Silva Rerum

GCC railway complete and operational by ’18 (Saudi Gazetta; 2015/08/12)

2015-08-13T03:11:00.000-07:00

KUWAIT — The Gulf railway project that links Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries will be completed and operating by 2018, the Kuwait Times reported Wednesday, citing the GCC Secretariat General. The project with a total cost of more than $15.4 billion will have a total length of 2,117 km and links Kuwait City and passes through GCC countries all the way to Muscat. It also includes the link between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia by a bridge. It said the passenger trains’ speed will be 220 km/hr, while cargo trains will be between 80-120 220 km/hr, with the use of diesel to generate power.

Each of the GCC countries will be responsible for building and costs of establishing the rail link within its borders.

The rail network plan comes as part of a larger drive to increase infrastructure projects across the GCC which were forecast to exceed $86 billion in 2014, an increase of 77.8 percent over 2013.

The collective GCC rail sector is expected to spend $200 billion as the six member countries – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar aim to complete the integrated GCC-wide network by 2018.

Rail networks create a more sustainable society that is not dependent on one mode of transport for passengers and goods.

Also the environmental advantages of using railways have been documented extensively, and the rail projects will create a range of employment opportunities including high-tech engineering positions.

Globe Express Services (GES) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Etihad Rail late last year, the developer and operator of the UAE’s national railway network. Once completed, Etihad Rail network will extend across the UAE, connecting the Emirates to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Oman. It will be part of the larger GCC rail network, which will connect the country with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through Ghuwaifat from the west and with the Sultanate of Oman through Al Ain from the east. — SG

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20150813253306

Forget Sykes-Picot. It’s the Treaty of Sèvres That Explains the Modern Middle East (Foreign Policy; 2015/08/10)

2015-08-11T06:19:00.001-07:00

Ninety-five years ago today, Europe carved up the Ottoman empire. That treaty barely lasted a year, but we're feeling its aftershocks today.

By Nick Danforth

Ninety-five years ago today, European diplomats gathered at a porcelain factory in the Paris suburb of Sèvres and signed a treaty to remake the Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The plan collapsed so quickly we barely remember it anymore, but the short-lived Treaty of Sèvres, no less than the endlessly discussed Sykes-Picot agreement, had consequences that can still be seen today. We might do well to consider a few of them as the anniversary of this forgotten treaty quietly passes by.

In 1915, as British troops prepared to march on Istanbul by way of the Gallipoli peninsula, the government in London printed silk handkerchiefs heralding the end of the Ottoman empire. It was a bit premature (the battle of Gallipoli turned out to be one of the Ottomans’ few World War I victories) but by 1920 Britain’s confidence seemed justified: With allied troops occupying the Ottoman capital, representatives from the war’s victorious powers signed a treaty with the defeated Ottoman government that divided the empire’s lands into European spheres of influence. Sèvres internationalized Istanbul and the Bosphorus, while giving pieces of Anatolian territory to the Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, French, British, and Italians. Seeing how and why the first European plan for dividing up the Middle East failed, we can better understand the region’s present-day borders, as well as the contradictions of contemporary Kurdish nationalism and the political challenges facing modern Turkey.

Within a year of signing the Treaty of Sèvres, European powers began to suspect they had bitten off more than they could chew. Determined to resist foreign occupation, Ottoman officers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk reorganized the remnants of the Ottoman army and, after several years of desperate fighting, drove out the foreign armies seeking to enforce the treaty’s terms. The result was Turkey as we recognize it today, whose new borders were officially established in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Sèvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the “Sèvres syndrome.” Sèvres certainly plays a role in Turkey’s sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief that the Armenian genocide — widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920 — was always an anti-Turkish conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth. Moreover, Turkey’s foundational struggle with colonial occupation left its mark in a persistent form of anti-imperial nationalism, directed first against Britain, during the Cold War against Russia, and now, quite frequently, against the United States.

But the legacy of Sèvres extends well beyond Turkey, which is precisely why we should include this treaty alongside Sykes-Picot in our history of the Middle East. It will help us challenge the widespread notion that the region’s problems all began with Europeans drawing borders on a blank map.

There’s no doubt that Europeans were happy to create borders that conformed to their own interests whenever they could get away with it. But the failure of Sèvres proves that that sometimes they couldn’t. When European statesmen tried to redraw the map of Anatolia, their efforts were forcefully defeated. In the Middle East, by contrast, Europeans succeeded in imposing borders because they had the military power to prevail over the people resisting them. Had the Syrian nationalist Yusuf al-‘Azma, another mustachioed Ottoman army officer, replicated Ataturk’s military success and defeated the French at the Battle of Maysalun, European plans for the Levant would have gone the way of Sèvres.

Would different borders have made the Middle East more stable, or perhaps less prone to sectarian violence? Not necessarily. But looking at history through the lens of the Sèvres treaty suggests a deeper point about the cause-and-effect relationship between European-drawn borders and Middle Eastern instability: the regions that ended up with borders imposed by Europe tended to be those already too weak or disorganized to successfully resist colonial occupation. Turkey didn’t become wealthier and more democratic than Syria or Iraq because it had the good fortune to get the right borders. Rather, the factors that enabled Turkey to defy European plans and draw its own borders — including an army and economic infrastructure inherited from the Ottoman empire — were some of the same ones that enabled Turkey to build a strong, centralized, European-style nation-state.

Of course, plenty of Kurdish nationalists might claim that Turkey’s borders actually are wrong. Indeed, some cite Kurdish statelessness as a fatal flaw in the region’s post-Ottoman borders. But when European imperialists tried to create a Kurdish state at Sèvres, many Kurds fought alongside Ataturk to upend the treaty. It’s a reminder that political loyalties can and do transcend national identities in ways we would do well to realize today.

The Kurdish state envisioned in the Sèvres Treaty would, crucially, have been under British control. While this appealed to some Kurdish nationalists, others found this form of British-dominated “independence” problematic. So they joined up to fight with the Turkish national movement. Particularly among religious Kurds, continued Turkish or Ottoman rule seemed preferable to Christian colonization. Other Kurds, for more practical reasons, worried that once in charge the British would inevitably support recently dispossessed Armenians seeking to return to the region. Some subsequently regretted their decision when it became clear the state they had fought to create would be significantly more Turkish — and less religious — than anticipated. But others, under varying degrees of duress, chose instead to accept the identity the new state offered them.

Many Turkish nationalists remain frightened by the way their state was destroyed by Sèvres, while many Kurdish nationalists still imagine the state they might have achieved. At the same time, today’s Turkish government extolls the virtues of Ottoman tolerance and multiculturalism, while Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, apparently after reading the sociologist Benedict Anderson in prison, claims to have discovered that all nations are merely social constructs. The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish HDP spent much of the last decade competing to convince Kurdish voters that a vote for their party was a vote for peace — competing, that is, over which party was capable of resolving Turkey’s long-simmering conflict by creating a more stable and inclusive state. In short, as many Americans still debate the “artificial” nature of European-made states in the Middle East, Turkey is fitfully transcending a century-long obsession with proving how “real” it is.

Needless to say, the renewed violence Turkey has seen in the past several weeks threatens these fragile elements of a post-national consensus. With the AKP calling for the arrest of Kurdish political leaders and Kurdish guerrillas shooting police officers, nationalists on both sides are falling back into familiar, irreconcilable positions. For 95 years, Turkey reaped the political and economic benefits of its victory over the Treaty of Sèvres. But building on this success now requires forging a more flexible political model, one that helps render battles over borders and national identity irrelevant.

Photo credit: David Rumsey Map Collection

The Geopolitics of the Syrian Civil War (Stratfor; 2014/01/21)

2015-08-04T02:53:00.000-07:00

By Reva Bhalla

International diplomats will gather Jan. 22 in the Swiss town of Montreux to hammer out a settlement designed to end Syria's three-year civil war. The conference, however, will be far removed from the reality on the Syrian battleground. Only days before the conference was scheduled to begin, a controversy threatened to engulf the proceedings after the United Nations invited Iran to participate, and Syrian rebel representatives successfully pushed for the offer to be rescinded. The inability to agree upon even who would be attending the negotiations is an inauspicious sign for a diplomatic effort that was never likely to prove very fruitful.

There are good reasons for deep skepticism. As Syrian President Bashar al Assad's forces continue their fight to recover ground against the increasingly fratricidal rebel forces, there is little incentive for the regime, heavily backed by Iran and Russia, to concede power to its sectarian rivals at the behest of Washington, especially when the United States is already negotiating with Iran. Ali Haidar, an old classmate of al Assad's from ophthalmology school and a long-standing member of Syria's loyal opposition, now serving somewhat fittingly as Syria's National Reconciliation Minister, captured the mood of the days leading up to the conference in saying "Don't expect anything from Geneva II. Neither Geneva II, not Geneva III nor Geneva X will solve the Syrian crisis. The solution has begun and will continue through the military triumph of the state."

Widespread pessimism over a functional power-sharing agreement to end the fighting has led to dramatic speculation that Syria is doomed either to break into sectarian statelets or, as Haidar articulated, revert to the status quo, with the Alawites regaining full control and the Sunnis forced back into submission. Both scenarios are flawed. Just as international mediators will fail to produce a power-sharing agreement at this stage of the crisis, and just as Syria's ruling Alawite minority will face extraordinary difficulty in gluing the state back together, there is also no easy way to carve up Syria along sectarian lines. A closer inspection of the land reveals why.

The Geopolitics of Syria

Before the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement traced out an awkward assortment of nation-states in the Middle East, the name Syria was used by merchants, politicians and warriors alike to describe a stretch of land enclosed by the Taurus Mountains to the north, the Mediterranean to the west, the Sinai Peninsula to the south and the desert to the east. If you were sitting in 18th-century Paris contemplating the abundance of cotton and spices on the other side of the Mediterranean, you would know this region as the Levant — its Latin root "levare" meaning "to raise," from where the sun would rise in the east. If you were an Arab merchant traveling the ancient caravan routes in the Hejaz, or modern-day Saudi Arabia, facing the sunrise to the east, you would have referred to this territory in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham, or the "land to the left" of Islam's holy sites on the Arabian Peninsula.

Whether viewed from the east or the west, the north or the south, Syria will always find itself in an unfortunate position surrounded by much stronger powers. The rich, fertile lands straddling Asia Minor and Europe around the Sea of Marmara to the north, the Nile River Valley to the south and the land nestled between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers to the east give rise to larger and more cohesive populations. When a power in control of these lands went roaming for riches farther afield, they inevitably came through Syria, where blood was spilled, races were intermixed, religions were negotiated and goods were traded at a frenzied and violent pace.

Consequently, only twice in Syria's pre-modern history could this region claim to be a sovereign and independent state: during the Hellenistic Seleucid dynasty, based out of Antioch (the city of Antakya in modern-day Turkey) from 301 to 141 B.C., and during the Umayyad Caliphate, based out of Damascus, from A.D. 661 to 749. Syria was often divided or subsumed by its neighbors, too weak, internally fragmented and geographically vulnerable to stand its own ground. Such is the fate of a borderland.

Unlike the Nile Valley, Syria's geography lacks a strong, natural binding element to overcome its internal fissures. An aspiring Syrian state not only needs a coastline to participate in sea trade and guard against sea powers, but also a cohesive hinterland to provide food and security. Syria's rugged geography and patchwork of minority sects have generally been a major hindrance to this imperative.

Syria's long and extremely narrow coastline abruptly transforms into a chain of mountains and plateaus. Throughout this western belt, pockets of minorities, including Alawites, Christians and Druze, have sequestered themselves, equally distrustful of outsiders from the west as they are of local rulers to the east, but ready to collaborate with whomever is most likely to guarantee their survival. The long mountain barrier then descends into broad plains along the Orontes River Valley and the Bekaa Valley before rising sharply once again along the Anti-Lebanon range, the Hawran plateau and the Jabal al-Druze mountains, providing more rugged terrain for persecuted sects to hunker down and arm themselves.

Just west of the Anti-Lebanon mountains, the Barada river flows eastward, giving rise to a desert oasis also known as Damascus. Protected from the coast by two mountain chains and long stretches of desert to the east, Damascus is essentially a fortress city and a logical place to make the capital. But for this fortress to be a capital worthy of regional respect, it needs a corridor running westward across the mountains to Mediterranean ports along the ancient Phoenician (or modern-day Lebanese) coast, as well as a northward route across the semi-arid steppes, through Homs, Hama and Idlib, to Aleppo.

The saddle of land from Damascus to the north is relatively fluid territory, making it an easier place for a homogenous population to coalesce than the rugged and often recalcitrant coastline. Aleppo sits alongside the mouth of the Fertile Crescent, a natural trade corridor between Anatolia to the north, the Mediterranean (via the Homs Gap) to the west and Damascus to the south. While Aleppo has historically been vulnerable to dominant Anatolian powers and can use its relative distance to rebel against Damascus from time to time, it remains a vital economic hub for any Damascene power.

Finally, jutting east from the Damascus core lie vast stretches of desert, forming a wasteland between Syria and Mesopotamia. This sparsely populated route has long been traveled by small, nomadic bands of men — from caravan traders to Bedouin tribesmen to contemporary jihadists — with few attachments and big ambitions.

