrique Recidive for Code Positive.

The London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) is one of the world’s leading security think-tanks with a high status in defence circles in western Europe and north America. Its two main annual publications, The Military Balance (an assessment of military capabilities and defence economics worldwide, published in February) and Strategic Survey (a review of global security, published in September) are studied and taken seriously by governments and opinion-formers. The IISS is very much a mainstream organisation, heavily engaged with the defence and security establishment. As such it carries considerable weight.

On 24 May 2004, only fourteen months after the start of the Iraq war, the IISS’s Strategic Survey 2003-04 caused some consternation among the Tony Blair government in arguing that: “…the substantially exposed US military deployment in Iraq represents al-Qaida with perhaps its most ‘iconic’ target outside US territory...Galvanised by Iraq, if compromised by Afghanistan, al-Qaida remains a viable and effective ‘network of networks’”.

This interpretation was not greatly different from analyses by more radical if less establishment sources, some of them presented in earlier columns in this series (see "Iraq in a wider war", 5 May 2004); but the prestige of the IISS meant that it carried greater weight.

This year’s document - Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs - is published only weeks before the Afghan war enters its tenth year, has once again caused flurries in government circles.  Its assessment of the state of the conflict in Afghanistan is blunt (see Richard Norton-Taylor, “Al-Qaida and Taliban threat is exaggerated, says security thinktank”, Guardian, 7 September 2010).

The IISS comments: “The Afghan campaign has involved not just mission creep but mission multiplication”; and that “..for western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests".

At the core of its analysis is the view that: “It is not clear that it should be axiomatically obvious that an Afghanistan freed of an international combat presence in the south would be an automatic magnet for al-Qaeda’s concentrated reconstruction. Al-Qaeda leadership, such as it is, may be quite content to stay where it is, while Taliban leaders who remained in Afghanistan might think twice of the advantages to them of inviting al-Qaeda back after the experience of the last decade.”

To repeat, this kind of assessment is shared elsewhere by more radical analysts; the significance here is the status of IISS in and around the corridors of power. It does not advocate withdrawal of all military forces as the answer, but does point in the direction of a very considerable drawdown as part of substantial changes in overall policy.

The stalled path

Several recent columns in this series have presented the argument that a major rethink on the western security posture in Afghanistan is going to have to come, sooner or later (see "Afghanistan: the fatal error" [24 June 2010], and "The AfPak war via WikiLeaks" [29 July 2010]). Does the fact that the IISS is adding its influence to the call make such a rethink more likely? On its own, it may make little difference, but alongside two recent developments in Afghanistan it may be that a momentum is growing towards that point.

The first is the fact that Afghan government corruption and maladministration is plumbing new depths. Two current examples make the point:

* the forced retiral (effectively sacking) of the deputy attorney-general, Fazel Ahmad Faqiryar, with effect from 29 August 2010; this follows his attempt to prosecute senior members of the government, in one of the very few serious recent attempts to stem corruption

*the increasing evidence of illicit accumulation of wealth by figures very close to Afghan's presidemnt, Hamid Karzai (see Andrew Higgins, "Karazi's brother made nearly $1 million on Dubai deal funded by troubled Kabul bank", Washington Post, 8 September 2010).

Afghanistan is now listed as number 179 out of 180 countries for corruption by Transparency International (Somalia is at 180).

The second development is less obvious but may be even more serious. A key aspect of coalition policy in Afghanistan is to reintegrate Taliban paramilitaries by providing them with jobs and other incentives if they lay down their arms. In parallel with increased foreign forces and extensive military campaigns in the Taliban heartlands of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, reintegration is an essential part of Isaf’s work if it is to succeed.

What is becoming clear is that the policy is in serious trouble, with very few paramilitaries coming forward in March-August 2010 (see Rod Nordland, “Lacking Money and Leadership, Push for Taliban Defectors Stalls", New York Times, 6 September 2010). In the period from September 2006 to February 2010, the Afghan Peace and Reconciliation Commission reports that 9,000 Taliban offered to change sides. That may be something of an exaggeration, but in any event since April 2010 barely a hundred have switched. There has been generous funding for the programme, with around $100 million from the United States and $150 million from several other countries including Germany, Britain and Japan; but the majority of it is simply not being spent because of numerous problems in organising reintegration facilities and encouraging paramilitaries to take part.

When General Stanley McChrystal took military command in Afghanistan on 10 June 2009, he argued for a programme to “offer eligible insurgents reasonable incentives to stop fighting and return to normalcy”. The defence secretary Robert Gates argued similarly in congressional hearings; and reintegration remains a key part of the policy of McChrystal’s own replacement, General David Petraeus (see "Afghanistan: the impossible choice", 1 July 2010).

The next step

The blunt truth is that it is scarcely happening - and that this calls into question any notion that real progress in curbing Taliban influence is being made. The indications even from high-level United States military commanders in Afghanistan seem to confirm this (see Julian E Barnes & Matthew Rosenberg, "Petraeus Expects Sustained Violence", Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2010).

The core reality is that at heart, reintegration is not about patrolling, fighting, using drones, air-strikes or artillery. It is not really about direct military action of any sort. What it is about is conducting civil operations that, if they are proved to work, can actually be represented as at last making progress towards stability.

That such reintegration is not working is an important detail in itself. It is also revealing of Nato/Isaf's overall Afghan predicament, and reinforcement for the more general critical analysis produced by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. In public, there is no change in western policy. In private, the situation may be different. The implication of the latter would be that at some time before March 2011 clear signs of a radical reassessment of western military policy in Afghanistan will at last emerge. If that happens, then IISS will have played a small but significant role.

Department of peace studies, Bradford University

International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS)

Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs (IISS, September 2010)

Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010)

Ceri Oeppen & Angela Schlenkhoff eds., Beyond the ‘Wild Tribes’: Understanding Modern Afghanistan and Its Diaspora (C Hurst, 2010)

Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)

Afghanistan Conflict Monitor

Antonio Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Resurgence of the Neo-Taliban in Afghanistan (C Hurst, 2007)

 Long War Journal

Afghanistan Analysts Network

Pajhwok Afghan News

e-Ariana

Abdul Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban (C Hurst, 2010)

Foreign Policy - The AfPak Channel

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001, and writes an international-security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group

His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010)

Context Block Class gives users of the Context module the ability to define custom classes for blocks per context, both for each block and globally for a region. The module implements a context reaction, providing the interface required for adding classes to blocks which have been defined for that context. This unlocks a tremendous amount of theming flexibility for users of Context module. When combined with a grid based theme or any other theme which implements re-usable styles, the options are endless!

• Context

1. Enable the module.
2. Ensure that your theme has a copy of block.tpl.php.
3. Insert a PHP snippet to your theme's block.tpl.php file(s) that prints the $context_block_classes variable (see below).
4. To add a class to a block or to all blocks within a region, add the "Block classes" reaction to your context.

Add this snippet to your theme's block.tpl.php inside the block's class definition:

<?php
print $context_block_classes;
?>

Here's the first line of the Garland theme's block.tpl.php prior to adding the code:
<div id="block-<?php print $block->module .'-'. $block->delta; ?>" class="clear-block block block-<?php print $block->module ?>">

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PayPal integration for the Drupal Commerce payment and checkout system. Currently supports PayPal WPS for redirected payment using the latest Commerce dev version as of Sept. 9, 2010. IPN support is forthcoming, but as of right now Commerce Payment doesn't support logging payment transactions anyways.

