Defence officials in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have increased sea and air patrols in the Straits of Malacca, after Singapore authorities warned that attacks were being planned in the area’s shipping lanes.
The latest threat was said to target an oil tanker, but few details have been given.
The Malacca Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Half the world’s oil is transported through it and hundreds of vessels pass through every day.
The shipping route is highly vulnerable, as a bottleneck of just 2.7km leaves little room for ships to manoeuvre or gather speed.
According to security analysts, the region is well-placed to detect and deter any threat, but doubts remain over whether maritime authorities would be able to thwart an attack without air and land support.
Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the United States “for consultations” after a US congressional panel narrowly voted to brand the mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces in World War One as genocide.
The move came despite warnings from both the White House and Turkey that it could harm US-Turkish relations and impede efforts to normalise ties between Ankara and Armenia.
The measure now goes before the full House of Representatives, but it is not clear whether it will actually go to a vote there.
In Armenia, the country’s foreign minister says the vote’s a boost for human rights.
China has announced that its military budget will rise by 7.5 per cent this year. The numbers if official will end more than two decades of annual double-digit increases.
The increase was unveiled on the eve of the annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
The meeting of the NPC is the biggest event on the Chinese political calendar, and the event is tightly scripted. It is more for show than for actual policy-making.
China on Thursday announced its smallest increase in defense spending in more than two decades, a likely result of both financial constraints and growing concern over perceptions of Beijing as a regional military threat.
The planned 7.5 percent boost in defense spending in 2010 follows at least 20 years of double-digit increases in the budget for the People’s Liberation Army — the world’s largest standing military with more than 2.3 million members.
Rapid military modernization and the acquisition of cutting-edge jet fighters, warships and submarines have aroused suspicions in Washington, Tokyo, New Delhi and elsewhere over China’s intentions, further fueled by Beijing’s growing diplomatic assertiveness and booming economic might.
The increase will be used to enhance China’s ability “to meet various threats,” said Li Zhaoxing, spokesman for China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, at a news conference held on the eve of the opening of its annual legislative session.
“China is committed to peaceful development and a military posture that is defensive in nature,” Li said.
He said this year’s defense budget of 532.11 billion yuan ($77.9 billion) remained relatively low, particularly in relation to the country’s vast territory and population. Li said Chinese defense spending has accounted for about 1.4 percent of gross domestic product in recent years, as opposed to more than 4 percent in the United States and more than 2 percent in Britain, France and Russia.
The increase over actual military spending in 2009 was 37.12 billion yuan, Li said. Defense expenditures account for 6.3 percent of China’s total budget, a decline from previous years, he said.
Officials say about one-third of China’s spending goes to salaries and improving living conditions for soldiers, with the rest split between replacing equipment and military research and development.
However, many overseas analysts believe the official figure accounts for only a part of actual military spending, with estimates on the total amount ranging up to twice or more what Beijing claims.
Figures provided by China’s Cabinet show the country’s last single-digit percentage in defense spending was in the 1980s.
The smaller rise in spending is due in part to the hit China’s economy, especially the crucial export sector, has taken from the global financial crisis, prompting the government to rein in some expenditures, said Ni Lexiong, a defense analyst at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.
Meanwhile, the leadership has realized that large increases are generating concern and suspicion among China’s neighbors, potentially sparking an arms race, he said.
“The decline shows that China does not want to be seen as an aggressive military power,” Ni said.
Thursday’s announcement follows repeated protests recently by Beijing over the U.S. sale of weaponry to Taiwan. Those sales are driven by threats from China to use force to bring the island under its control, backed up by an estimated 1,300 Chinese ballistic missiles positioned along the Taiwan Strait.
Communist-ruled China split with Taiwan amid civil war in 1949 and continues to regard the self-governing democracy as part of its territory. Beijing has warned of a disruption in ties with Washington if the sale goes ahead, but has not said what specific actions it would take.
Li, the congress spokesman, accused some foreign countries of backing Taiwan to thwart China, calling that unacceptable interference in China’s internal affairs.
Washington’s announcement in January that it intended to sell Taiwan $6.4 billion in helicopters, air defense missiles and other military hardware was especially unwelcome because it came amid a warming trend in Beijing’s relations with the island, he said.