Demography by Design

The demographics of this land have fluctuated greatly, depending on the prevailing power of the time. Christians, mostly Eastern Orthodox, formed the majority in Byzantine Syria. The Muslim conquests that followed led to a more diverse blend of religious sects, including a substantial Shiite population. Over time, a series of Sunni dynasties emanating from Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley and Asia Minor made Syria the Sunni-majority region that it is today. While Sunnis came to heavily populate the Arabian Desert and the saddle of land stretching from Damascus to Aleppo, the more protective coastal mountains were meanwhile peppered with a mosaic of minorities. The typically cult-like minorities forged fickle alliances and were always on the lookout for a more distant sea power they could align with to balance against the dominant Sunni forces of the hinterland.

The French, who had the strongest colonial links to the Levant, were masters of the minority manipulation strategy, but that approach also came with severe consequences that endure to this day. In Lebanon, the French favored Maronite Christians, who came to dominate Mediterranean sea trade out of bustling port cities such as Beirut at the expense of poorer Sunni Damascene merchants. France also plucked out a group known as the Nusayris living along the rugged Syrian coast, rebranded them as Alawites to give them religious credibility and stacked them in the Syrian military during the French mandate.

When the French mandate ended in 1943, the ingredients were already in place for major demographic and sectarian upheaval, culminating in the bloodless coup by Hafiz al Assad in 1970 that began the highly irregular Alawite reign over Syria. With the sectarian balance now tilting toward Iran and its sectarian allies, France's current policy of supporting the Sunnis alongside Saudi Arabia against the mostly Alawite regime that the French helped create has a tinge of irony to it, but it fits within a classic balance-of-power mentality toward the region.

Setting Realistic Expectations

The delegates discussing Syria this week in Switzerland face a series of irreconcilable truths that stem from the geopolitics that have governed this land since antiquity.

The anomaly of a powerful Alawite minority ruling Syria is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. Alawite forces are holding their ground in Damascus and steadily regaining territory in the suburbs. Lebanese militant group Hezbollah is meanwhile following its sectarian imperative to ensure the Alawites hold onto power by defending the traditional route from Damascus through the Bekaa Valley to the Lebanese coast, as well as the route through the Orontes River Valley to the Alawite Syrian coast. So long as the Alawites can hold Damascus, there is no chance of them sacrificing the economic heartland.

It is thus little wonder that Syrian forces loyal to al Assad have been on a northward offensive to retake control of Aleppo. Realizing the limits to their own military offensive, the regime will manipulate Western appeals for localized cease-fires, using a respite in the fighting to conserve its resources and make the delivery of food supplies to Aleppo contingent on rebel cooperation with the regime. In the far north and east, Kurdish forces are meanwhile busy trying to carve out their own autonomous zone against mounting constraints, but the Alawite regime is quite comfortable knowing that Kurdish separatism is more of a threat to Turkey than it is to Damascus at this point.

The fate of Lebanon and Syria remain deeply intertwined. In the mid-19th century, a bloody civil war between Druze and Maronites in the densely populated coastal mountains rapidly spread from Mount Lebanon to Damascus. This time around, the current is flowing in reverse, with the civil war in Syria now flooding Lebanon. As the Alawites continue to gain ground in Syria with aid from Iran and Hezbollah, a shadowy amalgam of Sunni jihadists backed by Saudi Arabia will become more active in Lebanon, leading to a steady stream of Sunni-Shiite attacks that will keep Mount Lebanon on edge.

The United States may be leading the ill-fated peace conference to reconstruct Syria, but it doesn't really have any strong interests there. The depravity of the civil war itself compels the United States to show that it is doing something constructive, but Washington's core interest for the region at the moment is to preserve and advance a negotiation with Iran. This goal sits at odds with a publicly stated U.S. goal to ensure al Assad is not part of a Syrian transition, and this point may well be one of many pieces in the developing bargain between Washington and Tehran. However, al Assad holds greater leverage so long as his main patron is in talks with the United States, the only sea power currently capable of projecting significant force in the eastern Mediterranean.

Egypt, the Nile Valley power to the south, is wholly ensnared in its own internal problems. So is Turkey, the main power to the north, which is now gripped in a public and vicious power struggle that leaves little room for Turkish adventurism in the Arab world. That leaves Saudi Arabia and Iran as the main regional powers able to directly manipulate the Syrian sectarian battleground. Iran, along with Russia, which shares an interest in preserving relations with the Alawites and thus its access to the Mediterranean, will hold the upper hand in this conflict, but the desert wasteland linking Syria to Mesopotamia is filled with bands of Sunni militants eager for Saudi backing to tie down their sectarian rivals.

And so the fighting will go on. Neither side of the sectarian divide is capable of overwhelming the other on the battlefield and both have regional backers that will fuel the fight. Iran will try to use its relative advantage to draw the Saudi royals into a negotiation, but a deeply unnerved Saudi Arabia will continue to resist as long as Sunni rebels still have enough fight in them to keep going. Fighters on the ground will regularly manipulate appeals for cease-fires spearheaded by largely disinterested outsiders, all while the war spreads deeper into Lebanon. The Syrian state will neither fragment and formalize into sectarian statelets nor reunify into a single nation under a political settlement imposed by a conference in Geneva. A mosaic of clan loyalties and the imperative to keep Damascus linked to its coastline and economic heartland — no matter what type of regime is in power in Syria — will hold this seething borderland together, however tenuously.

"The Geopolitics of the Syrian Civil War is republished with permission of Stratfor."

The Jihadist Trap of Here and Now (Stratfor; 2015/06/25)

2015-07-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

By Scott Stewart

In recent weeks, I have found myself spending a lot of time thinking about the jihadist strategy of al Qaeda and how it compares to that of the Islamic State. Earlier this month, I wrote about the possibility that the al Qaeda brand of jihadism could outlast that of the Islamic State. Last week, I wrote about how ideologies are harder to kill than individuals, focusing on the effect that the death of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wahayshi will have on the group and the wider global jihadist movement.

But beyond the impact of leaders like al-Wahayshi, there are other facets of strategy that will influence the war for the soul of jihadism. Specifically, I am talking about time and place. Both al Qaeda and the Islamic State seek to establish a global caliphate, but both differ quite starkly in how to accomplish this task and how soon it can be achieved.

Al Qaeda argues that the caliphate can be established only after the United States and its European allies have been defeated, to the extent that they can no longer interfere in Muslim lands — either because of a lack of ability or a lack of desire. The organization pursues a long-war approach that emphasizes the need to attack the United States, "the far enemy," before focusing on overthrowing local governments. The Islamic State takes the opposite tack. It has adopted a more urgent "why wait?" approach and concentrates its efforts on immediately taking, holding and governing territory. This strategy banks on being able to use any conquered territory and resources for the purposes of continued expansion. The direct approach explains the Islamic State's decision to quickly proclaim a caliphate at the beginning of Ramadan last year, after it had captured a large portion of Iraq and Syria. The group's message to the Muslim world is that the caliphate is here and now, and there is nothing the world can do to stop its inexorable expansion.

Since the fall of the Taliban's emirate in Afghanistan, several jihadist organizations have attempted to create Islamist polities, with the current attempt by the Islamic State (the organization's second try) being the most recent. So far, each of these attempts has ended in a spectacular failure and in each case, including the Taliban's emirate, western military intervention has played a key role in the downfall of the jihadist polity — and it will do so again in the case of the Islamic State's so-called caliphate.

Recent Jihadist Polities

In 2006, an array of jihadist groups led by al Qaeda in Iraq announced that they were forming an Islamic state in Iraq. They even began to refer to themselves as the Islamic State in Iraq. While the group initially eclipsed the al Qaeda core in terms of attracting foreign fighters, outside funding and publicity, the U.S. surge in Iraq and the Anbar Awakening greatly weakened the group. By 2010, when a U.S. airstrike killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri — the group's top two leaders — the organization had become only a shadow of its former self. The 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the sectarian policies of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government allowed the group to survive, and the civil war in Syria helped the organization recover its strength and grow into what it is today.

In 2011, as Yemen was struggling through a crisis that pitted elements of the military against each other, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seized the opportunity afforded by the chaos to grab large quantities of weapons, while also extending its influence over large areas of territory in Yemen's south. However, by mid-2012, Yemeni forces aided by U.S. intelligence and training (and some air support) were able to recapture most of the territory taken by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

A unique window into the thoughts of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula during this period was revealed with the discovery of letters sent by al-Wahayshi to Abu Musab Abdel al-Wadoud, the leader of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In the letters, which journalist Rukmini Callimachi discovered in the Malian city of Timbuktu, al-Wahayshi shared some of the lessons he learned — and mistakes his organization had made — so that al-Wadoud and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb would not repeat them.

According to one of al-Wahayshi's letters, his group suffered significant losses of men, materiel and money in 2012, far surpassing what they had gained in 2011. The group's higher profile and level of operational activity also resulted in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula losing a number of important members to U.S. airstrikes, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

In another of the letters, al-Wahayshi explained why his group purposefully did not proclaim an emirate in southern Yemen: "As soon as we took control of the areas, we were advised by the General Command here not to declare the establishment of an Islamic principality, or state, for a number of reasons: We wouldn't be able to treat people on the basis of a state since we would not be able to provide for all their needs, mainly because our state is vulnerable. Second: Fear of failure, in the event that the world conspires against us. If this were to happen, people may start to despair and believe that jihad is fruitless."

He encouraged al-Wadoud to also refrain from proclaiming an Islamic polity, but his advice went unheeded. Shortly after receiving the letter from al Wahayshi, jihadists aligned with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb declared an Islamic state called Azawad in northern Mali in April 2012. But the French intervention in Mali in January 2013 rapidly pushed the jihadists out of the territory they had conquered, ending the short-lived jihadist state of Azawad.

Past attempts to create an Islamic polity in Somalia were also thwarted by an international coalition. And in recent months Boko Haram, which now calls itself Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, lost most of the territory the group had previously seized in northern Nigeria.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made another land grab in 2015 as the country fell into chaos. In April, the group took control of Mukalla, Yemen's fifth largest city and the capital of Hadramawt province. Meanwhile, jihadist groups in Libya, such as Ansar al-Sharia, the Mujahideen Shura Council and the Islamic State's three Libyan Wilayats (or provinces) are all fighting with secular, nationalist and tribal forces for control of the country.

And of course, the Islamic State took control of large portions of Iraq and Syria last year and declared the re-establishment of the caliphate there. The group's theatrical, genocidal violence resulted in the formation of the coalition that began an air campaign against it in September 2014. Since then, the group has lost much of its strategic momentum, as well as a great deal of its economic infrastructure and many weapons and personnel. The Islamic State also lost control of a good deal of territory in Iraq and Syria, including places such as Tikrit, Kobani and, most recently, Tal Abyad. Still, the Islamic State has taken control of the cities of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, though the group is under attack from the international air campaign, as well as local ground forces.

Bin Laden's Strategy

The United States and the West played a critical role in the downfall of recent jihadist polities in Iraq, Yemen, Mali and Somalia. This fact would certainly not surprise Osama bin Laden, who lived to witness such events. From the beginning of his public campaign to establish the caliphate, and in his 1996 "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," bin Laden warned that the United States had to be driven out of the region before progress could be made. Bin Laden noted the way that Hezbollah's activities in Lebanon had driven U.S. and French forces out of the Levant, which gave the group space to become a powerful player in the region. He sought to replicate that success elsewhere.

It was a strategic vision bin Laden held until his death. In a letter written to his assistant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman — likely around March or April 2011, based upon the events commented on — he asked al-Rahman to dispatch a letter to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb asking it to focus on attacking U.S. embassies and oil companies, rather than local security forces. Bin Laden also wanted to warn the franchise about the dangers of prematurely proclaiming a caliphate:

We should stress on the importance of timing in establishing the Islamic state. We should be aware that planning for the establishment of the state begins with exhausting the main influential power that enforced the siege on the Hamas government, and that overthrew the Islamic emirate in Afghanistan and Iraq despite the fact this power was depleted. We should keep in mind that this main power still has the capacity to lay siege on any Islamic state, and that such a siege might force the people to overthrow their duly elected governments.
We have to continue with exhausting and depleting them until they become so weak that they can't overthrow any state that we establish. That will be the time to commence with forming the Islamic state.

Bin Laden understood that while the United States struggles with ephemeral, ambiguous entities, it is very good at attacking a well-defined enemy that it can identify and locate. Declaring an Islamic polity and attempting to hold and govern territory automatically makes an organization a fixed target on which the United States and its allies can focus their formidable power.

Yet, even knowing this fact, al Qaeda has not been immune to the trap of place. The al Qaeda core has always needed a sanctuary to operate effectively, like Sudan or the Taliban's Afghanistan. Lacking a suitable sanctuary, the group's operations since the invasion of Afghanistan have been limited. There are reports that the al Qaeda core sent a group of operatives from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area to Syria to attempt to establish a base there — the so-called Khorasan group. That group was struck by some of the first U.S. airstrikes in Syria in September 2014. Evidently, having an address has its downside.