Sponsored by Commerce Guys.

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This module defines context and access rules plugins for CTools (and Panels) based upon values of HTTP request header elements. The following headers are exposed into context and can be used as access rules parameters:

• Referrer
• User Agent
• Host
• Accept
• Accept Charset
• Accept Encoding
• Accept Language
• Connection

Chaos Tools

Extract the module to you site's module directory and enable it. It's usable only with modules utilising CTools context and access plugins, especially with Panels.

As Gerry Hassan notes below, in the context of Britain’s decomposing constitutional myths and structures, a bold new campaign has been launched to secure a referendum on our membership of the European Union.

The campaign is the brainchild of firebrand MEP Daniel Hannan, who resigned from his frontbench role in the European Parliament after David Cameron went back on his “cast-iron” guarantee of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and has since dedicated himself to building populist right-wing campaigns modelled on the US Teaparty movement.

So far these attempts have been notably unsuccessful, but could Europe be the catalyst to mobilise people?

The EU Referendum Campaign hopes to build a groundswell of cross-party support by encouraging people to sign up to a Pledge in support of a “referendum on who governs Britain: the EU or our elected parliament.”

This will be used to put pressure on sitting MPs :

As the number of people taking The Pledge increases we will inform the government, sitting MPs, as well as the prospective candidates of rival parties in their constituencies, of the running total of voters in each seat demanding our Referendum. We will be naming and shaming MPs and candidates who refuse to commit as well as publicising and praising the names of those who have themselves signed The Pledge.

The campaign has a slick website, a Westminster office and a core team led by James Pryor, a veteran Euro-sceptic  who was responsible for UKIP’s 2010 election campaign.

The campaign website has no information on sources of funding, but Campaign Director Marc Glendening told me that the group is being bank-rolled by Toby Blackwell’s, the President of Blackwell’s bookshops who has previous involvement in Euro-Sceptic groups such as Open Europe. (Interestingly, although one might expect to find a conventional free market capitalist behind such trenchant Euro-scepticism, Blackwell has been in the news this week over his plans to emulate John Lewis and hand control of his company to his staff.)

The EU Referendum Campaign will certainly need all the funding it can get if it to achieve its ambitious goals of harnessing the electoral power of voters across the country:

We will go into marginal constituencies and challenge the local politicians and prospective candidates at public meetings to account for their respective positions on this key issue. Leaflets will be distributed door to door keeping constituents informed about where the local politicians stand.

Much of the initial momentum for the campaign comes from the view that this is the “real” referendum people want to have rather than the “meaningless” one we are being offered on electoral reform.

Unsurprisingly, most of the those involved are people who have been in and out of the Tories and UKIP,  but the campaign aspires to be cross-party, appealing to Euro-sceptics on the left, and even supporters of the EU who take the position (which was effectively Lib Dem policy in 2008 at the time of the Lisbon Treaty) that there should be a referendum public debate on our membership of the EU in order to resolve the issue once and for all.

Currently, John Mills of the little-known Labour Euro Safeguard Committee is on the Council, but if the campaign wants to convince people it’s not just a front for UKIP and the Tory right, then it will have to succeed in its efforts to attract euro-sceptic Labour MPs such as Austin Mitchell and Kelvin Hopkins.  

If the campaign can position itself as authentically grassroots and non-partisan, and not just a campaign by fringe Europhobic hacks, then I think it has the potential to catch a spark and ignite popular anger at politicians and our hollowed out shell of a Parliament.

Even those on the left, such as myself, who are broadly supportive of the EU and its goals, can recognise the injustice in the fact the electorate is repeatedly denied the opportunity to have a say on the question of where power should lie. This fundamental lack of democracy has fed into distrust and paranoia at our dealings with the EU. As Hannan notes, “No one under the age of 54 has been asked about Britain's relationship with the EU.” 

Yet at the same time this also has the potential to be a very worrying development. If ever a right-wing movement emerged in Britain that matched Hannan’s beloved Teaparty, for sheer fear, bigotry, and contempt for truth and reason, then it would almost certainly have a strong anti-European component.

Although the UK has nothing comparable to the US’s tradition of anti-government individualism or religious fanaticism, a movement that rails against “elites” and provides populist xenophobic answers to people’s problems at a time of economic distress could win widespread support.

Not that that’s what the EU Referendum Campaign is at the moment, mind you. But it has the potential to feed in to broader anti-politics currents.  

It now looks less and less likely that Clegg’s modest reforms will capture the deep-swell of popular contempt for politicians and satisfy demands for a more accountable and representative democracy. A campaign for a referendum on the EU, on the other hand, just might. 

This is both an opportunity and a threat for democrats.

As Georgia’s school year gets underway, the country’s polyglot president is betting a thousand native English speakers can jump start an ambitious new policy to make English Georgia’s second language.

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With shops, schools and even nightclubs in southern Kyrgyzstan re-opening, daily life in the strife-torn region is slowly assuming a veneer of normalcy.

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A common perception is that the global recession has increased these numbers substantially, but as Duncan Green from Oxfam explained in his refreshingly-honest presentation (“I’m not an academic so I can make massive generalizations and I don’t care”), this may not be true.

“Overall, things aren’t so bad” was his conclusion from a twelve-country study of 2,500 poor households, at least in the sense that things haven’t gotten much worse for people already living on the margins. The figure that has been used by charities to engage with the public around the financial crisis - ‘100 million more people thrown into poverty’- was “just a back-of-the-envelope calculation,” but don’t let that stop you giving! And talking of giving, it seems as though remittances sent home by family members working abroad have held up pretty well.

The crisis has, however, created budget deficits that will inevitably reduce government expenditure in the next 12-24 months, and that will make chronic poverty worse, presumably in the UK too. It has also, as many conference presenters confirmed, tested people’s resilience to the limit and stretched frontline community groups to breaking point. But the more important questions concern how ‘regular’, ongoing chronic poverty can be reduced, since as Ravi Kanbur from Cornell University pointed out, crises of various kinds are a natural feature of all societies, even if we can’t predict exactly when they will hit or what form they will take. The trick is to get ahead of them and put in place measures like safety nets and ring-fenced government funds that can absorb shocks when they occur, and ensure that successful anti-poverty policies and programmes are not knocked off course. One way of financing such things, Kanbur suggested, would be to pre-approve additional lines of credit from the World Bank or some other international institution that countries could draw on very quickly in times of crisis.      

On the question of how to attack long-term, endemic poverty, there’s clearly a consensus emerging already in the conference, or maybe it was there before people arrived, this being a closely-knit academic and policy community. Whether it would be shared if the conference had been held in the USA or China is another matter. The conference has a very ‘Northern European’ feel, despite the presence of delegates from Asia, Africa and Latin America, and so far has given short shrift to the role of business and the market (not a single mention of “philanthrocapitalism” – hooray!). Central to this consensus is the role played by basic social protection (things like social safety-nets, cash transfers, family grants and the like), which almost seems like a new magic bullet, but it is clearly insufficient without what Andrew Shepherd of the Overseas Development Institute described as “transformative economic growth and progressive social change.” And in those respects, building people’s long-term assets is more important than increasing their short-term incomes, assets that include their bargaining capacities, community organizations, access to justice, health and education, as well as to land, livestock, savings and jobs.