Taiwan relations are less a factor in Beijing’s defense spending than economic stress and worries about appearing overly aggressive, said defense scholar Wang Kun-yi of Taipei’s Tamkung University.
“China’s defense budget is not specifically linked to cross-strait developments, but rather it is more related to the country’s global positioning,” Wang said.
Defense spending is among budget items to be approved at the end of the National People’s Congress’ session, which begins Friday and runs through March 14.
This year’s session is expected to see a shift in spending priorities toward affordable housing, education, health care and other social programs.
Li said the full assembly this year would amend a law on how deputies are selected, correcting a disparity that gave urban Chinese greater representation than their more numerous rural neighbors.
There was a major blow to the Taliban with the arrests of three senior leaders in Pakistan, including the number-two Afghan Taliban official. While this was a victory for U.S. and Pakistani intelligence, it was also a reminder of how the Taliban have used Pakistan as a base. Joining Daljit Dhaliwal to talk about the Marjah offensive and more are Gideon Rose and Susan Chira.
Dubai’s police chief says he’s almost certain Israel was involved in last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas official.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim says if proven then an arrest warrant should be issued for Israel’s top spy, the man who’s in charge of Mossad.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent. He says, if Israel is behind the assassination, then Tel Aviv could find itself in a diplomatic crisis with some of its European allies.
More on the growing row between London and Tel Aviv from the UK Guardian:
Britain today declared its “outrage” at the use of forged British passports by a hit squad that killed a Hamas official in Dubai, and dispatched police investigators to the Gulf emirate to collect evidence.
The officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) arrived in the United Arab Emirates as the investigation focused increasingly on Israel. The Dubai police chief declared that he was “99%, if not 100% certain” of Mossad’s involvement, and called on Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan. While SOCA is concentrating specifically on the misuse of British passports, it is understood that MI6 is conducting a broader, parallel probe into Israeli involvement.
Britain, Ireland and France stepped up diplomatic pressure on Israel, demanding explanations on the use of forged European passports by the assassins who targeted Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on 19 January.
However, the initial response from the Israeli envoys in London and Dublin was that they had nothing to say about the affair, bringing closer the prospect of a high-level diplomatic row. The Israeli embassy made no comment on its meeting at the French foreign ministry, which “expressed its deep concern about the malicious and fraudulent use of these French administrative documents.”
The US also looked likely to be drawn into the affair for the first time, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Mabhouh’s assassins had used American-registered credit cards to buy plane tickets.
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, had been asked to shed light on how the identities of six British citizens living in Israel had been stolen and used by the assassins. The foreign secretary said any tampering with British passports was “an outrage”. Miliband said: “We wanted to give Israel every opportunity to share what it knows about this incident and we hope and expect that they will cooperate fully with the investigation.”
Prosor, however, said he was “unable to add information” on the matter, and his counterpart in Dublin, Zion Evrony, delivered a similar response to a top Irish diplomat. “I told him I don’t know anything about the event – beyond that it is not customary to share the content of diplomatic meetings,” Evrony said.
Ireland’s foreign minister Michael Martin revealed that a further two Irish passports were used in the assassination, bringing the total number of Irish travel documents involved to five as speculation grew that the size of the hit squad was bigger than the 11 originally reported.
British diplomats in Israel have been meeting the six British nationals caught up in the assassination plot when their identities were used by the hit team. Foreign office officials said that none of the six had reported their passports stolen so the documents used by the killers appeared to be sophisticated clones. SOCA said the numbers on the fake passports were the same as the genuine ones. It confirmed the photographs and signatures on the passports used in Dubai do not match those on passports issued by British authorities.
Miliband is to meet in Brussels on Monday with his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, who has insisted there is no proof of Israeli involvement, and stressed that his government employed a “policy of ambiguity” on intelligence matters.
In Dubai, however, the emirate’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, called on local television for Interpol to issue “a red notice against the head of Mossad … as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is likely now.”
British officials said last night it was too early to speculate on what measures Britain might take against Israel if the government remained uncooperative.
One possible consequence could be Britain’s response to an Israeli request to change its ‘universal jurisdiction’ law on war crimes, under which a London magistrates court issued an arrest warrant in December for Israel’s former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for her role in the Gaza offensive a year earlier.
