Random Variable

This is mainly a summary of yesterday’s round table at the LSE featuring Lord Wallace, Justin Webb, Rob Singh, Mick Cox and Robin Niblett.

There was a palpable sense of disappointment amongst the speakers with regards to foreign policy. All agreed that although Obama is many places outside of the USA, he’s failed to connect with Americans themselves, and the Middle East continues to be disappointed at his failure to transform the Cairo speech into positive action. Oh, and he should never have accepted the Nobel Prize.

There was agreement that Obama’s Pakistan programme has been disastrous. For Niblett, there’s been a failure to separate nationalist terrorism (Taliban) that doesn’t form an immediate threat to the US from international terrorism (Al-Qaeda). Rob Singh pointed out how the US has failed to form policy that can properly engage Pakistan to deal with the ISI’s excesses-in particular the ISI is quite willing to keep the Afghan Taliban going as it hampers Indian influence in the region. Webb added that the Pakistani fear of India isn’t really taken seriously by policymakers. But this really highlights the main problem with Obama’s foreign policy.

As Mick Cox suggested, riffing off a recent piece by Barry Buzan, the main challenges that Obama faces are structural. International society is far less willing to tolerate a unipolar power, regardless of its inherent values, and American influence is declining with the rise of strong regional powers, none of whom constitute a superpower. Admittedly, most of the speakers are fearful of the drift into multipolarity, none so much as Rob Singh, who suggested that the paring back of the military is perhaps a deliberate strategy by Obama to reduce US military power. If true, then he’s taking a leaf out of Stephen Walt’s playbook. The only problem is that no one’s particularly willing to step up to take a joint leadership role.

The key problem ongoing for the United States is to transition smoothly to a multipolar world, making sure those regional powers learn the values and institutional norms of the liberal international order (China) and incentivising current free riders to rely on their own steam and play a more active role in international relations (European Union).

Climate change negotiation should never have been up to the unwieldy unanimous judgement process of COP15. EU+Japan should pursue strong reductions, with the US and China doing their own bilateral deals and joining us later on in the game. Many in the environmental movement will be upset at the lack of international agreement, and neoliberals may get worried about the possibilities of tariffs being imposed. But this sort of compromise will lead to stronger emission reductions than Kyoto that may actually lead the world off the path of calamity.

Image by The Edge of the American West

Today, Blair, Dennis Blair that is, director of national intelligence became the first individual in the Obama administration to question Obama’s decision to try Omar Abdulmutallab in the civilian court system. As Justin Webb said earlier tonight at the LSE, we have a strange situation where Abdulmutallab could have been killed in a drone strike in Yemen without so much a squeak, but he gets as far as Detroit and is given a defence lawyer.

This may seem paradoxical, but for people who argue for the necessity of extended war powers (Yoo et al.), its actually the wrong debate. Instead, they should be asking which methods of dealing with attempted terrorism are more likely to contribute to national security, rather than constituting simple revenge. As FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

we’ve had a number of cases in which through the process — the criminal justice process of the United States, individuals have decided to cooperate and provided tremendous intelligence. That is not to say that there may not be other ways of obtaining that intelligence. But, yes, in answer to your question, the criminal justice system has been a — a fount of intelligence in the years since September 11th.

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Thanks to Spencer Ackerman’s ongoing coverage.

Christian Bleuer is unimpressed by the growing popularity of a paper on “tribalism” amongst Pashtuns in Afghanistan, written by a Maj. Jim Gant -

Gant writes:

The central cultural fact about Afghanistan is that it is constituted of tribes. Not individuals, not Western-style citizens—but tribes and tribesmen. It is my deep belief—and the thesis of this paper—that the answer to the problems that face the Afghan people, as well as other future threats to US security in the region, will be found in understanding and then helping the tribal system of Afghanistan to flourish.

Afghanistan is not constituted of tribes, no matter what wikipedia or your local friends tell you.

I don’t profess to be an expert on Afghanistan, but I was struck by the certain type of thinking about societies that lead to these stereotypes. In particular, the Anglo-American emphasis on social contract theory – the idea that we’re all atomised individuals bound by a contract into our society. Durkheim set about to show this is false.

So, jump to 2010, and the US enters Afghanistan, notices their undersocialised social contract theories don’t work, and reach for the conclusion that it must be tribalism. But, Bleuer continues:

The decisions of individuals and of men who are not identified as tribal leaders have always had, and still have a huge amount of relevance. Examples, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hizb-i Islami is a Kharoti Pashtun. But he is no tribal leader. Communist-era President Najibullah was an Ahmadzai Pashtun. But he is no tribal leader. Mullah Omar is a Hotak Pashtun. But he is no tribal leader. All of these men recruited from a broad spectrum of Pashtuns and even non-Pashtuns (Omar less successfully). At times they used tribal networks. But mostly they totally disregarded them. These men need to be considered individuals, not prisoners of a tribal system that dictates their moves. The insurgents have members from every tribe, the government has members from every tribe. These people often made decisions independently.

Rather than identifying the social conditions on the ground that make people bind together in ways that we could identify a nation-state, Gant & Co. assume from the outset that the state can be imposed from above, and when it doesn’t, “tribalism” stands in as a shorthand for the complete eradication of individual agency.