Is this going to be enough? Will the right policies really make the difference? Many delegates seem to doubt it, asking recurring questions from the floor about power and politics and how foreign aid (and academic knowledge) engages with those processes. “The real problem”, said Stan Thekakara from Just Change in India this morning, “is that communities have lost the ability to control the factors that affect their lives,” partly, of course, because many of those factors now operate at the national and international levels with no democratic oversight or accountability. So, as Duncan Green posed to this afternoon’s panel of presenters, what are the politics of chronic poverty reduction? Answers on a postcard please to Duncan Green, Oxfam, John Smith House, Oxford. 

Google Instant is the new UX interfacing the user with Google's search results. The idea is to show users results to queries that they may be trying to make before they make them. Here are my initial thoughts:

• GI relies on you typing informative words early in the query in order to get the most predictive bang for the buck. However, interogative expressions (in SVO languages) tend to have the least informative elements at the front ('what...', 'how...', 'who...', etc.). This suggests that the experience reinforces the GPL (grunting pidgin language) model of web search rather than the natural language model of search (asking naturally formed questions).
• GI is another reinforcement of preferential attachment. I'm not quite sure what I want, maybe if you show me something that is a popular result for the most popular completion of my half formed query I will take it anyway, also adding more popularity to the query and the result. While this may or may not be a good or bad thing, it may drive results to what is satisfactory rather than what is optimal. It would be fascinating to see a comparative analysis of the query logs pre and post GI.
• GI doesn't (yet) work with special operators like 'filetype' or 'site' - a type of query that I regularly do - I'm sure that will be coming in the future as the product matures.
• One of the biggest design challenges of GI is the transition from the home page to the results page. I don't think Google has quite nailed that issue and I find the transition somewhat jarring currenlty.

Google Instant looks like a fascinating experiment, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I'm currently on the fence about it and leaning slightly to predict that it will go through many iterations before it really takes of.

Valentina the Great (not)

In principle nothing is impossible in Russian politics. President Putin is perfectly capable of nominating possibly not his Labrador Connie, but certainly Valentina Ivanovna Matviyenko as guardian of the presidential chair. There are, however, no serious indications that Mrs Matviyenko has any more chance of such a career leap than anyone else from the Russian political beau monde. This is demonstrated by how The Independent article appeared and some of its features.

“She was spotted and promoted by none other than the former President and current PM, Vladimir Putin. It was he who gave her the big break: the transfer to St Petersburg. So if he is in two minds about returning to the Kremlin himself and hesitant to back Medvedev for a second term, Ms Matviyenko's might be the new face of Russia.” – Mary Dejevski, Independent

Firstly, its appearance. Many people in St Petersburg remember that on 1 September 2006 a hare started up in the Russian media about the so-called project «Valentina the Great»: Mrs Matviyenko was slated for president in 2008. This didn't come to pass, as we know, and there are no serious reasons for believing that there was any such project in the real world of the Kremlin, rather than just in the imagination of various not very influential individuals.

To the amusement of the Russian independent media, an article appeared in Britain’s The Independent on 6 September suggesting Valentina Matviyenko, Governor of St Petersburg, might be a candidate for Russian president in 2012. 

It is striking that this new information about Matviyenko has appeared exactly the same amount of time before the forthcoming presidential elections, as the rumour about «Valentina the Great» did before the 2006 elections. An unlikely coincidence, though I'm not about to start speculating who stands to benefit from it and why.

Norman Foster is not guilty

Now for the special features of the article, which appears to have been written by a less than competent journalist. The trivial factual mistakes, which are easy to check, lead me to think that the author of the article in The Independent is also wide of the mark on the larger questions, which are more difficult to check.

“Her detailed answers started with her support – or not – for the Norman Foster tower that the Russian gas giant, Gazprom, wants to build in her city. On balance, she seemed to support it, in the face of fierce ecological objections, but not in a dogmatic way that would prevent compromise with protest groups concerned about damage to St Petersburg's skyline.” – Mary Dejevski, Independent

The well known British architect Sir Norman Foster, for example, is named as the architect of the Gazprom Tower project, known as the Okhta Centre. Foster actually designed a scheme for the reconstruction of the landmark «New Holland» complex: this has absolutely nothing to do with the «gas-scraper», which is situated at the other end of the city. Foster didn't even submit a design to the competition. He was at one time on the panel of judges, though he subsequently resigned, which would have barred him from entering the competition.

The article contains serious mistakes in Matviyenko's biography. She was Deputy Prime Minister, not a Deputy Minister. The author of the article clearly doesn't understand Russian government hierarchy: Deputy Minister is such an insignificant post that it would be an impossible jumping-off point for becoming Governor of St Petersburg.

But, leaving the factual mistakes on one side, it is more interesting to consider the article's take on Valentina Matviyenko's strong points.

Margaret Thatcher has nothing to do with it

The author's starting point is that Valentina Ivanovna has changed her hairstyle, lost weight, and started running the city more spontaneously and, at the same time, more confidently. People in the West people are possibly used to the fact that the chief distinguishing feature of Russian management is enjoyment of good holidays, lots of sport, sunbathing, time spent travelling round their own country and the world (including on a motorbike, a fire-extinguishing plane and a Lada Kalina car). But none of this is sufficient to qualify as Putin's next heir. In our political world there are other not insignificant factors involved in climbing up the vertical of power.

According to the author of the article, one of Matviyenko's strong points as a possible presidential candidate is the similarity of her biography with Margaret Thatcher's. There is actually only one thing that these two delightful ladies have in common: they are both chemists by training. But Thatcher went to Oxford University, whereas Matviyenko studied at the Leningrad Institute of Chemistry and Pharmaceuticals (LICP).

In the twilight of the Soviet age I taught economics at this institute, so am not unfamiliar with it. It is, alas, very far from Oxford. LICP was one Leningrad's least prestigious and high-quality educational institutions with pretty mediocre students. In the USSR pharmaceuticals did not have the significance they have since acquired as big business.  So the students who went to the «Pill», as it was known in student slang, were the ones who had failed to get into the famous pre-revolutionary Technological Institute, which attracted the city's best professors.

Moreover, Thatcher in her time showed herself to be an independent politician, able to break the mould. Matviyenko has only been able to carve out a career because she has presented herself as the representative of the «boss», i.e. Putin. She has never shown any sign of original ideas as to how the country should be governed.

The Muscovites are NOT coming

The article correctly points out that Matviyenko is a Putin person. This is one of its few uncontroversial contentions. But there is not one person in the higher echelons of power in Russia who is NOT a Putin person (except one or two installed by Medvedev), so any of them would be just as entitled as Matviyenko to lay claim to the presidency.

There are few regional governors in Russia as loyal to Vladimir Putin as Valentina Matviyenko.

What is most amusing is the author's enthusiasm for Matviyenko's success in St Petersburg. She maintains that families are moving there from Moscow for the culture and quality of life. The Russian translation on www.inosmi.ru actually says that they are moving because living standards are better there, but even The Independent article didn't come up with such idiocies (the standard of life in St Petersburg is much lower).