It is also not entirely surprising that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has lost three senior leaders in Mukalla since the group conquered the city in April. After the loss of two of his lieutenants, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader al-Wahayshi still visited the city for some unknown reason — and it must have been an important reason to override security concerns. In the aforementioned letter to al-Rahman, bin Laden asked him to "send a letter to the brothers in Yemen to have them implement security measures, avoid moving about except for dire need."

Bin Laden knew that controlling territory is a dangerous trap, unless the United States and its allies are vanquished from a given region. But there are times when even groups affiliated with al Qaeda need to run the risk of exposing themselves in contested territory.

The Eventual Progression

When the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant broke from al Qaeda and declared a caliphate in a specific location, the organization once again made itself a fixed target. Its ideology and claims also serve to tie the group to a specific piece of terrain. It suffered major losses the last time it was so bold, surviving only by abandoning territory, reducing the group's overall profile and returning to a low-level insurgency and terrorism campaign. Of course, the group's survival was also greatly aided by Sunni sheikhs in Iraq who did not trust the government of former Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki government and thus sought to maintain some sort of jihadist presence as a tool to wield against Shiite sectarianism. Allowing the Islamic Sate to survive in Iraq is something those sheikhs surely regret now.

Despite the criticism that U.S. President Barack Obama has received over his administration's policy toward the Islamic State, the organization's expansion has been stopped and is beginning to be rolled back. There are some who would claim that the organization has not been contained, as demonstrated by the proliferation of existing jihadist groups and factions that have declared allegiance to the Islamic State. But make no mistake, these franchises clearly lack the resources and leadership of the Islamic State core, and they have not gained any capacity previously lacking. They are essentially the same groups with the same capabilities. Only their names have changed, as well as perhaps a little bit of their operational and media philosophies.

It may take some time, but eventually U.S. air power paired with local ground forces will drive the Islamic State from its perch in the same manner as the Taliban and the Islamic State in Iraq. It took seven years to cripple the group last time with U.S. forces on the ground. It will likely take years this time — especially without the presence of a reliable allied ground force in Syria. But there is little doubt that the group will slowly be strangled on the ground as it is repeatedly pummeled by precision airstrikes.

The Islamic State, consequently, will eventually follow the same strategy as the Taliban, al Shabaab, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The group will abandon its territorial gains to return to an amorphous, low-level insurgency and terrorism campaign. It is, of course, the same strategic shift the group made in 2010. If it had not done so, it would not be here today. If the Islamic State does not abandon its here and now attitude, deciding to stand its ground and defend its caliphate to the end, it will be destroyed.

"The Jihadist Trap of Here and Now is republished with permission of Stratfor."

A Net Assessment of the Middle East (Strafor; 2015/06/09)

2015-07-08T08:25:00.003-07:00

By George Friedman

The term "Middle East" has become enormously elastic. The name originated with the British Foreign Office in the 19th century. The British divided the region into the Near East, the area closest to the United Kingdom and most of North Africa; the Far East, which was east of British India; and the Middle East, which was between British India and the Near East. It was a useful model for organizing the British Foreign Office and important for the region as well, since the British — and to a lesser extent the French — defined not only the names of the region but also the states that emerged in the Near and Far East.

Today, the term Middle East, to the extent that it means anything, refers to the Muslim-dominated countries west of Afghanistan and along the North African shore. With the exception of Turkey and Iran, the region is predominantly Arab and predominantly Muslim. Within this region, the British created political entities that were modeled on European nation-states. The British shaped the Arabian Peninsula, which had been inhabited by tribes forming complex coalitions, into Saudi Arabia, a state based on one of these tribes, the Sauds. The British also created Iraq and crafted Egypt into a united monarchy. Quite independent of the British, Turkey and Iran shaped themselves into secular nation-states.

This defined the two fault lines of the Middle East. The first was between European secularism and Islam. The Cold War, when the Soviets involved themselves deeply in the region, accelerated the formation of this fault line. One part of the region was secular, socialist and built around the military. Another part, particularly focused on the Arabian Peninsula, was Islamist, traditionalist and royalist. The latter was pro-Western in general, and the former — particularly the Arab parts — was pro-Soviet. It was more complex than this, of course, but this distinction gives us a reasonable framework.

The second fault line was between the states that had been created and the underlying reality of the region. The states in Europe generally conformed to the definition of nations in the 20th century. The states created by the Europeans in the Middle East did not. There was something at a lower level and at a higher level. At the lower level were the tribes, clans and ethnic groups that not only made up the invented states but also were divided by the borders. The higher level was broad religious loyalties to Islam and to the major movements of Islam, Shiism and Suniism that laid a transnational claim on loyalty. Add to this the pan-Arab movement initiated by former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who argued that the Arab states should be united into a single Arab nation.

Any understanding of the Middle East must therefore begin with the creation of a new political geography after World War I that was superimposed on very different social and political realities and was an attempt to limit the authority of broader regional and ethnic groups. The solution that many states followed was to embrace secularism or traditionalism and use them as tools to manage both the subnational groupings and the claims of the broader religiosity. One unifying point was Israel, which all opposed. But even here it was more illusion than reality. The secular socialist states, such as Egypt and Syria, actively opposed Israel. The traditional royalist states, which were threatened by the secular socialists, saw an ally in Israel.

Aftershocks From the Soviet Collapse

Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting collapse of support for the secular socialist states, the power of the traditional royalties surged. This was not simply a question of money, although these states did have money. It was also a question of values. The socialist secularist movement lost its backing and its credibility. Movements such as Fatah, based on socialist secularism — and Soviet support — lost power relative to emerging groups that embraced the only ideology left: Islam. There were tremendous cross currents in this process, but one of the things to remember was that many of the socialist secular states that had begun with great promise continued to survive, albeit without the power of a promise of a new world. Rulers like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Syria's Bashar al Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein remained in place. Where the movement had once held promise even if its leaders were corrupt, after the Soviet Union fell, the movement was simply corrupt.

The collapse of the Soviet Union energized Islam, both because the mujahideen defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan and because the alternative to Islam was left in tatters. Moreover, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait took place in parallel with the last days of the Soviet Union. Both countries are remnants of British diplomacy. The United States, having inherited the British role in the region, intervened to protect another British invention — Saudi Arabia — and to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. From the Western standpoint, this was necessary to stabilize the region. If a regional hegemon emerged and went unchallenged, the consequences could pyramid. Desert Storm appeared to be a simple and logical operation combining the anti-Soviet coalition with Arab countries.

The experience of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan and the secular regimes' loss of legitimacy opened the door to two processes. In one, the subnational groupings in the region came to see the existing regimes as powerful but illegitimate. In the other, the events in Afghanistan brought the idea of a pan-Islamic resurrection back to the fore. And in the Sunni world, which won the war in Afghanistan, the dynamism of Shiite Iran — which had usurped the position of politico-military spokesman for radical Islam — made the impetus for action clear.

There were three problems. First, the radicals needed to cast pan-Islamism in a historical context. The context was the transnational caliphate, a single political entity that would abolish existing states and align political reality with Islam. The radicals reached back to the Christian Crusades for historical context, and the United States — seen as the major Christian power after its crusade in Kuwait — became the target. Second, the pan-Islamists needed to demonstrate that the United States was both vulnerable and the enemy of Islam. Third, they had to use the subnational groups in various countries to build coalitions to overthrow what were seen as corrupt Muslim regimes, in both the secular and the traditionalist worlds.

The result was al Qaeda and its campaign to force the United States to launch a crusade in the Islamic world. Al Qaeda wanted to do this by carrying out actions that demonstrated American vulnerability and compelled U.S. action. If the United States did not act, it would enhance the image of American weakness; if it did act, it would demonstrate it was a crusader hostile to Islam. U.S. action would, in turn, spark uprisings against corrupt and hypocritical Muslim states, sweep aside European-imposed borders and set the stage for uprisings. The key was to demonstrate the weakness of the regimes and their complicity with the Americans.

This led to 9/11. In the short run, it appeared that the operation had failed. The United States reacted massively to the attacks, but no uprising occurred in the region, no regimes were toppled, and many Muslim regimes collaborated with the Americans. During this time, the Americans were able to wage an aggressive war against al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. In this first phase, the United States succeeded. But in the second phase, the United States, in its desire to reshape Iraq and Afghanistan — and other countries — internally, became caught up in the subnational conflicts. The Americans got involved in creating tactical solutions rather than confronting the strategic problem, which was that waging the war was causing national institutions in the region to collapse.

In destroying al Qaeda, the Americans created a bigger problem in three parts: First, they unleashed the subnational groups. Second, where they fought they created a vacuum that they couldn't fill. Finally, in weakening the governments and empowering the subnational groups, they made a compelling argument for the caliphate as the only institution that could govern the Muslim world effectively and the only basis for resisting the United States and its allies. In other words, where al Qaeda failed to trigger a rising against corrupt governments, the United States managed to destroy or compromise a range of the same governments, opening the door to transnational Islam.

The Arab Spring was mistaken for a liberal democratic rising like 1989 in Eastern Europe. More than anything else, it was a rising by a pan-Islamic movement that largely failed to topple regimes and embroiled one, Syria, in a prolonged civil war. That conflict has a subnational component — various factions divided against each other that give the al Qaeda-derived Islamic State room to maneuver. It also provided a second impetus to the ideal of a caliphate. Not only were the pan-Islamists struggling against the American crusader, but they were fighting Shiite heretics — in service of the Sunni caliphate — as well. The Islamic State put into place the outcome that al Qaeda wanted in 2001, nearly 15 years later and, in addition to Syria and Iraq, with movements capable of sustained combat in other Islamic countries.

A New U.S. Strategy and Its Repercussions

Around this time, the United States was forced to change strategy. The Americans were capable of disrupting al Qaeda and destroying the Iraqi army. But the U.S. ability to occupy and pacify Iraq or Afghanistan was limited. The very factionalism that made it possible to achieve the first two goals made pacification impossible. Working with one group alienated another in an ongoing balancing act that left U.S. forces vulnerable to some faction motivated to wage war because of U.S. support for another. In Syria, where the secular government was confronting a range of secular and religious but not extremist forces, along with an emerging Islamic State, the Americans were unable to meld the factionalized non-Islamic State forces into a strategically effective force. Moreover, the United States could not make its peace with the al Assad government because of its repressive policies, and it was unable to confront the Islamic State with the forces available.

In a way, the center of the Middle East had been hollowed out and turned into a whirlpool of competing forces. Between the Lebanese and Iranian borders, the region had uncovered two things: First, it showed that the subnational forces were the actual reality of the region. Second, in obliterating the Syria-Iraq border, these forces and particularly the Islamic State had created a core element of the caliphate — a transnational power or, more precisely, one that transcended borders.

The American strategy became an infinitely more complex variation of President Ronald Reagan's policy in the 1980s: Allow the warring forces to war. The Islamic State turned the fight into a war on Shiite heresy and on established nation states. The region is surrounded by four major powers: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey. Each has approached the situation differently. Each of these nations has internal factions, but each state has been able to act in spite of that. Put differently, three of them are non-Arab powers, and the one Arab power, Saudi Arabia, is perhaps the most concerned about internal threats.

For Iran, the danger of the Islamic State is that it would recreate an effective government in Baghdad that could threaten Iran again. Thus, Tehran has maintained support for the Iraqi Shiites and for the al Assad government, while trying to limit al Assad's power.

For Saudi Arabia, which has aligned with Sunni radical forces in the past, the Islamic State represents an existential threat. Its call for a transnational Islamic movement has the potential to resonate with Saudis from the Wahhabi tradition. The Saudis, along with some other Gulf Cooperation Council members and Jordan, are afraid of Islamic State transnationalism but also of Shiite power in Iraq and Syria. Riyadh needs to contain the Islamic State without conceding the ground to the Shiites.

For the Israelis, the situation has been simultaneously outstanding and terrifying. It has been outstanding because it has pitted Israel's enemies against each other. Al Assad's government has in the past supported Hezbollah against Israel. The Islamic State represents a long-term threat to Israel. So long as they fought, Israel's security would be enhanced. The problem is that in the end someone will win in Syria, and that force might be more dangerous than anything before it, particularly if the Islamic State ideology spreads to Palestine. Ultimately, al Assad is less dangerous than the Islamic State, which shows how bad the Israeli choice is in the long run.

It is the Turks — or at least the Turkish government that suffered a setback in the recently concluded parliamentary elections — who are the most difficult to understand. They are hostile to the al Assad government — so much so that they see the Islamic State as less of a threat. There are two ways to explain their view: One is that they expect the Islamic State to be defeated by the United States in the end and that involvement in Syria would stress the Turkish political system. The other is that they might be less averse than others in the region to the Islamic State's winning. While the Turkish government has vigorously denied such charges, rumors of support to at least some factions of the Islamic State have persisted, suspicions in Western capitals linger, and alleged shipments of weaponry to unknown parties in Syria by the Turkish intelligence organization were a dominant theme in Turkey's elections. This is incomprehensible, unless the Turks see the Islamic State as a movement that they can control in the end and that is paving the way for Turkish power in the region — or unless the Turks believe that a direct confrontation would lead to a backlash from the Islamic State in Turkey itself.

