A major report by New America Foundation's Peter Bergen and a long investigative piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker are raising questions about the efficacy of Predator assassinations of Taliban leaders in Pakistan.
by Michael Shellenberger
A major report by New America Foundation's Peter Bergen and a long investigative piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker are raising questions about the efficacy of Predator assassinations of Taliban leaders in Pakistan.
Peter Bergen, CNN's top terrorist expert and Senior Fellow at New America Foundation did an analysis of Predators, which are unmanned aerial drones that are frequently equipped with missiles to shoot at alleged terrorist commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan:
Bergen writes, "Since 2006, our analysis indicates, 82 U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have killed between 750 and 1,000 people. Among them were about 20 leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups, all of whom have been killed since January 2008.... of those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent... the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent."
The report and article raise questions about the efficacy and morality of the DoD and CIA using these robot planes to shoot missiles into commanders' houses. Lots of civilians die for every Taliban member they whack. They are clearly being used to good propaganda effect by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. David Rhode, the Times reporter who was kidnapped for 7 months earlier this year, wrote a remarkable five-part series in the Times that ended yesterday, confirming that.
Continue reading "Is Predator Assassination Program Helping or Hindering The War on Terrorists?" »
Vaclav Smil's new work assesses the threat of terrorism and war in the context of other global threats.
by Michael Shellenberger
The contemporary historian Vaclav Smil has written a major new work on the world's greatest threats, "Global Catastrophes and Trends" (MIT Press 2008), which assesses the threat of terrorism and war in the context of other global threats. Smil is a major global energy analyst, the author of a key textbook on the subject and numerous specialty papers, and the author of 20 significant works in his field, many of which are large overviews and summaries of a vast specialized literatures, from oil supplies to resource wars to the earth's chemical and biological processes. So this book has been greeted by the New York Review of Books and others as a major new entrant in a field marked by overstatement, hysteria, and poor analysis.
Because he wants us to appreciate the complexity and unreliability of any assessment of such a magnitude, Smil makes readers wait until page 245, eight pages from the finale, before ranking threats of "fatal discontinuities." He ranks them in order of risk, which he defines as probability/fatality, as the following: megawars, influenza, volcanoes, tsunamis, and asteroids. Smil actually considers global warming to be one of the biggest threats, but he doesn't count it as a fatal discontinuity because its effects would be gradual and dispersed and not easily tied to its causes. Terrorism isn't on the list because it affects so few people (unless it triggers a megawar, in which case it's no longer terrorism per se).
Smil considers terrorism in a larger discussion of violent conflicts. Only a few very big wars change the direction of human development and history, WWI, WWII, the American Civil War, and the Taiping war (1851-1864) -- which I had barely remembered from school, but which was significant for ending the royal order and killing 20 million Chinese, more than the total death toll of WWI. Great wars have killed about 95 million over the last 200 years. They occur about once every 35 years, and from this Smil concludes the probability of another great war at 20 percent over the next 50 years, which Smil notes is 1 - 2 orders of magnitude (OM) higher than global natural disasters.
Smil notes that the greatest episodes of human violence occurred outside of war -- Stalin and Mao's combined killing of 70 million people between 1929 and 1953 in Russia and 1949 and 1976 in China -- as these nations created modern albeit Communist states. In the 200 years before 1980, the number of wars increased each decade, a remarkable pattern, and these wars became of an increasingly short duration. But the 1990s may have been a turning point. Between 1992 and 2003, armed conflicts declined by 40 percent, and wars with more than 1,000 battle deaths dropped by 80 percent, a remarkable and hugely positive trend reversal. There is debate over whether this is momentary or a sign of a new trend.
Major researchers have concluded that wars are largely random and unpredictable even if they are understandable and explainable ex post facto. Warring nations, in the words of one of them, "bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in overheated gas." But other theorists say that rising global interdependence is behind the decline of wars, "greatly reducing the density and the pressure of the gas," writes Smil, extending the metaphor. Still, Smil notes, history is full of "fatal discontinuities," among them Napoleon, Hitler, Putin, and Chavez, all back-benching military officials who nobody expected to transform their countries.
Meanwhile, nuclear war remains a grave threat, but one that has been declining, even with the threat of nuclear terrorism, which Smil considers quite low. The greatest risks were during the Cold War, in particular the Cuban Missile Crisis. Deterrence still works.
Continue reading "Vaclav Smil on Terrorism, and the Hierarchy of Catastrophe" »