„ Vast investment by the central government improved the city's dilapidated fabric in time for the 300th anniversary in 2003. But the bigger changes have happened since, with huge new housing and commercial building projects and, most conspicuously, a transformation of the public mood. For the first time in my more than 30 years of visiting, people on the streets of St Petersburg seem confident and content with themselves.” – Mary Dejevski, Independent

There are actually many more Petersburgers moving to Moscow than there are rich Muscovites buying second flats in St Petersburg. It was a problem in Soviet times and Matviyenko has naturally not been able to reverse this very obvious trend. To have any hope of job fulfillment or a career in today's Russia, a move to the capital nearer to big money and the centre of decision-making sooner or later becomes essential. Under Matviyenko two or three head offices of big Russian companies have moved from Moscow to St Petersburg, but the realities of decision-making are in Moscow and senior management cadres are concentrated right there.

The article assesses life in St Petersburg by looking at the prosperity and confidence shining from the faces of its inhabitants. There are contented-looking faces in other places in Russia too, with the possible exception of depressing centres of population like Pikalevo. Hardly surprising, as the flow of petrodollars has raised living standards. But this has absolutely nothing to do with Matviyenko. There have been no serious attempts to develop business in St Petersburg and Putin, when contemplating the problem of 2012, knows full well that Valentina Ivanovna is a good lobbyist, who creates the right conditions for attracting government funding to St Petersburg. She is absolutely not an outstanding administrator, whose city offers better chances for business development than other cities.

Corruption rules!

Meanwhile The Independent article doesn't consider the real problems. According to its author, Matviyenko has even become one of the few people in power in Russia who is waging active war on corruption. The real methods of battling corruption in St Petersburg are sometimes quite tragicomical. Some time ago, for instance, posters appeared in the streets calling on citizens to «report» incidences of corruption to the relevant bodies.

“She also seemed to be one of very few Russian politicians to be actively tackling corruption.” – Mary Dejevski, Independent

This is perhaps an indirect sign that the government of St Petersburg has not been able to come up with any more effective measures. But my personal opinion is that this advertising campaign has no connection whatsoever with the problem of corruption. It's much more likely to be a way of using up funding allocated for this purpose. Before this «anti-corruption» campaign there were posters all over the city promoting tolerance.  This was connected with an officially-funded «tolerance programme».

Anxiety has recently been expressed in the media about the meteoric rise and successful career of Matviyenko's son in St Petersburg. I am no specialist on this subject and shall refrain from speculation, but it is interesting that the author of the article in The Independent appears not even to have heard this story, although it is the kind of information that a professional journalist should be gathering.

This is not an exhaustive list of the oddities of this article. But the conclusion reached by the independent newspaper The Independent independently of many important facts could be regarded as extremely dubious.

Valentina Matviyenko: Meet Russia's Thatcher, the chemist who could end up in the Kremlim, by Mary Dejevsky in St Petersburg, Independent, Sept. 6, 2010

Valentina Matvienko’s Second Term: From Ambitious Projects to Threats of Removal, by Daniil Tsygankov, St. Petersburg-Moscow, Russian Analytical Digest, (Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, and the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the Institute of History at the University of Basel

Gender not an issue for most influential woman in Russia, Helsinki Sanomat, Finland, By Jussi Konttinen, June 4th, 2008

Valentina I. Matvienko was born in Ukraine in 1949. She graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Chemistry and Pharmaceutics in 1972, and the Social Sciences Academy of the CPSU Central Committee, in 1985.

Mrs. Matvienko pursued her active career in the Komsomol organization for young communists from 1972 on, first as a Chief of the Department in the Petrogradsky District Komsomol Committee, and later as the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Komsomol Committee.

In 1989, Mrs. Matvienko was elected to the Soviet Parliament, where she subsequently chaired the Soviet Supreme Council Committee for Women, Families, Maternity and Childhood.

Mrs. Matvienko entered her diplomatic service in 1991, and pursued a career in foreign service until 1998. In 1991-94, she was the Ambassador of the Soviet Union and later the Ambassador of Russia to the Republic of Malta, later served as the Ambassador of the Russian Federation in Greece in 1997-98.

In the following years (1998-2003), Valentina Matvienko worked as a Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation for Social Policy.

On October 5, 2003, Valentina Matvienko was elected Governor of St.Petersburg.

Married. Has a son.

The SNP minority government under Alex Salmond has finally accepted political arithmetic and retreated on its promise to hold an independence referendum before the May 2011 Scottish Parliament elections.

Now Daniel Hannan, Tory MEP and freethinker has announced a new campaign – called the EU Referendum Campaign  – campaigning for a vote on ‘In’ or ‘Out’ of the European Union. It is not clear whether this is just a campaign calling for a vote in principle or, as is more likely, a vote for pulling out the European Union altogether. At the same time there is to be an AV referendum on the same day as devolved elections – something the Electoral Commission has already made a previous ruling against – on a policy no one supports, as well as a future Welsh devolution referendum.

Daniel Hannan speaking in the European Parliament

As Peter Hoskin put it on ‘Spectator Coffee House’, ‘referenda are now hardwired into the political mainstream’. This is both right and wrong. Hoskin is right something is shifting, but let's remember the ‘political mainstream’ has only held one UK-wide referendum in its history: on the renegotiated terms of Common Market entry n 1975 – two years after Ted Heath took the UK into Europe with no plebiscite.

Yet, something is moving. One change is that the voodoo world of parliamentary sovereignty and Westminsterism is slowly and unceremoniously coming to an end. Thatcher and Blair took these notions to levels of caricature and parody: late Westminsterism era hyper-activity and centralism intervening at a micro-level across practically every aspect of society.<!--break-->

Thatcher and Blair directly weakened parliamentary sovereignty, Westminster and the integrity of the British state, leading to unintended consequences which we will only begin to understand long after they have left the stage. The late New Labour era of numerous political scandals – from ‘cash for honours’ to the squashing of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE Systems culture of corporate kickbacks, to the shock of a political nomenklatura caught in the expenses scandal – has yet to be fully felt and understood.

There was an equivalent of a popular uprising and revulsion against the Orwellian scale of this. And one dimension of change here was that the slow weakening of the mantra of parliamentary sovereignty was exposed for the time warp mysticism it is, and as a result the popular belief in a politics of popular sovereignty came centre-stage.

The consequences and tensions of this should be underlined. The British political classes are still gripped by the fanaticism of Westminsterism and parliamentary sovereignty, but in its leading, enlightened sections – such as the Cameroon Conservatives – know they are on thin ice. The voters have long abandoned the Hogwartsland magical world of faith in Westminsterism and parliamentary sovereignty. Instead, across the UK there is a powerful, implicit sense of popular sovereignty; that power lies and comes directly from the popular will not parliamentary mumbo-jumbo.

Then we come to the AV referendum. This can now be seen as classic Cameron-Clegg ‘modernisation’ – looking both ways at the same time. Part appealing for renewal with the allure of future democratisation. Part consolidating the old system with change that is not too fundamental or far-reaching but harks back to when British chaps used to know how best to govern the world; the promise then to India or Egypt was always democracy and ‘civilisation’ at some distant point on the horizon; Britain’s political class still haven’t lost their imperial impulse (even excluding wars)!

The Salmond Referendum Shuffle

Then there is the Scottish situation. The SNP’s entire raison d’etre is about statehood and independence, and tactically advancing this through an independence referendum.

The Nationalists have long known that they don’t have the votes to win a majority in the Parliament. Wendy Alexander, briefly Scottish Labour leader nearly gave an opening with her ‘bring it on’ moment.