The Islamic State's Role in the Region

The Islamic State represents a logical continuation of al Qaeda, which triggered both a sense of Islamic power and shaped the United States into a threat to Islam. The Islamic State created a military and political framework to exploit the situation al Qaeda created. Its military operations have been impressive, ranging from the seizure of Mosul to the taking of Ramadi and Palmyra. Islamic State fighters' flexibility on the battlefield and ability to supply large numbers of forces in combat raises the question of where they got the resources and the training.

However, the bulk of Islamic State fighters are still trapped within their cauldron, surrounded by three hostile powers and an enigma. The hostile powers collaborate, but they also compete. The Israelis and the Saudis are talking. This is not new, but for both sides there is an urgency that wasn't there in the past. The Iranian nuclear program is less important to the Americans than collaboration with Iran against the Islamic State. And the Saudis and other Gulf countries have forged an air capability used in Yemen that might be used elsewhere if needed.

It is likely that the cauldron will hold, so long as the Saudis are able to sustain their internal political stability. But the Islamic State has already spread beyond the cauldron — operating in Libya, for example. Many assume that these forces are Islamic State in name only — franchises, if you will. But the Islamic State does not behave like al Qaeda. It explicitly wants to create a caliphate, and that wish should not be dismissed. At the very least, it is operating with the kind of centralized command and control, on the strategic level, that makes it far more effective than other non-state forces we have seen.

Secularism in the Muslim world appears to be in terminal retreat. The two levels of struggle within that world are, at the top, Sunni versus Shiite, and at the base, complex and interacting factions. The Western world accepted domination of the region from the Ottomans and exercised it for almost a century. Now, the leading Western power lacks the force to pacify the Islamic world. Pacifying a billion people is beyond anyone's capability. The Islamic State has taken al Qaeda's ideology and is attempting to institutionalize it. The surrounding nations have limited options and a limited desire to collaborate. The global power lacks the resources to both defeat the Islamic State and control the insurgency that would follow. Other nations, such as Russia, are alarmed by the Islamic State's spread among their own Muslim populations.

It is interesting to note that the fall of the Soviet Union set in motion the events we are seeing here. It is also interesting to note that the apparent defeat of al Qaeda opened the door for its logical successor, the Islamic State. The question at hand, then, is whether the four regional powers can and want to control the Islamic State. And at the heart of that question is the mystery of what Turkey has in mind, particularly as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's power appears to be declining.

"A Net Assessment of the Middle East is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Could India's Military Really Crush Pakistan? (National Interest; 2015/07/02)

2015-07-02T08:43:00.002-07:00

by Walter C. Ladwig III

Following a raid by Indian special forces into Myanmar early this month, increasing attention has been given to the prospect that India might use similar means against Pakistan to pressure it to end support for anti-Indian militant groups. India’s on-going military modernization and headline-grabbing increases in defense spending have already raised concerns that it threatens to upset the delicate conventional military balance in the region and make military action a more attractive prospect for New Delhi. Taken at face value, there appears to be some validity to this line of thinking. Indian defense spending [4] has doubled in real terms since 1997, growing at an average of 6.3 percent per year. The Modi announced a further 11 percent hike, raising the 2015–2016 military budget to $39.8 billion. Moreover, India is presently the world’s largest buyer of conventional weapons [5], with upwards of $100 billion expected to be spent [6] on modernizing its defense forces over the next decade.

Consequently, a number of scholars and analysts have suggested Indian military modernization is threatening Pakistan’s conventional deterrence and pressuring Islamabad to embrace battlefield nuclear weapons as a tool of self defense. Yet, this line of thinking overlooks the fact that the Indian military is beset by obsolete platforms. Moreover, a pair of key structural factors mitigate whatever advantages India may be gaining through military modernization: terrain is not conducive to rapid successes in areas of significant strategic value, and in the most likely conflict scenarios, India is unlikely to achieve the strategic surprise necessary to make a limited offensive succeed. Consequently, Indian policymakers cannot be confident that even a limited resort to military force would achieve a rapid result, which is an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure [7].

Deterring State-Sponsored Terrorism with Conventional Force

Since the mid 2000s, the Indian Army has explored changes to its force structure and concept of operations [8] to enable short-notice offensives of limited duration that would seek to make several small thrusts to Pakistan to quickly seize and hold territory. Termed “proactive strategies,” the aim is to rapidly mobilize division or smaller sized formations to carry out retaliatory conventional strikes that would deter or punish Pakistan for its links to terrorist groups, while simultaneously pursuing narrow enough aims to deny Islamabad a justification to escalate the clash to the nuclear level. In particular, the Indian Army seeks a rapid mobilization and offensive action by division or smaller sized formations who would seek to punish enemy forces or seize territory in a limited offensive of short duration.

Unsurprisingly these efforts have not been well received in Pakistan, whose leaders view the country’s conventional armed forces as the cornerstone of their strategic deterrent capability [9]. Consequently, in recent years, a number of Pakistani analysts have sounded warnings [10] about the Indian military’s alleged growing quantitative and qualitative advantages, alleging that Islamabad’s inability to keep pace with New Delhi’s military build up has increased the pressure [11] to expand Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to include low-yield warheads and short-range delivery systems. These concerns have been echoed in Washington, D.C. A number of researchers at think tanks, including the Carnegie Endowment [12], the Congressional Research Service [13], the Council on Foreign Relations [14], and the Hudson Institute [15] appear to share the beliefs of the Stimson Center’s Michael Krepon [16] that Pakistan’s recent embrace of the utility of tactical nuclear weapons and broader Pakistani efforts to enhance the quality and quantity of their nuclear arsenal is a result of “India’s growing conventional capabilities and its more proactive military plans.”

Despite the seemingly dramatic increases in its defense spending, the Indian military—in particular the Army—faces numerous capability shortfalls [17] that would hinder military operations [18] against Pakistan. The large number of obsolete tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces, not to mention critical shortages of ammunition and air-defense assets, raise serious questions whether India can undertake large-scale military operations at all, let alone whether ongoing defense modernization really is sharply shifting the conventional balance in its favor. Although Indian defense spending has gained attention worldwide, much of that money has been spent merely replacing obsolete weapons and equipment.

The most visible manifestation of the “hollowing out” of the Indian Army occurred in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, when then Army chief General Deepak Kapoor reportedly was forced to admit [19] to the country’s political leadership that the Army “was not ready for war” with Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks.

Consequently, deterring Pakistani support for terrorism via conventional punishment faces a number of obstacles, including a lack of sufficient numerical superiority in the conflict zone, unfavorable terrain for a quick offensive and a lack of strategic surprise that could offset these other two factors.

Balance of Forces

Since the end of the Cold War, the manpower balance between the two armies has hovered around a 2:1 ratio in India’s favor. However, just 18 of the army’s 36 divisions are stationed in the states bordering Pakistan, fifteen of which are infantry divisions, with only limited offensive power. In contrast, 18 of the Pakistani army’s 22 divisions—including both of their armored divisions—are deployed in provinces adjacent to the international border. If we account for the estimated [20] 70,000 Pakistani soldiers that have been temporarily redeployed to confront the Pakistani Taliban, India’s manpower advantage at the theater level at the start of any crisis would be 1.2:1.

The conventional wisdom amongst some defense analysts is that an attacking force requires [21] a minimum of a 1.5:1 superiority in forces at the theater level to succeed. However, an attacker would likely seek [22] a larger advantage, on the order of 2:1, before initiating offensive operations and those seeking a decisive outcome would want still higher force ratios in their favor. In any instance, India’s local force advantage is not decisive. Although in a longer conflict India could bring its numerical superiority to bear, the military has numerous shortfalls of ammunition and equipment that make a struggle of more than a few weeks duration unlikely. For example, as of August 2014, the Army lacked [23] ammunition to undertake more than twenty days of “intense fighting” with less than seven days of reserves of key stocks of artillery ammunition, anti-tank missiles and a “critical shortage” of ammunition for its main battle tanks that would run out [24] after ten days, hardly enough time for additional forces to make a difference.

In terms of equipment for ground combat, Pakistan appears to have partially closed a nearly 2:1 gap in tanks that India possessed in the early 1990s, to the point where India’s advantage is just over 1.15:1. However, this modest edge is undercut by the fact that Pakistani armored units are primarily stationed in the vicinity of the international border, while India’s are primarily based in central India.

Main Battle Tanks: 1992-2014

Moreover, it is alleged that large numbers of the Indian army’s fleet of tanks are nearing obsolescence and unable to operate at night, while their modern replacements are unsuited for operations in the desert regions around the international border. Unsurprisingly, some Indian defense analysts have suggested that their army requires at least 1,500 modern tanks to gain a conventional edge.

The major shortcoming for Indian forces seeking to undertake a short-notice offensive is their lack of mobile artillery to provide fire support to advancing units. Political scandals and bureaucratic red tape have left the army with just 10 percent of the self-propelled artillery its mobile armored brigades and divisions require, constraining the kind of bold thrusts a limited aims offensive would require. A recently announced plan [25] to acquire 814 mounted gun systems will address some of this shortfall, but the byzantine nature [26] of Indian weapons procurement and a history of repeated artillery acquisition failures makes it unknown when, if ever, these weapons will actually find their way into service.

Geography

The 2,900 kilometer long Indo-Pakistani border is characterized by diverse and varied terrain that has differential impacts on military operations. In Kashmir, the landscape is mountainous and heavily forested. When combined with a lack of wide roads, the movement of vehicles and large military formations is significantly hindered. Depending on the time of year, it is possible to conduct large-scale military operations across the Line of Control (LoC) in the areas of south Jammu and the Kashmir valley. However, difficult terrain and under-developed transport infrastructure, in the words of one scholar [27], “makes swift, deep penetrations unlikely, if not impossible, in the face of even minor resistance.”

A second section of the border running from Southern Jammu and Kashmir through the Punjab down to Northern Rajasthan is marked by a near continuous line of concrete irrigation canals that stretch for 2,000 kilometers. Not only does this network of canals and their tributaries form an obstacle in its own right, they have been turned into defensive fortifications with the addition of large pilings of soil, concrete bunkers, minefields, and fortified gun emplacements. Securing a bridgehead and mounting a cross-canal assault against a dug-in opponent will be a time consuming and bloody affair.

The third section of the international border, where the Sindh and Punjab meet, is often described as Pakistan’s major point of strategic vulnerability because the country’s primary north-south transportation artery runs extremely close to the international border. However, that historical risk has been significantly alleviated by the construction of a largely parallel highway on the western side of the Indus River. Although this region lacks the extensive fortifications described in the northern Punjab, the presence of irrigation canals and a major river constrain the available axes of advance and allow defenders to fight from prepared positions.

The southernmost sections of the international border, consisting of the flat, barren deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat are extremely suitable for mechanized military operations, however they lack significant strategic value. Moreover, on the Pakistani side of the border areas of the harsh desert have been left empty to provide a natural buffer-zone that allows defenders to trade space for time as they readied a counter-attack.

Absence of Strategic Surprise

In a future clash in which India would wish to employ a pro-active strategy against Pakistan, the Indian Army is unlikely to achieve strategic surprise in a manner that would allow it to overcome the previously discussed constraints of numbers and terrain.

As the status-quo power in the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir, India has little incentive [28] to launch a surprise attack. Consequently, under the most likely conflict scenarios, Pakistani forces will not be caught off guard, but will have a warning period in which they can mobilize their forces. A large-scale act of terrorism within India that is linked to Pakistan is by far the most probable [29] trigger of conflict. That being said, given that the infiltration of Pakistani forces into Kashmir preceded the 1965 and 1999 wars, a future Pakistani government’s decision to do the same cannot be ruled out as a proximate cause of conflict. In either case, the Pakistani government will have prior warning about the imminent commencement of hostilities, either because scenes of terror are playing out on international television or because they were actively infiltrating troops into Indian territory.

Indian response time will also provide a buffer for Pakistan to respond. Based on the aftermath of the 2001 and 2008 terrorist attacks, the Indian army would require several weeks before it could hope to initiate military operations. Although reducing mobilization time is a key aspect of the “pro-active” strategies, offensive forces have not been pre-deployed in the border region, nor will the army’s efforts reduce the amount of time the country’s political leadership requires to deliberate before choosing to employ military force.

With 80 percent of the Pakistani Army’s divisions based in provinces adjacent to the international border—the majority of which are forward-deployed in defensive positions—Pakistan’s military is postured to repel an Indian attack. Additionally, it has taken steps [30] in recent years to improve its crisis response capability so that it can capitalize on any warning it receives. Given the previous discussions of the terrain advantages accruing to a defender in Kashmir and the Punjab, even a partial mobilization of Pakistani forces is likely to present a significant obstacle to a limited offensive.

Were the Indian Army to seek to launch a short-notice, limited offensive, the twin constraints of geography and lack of strategic surprise suggest that under the most likely scenarios, India would have parity at best in the number of troops they could bring to bear in the early days of a conflict. In a conflict of several weeks duration, the army could leverage its larger numbers by shifting forces from East to West, but that would require a longer period of fighting than most analysts believe is possible before outside powers intervene to force a resolution to the crisis or the Indian Army runs out of ammunition. Moreover, a major shift of troops or the opening of multiple fronts beyond the Line of Control in Kashmir would signal to Pakistan that the conflict was not limited and short-duration, but full-scale war with the attendant nuclear escalation risks. None of this suggests Indian political leaders would have a high degree of confidence that a limited offensive would quickly achieve its objectives at minimal risk.

