Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Water wars in the offing?

Via New Scientist:

India is at the epicentre of the pump revolution. Using technology adapted from the oil industry, smallholder farmers have drilled 21 million tube wells into the saturated strata beneath their fields.
Every year, farmers bring another million wells into service, most of them outside the control of the state irrigation authorities. The pumps, powered by heavily subsidised electricity, work day and night to irrigate fields of thirsty crops like rice, sugar cane and alfalfa.
But this massive, unregulated expansion of pumps and wells is threatening to suck India dry. "Nobody knows where the tube wells are or who owns them. There is no way anyone can control what happens to them," says Tushaar Shah, head of the International Water Management Institute's groundwater station, based in Gujarat. "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India," he says.
Shah gave his apocalyptic warning at the annual Stockholm Water Symposium in Sweden last week. His research suggests that the pumps, which transformed Indian farming, bring 200 cubic kilometres of water to the surface each year. But only a fraction of that is replaced by the monsoon rains.

Pakistan, Vietnam, and northern China are also pumping up ground water faster than it can be replaced.

Saturday, August 28, 2004

An explosive hypothesis

It appears that insurgents in Thailand, Nepal, and India are picking up tricks with regard to improvised explosive devices after the recent successes demonstrated in Iraq.

Meanwhile, investigations are underway for the two Russian flights down with interesting results so far. Courtesy of VOA:

In Russia, investigators looking into the cause of two near simultaneous airliner crashes, are focusing their attention on two female passengers, who purchased tickets for each flight at the last minute. On Friday, investigators at one of the crash sites reported finding traces of an explosive...
The body parts of one woman were scattered widely on the ground. Officials said parts of her legs were found in the toilet section of one plane, leading to speculation that she might have detonated some kind of explosive from there.

Other reports have cited hexogen, previously implicated in explosions blamed on Chechen insurgents in Russia, so I did a bit of digging. Hexogen is known by different names.

RDX stands for Royal Demolition eXplosive. It is also known as cyclonite or hexogen. The chemical name for RDX is 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine. It is a white powder and is very explosive.

It's also a component in plastic explosives, such as Semtex.

Stanislav Brebera spent much of his life developing Semtex, the best plastic explosive in the world. It feels like Play Dough, has no smell, and was designed in 1966 to clear land-mines and improve industrial safety. It is also undetectable by dogs and airport security devices...
... this extraordinarily stable compound of RDX (Cyclonite) and PETN (Penaerythrite Tetranitrate) slips through airport security scans as easily as a pair of nylons. According to the FBI, Semtex has an indefinite shelf life and is far stronger than traditional explosives such as TNT. It is also easily available on the black market.
Semtex became infamous when just 12 ounces of the substance, molded inside a Toshiba cassette recorder, blasted Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky above Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988... Some experts now put worldwide stockpiles of Semtex at 40,000 tons.

RDX is less stable than Semtex, but more stable than TNT. Given that Semtex has no discernable odor, it's likely hexogen has the similar property. I presume that a belt of explosives would have been caught during routine airport screening. Given the positioning of one of the remains of one of the likely attackers, I'd posit that the explosive and/or detonator was smuggled aboard via a body cavity, and the explosive device assembled while in the lavoratory. It's either that or else Russian airport security was really slack.

Monday, August 23, 2004

It keeps on going and going

US scientists have genetically engineered mice with twice the endurance of ordinary mice. Apparently uncoming drugs may be able to simulate this effect, at least in part. How long until such is also part of the arsenal of ingested combat enhancements, along with modafinil?

[Edit: here's the original press release.]

Saturday, August 21, 2004

So how about that axis?

Tucked away at the bottom of a piece from June:

Foreign policy analyst John Loftus told Fox News that the "diplomatic solution" could involve preventing trade out of Iran and North Korea, which intelligence sources say has been sending enriched uranium to Iran.
"We're going to use a little persuasion. In the last week, virtually every carrier group in the United States Navy has been ordered to put to sea and they're heading in two directions — one for the Arabian peninsula and the other into the Pacific. Now, just by coincidence, the largest maritime exercise in military history, RIMPAC, Operation Pacific Rim, will take place off the coast of Hawaii in August...
"In August, they will have finished their exercise and they'll be within easy sailng distance of the Korean peninsula...

Assuming that the naval deployments have gone as expected, it would be clear from actions that contingencies are being planned for. The phrase axis of evil has been remarkably absent from US election campaign rhetoric.