This has suited the SNP who lack a majority in the Parliament and know they lack a majority in the country; instead they had hoped once they lost a vote in Parliament to claim the high democratic ground against their unionist opponents.

It was never that simple. Independence is not that high an issue with voters. SNP supporters will say neither was devolution pre-Parliament. The difference is that devolution under Thatcher and Major became increasingly interconnected with ‘bread and butter’ economic and social issues; independence has so far failed to do this. The coming public spending savaging – estimated at 5.9% cuts of £1.7 billion in 2011-12 – will be potentially aided by the ‘Calman cuts’  – which would produce Scots public spending cuts comparable to a Polish post-Communist ‘shock therapy’ – may change this.

This leads into difficult terrain. The SNP are now talking of making independence a rallying cry at next May’s elections. And the party has plans for a multi-option referendum on independence and ‘devolution max’ on one side and the limited change of ‘devolution lite’ (Calman) on the other. That seems too simple and complicated at the same time. When Scotland has its independence vote, it has to be a simple Yes/No vote on one question, which would stand up to international scrutiny and produce an unambiguous result.

There are controversies such as whether it is in the power of the Scottish Parliament to even hold a vote. Matt Qvotrup, a respected constitutional expert, has made the case that the First Minister could call a referendum vote through a Scottish Statutory Instrument (SSI) of the Parliament, but this would be even more controversial and seen as undemocratic, bad politics.

Peter Jones, no friend of the SNP, has argued that ‘the national conversation’, ministerial advocacy of independence for the last few years, and detailed civil servant work on the area, has changed Scottish politics. He writes:

For the best part of four years, independence has been moved from a fringe topic of interest only to the committed to a more central place. 

He then makes the over-statement on independence that ‘Scots have been forced to think about it much more deeply than they have done before’ and ‘the unionist parties have been compelled to come up with an alternative strategy’. By this he means Calman; but I think Calman is a response and tactical manoeuvre in reaction to the SNP, not ‘an alternative strategy’ for a reformed union – and one that may spectacularly backfire on them.

Joan McAlpine responding in the next day’s ‘Scotsman’ disagreed with Jones from a pro-independence position, and quoted a senior Nationalist politician saying that "unionists who welcomed the move saw it as evidence that the SNP had at last become ‘house-trained’ and were working within parameters set by the Establishment".

She makes the case that the SNP shift from a ‘referendum to deferendum’ is one which could backfire in the party; and also combine with concerns in the SNP about a party which seems to be content in office to be seen to be ‘governing well’ and ‘managerial’.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist administration still invokes opprobrium in its opponents. Jeremy Paxman introducing Alex Salmond on ‘Newsnight UK’ talks about the dropping of independence as the end of ‘shaking off the English jackboot’, a language of scorn and dismissal, while Iain Gray, Scottish Labour leader, allows at every opportunity his utter contempt for the SNP and Salmond to show through. Gray’s opinion poll ratings are on the floor – with 9% of Scots supporting him as their choice for First Minister next year (the same level of support for Tory Annabel Goldie) versus 31% for Salmond – but Gray may find himself in office next year.

The SNP matters because of their ultimate goal of Scottish statehood and independence. The first Alex Salmond SNP administration has been a decent and relatively popular one, but it has not been a transformative one. It has set out to not make enemies, particularly in institutional Scotland, and has not attempted a governing or movement strategy of change. The first would see the SNP in office create a number of alliances – for example with the labour and trade union movement, while also picking a number of challenges – with the extended quango state to take one example. And the second, would see thought and effort going into an ecology of self-government agencies and bodies. Instead, the SNP is left isolated, trying via a ‘safety first’ approach to win people over to radical change by reassurance.

The shift of the SNP from the politics of the possible 'neverendum' – the unionist nightmare of one referendum vote followed by another until a pro-independence majority emerged – has been replaced by the politics of the never-referendum – where an independence vote does not happen in the immediate future. That’s how it looks at the moment, although things could change after the election and the cuts begin.

The SNP have proven they have the competence to govern, but they need a radical imagination and zeal if they are to change Scotland and achieve independence. That ultimately is about more than the tactics of whether you bring an independence bill to the Scottish Parliament in expectation of defeat. On the other hand, the unionist parties and institutional establishment of Scotland have not come to terms with the depths of the multi-faceted crisis of Britain: of its politics, democracy, state and economy. This goes to the heart of what Britain is and what the union is for.

The old Westminster British political order is broken and unfixable. British public opinion has moved dramatically beyond its arcane assumptions and conventions. Radicals in all parties and none realise the extent of the crisis; that’s why Daniel Hannan’s campaign for a EU referendum is so timely and the sort of thing which could catch the spark of popular disconnection. The current stalemate in Scottish politics is not an enduring ceasefire, but merely one more skirmish in the long revolution and campaign for self-government.

A great deal of noise is currently being generated about development issues, piggy-backing on the 10th anniversary of the Millennium Declaration and targeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Summit in mid-September, which will be attended by Nick Clegg. Special interest groups of all kinds are taking this opportunity to push their message.

The MDGs have been used for the past decade as a tool for guiding and measuring development progress. Not only has progress been found wanting: the MDGs themselves are wanting. They represent the wrong view of change; they are being routinely misused in a way which confuses the ends with the means; they are highly unrealistic; and they are set at a global level, when development happens much more locally. Because of these flaws, they act as perverse incentives, even obstructing the development process they are supposed to galvanise. The problem is not just the MDGs, but the ill-adapted development discourse that they represent.

This prevailing development discourse tends to pull analysis, policy and action away from the political, institutional and societal towards the technical. This is partly because technical issues are simpler and less contentious. But it is also because the idea of ‘development’ – which is after all an intellectual and political construct – has become hugely confused. The mix of different ideas about human progress is dynamic, constantly being added to, and there are limits to the amount that can be added to a construct of this nature before it breaks down under its own weight.

The development construct is now cracking under the weight of issues such as governance, human rights, gender, livelihoods, poverty eradication, poverty reduction, exclusion, international trade, human security, conflict-sensitivity, peacebuilding, climate adaptation, fragility, statebuilding, etc. (And this is before geo-political issues like anti-terrorism and access to rare earth minerals are added to increase complexity still further.) Because the development discourse accommodates them poorly, these complex ideas of human progress become distorted and mixed up together incoherently. A combination of politics and institutional constraints has turned this into an oversimplified development paradigm, as represented by the MDGs, which are a poor map with which to navigate, much less catalyse, the processes that constitute human progress.

This matters enormously, because of the vast scale of human underdevelopment, and especially in so-called ‘fragile’ contexts, which are most resistant to progressive change and which are or risk being affected by violent conflict. It is therefore tremendously important to review and update our understanding of the way human progress happens. Politically, now is the right time to do this, because a growing public scepticism at a time of economic belt-tightening is raising well-founded questions about the impact of development aid, and these need convincing answers if public support is not to leach away. Meanwhile, other changes taking place in the world make this process overdue: the global power dynamic is shifting; there are a growing number of incomplete peace processes with the challenges they bring; development itself produces additional stresses in fragile contexts; and meanwhile climate change is generating another layer of stresses, to which people will have to adapt.

We suggest three broad areas for action around the need to a) reframe the development discourse; b) create a new narrative to replace the MDGs; and c) make development institutions more fit for their purpose.