Alternative Approaches?

The main alternative to crossing the LoC on the ground in force is reliance on long-range punishment strikes. These could be carried out by manned aircraft or missiles. The problem facing a bombardment strategy is that achieving a decisive result and limiting escalation are necessarily in tension: the targets that are of lowest escalation risk are also those of least value. If India were to opt for attacks on high-value militant assets in Pakistan proper, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s massive headquarters in Muridke, or, as some suggest, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) facilities linked to terrorist groups, it may succeed in imposing significant costs on Islamabad and Rawalpindi, but a significant military response would be guaranteed. In contrast, the most limited target available would be terrorist training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. However, these targets are likely to be unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, Kashmiri militant groups have diversified across Pakistan [31] which means there is no guarantee that the group suspected of responsibility for a specific terrorist attack would be vulnerable to retaliation in Pakistani Kashmir. Moreover, following news of a major terror attack, anti-Indian terrorist groups—even those unconnected to the event—are likely to go into hiding for a period of time, leaving identified camps unoccupied. Finally, since India does not possess heavy bombers, the ability of fighter jets or missile strikes to significantly damage terrorist bases is open to question.

It may be possible to reduce escalatory pressure on the Pakistani government by strictly confining strikes to the disputed territory of Kashmir, avoiding a direct confrontation with Pakistani military assets and inflicting very limited civilian casualties.mNevertheless, the Pakistani government will likely face strong domestic pressure—from both the military, radical Islamist groups, and a nationalistic public—to mount a response to an Indian attack. The optimistic case is that confining the strikes to Pakistan administered Kashmir—rather than internationally recognized Pakistani territory—will prevent Pakistan from horizontally escalating the conflict beyond Kashmir, thus keeping the clash from escalating vertically into full-scale war.

Limited strikes on a limited number of targets in Kashmir may prevent a conflict from escalating but, for reasons described above, this is likely to result in military action that is of symbolic, rather than substantive, nature, designed to assuage the anger of the Indian public rather than inflict meaningful harm on terrorist networks. Ultimately Indian military leaders may have to accept, if they haven’t already, the very unpleasant reality that what is essentially a political problem—Pakistan’s continued desire to wrest Kashmir away from India and its army’s pathological hatred [32] of “Hindustan”—may not be amenable to a strictly military solution.

Conclusion

The Indian government has demonstrated an increased willingness to use force in an environment where headline grabbing increases in the Indian defense budget and a high-profile military modernization program are already alarming observers who worry that this could undermine the conventional military balance maintaining South Asia’s “ugly stability.” While on their face these concerns have validity, upon deeper examination, it is clear that, modernizing or not, the Indian military is capable of bringing far less force to bear in a limited conflict with Pakistan than most people realize. As a result, it is unlikely that Indian policymakers would conclude that they can either achieve strategic surprise against Pakistan necessary for a successful ground incursion or carry out highly-effective air strikes with little escalatory risk, each of which is a necessary condition for military operations to be authorized. Consequently, claims that India’s growing military power justifies Pakistan’s pursuit of tactical nuclear weapons, lack a firm foundation. South Asia remains an unstable region of the world, but the Indian military is not a source of that instability.

Walter C. Ladwig III is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. For a more detailed examination of this topic, see the author’s “Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia [33],” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2015).

Source: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/could-indias-military-really-crush-pakistan-13247

What Borders Mean to Europe (Stratfor; 2015/06/23)

2015-06-23T07:09:00.001-07:00

By George Friedman

Europe today is a continent of borders. The second-smallest continent in the world has more than 50 distinct, sovereign nation-states. Many of these are part of the European Union. At the core of the EU project is an effort to reduce the power and significance of these borders without actually abolishing them — in theory, an achievable goal. But history is not kind to theoretical solutions.

Today, Europe faces three converging crises that are ultimately about national borders, what they mean and who controls them. These crises appear distinct: Immigration from the Islamic world, the Greek economic predicament, and the conflict in Ukraine would seem to have little to do with each other. But in fact they all derive, in different ways, from the question of what borders mean.

Europe's borders have been the foundation of both its political morality and its historical catastrophes. The European Enlightenment argued against multinational monarchies and for sovereign nation-states, which were understood to be the territories in which nations existed. Nations came to be defined as groupings of humans who shared a common history, language, set of values and religion — in short, a common culture into which they were born. These groups had the right of national self-determination, the authority to determine their style of government and the people who governed. Above all, these nations lived in a place, and that place had clear boundaries.

The right of national self-determination has created many distinct nations in Europe. And, as nations do, they sometimes distrust and fear one other, which occasionally leads to wars. They also have memories of betrayals and victimizations that stretch back for centuries before the nations became states. Some viewed the borders as unjust, because they placed their compatriots under foreign rule, or as insufficient to national need. The right of self-determination led inevitably to borders, and the question of borders inevitably led to disputes among states. Between 1914 and 1945, Europeans waged a series of wars about national boundaries and about who has the right to live where. This led to one of the greatest slaughters of human history.

The memory of that carnage led to the creation of the European Union. Its founding principle was that this kind of massacre should never happen again. But the union lacked the power to abolish the nation-state — it was too fundamental to the Europeans' sense of identity. And if the nation-state survived, so did the idea of place and borders.

If the nation-state could not be abolished, however, then at least the borders could lose their significance. Thus two principles emerged after World War II: The first, predating the European Union, was that the existing borders of Europe could not be changed. The hope was that by freezing Europe's borders, Europe could abolish war. The second principle, which came with the mature European Union, was that the bloc's internal borders both existed and did not exist. Borders were to define the boundaries of nation-states and preserved the doctrine of national self-determination, but they were not to exist insofar as the movement of goods, of labor and of capital were concerned. This was not absolute — some states were limited in some of these areas — but it was a general principle and goal. This principle is now under attack in three different ways.

The Movement of Muslims in Europe

The chaos in the Middle East has generated a flow of refugees toward Europe. This is adding to the problem that European nations have had with prior Muslim migrations that were encouraged by Europeans. As Europe recovered from World War II, it needed additional labor at low cost. Like other advanced industrial countries have done, a number of European states sought migrants, many from the Islamic world, to fill that need. At first, the Europeans thought of the migrants as temporary residents. Over time, the Europeans conceded citizenship but created a doctrine of multiculturalism, which appeared to be a gesture of tolerance and was implicitly by mutual consent, given that some Muslims resisted assimilation. But this doctrine essentially served to exclude Muslims from full participation in the host culture even as they gained legal citizenship. But as I have said, the European idea of the nation was challenged by the notion of integrating different cultures into European societies.

Partly because of a failure to fully integrate migrants and partly because of terrorist attacks, a growing portion of European society began perceiving the Muslims already in Europe as threatening. Some countries had already discussed resurrecting internal European borders to prevent the movement not only of Muslims, but also of other Europeans seeking jobs in difficult economic times. The recent wave of refugees has raised the matter to a new level.

The refugee crisis has forced the Europeans to face a core issue. The humanitarian principles of the European Union demand that refugees be given sanctuary. And yet, another wave of refugees into Europe has threatened to exacerbate existing social and cultural imbalances in some countries; some anticipate the arrival of more Muslims with dread. Moreover, once migrants are allowed to enter Europe by any one country, the rest of the nations are incapable of preventing the refugees' movement.

Who controls Europe's external borders? Does Spain decide who enters Spain, or does the European Union decide? Whoever decides, does the idea of the free movement of labor include the principle of the free movement of refugees? If so, then EU countries have lost the ability to determine who may enter their societies and who may be excluded. For Europe, given its definition of the nation, this question is not an odd, legal one. It goes to the very heart of what a nation is, and whether the nation-state, under the principle of the right of national self-determination, is empowered to both make that decision and enforce it.

This question does not merely concern Muslims. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Ostjuden — the Jews coming into Western Europe as they fled czarist edicts — raised the same challenge, even though they sought more vigorously to assimilate. But at that point, the notion of borders was unambiguous even if the specific decision on how to integrate the Jews was unclear. In many countries, the status of minorities from neighboring nations was a nagging question, but there were tools for handling it. The Muslim issue is unique in Europe only to the extent that the European Union has made it unique. The bloc has tried to preserve borders while sapping them of significance, and now there is an upsurge of opposition not only to Muslim immigration, but also to the European Union's understanding of borders and free movement.

The Greek Crisis

The question of borders is also at the heart of the Greek crisis. We see two issues: one small, the other vast. The small one involves capital controls. The European Union is committed to a single European financial market within which capital flows freely. Greeks, fearing the outcome of the current crisis, have been moving large amounts of money out of Greece into foreign banks. They remember what happened during the Cyprus crisis, when the government, capitulating to German demands in particular, froze and seized money deposited in Cypriot banks. Under EU rules, the transfer of deposits in one country of the bloc, or even outside the bloc, is generally considered legitimate. However, in the case of Cyprus, the free movement of capital across borders was halted. The same could conceivably happen in Greece.

In any event, which is the prior principle: the free movement of capital or the European Union's overarching authority to control that flow? Are Greek citizens personally liable for their government's debt — not merely through austerity policies, but also through controls imposed by the Greek government under European pressure to inhibit the movement of their money? If the answer is the latter, then borders on capital can be created temporarily.

The larger issue is the movement of goods. A significant dimension of this crisis involves free trade. Germany exports more than 50 percent of its gross domestic product. Its prosperity depends on these exports. I have argued that the inability to control the flow of German goods into Southern Europe drove the region into economic decline. Germany's ability to control the flow of American goods into the country in the 1950s helped drive its economic recovery. The European Union permits limits on the movement of some products, particularly agricultural ones, through subsidies and quotas. In theory, free trade is beneficial to all. In practice, one country's short-term gain can vastly outweigh others' long-term gains. The ability to control the flow of goods is a tool that might slow growth but decrease pain.

The essential principle of the European Union is that of free trade, in the sense that the border cannot become a checkpoint to determine what goods may or may not enter a country and under what tariff rule. The theory is superb, save for its failure to address the synchronization of benefits. And it means that the right to self-determination no longer includes the right to control borders.

Ukraine and the 'Inviolability' of Borders

Finally, there is the Ukraine issue — which is not really about Ukraine, but about a prior principle of Europe: Borders cannot be allowed to change. The core of this rule is that altering borders leads to instability. This rule governed between 1945 and 1992. Then, the fall of the Soviet Union transformed the internal borders of Europe dramatically, moving the Russian border eastward and northward. The Soviet collapse also created eight newly free nations that were Soviet satellites in Central and Eastern Europe and 15 new independent states — including Russia — from the constituent parts of the Soviet Union. It could be argued that the fall of the Soviet Union did not change the rule on borders, but that claim would be far-fetched. Everything changed. Then came the "velvet divorce" of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and now there are potential divorces in the United Kingdom, Spain and Belgium.

Perhaps most importantly, the rule broke down in Yugoslavia, where a single entity split into numerous independent nations, and, among other consequences, a war over borders ensued. The conflict concluded with the separation of Kosovo from Serbia and its elevation to the status of an independent nation. Russia has used this last border change to justify redrawing the borders of Georgia and as a precedent supporting its current demand for the autonomy and control of eastern Ukraine. Similarly, the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia shifted dramatically as the result of war. (On a related note, Cyprus, divided between a Turkish-run north and a Greek-run south, was allowed into the European Union in 2004 with its deep border dispute still unsettled.)

Since the end of the Cold War, the principle of the inviolability of borders has been violated repeatedly — through the creation of new borders, through the creation of newly freed nation-states, through peaceful divisions and through violent war. The principle of stable borders held for the most part until 1991 before undergoing a series of radical shifts that sometimes settled the issue and sometimes left it unresolved. The Europeans welcomed most of these border adjustments, and in one case — Kosovo — Europeans themselves engineered the change.

It is in this context that the Ukrainian war must be considered. Europe's contention, supported by America, is that Russia is attempting to change inviolable borders. There are many good arguments to be made against the Russians in Ukraine, which I have laid out in the past. However, the idea that the Russians are doing something unprecedented in trying to redraw Ukraine's borders is difficult to support. Europe's borders have been in flux for some time. That is indeed a matter of concern; historically, unsettled borders in Europe are precursors to war, as we have seen in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus and now Ukraine. But it is difficult to argue that this particular action by Russia is in itself a dramatically unprecedented event in Europe. The principle of national self-determination depends on a clear understanding of a nation and the unchallenged agreement on its boundaries. The Europeans themselves have in multiple ways established the precedent that borders are not unchallengeable.

There are two principles competing. The first is the European Union's desire that borders be utterly permeable without the nation-state losing its right to self-determination. It is difficult to see how a lack of control over borders is compatible with national self-determination. The other principle is that existing borders not be challenged. On the one hand, the union wants to diminish the importance of borders. On the other hand, it wants to make them incontestable.

