Some Observations

For the green berets in business suites: Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is setting itself up to be Africa's Singapore through creative city planning and a developing high tech industry. This is encouraging news, but the goal is to be a middle income country by 2020, ten years from now, and 26 years after the end of the 1994 genocide. Development alone could not accomplish this; security and order had to be restored and now, through prosperity, secured. Even now, there remains a nervous, heavy police presence. One former resident notes "But for me the problem is I used to buy clothes at the market and then sell them on the street. If I go into town from here I'm so dusty when I get there that the police send me back outside the city limits."

In Moldova, police seized 1.8 kilograms of uranium from smugglers, two of whom were former police themselves. The uranium-238 wasn't dangerous unless enriched with other isotopes, and then it could only be used in a "dirty bomb" but that's still alarming news of nuclear threats not from a state in the Middle East but criminals in the former Soviet Union. Moldova is one of those places everyone says we should pay attention to, but nobody does.

The UN Environmental program (UNEP) has begun assessing the damage from oil spills in the Niger Delta, one of the major issues that, ostensibly, drove MEND to militancy. Their findings so fare are interesting: 90 percent of oil spills were linked to criminal activity and oil bunkering or theft. In other words, groups like MEND had done most of the damage that they claim to be fighting, or at least greatly worsened the problem.  This reminds me of Bruce Schneier's Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists that argues that the political goals of terrorist organizations tend to be secondary or deceptive.  We've already discussed how much thinking on terrorist motivation is misguided here.

Alex Olesker

Comments

[russ greene]

It's always struck me that the same people who are so skeptical of American and Western intentions often seem to take terrorists and insurgents at their word when it comes to their objectives.