There is no lack of creative thinking in the development sector. Plenty of ideas are being proposed and tested, and the sector is constantly alive with discussions about better ways to work. The problem is that for institutional reasons such ideas tend to be pushed to the margins. We need to harness these ideas and discussions better in order to improve our understanding of human progress, and enable more appropriate policies and actions to be developed and put into practice. This means we need a sustained, open and honest discussion about human progress and the role of development institutions.

Many people working in development are sceptical about the prevailing development paradigm, but self-censor their views and ideas because the room for change seems limited. Such people need to be encouraged and empowered to be more forthcoming. There are numerous opportunities for this at every level, in the development of policies, strategies, and international agreements.

These processes include the High Level Summit in September 2010, the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Seoul in 2011; the International Network on Conflict and Fragility managed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. Meanwhile the EU is in the process of reconfiguring its external relations architecture. The new External Action Service will play a role in the EU’s overseas development assistance, and discussions about this should be informed by new thinking about human progress rather than simply adopting the paradigms on which the EC has based its overseas development in the past. Meanwhile, new development policies and strategies are constantly being prepared in developing and donor countries, in partnerships between them, and in multilateral organisations. All such processes provide opportunities for a fresh look at what constitutes development, and how it happens.

Seizing such opportunities for constructive conversations will depend on leadership, and on the way questions are framed. Leadership combines risk-taking and inspiration, as well as an ability to navigate politically. Good leadership will be needed to create space for a more honest conversation about development; and this will entail reframing the questions to enable and encourage a deeper and more wide-ranging conversation. The fundamental question to be asked is, ‘What do developed societies look like, how do they become like that, and how can such changes be catalysed?’

At the MDG Summit in September, the main question being asked is ‘How can we achieve the MDGs by 2015?’ It would be impossible to change this now. But the Summit can nevertheless be used as an opportunity to begin changing the nature of the debate, for example, by establishing a process to identify what will replace the MDGs in 2015. The terms of reference for this process can be framed in a way which allows the conversation to question the MDGs themselves, rather than simply why they will not have been met.

If this is matched at other levels of planning and review – in the development of new donor strategies for example, and in the political debate in ‘fragile’ countries themselves – the nature of the discourse will start to change, and an informal dialogue will be created which will contribute to a much richer narrative about human progress. The discussion needs to incorporate a mixture of perspectives from rich and poorer countries, different political cultures, established and emerging powers, governmental and non-governmental backgrounds, big business and small business, different civil society groupings, diverse geographic and cultural perspectives, different gender and age groups, the media, and academics from different disciplines such as economics, history, anthropology, and the arts.

The media and politicians have a particularly important role to play, as it is they who ultimately set the terms of the public discourse within which aid and development institutions are guided and held accountable. They can help move the public debate away from the traditionally binary discussion about the pros and cons of aid, if they are willing to examine the complexity and nuances of the issue, what works and what does not work, and find new ways of conveying these to the general public.

Ultimately, if the terms of the development discourse are to be renewed as we believe necessary, it will be because the many people working within the sector who know that the current paradigm is inadequate, take the initiative within their sphere of influence to alter the nature of the debate, and together create a kind of movement for change.

As part of the changing discourse, we need to create a new narrative of development – of human progress – and a new global framework to replace the MDGs when they expire in 2015. This will tell the story of how human societies have developed, are developing and can develop further in the future. To avoid repeating the problems associated with the MDGs, it is important that this narrative achieves a better balance between political expediency and analytical rigour. The first step must be to create an analytically rigorous model. Once this is established, it can be used as the basis for a more political framework, but there should be no confusion between the two. This new framework can then be used by governments, NGOs, intergovernmental bodies and others, in line with the OECD’s exhortation to take the context as the starting point, to inspire local, national, regional and where appropriate, global goals and measures of progress.

In our recent report, we suggested a model or framework for this new narrative, based on a vision of a world in which people can resolve their differences without violence, while continuing to make equitable social and economic progress, and without lessening the opportunities for their neighbours or future generations to do the same. This vision would be both enabled and recognisable by five core factors: equal access to justice, political voice, security, economic opportunity and well-being. These would in their turn be underpinned by a self-reinforcing set of values and institutions. We suggest how societies have in the past made the transition towards this vision, giving clues as to how others may do so, and how such processes can be catalysed and helped.

We make no claim to have found the best definition of development, only to have asked some of the important questions and made a contribution to the debate. We expect and welcome comment and criticism, in recognition of the fact that not enough is yet understood about how development happens. More debate is what is needed and there must be room for diverse, even contradictory perspectives. Indeed, the narrative would benefit from ideas drawn from a combination of disciplines, including history, economics, business sectors, political science, sociology and anthropology. But it is important to create a common framework within which different perspectives can be compared, and used to inspire progress and hold development actors accountable for their actions and progress. This common framework should have certain minimum characteristics, e.g. it should:

• Be vision-based, i.e. contain a comprehensive idea of what developed societies look like.
• Describe how societies have transformed and can transform – i.e., make progress towards the vision.
• Explain the role of values and institutions in the process of change and in the vision itself.
• Be analytically sound.
• Be true to the idea of enabling change as contained in the UN Millennium Declaration: i.e. ‘promote and create global and national environments conducive to development and to the eradication of poverty’. This is in recognition that development is a mainly endogenous process of change happening at multiple inter-related levels within society, requiring leadership and effective relationships and negotiation; and one that can be influenced, but not wrought, by external forces and an external enabling environment.
• Acknowledge the fundamental importance of subsidiarity, i.e. that decisions and actions are taken at the lowest appropriate level, within a framework which is set at the highest appropriate level; i.e. be expected to take context as the starting point.
• Make clear the difference between the vision, and the means or strategies needed to get there. This means, for example, disentangling humanitarian from development outcomes and processes – i.e. make clear the difference between humanitarian outcomes such as providing basic services to people in fragile contexts, and true development milestones that are the markers of progress towards the vision.
• Recognise the complexities and nuanced nature of development, and find ways to communicate these publicly as simply as possible.

This new framework needs to be substantially completed by 2014, in time to replace the MDGs.

Fitness for purpose is a dynamic concept: the fitness of the institution must evolve as and when its purpose evolves. Our understanding of the complexity of human progress is continually improving, leading to suggestions for new, different approaches and ways of working. But the institutions of development and aid have failed to keep up: they contain a great deal of inertia. One can almost talk of the global development institution (in the singular), so conformist and orthodox have donors, multilateral organisations, NGOs and recipient governments become. This means that when new ideas do filter through the aid and development system, as ‘fragile states’ and peacebuilding/statebuilding have done in the past few years, the response tends to be “What can our existing institutions do with this idea?”, rather than the more appropriate “What institutions do we need, to work on the basis of this new knowledge, or to meet this new challenge?”

The question before us should be: What kinds of institutions are needed in order to catalyse key processes such as state- and nation-building, opening access to political and economic opportunity, the impersonalisation of the political economy, sustained economic growth, democratisation, the establishment of the rule of law, and the evolution of a culture which encourages initiative? The tricky thing about this kind of work is that development institutions have to work within the political economy which they are keen to see transformed, and therefore to borrow a metaphor from woodwork, they have to “work with the grain, to change the grain” – a very tall order which above all requires analytical and political expertise.