Neither principle is succeeding. Within Europe, more forces are emerging that want to return control over borders to nation-states. In different ways, the Muslim immigrant crisis and the Greek crisis intersect at the question of who controls the borders. Meanwhile, the inviolability of borders has been a dead letter since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The idea of borders being archaic is meaningful only if the nation-state is archaic. There is no evidence that this is true in Europe. On the contrary, all of the pressures we see culturally and economically point to not only the persistence of the idea of nationality, but also to its dramatic increase in Europe. At the same time, there is no evidence that the challenge to borders is abating. In fact, during the past quarter of a century, the number of shifts and changes, freely or under pressure, has only increased. And each challenge of a national border, such as the one occurring in Ukraine, is a challenge to a nation's reality and sense of self.

The European Union has promised peace and prosperity. The prosperity is beyond tattered now. And peace has been intermittently disrupted — not in the European Union, but around it — since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992 to create a common economic and monetary union. All of this is linked to the question of what a border represents and how seriously we take it. A border means that this is my country and not yours. This idea has been a source of anguish in Europe and elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is a reality embedded in the human condition. Borders matter, and they matter in many different ways. The European crisis, taken as a whole, is rooted in borders. Attempting to abolish them is attractive in theory. But theory faces reality across its own border.

50 Kgs of Caesium-137 Missing in Kazakhstan

2014-09-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

Authorities in Kazakhstan have been put on high-alert after a sealed container containing 50 kilograms of highly radioactive materials went missing in Kazakhstan’s west. A police spokesperson from Mangistaupada said on Tuesday that there is a possibility that the container "may have fallen out of the vehicle that was carrying it".

As reported by Al-Jazeera, the radioactive material has been identified as caesium-137 - which is used for medical purposes and in nuclear reactors and as such is commonly found in hospitals, universities and reactors around the world. Caesium-137 has a radioactive half-life of 30 years. An over-exposure to the isotope may cause serious radioactive burns and death.

Security officials are coordinating with emergency workers and the military to locate the missing radioactive containers. Kazakh authorities have yet to release more information on the incident - including the origins of the missing radioactive materials.

Kazakhstan is known to have inherited nuclear warheads and nuclear test sites from its Soviet forefathers.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has yet to comment on the incident. Every year, IAEA receives hundreds of complaints and reports of missing and/or stolen radioactive materials, which posses severe implications if they fall onto the wrong hands.

Source: http://en.tempo.co/read/news/2014/09/04/074604524/50-Kgs-of-Caesium-137-Missing-in-Kazakhstan

Ukraine, Iraq and a Black Sea Strategy (Stratfor, 2014/09/02)

2014-09-05T04:33:00.002-07:00

Geopolitical Weekly

Tuesday, September 2

By George Friedman
The United States is, at the moment, off balance. It faces challenges in the Syria-Iraq theater as well as challenges in Ukraine. It does not have a clear response to either. It does not know what success in either theater would look like, what resources it is prepared to devote to either, nor whether the consequences of defeat would be manageable.
A dilemma of this sort is not unusual for a global power. Its very breadth of interests and the extent of power create opportunities for unexpected events, and these events, particularly simultaneous challenges in different areas, create uncertainty and confusion. U.S. geography and power permit a degree of uncertainty without leading to disaster, but generating a coherent and integrated strategy is necessary, even if that strategy is simply to walk away and let events run their course. I am not suggesting the latter strategy but arguing that at a certain point, confusion must run its course and clear intentions must emerge. When they do, the result will be the coherence of a new strategic map that encompasses both conflicts.
The most critical issue for the United States is to create a single integrated plan that takes into account the most pressing challenges. Such a plan must begin by defining a theater of operations sufficiently coherent geographically as to permit integrated political maneuvering and military planning. U.S. military doctrine has moved explicitly away from a two-war strategy. Operationally, it might not be possible to engage all adversaries simultaneously, but conceptually, it is essential to think in terms of a coherent center of gravity of operations. For me, it is increasingly clear that that center is the Black Sea.

Ukraine and Syria-Iraq

There are currently two active theaters of military action with broad potential significance. One is Ukraine, where the Russians have launched a counteroffensive toward Crimea. The other is in the Syria-Iraq region, where the forces of the Islamic State have launched an offensive designed at a minimum to control regions in both countries -- and at most dominate the area between the Levant and Iran.
In most senses, there is no connection between these two theaters. Yes, the Russians have an ongoing problem in the high Caucasus and there are reports of Chechen advisers working with the Islamic State. In this sense, the Russians are far from comfortable with what is happening in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, anything that diverts U.S. attention from Ukraine is beneficial to the Russians. For its part, the Islamic State must oppose Russia in the long run. Its immediate problem, however, is U.S. power, so anything that distracts the United States is beneficial to the Islamic State.
But the Ukrainian crisis has a very different political dynamic from the Iraq-Syria crisis. Russian and Islamic State military forces are not coordinated in any way, and in the end, victory for either would challenge the interests of the other. But for the United States, which must allocate its attention, political will and military power carefully, the two crises must be thought of together. The Russians and the Islamic State have the luxury of focusing on one crisis. The United States must concern itself with both and reconcile them.
The United States has been in the process of limiting its involvement in the Middle East while attempting to deal with the Ukrainian crisis. The Obama administration wants to create an integrated Iraq devoid of jihadists and have Russia accept a pro-Western Ukraine. It also does not want to devote substantial military forces to either theater. Its dilemma is how to achieve its goals without risk. If it can't do this, what risk will it accept or must it accept?
Strategies that minimize risk and create maximum influence are rational and should be a founding principle of any country. By this logic, the U.S. strategy ought to be to maintain the balance of power in a region using proxies and provide material support to those proxies but avoid direct military involvement until there is no other option. The most important thing is to provide the support that obviates the need for intervention.
In the Syria-Iraq theater, the United States moved from a strategy of seeking a unified state under secular pro-Western forces to one seeking a balance of power between the Alawites and jihadists. In Iraq, the United States pursued a unified government under Baghdad and is now trying to contain the Islamic State using minimal U.S. forces and Kurdish, Shiite and some Sunni proxies. If that fails, the U.S. strategy in Iraq will devolve into the strategy in Syria, namely, seeking a balance of power between factions. It is not clear that another strategy exists. The U.S. occupation of Iraq that began in 2003 did not result in a military solution, and it is not clear that a repeat of 2003 would succeed either. Any military action must be taken with a clear outcome in mind and a reasonable expectation that the allocation of forces will achieve that outcome; wishful thinking is not permitted. Realistically, air power and special operations forces on the ground are unlikely to force the Islamic State to capitulate or to result in its dissolution.
Ukraine, of course, has a different dynamic. The United States saw the events in Ukraine as either an opportunity for moral posturing or as a strategic blow to Russian national security. Either way, it had the same result: It created a challenge to fundamental Russian interests and placed Russian President Vladimir Putin in a dangerous position. His intelligence services completely failed to forecast or manage events in Kiev or to generate a broad rising in eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the Ukrainians were defeating their supporters (with the distinction between supporters and Russian troops becoming increasingly meaningless with each passing day). But it was obvious that the Russians were not simply going to let the Ukrainian reality become a fait accompli. They would counterattack. But even so, they would still have moved from once shaping Ukrainian policy to losing all but a small fragment of Ukraine. They will therefore maintain a permanently aggressive posture in a bid to recoup what has been lost.
U.S. strategy in Ukraine tracks its strategy in Syria-Iraq. First, Washington uses proxies; second, it provides material support; and third, it avoids direct military involvement. Both strategies assume that the main adversary -- the Islamic State in Syria-Iraq and Russia in Ukraine -- is incapable of mounting a decisive offensive, or that any offensive it mounts can be blunted with air power. But to be successful, U.S. strategy assumes there will be coherent Ukrainian and Iraqi resistance to Russia and the Islamic State, respectively. If that doesn't materialize or dissolves, so does the strategy.
The United States is betting on risky allies. And the outcome matters in the long run. U.S. strategy prior to World Wars I and II was to limit involvement until the situation could be handled only with a massive American deployment. During the Cold War, the United States changed its strategy to a pre-commitment of at least some forces; this had a better outcome. The United States is not invulnerable to foreign threats, although those foreign threats must evolve dramatically. The earlier intervention was less costly than intervention at the last possible minute. Neither the Islamic State nor Russia poses such a threat to the United States, and it is very likely that the respective regional balance of power can contain them. But if they can't, the crises could evolve into a more direct threat to the United States. And shaping the regional balance of power requires exertion and taking at least some risks.

Regional Balances of Power and the Black Sea

The rational move for countries like Romania, Hungary or Poland is to accommodate Russia unless they have significant guarantees from the outside. Whether fair or not, only the United States can deliver those guarantees. The same can be said about the Shia and the Kurds, both of whom the United States has abandoned in recent years, assuming that they could manage on their own.
The issue the United States faces is how to structure such support, physically and conceptually. There appear to be two distinct and unconnected theaters, and American power is limited. The situation would seem to preclude persuasive guarantees. But U.S. strategic conception must evolve away from seeing these as distinct theaters into seeing them as different aspects of the same theater: the Black Sea.
When we look at a map, we note that the Black Sea is the geographic organizing principle of these areas. The sea is the southern frontier of Ukraine and European Russia and the Caucasus, where Russian, jihadist and Iranian power converge on the Black Sea. Northern Syria and Iraq are fewer than 650 kilometers (400 miles) from the Black Sea.
The United States has had a North Atlantic strategy. It has had a Caribbean strategy, a Western Pacific strategy and so on. This did not simply mean a naval strategy. Rather, it was understood as a combined arms system of power projection that depended on naval power to provide strategic supply, delivery of troops and air power. It also placed its forces in such a configuration that the one force, or at least command structure, could provide support in multiple directions.
The United States has a strategic problem that can be addressed either as two or more unrelated problems requiring redundant resources or a single integrated solution. It is true that the Russians and the Islamic State do not see themselves as part of a single theater. But opponents don't define theaters of operation for the United States. The first step in crafting a strategy is to define the map in a way that allows the strategist to think in terms of unity of forces rather than separation, and unity of support rather than division. It also allows the strategist to think of his regional relationships as part of an integrated strategy.
Assume for the moment that the Russians chose to intervene in the Caucasus again, that jihadists moved out of Chechnya and Dagestan into Georgia and Azerbaijan, or that Iran chose to move north. The outcome of events in the Caucasus would matter greatly to the United States. Under the current strategic structure, where U.S. decision-makers seem incapable of conceptualizing the two present strategic problems, such a third crisis would overwhelm them. But thinking in terms of securing what I'll call the Greater Black Sea Basin would provide a framework for addressing the current thought exercise. A Black Sea strategy would define the significance of Georgia, the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Even more important, it would elevate Azerbaijan to the level of importance it should have in U.S. strategy. Without Azerbaijan, Georgia has little weight. With Azerbaijan, there is a counter to jihadists in the high Caucasus, or at least a buffer, since Azerbaijan is logically the eastern anchor of the Greater Black Sea strategy.
A Black Sea strategy would also force definition of two key relationships for the United States. The first is Turkey. Russia aside, Turkey is the major native Black Sea power. It has interests throughout the Greater Black Sea Basin, namely, in Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine. Thinking in terms of a Black Sea strategy, Turkey becomes one of the indispensible allies since its interests touch American interests. Aligning U.S. and Turkish strategy would be a precondition for such a strategy, meaning both nations would have to make serious policy shifts. An explicit Black Sea-centered strategy would put U.S.-Turkish relations at the forefront, and a failure to align would tell both countries that they need to re-examine their strategic relationship. At this point, U.S.-Turkish relations seem to be based on a systematic avoidance of confronting realities. With the Black Sea as a centerpiece, evasion, which is rarely useful in creating realistic strategies, would be difficult.

The Centrality of Romania

The second critical country is Romania. The Montreux Convention prohibits the unlimited transit of a naval force into the Black Sea through the Bosporus, controlled by Turkey. Romania, however, is a Black Sea nation, and no limitations apply to it, although its naval combat power is centered on a few aging frigates backed up by a half-dozen corvettes. Apart from being a potential base for aircraft for operations in the region, particularly in Ukraine, supporting Romania in building a significant naval force in the Black Sea -- potentially including amphibious ships -- would provide a deterrent force against the Russians and also shape affairs in the Black Sea that might motivate Turkey to cooperate with Romania and thereby work with the United States. The traditional NATO structure can survive this evolution, even though most of NATO is irrelevant to the problems facing the Black Sea Basin. Regardless of how the Syria-Iraq drama ends, it is secondary to the future of Russia's relationship with Ukraine and the European Peninsula. Poland anchors the North European Plain, but the action for now is in the Black Sea, and that makes Romania the critical partner in the European Peninsula. It will feel the first pressure if Russia regains its position in Ukraine.
I have written frequently on the emergence -- and the inevitability of the emergence -- of an alliance based on the notion of the Intermarium, the land between the seas. It would stretch between the Baltic and Black seas and would be an alliance designed to contain a newly assertive Russia. I have envisioned this alliance stretching east to the Caspian, taking in Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Poland-to-Romania line is already emerging. It seems obvious that given events on both sides of the Black Sea, the rest of this line will emerge.
The United States ought to adopt the policy of the Cold War. That consisted of four parts. First, allies were expected to provide the geographical foundation of defense and substantial forces to respond to threats. Second, the United States was to provide military and economic aid as necessary to support this structure. Third, the United States was to pre-position some forces as guarantors of U.S. commitment and as immediate support. And fourth, Washington was to guarantee the total commitment of all U.S. forces to defending allies, although the need to fulfill the last guarantee never arose.
The United States has an uncertain alliance structure in the Greater Black Sea Basin that is neither mutually supportive nor permits the United States a coherent power in the region given the conceptual division of the region into distinct theaters. The United States is providing aid, but again on an inconsistent basis. Some U.S. forces are involved, but their mission is unclear, it is unclear that they are in the right places, and it is unclear what the regional policy is.
Thus, U.S. policy for the moment is incoherent. A Black Sea strategy is merely a name, but sometimes a name is sufficient to focus strategic thinking. So long as the United States thinks in terms of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq as if they were on different planets, the economy of forces that coherent strategy requires will never be achieved. Thinking in terms of the Black Sea as a pivot of a single diverse and diffuse region can anchor U.S. thinking. Merely anchoring strategic concepts does not win wars, nor prevent them. But anything that provides coherence to American strategy has value.
The Greater Black Sea Basin, as broadly defined, is already the object of U.S. military and political involvement. It is just not perceived that way in military, political or even public and media calculations. It should be. For that will bring perception in line with fast-emerging reality.