Livni cancelled her planned visit to London as a result, leading Miliband to promise the law would be changed. “Israel is a strategic partner and a close friend of the UK. We are determined to protect and develop these ties,” Miliband said.
However, there have been growing calls for the relationship to be reassessed if Israel is proved to have been involved in the forging of British passports in the Mabhouh assassination. Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s ambassador to Iran from 2003 to 2006 said: “All this just says how pathetic and ludicrous the claim is that Israel is Britain’s strategic partner.”
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, said Israel must provide assurances it would ban Mossad from using UK travel papers. He also called on the government to make clear when it knew about the use of falsified British passports.
The Dubai authorities said they had asked Britain for assistance at the end of January, but the foreign office insists it was only informed of the British connection hours before it was made public.
There remains considerable mystery over why Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas military advisor, was targeted and over Mossad’s alleged involvement. The traces left an uncharacteristically amateurish trail for a killing by the Israeli intelligence service. For more, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews David Schenker, director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Prolific Mexican politician and intellectual Jorge Castañeda believes that a greater North American community — a “North American Union” — with economies tied together under a European Union-style system, complete with open borders and a unified currency, is the wave of the future.
In a new interview with Web site BigThink.com, Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000-2003 and a global distinguished professor of politics at New York University, said that with nearly 11 percent of Mexicans living in the United States, he has stopped seeing his nation as a Latin American country.
“Well, my sense is that we’re moving closer and closer to forms of economic integration with the United States and Canada and conceivably Central America and Caribbean could become part of that in the coming years,” he said. “I don’t see Mexico as a Latin American country. Too much of trade, investment, tourism, immigration, remittances, absolutely everything is concentrated exclusively with the United States. So, Mexico has to be part of a North American community, a North American union, which at some point probably should include some type of monetary union along European lines with a free flow of labor, with energy being on the table, etc.”
Often demonized as some type of “conspiracy theory” in mainstream American press, the so-called North American Union proposals have actually existed for some time. In May of 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled “Building a North American Community” in which it calls for an EU-like integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico.
While the document does not specifically call for the ceding of sovereignty between the three nations — as some vocal opponents of the idea have suggested — it does recommend the formation of a North American Advisory Council and a multinational inter-parliamentary group to facilitate mutual cooperation. Though the group originally set out to achieve this goal by 2010, few in mainstream America are even aware of it today.
“Economic and social citizenship in North America implies the ability of citizens to exert pressure for the implementation of an inclusive economic policy at home and to be engaged in the international economy,” wrote CFR member Carlos Heredia. “To the extent that citizens of the three partner countries see that North American integration brings concrete benefits, a new constituency will be galvanized to support these efforts in the years to come.”
“How far away are we from that?” Castañeda asked, rhetorically. “Quite far, but so did it seem back in Europe in the 1950’s and very little time later they came around and understood that that was their future lay. My sense is that the Mexican society is voting with its feet. We have a higher share of Mexicans living in the United States than we have ever had in our history. One out of every nine Mexicans, Mexican citizens, people born in Mexico, live in the United States today.”
In recent weeks, Castañeda also appeared on CNN’s Amanpour for a debate about the drug war. He explained that in his view, marijuana should be legalized in order to take away the drug cartels’ primary revenue source. However, “we can’t do it in Mexico if the U.S. doesn’t do it at the same time,” he said.
Speaking to BigThink, he carried a similar message.
“Having recklessly plunged the country into [the drug war] now, I think what Calderón and the United States should do is to sort of sit back for a second, think this through, see what they really want to achieve, what is achievable and what should be done that’s new,” he said. “For example, there are more and more states in the US that are moving towards decriminalization at least of marijuana. Mexico is still a very important producer of marijuana. Some people say that up to 60 percent of the profits of Mexico’s cartels come from marijuana. Well, if the United States or California’s de facto legalizing it through medical marijuana, what sense does it make for Mexicans to die to stop marijuana from entering the US when once it enters it can be sold legally at over 1,000 dispensaries in Los Angeles, more than the number of public schools there are in Los Angeles. That’s certainly one thing that we can do.”