While I'm at it, here's two countries to worry about: Nepal and Uzbekistan.

The US plans to boost its troop presence in Uzbekistan as a "lily pad", as well as Poland and Romania. However, the Uzbek government is confronting a low intensity insurgency of Islamic militants, complete with suicide bombers.

In Nepal, Maoist rebels have laid siege to the capital. In Maoist doctrine, taking cities would be the final phase, after having secured the countryside.

Time reported in September 2003:

They say they are now embarked on the final phase of Mao's revolutionary timetable: eliminating all enemies of the revolution, bringing a terrorized capital to its knees and, eventually, overrunning the city and seizing power. "We control all the countryside," gloats Maoist political officer Ram Lohani Chaudhray. "The government and most of the army hide in Kathmandu. But we have many fighters there. We have them holed up and we will wipe them out."

Is this the endgame, as they say?

Thursday, August 19, 2004

The shape of the pullout to come

The recently announced worldwide troop pullouts by the USA serves multiple purposes.

  1. Improved domestic trickle-down effect from military spending. Basing more troops on US soil will increase domestic spending, which should have a net effect of boosting the American economy in the long term.
  2. Reduction of support for competing economies. In particular, Germany will be the subject of the most reductions. If there was any intent to punish Germany for its lack of support leading up to the recent US coalition-Iraq war, it'll come to pass in the form of the loss of over a billion dollars in spending.
  3. Minor budget reduction. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the estimated cost savings of one billion per year, the troop shift would pay for itself in seven years.

As well, it sets the stage for a more lightweight footprint for American forces overseas. Key phrases to look for: lily pads, Striker Brigade, and Global Strike bomber. Expect fewer and smaller permanent bases overseas, but with capacity to handle temporary swells in troops, increased emphasis on rapid reaction forces able to deploy globally on short notice, and bombers based on US-soil which will be capable of delivering smart weapons anywhere in the world.

Once likely consequence is additional incentive for the EU to boost its own rapid reaction force if it is to maintain a political policy course distinct from the USA and NATO.

Friday, August 13, 2004

Bubbles and oil

Business Week carried an interesting piece regarding the trading of oil futures on the commodities markets.

New players are helping to push up the volume of crude-oil contracts traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex). Such trades are on their way to an all-time record this year, up 13% through July. Data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) show that the amount of money flowing into commodity funds -- many of which include a good chunk of oil investments -- has surged whenever the stock market has swooned over the past five years. Today, there are more than 3,200 funds registered with the cftc, almost twice the number in 1999.

Regardless of the long-term prospects for oil prices, given the potential for risk to be overestimated and the impact of consensus on pricing, the elements are in place for a price bubble in the short-term.

An unstated implication is that low interest rates are also behind the push towards commodities as an alternate means of increasing returns over the more traditional balancing act between stocks and bonds.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Agriculture and terror

According to the UN's International Labour Organization, young people aged 15-24 make up almost half of the jobless in the world. If they are not successfully integrated economically into society, it's not a far stretch to see them turn to crime. There's also the correlation with terrorism. Western farm subsidies are clearly not helping in this regard, as the dumping of the resulting commodities hurts farmers in poorer countries.

According to a May 2003 piece:

... notes the Oxfam report: "By driving down prices for these farmers, US taxpayers -- along with their European counterparts in other product groups -- bear a direct responsibility for poverty in Africa." It charges that US subsidies directly led to losses amounting to more than $300 mn in potential revenue in sub-Saharan Africa during the 2001/02 season. US subsidies have a major influence on the world market because a large proportion of US production -- more than 50 per cent -- is exported, making the country the largest exporter by a wide margin.

The USA rightly points out that the EU is also to blame.

Subsidies and other supports to farmers in the EU amounted to an estimated $93 bn last year -- nearly double the $49 bn the US spent. To illustrate the absurdity of the subsidies in relation to human development, World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern uses the example of an average European cow, which receives $2.50 per day in subsidies while 75 per cent of Africans live on less than $2 a day. These subsidies have allowed the region to dominate world trade even in the most unlikely of agricultural products.

The export of subsidized agricultural goods is the export of poverty. Correlated linkages with resulting crime, instability, and terrorism can be a form of blowback.