"Ukraine, Iraq and a Black Sea Strategy is republished with permission of Stratfor."

From Estonia to Azerbaijan: American Strategy After Ukraine

2014-09-05T04:29:00.000-07:00

Geopolitical Weekly

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

By George Friedman

As I discussed last week, the fundamental problem that Ukraine poses for Russia, beyond a long-term geographical threat, is a crisis in internal legitimacy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent his time in power rebuilding the authority of the Russian state within Russia and the authority of Russia within the former Soviet Union. The events in Ukraine undermine the second strategy and potentially the first. If Putin cannot maintain at least Ukrainian neutrality, then the world's perception of him as a master strategist is shattered, and the legitimacy and authority he has built for the Russian state is, at best, shaken.

Whatever the origins of the events in Ukraine, the United States is now engaged in a confrontation with Russia. The Russians believe that the United States was the prime mover behind regime change in Ukraine. At the very least, the Russians intend to reverse events in Ukraine. At most, the Russians have reached the conclusion that the United States intends to undermine Russia's power. They will resist. The United States has the option of declining confrontation, engaging in meaningless sanctions against individuals and allowing events to take their course. Alternatively, the United States can choose to engage and confront the Russians.

A failure to engage at this point would cause countries around Russia's periphery, from Estonia to Azerbaijan, to conclude that with the United States withdrawn and Europe fragmented, they must reach an accommodation with Russia. This will expand Russian power and open the door to Russian influence spreading on the European Peninsula itself. The United States has fought three wars (World War I, World War II and the Cold War) to prevent hegemonic domination of the region. Failure to engage would be a reversal of a century-old strategy.

The American dilemma is how to address the strategic context in a global setting in which it is less involved in the Middle East and is continuing to work toward a "pivot to Asia." Nor can the United States simply allow events to take their course. The United States needs a strategy that is economical and coherent militarily, politically and financially. It has two advantages. Some of the countries on Russia's periphery do not want to be dominated by her. Russia, in spite of some strengths, is inherently weak and does not require U.S. exertion on the order of the two World Wars, the Cold War or even the Middle East engagements of the past decade.

The Russian and U.S. Positions

I discussed Russian options on Ukraine last week. Putin is now in a position where, in order to retain with confidence his domestic authority, he must act decisively to reverse the outcome. The problem is there is no single decisive action that would reverse events. Eventually, the inherent divisions in Ukraine might reverse events. However, a direct invasion of eastern Ukraine would simply solidify opposition to Russia in Kiev and trigger responses internationally that he cannot predict. In the end, it would simply drive home that although the Russians once held a dominant position in all of Ukraine, they now hold it in less than half. In the long run, this option -- like other short-term options -- would not solve the Russian conundrum.

Whatever Putin does in Ukraine, he has two choices. One is simply to accept the reversal, which I would argue that he cannot do. The second is to take action in places where he might achieve rapid diplomatic and political victories against the West -- the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus -- while encouraging Ukraine's government to collapse into gridlock and developing bilateral relations along the Estonia-Azerbaijan line. This would prevent a U.S. strategy of containment -- a strategy that worked during the Cold War and one that the Europeans are incapable of implementing on their own. This comes down to the Americans.

The United States has been developing, almost by default, a strategy not of disengagement but of indirect engagement. Between 1989 and 2008, the U.S. strategy has been the use of U.S. troops as the default for dealing with foreign issues. From Panama to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States followed a policy of direct and early involvement of U.S. military forces. However, this was not the U.S. strategy from 1914 to 1989. Then, the strategy was to provide political support to allies, followed by economic and military aid, followed by advisers and limited forces, and in some cases pre-positioned forces. The United States kept its main force in reserve for circumstances in which (as in 1917 and 1942 and, to a lesser degree, in Korea and Vietnam) allies could not contain the potential hegemon. Main force was the last resort.

This was primarily a strategy of maintaining the balance of power. The containment of the Soviet Union involved creating an alliance system comprising countries at risk of Soviet attack. Containment was a balance of power strategy that did not seek the capitulation of the Soviet Union as much as increasing the risks of offensive action using allied countries as the first barrier. The threat of full U.S. intervention, potentially including nuclear weapons, coupled with the alliance structure, constrained Soviet risk-taking.

Because the current Russian Federation is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at its height and because the general geographic principle in the region remains the same, a somewhat analogous balance of power strategy is likely to emerge after the events in Ukraine. Similar to the containment policy of 1945-1989, again in principle if not in detail, it would combine economy of force and finance and limit the development of Russia as a hegemonic power while exposing the United States to limited and controlled risk.

The coalescence of this strategy is a development I forecast in two books, The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years, as a concept I called the Intermarium. The Intermarium was a plan pursued after World War I by Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski for a federation, under Poland's aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. What is now emerging is not the Intermarium, but it is close. And it is now transforming from an abstract forecast to a concrete, if still emergent, reality.

Forces Leading to the Alliance's Emergence

A direct military intervention by the United States in Ukraine is not possible. First, Ukraine is a large country, and the force required to protect it would outstrip U.S. capabilities. Second, supplying such a force would require a logistics system that does not exist and would take a long time to build. Finally, such an intervention would be inconceivable without a strong alliance system extending to the West and around the Black Sea. The United States can supply economic and political support, but Ukraine cannot counterbalance Russia and the United States cannot escalate to the point of using its own forces. Ukraine is a battleground on which Russian forces would have an advantage and a U.S. defeat would be possible.

If the United States chooses to confront Russia with a military component, it must be on a stable perimeter and on as broad a front as possible to extend Russian resources and decrease the probability of Russian attack at any one point out of fear of retaliation elsewhere. The ideal mechanism for such a strategy would be NATO, which contains almost all of the critical countries save Azerbaijan and Georgia. The problem is that NATO is not a functional alliance. It was designed to fight the Cold War on a line far to the west of the current line. More important, there was unity on the principle that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to Western Europe.

That consensus is no longer there. Different countries have different perceptions of Russia and different concerns. For many, a replay of the Cold War, even in the face of Russian actions in Ukraine, is worse than accommodation. In addition, the end of the Cold War has led to a massive drawdown of forces in Europe. NATO simply lacks the force unless there is a massive and sudden buildup. That will not occur because of the financial crisis, among other reasons. NATO requires unanimity to act, and that unanimity is not there.

The countries that were at risk from 1945 to 1989 are not the same as those at risk today. Many of these countries were part of the Soviet Union then, and the rest were Soviet satellites. The old alliance system was not built for this confrontation. The Estonia-Azerbaijan line has as its primary interest retaining sovereignty in the face of Russian power. The rest of Europe is not in jeopardy, and these countries are not prepared to commit financial and military efforts to a problem they believe can be managed with little risk to them. Therefore, any American strategy must bypass NATO or at the very least create new structures to organize the region.

Characteristics of the Alliance

Each of the various countries involved is unique and has to be addressed that way. But these countries share the common danger that events in Ukraine could spread and directly affect their national security interests, including internal stability. As I observed, the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus are areas where the Russians could seek to compensate for their defeat. Because of this, and also because of their intrinsic importance, Poland, Romania and Azerbaijan must be the posts around which this alliance is built.

The Baltic salient, 145 kilometers (90 miles) from St. Petersburg in Estonia, would be a target for Russian destabilization. Poland borders the Baltics and is the leading figure in the Visegrad battlegroup, an organization within the European Union. Poland is eager for a closer military relationship with the United States, as its national strategy has long been based on third-power guarantees against aggressors. The Poles cannot defend themselves and the Baltics, given the combat capabilities necessary for the task.

The Dniester River is 80 kilometers from Odessa, the main port on the Black Sea for Ukraine and an important one for Russia. The Prut River is about 200 kilometers from Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Moldova is between these two rivers. It is a battleground region, at least of competing political factions. Romania must be armed and supported in protecting Moldova and in organizing southeastern Europe. In Western hands, Moldova threatens Odessa, Ukraine's major port also used by Russia on the Black Sea. In Russian hands, Moldova threatens Bucharest.

At the far end of the alliance structure I am envisioning is Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea bordering Russia and Iran. Should Dagestan and Chechnya destabilize, Azerbaijan -- which is Islamic and majority Shiite but secular -- would become critical for limiting the regional spread of jihadists. Azerbaijan also would support the alliance's position in the Black Sea by supporting Georgia and would serve as a bridge for relations (and energy) should Western relations with Iran continue to improve. To the southwest, the very pro-Russian Armenia -- which has a Russian troop presence and a long-term treaty with Moscow -- could escalate tensions with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. Previously, this was not a pressing issue for the United States. Now it is. The security of Georgia and its ports on the Black Sea requires Azerbaijan's inclusion in the alliance.

Azerbaijan serves a more strategic purpose. Most of the countries in the alliance are heavy importers of Russian energy; for instance, 91 percent of Poland's energy imports and 86 percent of Hungary's come from Russia. There is no short-term solution to this problem, but Russia needs the revenue from these exports as much as these countries need the energy. Developing European shale and importing U.S. energy is a long-term solution. A medium-term solution, depending on pipeline developments that Russia has tended to block in the past, is sending natural gas from Azerbaijan to Europe. Until now, this has been a commercial issue, but it has become a strategically critical issue. The Caspian region, of which Azerbaijan is the lynchpin, is the only major alternative to Russia for energy. Therefore, rapid expansion of pipelines to the heart of Europe is as essential as providing Azerbaijan with the military capability to defend itself (a capability it is prepared to pay for and, unlike other allied countries, does not need to be underwritten).

The key to the pipeline will be Turkey's willingness to permit transit. I have not included Turkey as a member of this alliance. Its internal politics, complex relations and heavy energy dependence on Russia make such participation difficult. I view Turkey in this alliance structure as France in the Cold War. It was aligned yet independent, militarily self-sufficient yet dependent on the effective functioning of others. Turkey, inside or outside of the formal structure, will play this role because the future of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and southeastern Europe is essential to Ankara.

These countries, diverse as they are, share a desire not to be dominated by the Russians. That commonality is a basis for forging them into a functional military alliance. This is not an offensive force but a force designed to deter Russian expansion. All of these countries need modern military equipment, particularly air defense, anti-tank and mobile infantry. In each case, the willingness of the United States to supply these weapons, for cash or credit as the situation requires, will strengthen pro-U.S. political forces in each country and create a wall behind which Western investment can take place. And it is an organization that others can join, which unlike NATO does not allow each member the right to veto.

The Practicality of the U.S. Strategy

There are those who would criticize this alliance for including members who do not share all the democratic values of the U.S. State Department. This may be true. It is also true that during the Cold War the United States was allied with the Shah's Iran, Turkey and Greece under dictatorship and Mao's China after 1971. Having encouraged Ukrainian independence, the United States -- in trying to protect that independence and the independence of other countries in the region -- is creating an alliance structure that will include countries, such as Azerbaijan, that have been criticized. However, if energy does not come from Azerbaijan, it will come from Russia, and then the Ukrainian events will dissolve into tragic farce. The State Department must grapple with the harsh forces its own policies have unleashed. This suggests that the high-mindedness borne of benign assumptions now proven to be illusions must make way for realpolitik calculations.

The balance of power strategy allows the United States to use the natural inclination of allies to bolster its own position and take various steps, of which military intervention is the last, not the first. It recognizes that the United States, as nearly 25 percent of the world's economy and the global maritime hegemon, cannot evade involvement. Its very size and existence involves it. Nor can the United States confine itself to gestures like sanctions on 20 people. This is not seen as a sign of resolve as much as weakness. It does mean that as the United States engages in issues like Ukraine and must make strategic decisions, there are alternatives to intervention -- such as alliances. In this case, a natural alliance structure presents itself -- a descendant of NATO but shaped for this crisis, much like the alliance I forecast previously.