To meet this challenge, the international community and individual states, along with civil society, need to review the institutions available to them and renew them. We do not underestimate the difficulty of doing this, but it is critical to a more successful international development endeavour. The key elements these institutions need to address between them are as follows:

• Establish a clear purpose for which these institutions are held transparently accountable. Broadly, there is a choice to be made here: the institutions can either provide a kind of welfare assistance in support of economic and social sector programmes, or they can aim to support development based on a more complex vision of human progress such as we have explored in this paper. These two options are very different in nature and thus require very different institutions for effective delivery. If the latter option is chosen, it should be coherent with the improved development narrative called for. Institutions need to know their limits and focus on nudging, stimulating and incentivising changes, within a strategic, big picture view of transformation.
• Ensure that they are organised, resourced and staffed in line with the agreed purpose, and that internal reward and accountability systems are designed accordingly, e.g. to encourage and reward creativity. This is likely to mean that they adopt the concept of subsidiarity themselves, with more decisions being taken closer to the ground and for some institutions, less reliance on “missions” from headquarters. It will mean forming new kinds of relationships with governments, civil society and others, and will require staff with the right kind of skills for such roles – people who can work with the grain to change the grain. This kind of work is not only labour-intensive, it is expert labour-intensive. It requires an institutional culture which is transparent and self-critical, and invites criticism from elsewhere.
• Be able to work with the grain to change the grain. This means working in new ways, for example to engage politically and on complex societal issues including exclusion, trust, culture and nation-building; to understand the operation of complex processes; to understand the operation of complex and competing incentives on people’s decisions and behaviour; to strengthen values and institutions (“the rules of the game”) in line with the long-term vision and promote leadership, improved relationships and opportunities for the negotiation of changed roles. And it needs to be able to harness the transforming progressive potential of the growing middle class in poor countries.
• Work at multiple levels:
  • Internationally – on issues such as international trade and investment, and international criminality (e.g. narcotics and money laundering);
  • In donor countries, to reach a new honest compact with rich country taxpayers based on the improved development narrative, and within a coherent foreign policy in which tensions between overseas development goals and other aspects of the national interest are resolved; and
  • In fragile contexts where the transformation needed for people to make genuine progress can be supported and stimulated.
• Look beyond “aid”, and especially at other international institutions whose actions have an impact on the enabling global environment, such as trade, and the regulation of international businesses operating in fragile environments.
• Devise strategies that are analytically sound, and are rooted in an analysis of the political economy. This entails figuring out how incentives can be rebalanced to promote change, and is likely to imply a more subtle and sharper use of aid conditionality as well as more donor funding through nongovernmental vehicles. While external agencies may lack leverage on the big political issues in fragile contexts, they can use their limited powers to incentivise small changes with big potential impacts.
• Take a long-term perspective, maintaining a balance between predictability and flexibility: predictability, so that partners and others can plan accordingly; flexibility, to be able to react and respond as the situation changes and understanding improves, in line with a concept of conflict-sensitivity.

We recognise the enormity of the challenge we have proposed. But we make this challenge as realists not idealists. In a rapidly changing world, the development institutions – whose fundamental mandate is to help shape the changes – must continue to evolve, or they risk becoming irrelevant.

This article is based on the recent International Alert report by the same authors: Working with the grain to change the grain: moving beyond the Millennium Development Goals, September 2010. (www.international-alert.org) 

Pakistan is in the eye of many storms. It lies at the heart of the United States’s almost decade-long “war on terror”, with an ever-ambiguous position (in Washington’s view) as an unreliable and perhaps even renegade ally. It is a society riven by enormous social inequalities and deep political, religious and ethnic divisions. It is frequently hit by acts of pitiless violence, from the targeting by religious extremists of members of rival faiths to “drone attacks” by US forces which kill innocent civilians.

Now, it is now battered by catastrophic floods which have destroyed the livelihoods of millions of the country’s people, threatening even greater humanitarian disasters to come. The United Nations reported on 7 September 2010 that as many as 10 million people have been living entirely without shelter for six weeks. And even in sport there is no release, for players in the national cricket team are charged with taking money in return for aiding a betting-scam by altering their on-field behaviour.

This mix of political crisis, natural tragedy and everyday corruption is itself an indication of how intractable Pakistan’s problems are. What is also clear is that the most serious of these problems go to the very top, and relate to the nature of the state and its institutions (not least its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency). If there is a way forward for Pakistan, a path beyond violence and extremism, it surely lies in addressing how these institutions operate - in particular, how the years of war in Afghanistan and its spillover effects in Pakistan have entrenched militarism and strengthened those forces in Pakistan most beyond democratic control.

The real policy

The role of Inter-Services Intelligence was highlighted once more with the disclosure by the WikiLeaks project on 25 July 2010 of a vast trove of classified United States military documents on its operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The approximately 90,000 pages of Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 are the latest evidence from a series of reports that the ISI has given ongoing support to Islamist militant networks operating in Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks “revelations” provoked a great outpouring of publicity, which in great part is owed to the nature of the project and the way it cooperated with established newspapers (such as the New York Times and Der Spiegel) to maximise impact. So it is important to stress that where the ISI is concerned the documents offer nothing new. US military intelligence has known for several decades that Pakistan’s state sponsors Islamist networks (see Paul Rogers, "The Afghan war via WikiLeaks", 29 July 2010).

There are many examples to confirm this in existing official records. For example, two declassified reports of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington - dated two weeks after 9/11, and released in September 2003 - observe that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network was “able to expand under the safe sanctuary extended by Taliban following Pakistan directives” and funded by the ISI.

In addition, confidential Nato reports and US intelligence assessments circulated to White House officials in 2008 confirm consistent ISI support for Taliban insurgents. They indicate that Pakistan’s current chief-of-staff, General Ashfaq Kayani - who served as head of the ISI from 2004-07 - presided over Taliban training-camps in Pakistan’s western province of Balochistan and provided militants with over 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. In the same year, US intelligence intercepted Kayani’s description of the senior insurgent leader Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani as a “strategic asset” in the insurgency around Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

Britain, another key ally of both Pakistan and the United States, has also long been aware of this involvement. A leaked report in 2006 by the ministry of defence-run think-tank, the Defence Academy, spelled out the ISI’s “dual role in combating terrorism” while simultaneously “supporting the Taliban [and] supporting terrorism and extremism”.

A practice of successive British governments has been to overlook such evidence while trumpeting Pakistan’s brilliance at fighting the “war on terror”. In late June 2010, the new foreign secretary William Hague praised General Kayani’s efforts to combat extremism, emphasising the significance of Britain’s long-term strategic and economic relationship with Pakistan. This made the new prime minister David Cameron’s condemnation of Pakistan’s “export of terror” all the more was unexpected and wounding to Islamabad - especially as it was uttered during a visit to India.

The logic of war

The WikiLeaks documents may not have provided anything really new, but they did present Washington with a problem in that they again exposed the mismatch between its public support for Pakistan and its awareness of Pakistan’s extensive links with the Taliban. However, the United States’s official response - beyond condemning WikiLeaks for putting the lives of some of the people named in the documents at risk - showed no sign of acknowledging this contradiction.

The US vice-president Joe Biden insisted that the leaks predate the Barack Obama administration’s policy. He and other spokespeople argued that any ISI support for the Taliban is a rogue operation by isolated “elements” in the organisation.