The New York Times reports that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a “founding father” of the Afghani Taliban and the number two in command behind the blind cleric Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, has been captured in a joint US-Pakistani operation in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and commercial capital. According to US government officials, the capture of Mullah Barader occurred “several days” ago and remains in Pakistani custody, with both US and Pakistani intelligence officials taking part in interrogations.
In addition to running the Taliban’s military operations, Mullah Baradar runs the group’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura so called because the Taliban’s leaders for years have been thought to be hiding in or near Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, the restive province in southwestern Pakistan. Here some more background on Mullah Adul Ghani Baradar from a Newsweek profile in July 2009:
In more than two dozen interviews for this profile, past and present members of the Afghan insurgency portrayed Baradar as no mere stand-in for the reclusive Omar. They say Baradar appoints and fires the Taliban’s commanders and governors; presides over its top military council and central ruling Shura in Quetta, the city in southwestern Pakistan where most of the group’s senior leaders are based; and issues the group’s most important policy statements in his own name. It is key that he controls the Taliban’s treasury—hundreds of millions of dollars in -narcotics protection money, ransom payments, highway tolls, and “charitable donations,” largely from the Gulf. “He commands all military, political, religious, and financial power,” says Mullah Shah Wali Akhund, a guerrilla subcommander from Helmand province who met Baradar this March in Quetta for the fourth time. “Baradar has the makings of a brilliant commander,” says Prof. Thomas Johnson, a longtime expert on Afghanistan and an adviser to Coalition forces. “He’s able, charismatic, and knows the land and the people so much better than we can hope to do. He could prove a formidable foe.”
No one among the Taliban—least of all Baradar himself—will say he’s taken Omar’s place. On the contrary, Baradar portrays himself as a loyal lieutenant carrying out the orders of his absent boss. “We are acting on [Omar's] instructions,” he told NEWSWEEK via e-mail in a recent exclusive interview. He didn’t reveal how or when he gets those instructions, saying only that “continuous contacts are not risk-free because of the situation.”
Yet while Taliban fighters are reluctant to be seen criticizing Omar in any way, they clearly imply that his deputy has a more modern, efficient style of command. Baradar is consistently described as more open, more consultative, more consensus-oriented, and more patient than Omar. Taliban operatives say he’s less mercurial and more willing to hear different views rather than act on hearsay, emotion, or strict ideology. “Baradar doesn’t issue orders without understanding and investigating the problem,” says a commander from Zabul province who met with him in March and asked not to be named so he could speak freely. “He is patient and listens to you until the end. He doesn’t get angry or lose his temper.”
That’s raised another question: whether the Americans and the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai might ultimately be able to strike a deal with Baradar. His influence among the insurgents—and with Mullah Omar—is unmatched, and he’s not as close-minded as many of the leaders in Quetta are. Back in 2004, according to Maulvi Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban cabinet minister who now lives in Kabul, Baradar authorized a Taliban delegation that approached Karzai with a peace offer, even paying their travel expenses to Kabul. That outreach fizzled, but earlier this year another two senior Taliban operatives sent out separate peace feelers to Qayyum Karzai, the Afghan president’s older brother, apparently with Baradar’s approval, according to three ranking Taliban sources. They say the initiatives were quickly rescinded. Still, when NEWSWEEK spoke to the elder Karzai last week and asked him about the story, he did not deny that such contacts had taken place, saying only, “This is a very sensitive time, and a lot of things are going on.” Publicly, Baradar, who belongs to the same Pashtun tribe as Karzai, has scoffed at peace efforts, denouncing them as a ploy to split the insurgency. But that may simply reflect his feeling that the insurgents currently have the momentum.
Baradar can take much of the credit for rebuilding the Taliban into an effective fighting force.
There are a number of takeaways to the capture of Mullah Baradar. First it took place in Karachi, a teeming city of over 14 million people, suggesting that much of the Taliban’s leadership has migrated away from the border areas. Mullah Barader may have been forced to flee from the increasingly less secure hiding places alongside the Afghan-Pakistani frontier as a result of the increased number and ever more effective strikes by unmanned predator drones.
The other key takeaway is that the capture of Mullah Baradar suggests that the US has finally impressed on the Pakistani authorities the urgency of dismantling the Taliban networks inside Pakistan and that the Pakistanis are now more engaged in counter-terrorism operations. US intelligence officials have long accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of sheltering and protecting the more senior and high-ranking members of the Taliban.