Squeeze play

Having been encircled by shifts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and distanced from the EU because of the ongoing nuclear scuffle via the IAEA, Iran is reaching out to Turkey. This is particularly interesting given the current administration's consistent push for the EU to accept Turkey as a member. Though the EU has balked so far, in part due to cultural xenophobia, such an emergent linkage would permit population flows from Iran and Turkey to the EU, and also link up economies further. Strategically, this would be in line with Barnett's Core and Gap framing.

Saturday, August 07, 2004

Washington Times surprised at China

On July 16, the Washington Times expressed surprise at China's new Yuan-class attack submarine.

China's naval buildup has produced a new type of attack submarine that U.S. intelligence did not know was under construction, according to U.S. defense and intelligence officials.

I find that a difficult claim to believe. Perhaps they should subscribe to Stratfor. This apparent mirror of an April 4, 2001 sample is illuminating. From the summary:

A series of incidents – stretching back several years and culminating in the apparent loss of the EP-3E aircraft – indicates that the United States has been hunting for signs of a breakthrough in Chinese submarine technology. Sources inside China and a series of incidents stretching back months and years indicate that Western militaries have been intensively hunting for clues to two new classes of submarines. One is a quiet, diesel design. The other is a potential breakthrough: a homegrown version of the Russian Victor III that would allow Beijing’s navy for the first time to threaten America’s most powerful conventional weapon, the aircraft carrier.

The inference from the piece is that the USA has been looking for evidence of new homegrown subs since at least 1999. Since such developments were anticipated, can it really be a surprise?

It's public knowledge which shipyard built the sub.

China’s Wuhan Shipyard has recently (May 2004?) launched a new generation conventional diesel-electric submarine (SSK), which is named Yuan class by the U.S. intelligence. It is estimated that the programme might have begun in 2002, with first boat laid down at Wuhan Shipyard in later 2003 or early 2004. Photos of this submarine were first seen on Internet in July 2004...

Also note that two Russian Kilo class submarines were taken out of service in 2000. The suggestion was that they were sent for repairs because of battery issues; whatever the reasons, they were likely taken offline for reverse engineering as well.

Nor is the USA unaware of the emerging threat. Back in May 2001, this report noted that Rumsfeld contemplated cutting existing aircraft carriers in favor of smaller carriers which would be harder to target.

In the mid-1990s, Chinese planners concluded that future strategy would be geared towards submarines.

A group of PLAN strategists summarized their analysis of the mid-1990s revolution in military affairs (RMA) as follows: “We can conclude that during the First World War, the dominant vessel was the battleship, and in World War Two, it was the aircraft carrier. In future global wars, the most powerful weapon will be the submarine… [because] submarines will experience less impact from reconnaissance technology than other platforms.” Current developments suggest that this view reflects the dominant thinking of the PLA high command.

Motive, means, and opportunity. So where exactly is the surprise here?

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Trends in Sudan

I expect we will see the emerging genocide continue essentially unchallenged in Sudan. The flypaper strategy in Iraq has given a lesson to everyone in the world on how to resist the West. The Sudanese army combined with the Janjawid could go plainclothes, fade into the population, and proceed to wage a classic insurgency against Western troops and aid personnel. This likely makes the West wary of sending troops in. Furthermore, Europe has an additional disincentive, as they are involved with Sudanese oil. Finally, environmental degradation is exacerbating resource competition. This bodes ill for the next few decades, as Sudan's population is expected to grow further; cf. the population pyramid charts for Sudan over 2000, 2025, and 2050.

Sunday, August 01, 2004

Hearts, minds, money, and trust

Newsweek is carrying a story about behavioral economics. I found these results interesting with regard to economic decision-making:

Quartz has also seen intriguing differences between men and women in the scanner. Men's brains tend to shut down after they've made their decision, awaiting a reply from the other subject. But women ... show continued activity in at least three areas—the ventral striatum (the brain's center for anticipating rewards), the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (which is involved with planning and organizing) and the caudate nucleus (a checking and monitoring region ...). Women, says Quartz, seem to obsess more over whether they did the right thing—and how the other subject will react to them.

Thus implies that there are at least two stable strategies that can be pursued. It would be premature to conclude that either emergent strategy is superior. Both likely have survival value in order to be reinforced via selection.

Also of note:

... with approximately 85 percent accuracy, the subjects, separated by the distance from Los Angeles to Texas, can guess whether they're playing against a man or a woman. They appear to be picking up on subtle clues in the interactions...

Can such differences be applied constructively to hearts and minds campaigns by the West? Perhaps one size does not fit all.