This stance is consistent with Washington’s longer-term rhetorical, military and political support of Pakistan. The chairman of the US joint chiefs-of-staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has argued that General Kayani was committed to purging the ISI in order to end its support for militant networks. He and other officials persuaded the US Congress in October 2009 to commit to an unconditional five-year package of $6 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan.

Such positions are contradicted by US officials interviewed (under cover of anonymity) by the New York Times who confirmed that the portrayal of the ISI’s “collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.” The documents, the paper concluded, show that the ISI has “acted as both ally and enemy”, appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while exerting influence in Afghanistan.

The inconsistency between the documentary record and the assertions of figures such as Biden and Mullen could not be clearer. This itself raises two serious questions about the nature of the regional and indeed global war being waged by the United States and its allies. 

The first is whether Washington and London’s unconditional military support for Pakistan has served to fuel the 90% increase in violence in Afghanistan over the past year. Indeed, Ola Tunander of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute even argues in a confidential report to Norway’s foreign-affairs ministry that the US strategy in Afghanistan is deliberately to “support both sides” in order to “calibrate the level of violence”.

The result of the Taliban advance over 2009-10 - anticipated by senior Nato official Thomas Brouns’s warning in Military Review (summer 2009) of “the possibility of strategic defeat” - has now led Obama’s team to reconsider an option suggested under the George W Bush administration: a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban, in part to create enough stability to enable a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline to go ahead.

The second question is about the relation between Washington’s regional war aims and the wider geopolitical objectives of its “war on terror”. Ola Tunander sees its broader agenda as being to mobilise other governments to support US global policy, thus legitimising the effort to sustain a US-dominated unipolar order. The logic of this approach is that the US seeks to perpetuate global warfare not merely to target local insurgents or anti-American regimes but effectively to stall the emergence of an “economic-political multipolar power-structure”, which would give states and regions such as China and Europe a more significant world standing.

The need for change

The hardest effect of the policies of Pakistan’s state and its foreign allies falls on the people of the region - millions of Pakistanis and Afghans living in poverty, under intense pressures of insecurity, and now (in the case of Pakistan) suffering enormous hardship and danger from weeks of unprecedented flooding. The inability or unwillingness of their political masters to deliver proper aid and support to desperate people both encourages further support for insurgents and creates space for militants and their networks to extend their influence: by (for example) establishing free madrasas, setting up relief-camps, and providing medicine and even generators.

There is no easy way to untangle the contradictions and hypocrisies in which the actions of Pakistan and its allies are enmeshed. But the process could begin if the United States and Britain were to make military and economic aid to Pakistan conditional on Islamabad ceasing support to Islamist insurgent networks, which would undercut these networks’ principal source of financial and logistical support; reduce Nato forces in order to reverse the direct correlation between the Afghan surge and the escalation of insurgent violence; and divert aid from military to humanitarian, development and infrastructure projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such serious joint action would signal to the ISI that the game has changed.

As long as Pakistan’s security mandarins believe that Nato is dependent on them to win the war in Afghanistan, they will feel free to expand their regional strategic influence by military means. And as long as western backers of Pakistan continue to fuel violence through a military-dominated strategy underpinned by cold geopolitical calculations, they will aid Taliban recruitment efforts and prolong conflict indefinitely. The storms that assail Pakistan will only be relieved if the interests of Pakistani citizens are put at the centre of policy.

Institute for Policy Research & Development

Pakistan Security Research Unit

Foreign Policy - AfPak channel

Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (C Hurst, 2005)

Pakistan Policy Blog

Long War Journal

Pakistan Conflict Monitor

Story of Pakistan

Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy (Pluto Press, 2007)

Shaun Gregory, Pakistan: Securing the Insecure State (Routledge, 2008)

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, And How to Save It (Pluto Press, 2010)

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A special guest post from “Sekundar.”

As has been well documented at the NYT and elsewhere, Kabul Bank went through a significant crisis last week. Kabul Bank is Afghanistan’s largest bank, and among other things is the mechanism by which the Afghan government and security forces pay their people. The crisis began when two executives were unceremoniously removed from their positions (ostensibly because under new banking regulations, executives cannot be shareholders) among allegations of malfeasance that resulted in the loss of some $300 million through bad loans and development deals, with most of that flowing into property investments in Dubai (WaPo/CP). Presiding over the shady deals were Sherkhan Farnud and Khalilullah Feruzi, the chairman and CEO, respectively. It is alleged that some of the deals involved Karzai loyalists, including the brothers of both Karzai and VP Fahim.

With the departure of the two, nervous Afghans began to withdraw money. In an astounding display of sandbagging, Feruzi let fly (from Dubai) that if the present rate of withdrawals continues, the bank will collapse, which created a panic among those who hold accounts at Kabul bank. It has been reported that customers are lining up for days to get a chance to withdraw money. Some locations have been unable to accommodate so many transactions (AP). In Kabul police and security forces have taken positions outside the bank’s offices in an effort to avoid a riot (BBC). At present it’s estimated that $300 million have been withdrawn during this crisis, with only $200 million remaining in Kabul Bank’s coffers (WaPo/WSJ/FT). The government injected $100 million just to make sure that state salaries were paid; unpaid soldiers and police are something no one wants to see. Now the government is looking to recoup the money, and maybe a villa or eighteen at Palm Jumeirah, by freezing the assets of Farnud and Feruzi (BBC/RFERL). Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal has said that the government will not allow the bank to fail. Karzai, ever eager to dodge responsibility, has been quoted as saying “The Western press has been covering [the crisis] in a negative and provocative way,” as if there was a silver lining. The third largest stakeholder, Mahmoud Karzai, has meanwhile gone on the offensive, asserted “America should do something,” such as guaranteeing all of Kabul Banks’s clients (WaPo). At least he had the sense to make the statement in Afghanistan, and not from his luxury villa in Dubai.

As the bank’s biggest share-holders, Farnud, Feruzi, and Karzai probably don’t want the bank to fail. By speaking with the media, they have secured both the nervous attention of their Afghan customers and the Western powers that may be called upon to bail out the bank should it in-fact reach a point of failure. The US has stated that it will not assist in a bail out, at least not directly. But with the US and ISAF members providing the majority of the Afghan government’s funding, to include the governmental Da Afghanistan Bank (which, in its oversight role of banking in Afghanistan, may or may not have called for the sacking of Feruzi and Farnud), it would seem there’s little chance of the US getting off so easily. The director of Da Afghanistan Bank, Abdul Quadeer Fitrat, has said the central bank would step if necessary (NYT/Bloomberg). Additionally, the upcoming elections in both Afghanistan (Sept 18) and the US (Nov 2) make it more likely that the US government will seek a way for the stakeholders of Kabul Bank to remain calm.

In order to avoid this stability problem seemingly out of left field, the US will foot the bill for the bail out, one way or another. But the timing, just before elections, during ramazan, and after the most violent summer of the current conflict, could hardly be worse for the government in Kabul. President Obama has promised a review of the war effort in December, and will undoubtedly bring into question the favoritism the Karzai clique has enjoyed. Allegations of embezzlement will not help their case. The banking crisis won’t make or break the ISAF effort in the country, but it is one more painfully obvious example of how the central government is failing the people (CSM). The Afghan government is losing its allies, and legitimacy among its constituents. It can’t afford to do that anymore.

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