From there, it’s only a short step to the negative legacy that Durkheim left us, at least in the American social sciences – functionalism. It suggests that every social condition is necessary, and therefore unchangeable. Harrison White rightly attacked the functionalist school in favour of concentrating on networks and identity. How is it possible to describe Afghanistan as an unchanging tribal region, when the Taliban mobilised Afghans based on a Deobandi identity originating from the Indian subcontinent?

That legacy misses what Durkheim got right. The utilitarians couldn’t give an account of society based solely on hyper-idealised liberal, rational individuals. Durkheim correctly identified that social solidarity was far more complex, and resulted from feelings generated by “social facts”, these are ever-present in every society, and they’re subject to massive upheaval and change, as they did so in Durkheim’s early 20th Century France.

But go read Christian’s post in full. It’s got much more nuance than my paltry attempt to shoehorn a Durkheim narrative into everything just because I’ve got an essay to write on the guy.

I’m unclear of what exactly Effendi actually wants of universities. In an earlier post, Effendi makes a link between “pant bomber” AbdulMutallab  and the East London Mosque, and in a more recent post says that UCL must take responsibility for AbdulMutallab ’s radicalisation, and in another where he accuses Sunny of “insidious and ignorant propaganda” again highlights a link with the East London Mosque. I know some people who want to turn UCL into an open-source software house, but this to call for it to transform into a counter terrorism unit is just silly.

Moazzem Begg spoke at UCL in January 2007, and didn’t broadcast an interview with Al-Awlaki until December 2007, and after AbdulMutallab  passed on the reigns of the ISOC presidency to another. How is UCL supposed to have taken action ex-ante of any actionable information? Surely it would be better to point the finger at intelligence agencies? Qasim Rafiq, who was ISOC’s president 2006-2007 reported that Islamic Societies were under pressure in the wake of 7/7 and some action was likely to take place if there was any clear information, and he didn’t have any knowledge of what AbdulMutallab was up to.

I also find the “gateway drug” hypothesis less than compelling. The “gateway drug” analogy is a common trope of the right, applied to everything from Grand Theft Auto to Durex ads. There’s a clear distinction between on-campus groups, such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and violent extremists. There’s enough internecine ideological conflict within the neofundamentalist movement that means that HuT neither condone AQs methods nor have any formal links with them. Most individual members also seem to hold an internal psychological limit as they trade off being an active member of an organisation against other desires and interests – which tend to grow after finishing at universities when they realise that a family and job security matters more to them than a political cause built up on a deck of cards. Those who are going to move towards violent extremism will self-select and seek out opportunities for radicalisation.

The Hizb phenomenon, as well as the claims being made about UCL ISOC’s 2007 War-on-Terror must be seen in the context of the wider politics on the campuses of universities. Political parties remain generally unrepresentative, and tend to have small presences on university campuses today. Their members are invariantly career politicians, unconcerned with grass-roots mobilisation and persuasion unless they’re going to play well to the national audience. Labour can say what they will, but the Iraq invasion amidst huge public opposition ended any pretence of representation that many British Muslims felt they had. Which tends to leave the far-left and Hizb-ut-Tahrir to fill in the gap to attract people interested in the politics of the disaffected, and HuT has the social network advantage amongst Muslim students.

However, we cannot deny students from being involved political activities directed against at the policies of the nation-state or that do not call for violence to be enacted against its citizens. Whereas the oft-thinly veiled anti-Semitism of HuT does violate this principle, Islamic Society or SWP members rallying against the “War on Terror” and suggesting that prisoners of all sorts are entitled to due process and humane conditions, and framing the Israel/Palestine conflict as one of between an “imperial power” and “freedom fighters” does not, no matter how unpleasant that statement may seem to rest of us.

When staff and students see comments such as the one quoted by Malcolm Grant, about why we would allow a non-national to become a president of a Students’ Union society, we won’t see it as anything less than an attack on the founding liberal principles of the college. Here’s article 6 of the 1977 UCL Charter (I was trying to find the 1836 original, but it’s somewhere in the library stores):

All persons of the requisite academic standard, whether resident in Our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or elsewhere, shall be eligible for admission to the College without any distinction whatsoever and no religious test shall be imposed on any Member of the College nor shall any disability be imposed on the grounds of political belief, sex or race.

We cannot regulate the actions of students due to their religion or any other part of their identity. It should be stated, that UCL was the first university in England to accept students without requiring an Oath to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, was the first to admit women, and the first university to establish a Students’ Union.

Jeremy Bentham, UCL’s spiritual founder and resident of the South Cloisters, was offended by having to make an oath to the Thirty-Nine Articles at Oxford. He later argued against the idea of oaths even in public court, saying that testimonies on oath were required “not in pursuit of the ends of justice, but in pursuit of private sinister ends – indirect hostility to the public ends.”

To which “private sinister ends” are some pursuing in today’s age in “indirect hostility to the public ends” and without benefit to justice? Nothing less than the subjugation of free speech on campuses and the private beliefs of our students to mere public opinion.

Good night and good luck with that.