The participation of Pakistan’s spy service could suggest a new level of cooperation from Pakistan’s leaders, who have been ambivalent about American efforts to crush the Taliban. Increasingly, the Americans say, senior leaders in Pakistan, including the chief of its army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, have gradually come around to the view that they can no longer support the Taliban in Afghanistan — as they have quietly done for years — without endangering themselves. Indeed, American officials have speculated that Pakistani security officials could have picked up Mullah Baradar long ago.
The officials said that Pakistan was leading the interrogation of Mullah Baradar, but that Americans were also involved. The conditions of the questioning are unclear. In its first week in office, the Obama administration banned harsh interrogations like waterboarding by Americans, but the Pakistanis have long been known to subject prisoners to brutal questioning.
American intelligence officials believe that elements within Pakistan’s security services have covertly supported the Taliban with money and logistical help — largely out of a desire to retain some ally inside Afghanistan for the inevitable day when the Americans leave.
The ability of the Taliban’s top leaders to operate relatively freely inside Pakistan has for years been a source of friction between the ISI and the C.I.A. Americans have complained that they have given ISI operatives the precise locations of Taliban leaders, but that the Pakistanis usually refuse to act.
The Pakistanis have countered that the American intelligence was often outdated, or that faulty information had been fed to the United States by Afghanistan’s intelligence service.
For the moment it is unclear how the capture of Mullah Baradar will affect the overall direction of the Taliban, who have so far refused to disavow Al Qaeda and to accept the Afghan Constitution. American officials have hoped to win over some midlevel members of the group.
Mr. Riedel, the former C.I.A. official, said that he had not heard about Mullah Baradar’s capture before being contacted by The Times, but that the raid constituted a “sea change in Pakistani behavior.”
In recent weeks, American officials have said they have seen indications that the Pakistani military and spy services may finally have begun to distance themselves from the Taliban.
While the capture of Mullah Baradar is a significant development, it is the level of cooperation between the US and Pakistani authorities that is the larger story. That’s the real breakthrough.
Nonetheless, it must also be underscored that Pakistan’s government is likely to feel the heat from a large segment of the Pakistani population that is vehemently opposed to close US-Pakistani cooperation.
Somalia’s spiralling instability has reached the capital, Mogadishu, as at least 17 people were killed and 61 injured in fighting between government forces and opposition fighters. But just who is fuelling the conflict this time around and is the country becoming a battleground in the fight against al-Qaeda?
Mwangi S. Kimenyi, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative of The Brookings Institution has an article worth a read: Fractionalized, Armed and Lethal: Why Somalia Matters.
For the last few years, Somalia has held strong onto the top spot in both the Index of Failed States and the Fragile States Index. And this country—if one can use that term—is likely to maintain its lead for the foreseeable future. But this is nothing to brag about.
By definition of a failed state, Somalia has no single legitimate governing authority and is divided among numerous constituent factions that are relatively strong and have control of some lucrative sources of revenue. These factions are well organized and function more or less as independent states. Yet no single faction has a monopoly on violence, which explains why Somalia has remained a failed state for so long. In essence, the various factions have no interest in a well organized sovereign state. As such, the failed state is in a precarious equilibrium, resulting in what may appear as paradoxically both a functional and stable, stateless society.
Probably because of its fragile nature and the fact that it is small and poor, the international community has grossly underestimated the capacity of this country to destabilize the region and to engage in extremely costly activities to the international community. At present, there are no well-coordinated international efforts to rebuild this state. Yet this country—or better, its various factions—possesses the potential to inflict major global damage and could be the next hotbed for international terrorism. Ignoring Somalia would be a huge political and humanitarian mistake. But the Somali state may also have degenerated beyond the stage where marginal interventions can be beneficial; thus the focus should shift to building a new state. As the events of the last two decades have shown, the Somali state was not consensual and focusing on reverting to the same structure is likely to be futile.
Fractionalized Society
A number of factors make Somalia an increasingly volatile country. The first of course is the presence of numerous factions that lay claim to a specific territory or strong mass of supporters. Some factions have established control of a sizeable part of the country while others consist of small warring groups. Of these factions, many have a claim to illegal enterprises and have established themselves as legitimate tax collectors or traders. With the vacuum created by the absence of a state sovereign, each faction has established its own organized “government” and possesses substantial capacity to impart violence. The factions include the governments of Somaliland and Puntland, both of which have been able to control a significant section of the country and are able to maintain some degree of peace. Other notable factions are the warring groups in the central region, including the Federal Transitional Government, Al-Shabab, Hizbul-Islam and Ahlu Sunna Wal-Jamaa. Then of course there are other groups like the Islamic courts that control most of South-Central Somalia, and the infamous pirates, whose sole interest is monetary gain (and which may support some of the other insurgent groups).
With all of these groups competing for control, it is not surprising that some of these factions have connections or are sympathetic with terrorist groups. Some Somali factions have accepted financial support from terror organizations in order to settle clan disputes.
The absence of a central authority combined with its general lawlessness makes Somalia an ideal haven for terrorists.
Illegal Arms Market
Not only is Somalia heavily fractioned, but these factions are well-armed. Although U.N. Security Council Resolution 751 placed an arms embargo on Somalia, reports indicate that the number and variety of small arms available in Somalia is greater than at any time since the early 1990s. Private businesses, nation states, arms dealers, Somalis in the Diaspora, and local clans/militia all contribute to the growing number of smuggled weapons in the country. In fact, small arms are so prolific in Somalia that they are a form of currency in most parts of the country.
The Somali arms market, based in Mogadishu, is a key hub for arms trading in East Africa and weapons are constantly being transported along its porous border to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and the DRC. The Kenyan government estimates that thousands of small arms are smuggled across the border every year. In fact, the Kenyan government is finding it difficult to fight crime as a result of the large number of illegal arms smuggled from Somalia. The presence of such a high number of guns poses a threat to security in Northeast Africa and beyond.
Drug Economy
Where there are guns, there are often drugs; and in Somalia the trade is in khat—a narcotic leaf that is traditionally consumed in parts of Africa and in Arab countries for its stimulating properties. Although khat is considered legal in many countries, it is an addictive drug. Khat is the most common drug in Somalia and it is estimated that approximately 75 percent of all males in Somalia use it. The khat trade is fairly lucrative, with a significant proportion of the drug originating from the Kenyan highlands and exported freely to Somalia. Kenya exports about $250 million of khat annually, beating out tea as one of the county’s most lucrative exports, with a majority bound for Somalia. The Kenya National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse estimates that Kenya exports about $300,000 worth of khat to Somalia daily. Despite the negative consequences of a stateless Somalia that Kenya is experiencing, there has not been any attempt by the Kenyan government to curtail this trade, because local interests benefit a great deal.
With no central government to regulate the trade, warlords in Somalia have extended their power and now collect taxes and customs duties on khat. Many clans and regional administrations rely on import tax from the drug as their main source of revenue. In 2003, the U.N. Panel of Experts on Somalia reported that many warlords now control the khat trade and use the proceeds to buy weapons needed to maintain control of their territory. This highly addictive substance even allows warlords to keep their troops loyal since otherwise troops suffer the consequences of withdrawal. Accordingly, khat is often included as part of troop salaries.
Diaspora Support of Factions
Evidence shows that civil wars are likely to last longer and be more intense in countries that have large populations outside of their own, due to support that members of the Diaspora provide to warring factions. Somalia is a case in point. Although the Diaspora can and has played a critical role in facilitating peace building and local reconciliation in some cases (especially in Somaliland and Puntland), in other cases the Diaspora has also provided financial support to warring clans facilitating conflict. Without financial support from the Somali Diaspora, many clans lack the resources to wage war against each other. Estimates show that at least 1 million Somalis—approximately 13 percent of the population—live abroad, mainly in Kenya, Yemen, the U.K., Canada, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the U.S. The UNDP estimates that annual remittances (or Hawala) from the Somali Diaspora are about $1 billion (about 18 percent of GDP). Although it is impossible to measure the exact amounts, the available data shows that the flow of remittances is substantial. On balance, the Diaspora is contributing to the further degeneration of the state.
John Brennan, Assistant to the President For Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, speaks at “A Dialogue on Our Nation’s Security” held at NYU. This was a public forum co-hosted by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University on February 13, 2010.