In my view, Russian power is limited and has flourished while the United States was distracted by its wars in the Middle East and while Europe struggled with its economic crisis. That does not mean Russia is not dangerous. It has short-term advantages, and its insecurity means that it will take risks. Weak and insecure states with temporary advantages are dangerous. The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity. This is a case of anti-air missiles, attack helicopters, communications systems and training, among other things. These are things the United States has in abundance. It is not a case of deploying divisions, of which it has few. The Poles, Romanians, Azerbaijanis and certainly the Turks can defend themselves. They need weapons and training, and that will keep Russia contained within its cauldron as it plays out a last hand as a great power.

"From Estonia to Azerbaijan: American Strategy After Ukraine is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity (New York times; 2010/11/26)

2014-01-09T01:40:00.000-08:00

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.

Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar at night (source: Flicker)

Here, on a barren island on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, workers have dug the foundations for three colossal museums: an $800 million Frank Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of its New York flagship; a half-billion-dollar outpost of the Louvre by Jean Nouvel; and a showcase for national history by Foster & Partners, the design for which was unveiled on Thursday. And plans are moving ahead for yet another museum, about maritime history, to be designed by Tadao Ando.

Nearly 200 miles across the Persian Gulf, Doha, the capital of Qatar, has been mapping out its own extravagant cultural vision. A Museum of Islamic Art, a bone-white I. M. Pei-designed temple, opened in 2008 and dazzled the international museum establishment. In December the government will open a museum of modern Arab art with a collection that spans the mid-19th-century to the present. Construction has just begun on a museum of Qatari history, also by Mr. Nouvel, and the design for a museum of Orientalist art by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron is to be made public next year.

To a critic traveling through the region, the speed at which museums are being built in Abu Dhabi — and the international brand names attached to some of them — conjured culture-flavored versions of the overwrought real-estate spectacles that famously shaped its fellow emirate, Dubai. By contrast, Doha’s vision seemed a more calculated attempt to find a balance between modernization and Islam.

But in both cases leaders also see their construction sprees as part of sweeping efforts to retool their societies for a post-Sept. 11, post-oil world. Their goal is not only to build a more positive image of the Middle East at a time when anti-Islamic sentiment continues to build across Europe and the United States, but also to create a kind of latter-day Silk Road, one on which their countries are powerful cultural and economic hinges between the West and rising powers like India and China.

And they are betting that they can do this without alienating significant parts of the Arab world, which may see in these undertakings the same kind of Western-oriented cosmopolitanism that flourished in places like Cairo and Tehran not so long ago, and that helped fuel the rise of militant fundamentalism.

Building a New Narrative

A little over a half-century ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village with no literary or scientific traditions to speak of, no urban history. Its few thousand inhabitants, mostly poor and illiterate, survived largely on animal herding, fishing and pearl diving.

After oil production began here in the 1960s, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the country by bringing several emirates together under Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the early 1970s, made deals with Western oil companies that financed the area’s first paved roads, hospitals and schools. The emirates became a kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, a haven of calm and prosperity surrounded by big, aggressive neighbors, Iran and Iraq to the north and Saudi Arabia to the west.

But by the time Sheik Zayed’s descendants began coming to power in the 1990s, that low-key approach felt out of date. Globalism was the catchword of the moment, and the construction boom in neighboring Dubai was demonstrating, despite its later bust, how completely a city could transform itself in just a few years.

As important, reliance on economic ties with the West began to seem imprudent after Sept. 11, as Western governments scrutinized all sorts of Arab financial dealings with increasing intensity, and even travel to the West became a sometimes degrading experience for Arabs.

In 2005 Sheikh Zayed’s son and heir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, approached Thomas Krens, who was the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, with the idea of creating a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum — a Middle Eastern version of what Mr. Krens and Mr. Gehry had accomplished a decade earlier in Bilbao, Spain. But the sheik’s ambitions were never so small: within a few years the proposed site of the project, Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile development zone just north of Abu Dhabi’s urban center, was being planned as a miniature city built around culture and leisure, with some of the most recognizable names from the creative world.

Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster deal with the Louvre was signed in 2007; another deal, with the British Museum, to design exhibitions for Foster & Partners’ Zayed National Museum, was signed two years later. The maritime museum by Mr. Ando and a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid are still being planned. These cultural megaprojects will be joined by a campus of New York University on Saadiyat Island’s southern shore and, in a location to be determined, a four-million-square-foot development for media companies and film studios meant partly to provide job training and opportunities for young Emiratis.

Sheik Khalifa and his government want all this to instill national pride in a new generation of Emiratis while providing citizens with tools, both intellectual and psychological, for living in a global society. The idea, several people told me on a recent visit, is to tell a new story, one that breaks with a long history of regional decline, including the recent upheavals caused by militant fundamentalism, and to re-establish a semblance of cultural parity with the West.

“There are religious extremists everywhere in the Middle East — even here,” said an Arab consultant who has worked on several developments and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. The sheik, this person said, believes the cosmopolitan influences of the projects may help “open up the minds of these younger Emiratis before they go down that road.”

Of all the projects, the Louvre outpost seems the most natural fit with Abu Dhabi’s globalist aspirations. On top of a generous construction budget, the government is paying France $1.3 billion, mainly to establish an art-borrowing agreement that will ensure that it gets the pick of the Louvre’s encyclopedic collections, as well as art from several other museums. The range and depth of those collections will allow the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which is being marketed as a “universal museum,” to show off the cultural achievements of civilizations from every corner of the world.

And Mr. Nouvel’s design for this museum — a maze of gallery buildings and canals, all covered by a huge stainless-steel dome — is a wonderfully romantic evocation of a Middle East at ease with technology. Sunlight will penetrate its perforated skin, creating hundreds of beams that recall the interiors of great mosques, or even the filtering of light through the tree canopies in an oasis. Tucked under the dome, the galleries and their watery setting refer to Venice — an emblem, Mr. Nouvel has said, of the fertile cultural crosscurrents that once existed between East and West.

Globalism or Colonialism?

But while the Louvre will be able to draw on thousands of years of shifting cultural influences, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is focused on 1965 to the present, a period culturally dominated by the West, reveals the problems that arise when the political message you are trying to send collides with historical reality.

Mr. Krens envisioned a “global museum” that nonetheless seemed to acknowledge the primacy of Western contemporary art. The museum — from the outside, a chaotic pileup of translucent cones and gigantic children’s building blocks — was organized around a cluster of first-floor galleries representing key movements in Europe and the United States. Islamic collections would be housed two floors above, while warehouselike galleries would radiate out from the core, each devoted to a different region — the Far East, India, Africa. The plan’s Western bent didn’t fly for the clients, or for Richard Armstrong, who replaced Mr. Krens as the director of the Guggenheim Foundation in 2008.

Nine months ago Mr. Armstrong began developing an alternative plan, in which artists from all over the world would be grouped together in theme galleries: abstract art, Pop Art, performance art and so on. Even in this scheme, however, Mr. Armstrong admits that galleries will end up being organized around major anchor pieces that are, by and large, by blue-chip Western artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Anselm Kiefer.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has a team of three curators working in New York to build a collection with a budget of up to $600 million, more than 200 times the annual acquisitions budget of the Guggenheim in Manhattan. But they need to be done in time for the museum’s opening in just three years — a time frame that many people in the museum world regard as absurdly short.

Similar issues arose with the plan for the Zayed National Museum, the institution that most directly speaks to the country’s identity. The museum was intended to explore the United Arab Emirates’ relatively sparse historical record through the life of Sheik Zayed, a man known for his humility, who died in 2004. Yet after Norman Foster presented his initial design proposal, in 2007, he was told that the country’s leadership wanted something grander, even though there was still no clear idea of what, exactly, would go inside.

Mr. Foster was sent back to the drawing board, and a team of curators from the British Museum worked out an exhibition program. The new design features an enormous landscaped mound capped by five featherlike wind towers — the tallest one rising 300 feet — an attempt to evoke falconry, a favorite pastime of Arab royals.

That the collections of both the Guggenheim and the National Museum are being planned in the West raises a larger issue: while the money for all these developments comes from Emirati oil, the projects themselves are being shaped almost exclusively by foreigners. Abu Dhabi has become a revolving door of museum directors, architects, curators and other high-level consultants, and the hectic pace at which their plans are being pushed through has contributed to a sense among some here that what is being touted as a societywide embrace of global culture will end up being just another example of cultural colonialism.

The Media Zone will have a similarly strong international flavor. The government hopes that its mix of corporate offices and production studios will attract foreign news companies, as well as Bollywood studios. And an early design — clusters of sleekly contoured towers set atop six superblocks — involved a whole cast of celebrated Western architects, including Bernard Tschumi, Diller Scofidio & Renfro and UNStudio.

Just east of the city’s museum district, workers have broken ground on a 27-acre New York University campus, vaguely Beaux-Arts in plan, where classes will be taught in English and where there will be no quotas ensuring that Emiratis or other Arabs are given a significant number of places.

Insiders and Outsiders

The Arab world has been down a similar road. An earlier wave of Western consultants — businessmen, foreign service types, engineers and architects — poured into the Middle East in the 1950s and ’60s, selling a cold war brand of modernity that would uplift Arab societies, in particular by fostering a thriving middle class. In practice the changes often simply reinforced divisions between a privileged elite — modern, educated, in tune with the West — and a struggling underclass, something that was not a small factor in the rise of fundamentalist violence.

No one would claim that a country as small and rich as the United Arab Emirates has the same combustible mix of social problems as, say, Egypt or Iran, but there are obvious echoes when you consider whom these cultural megaprojects will probably serve.

The new museums will be embedded in a kind of suburban opulence that can be found all over the Middle East, but rarely in such isolation and on such an expansive scale as in Abu Dhabi. The concrete frames of a new St. Regis hotel and resort and a Park Hyatt are rising just down the coast from the museum district, along Saadiyat Beach. Nearby, a 2,000-home walled community is going up along an 18-hole golf course designed by Gary Player, to be joined eventually by several more luxury residential developments and two marinas for hundreds of yachts. A tram will loop around Saadiyat, connecting these developments to the museums.

As telling, in its way, is the Workers’ Village that I was taken to see during a tour of the island. The camp, still under construction, is expected to house 40,000 foreigners brought in to build this paradise.

It is neatly divided into three-story prefabricated housing blocks, which are interspersed with pretty courtyards. A two-story structure, just off one of the courtyards, serves as a communal hall, with dining on the ground floor and a library upstairs with books arranged by language: Arabic, Hindi, Nepalese, Tamil, Malaysian. The same languages blare from TV rooms off a balcony.

In some sense this village embodies a version of the cosmopolitanism Abu Dhabi says it is trying to create. But even if it is completed as planned, it will house only a small fraction of the city’s hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers; the rest will presumably live in cramped quarters in the city’s industrial sector or in faraway desert encampments. And once the museums are completed, a spokesman for the government development agency told me, it will be bulldozed to make room for more hotels and luxury housing.

Arabic Tradition in Qatar

Doha, like Abu Dhabi, was built from a small trading village into a city of about a million in the last 50 years. But both the museums being built around Doha and the art and artifacts to which they are dedicated — private collections amassed over decades by members of the ruling family — reflect a more patient, gradual approach to culture building than that of Abu Dhabi, and one that looks less to the West. If the cultural identities that both cities are trying to create are to some extent fictions, Doha’s is one woven largely of the cosmopolitan traditions of the region — that is, of places like Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo.

The three major Qatari national collections were assembled by the emir’s cousins Sheik Hassan al-Thani and Sheik Saud al-Thani, who began collecting in the 1980s, when art was still viewed as dubious, even unmanly, among the country’s elites.

“If I talked about modern art, no one understood me,” Sheik Hassan told me when we met in Doha. “It was impossible to even start this conversation.”

In the 1990s a new emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, began to liberalize many institutions and to open the door cautiously to the outside world. In 1995 he announced plans for Education City: a sprawling campus whose programs are now run by American universities like Texas A&M and Georgetown, but with agreements to ensure that a large proportion of its students are Qatari nationals. A year later he established the news network Al Jazeera.

The museum projects were also part of this liberalization effort. After Sheik Saud agreed to donate his collection of Islamic art to the state, Sheik Hamad hired Mr. Pei to design a building for it. When the resulting Museum of Islamic Art opened, it was celebrated as a successful Modernist interpretation of Islamic precedents, from the ablution fountain of the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo to old Islamic fortresses in North Africa. Its monumental forms express Mr. Pei’s ideal of a world in which modernity and tradition exist in perfect balance.

As striking as Mr. Pei’s architecture, however, was the obvious subtext of the collection, whose treasures range from Iraqi ceramics to Spanish silk curtains and Indian jewelry. If these pieces were assembled with an eye to exploring the richness of Islamic art — and the historic reach of Islam — their presentation was also a way to emphasize the cultural crosscurrents that produced them. The message, directed at both local and foreign audiences, is that much of what is great in Western, Eastern and Middle Eastern traditions is based on their connections to one another.

“My father often says, in order to have peace, we need to first respect each other’s cultures,” said Sheika al-Mayassa Bint Hamad Al Thani, the emir’s 28-year-old daughter and the main force behind the museum building program in Qatar. “And people in the West don’t understand the Middle East. They come with bin Laden in their heads.”

The museums, she hopes, will help “to change that mind-set.”

The newer national collections, parts of which will be unveiled to the public over the next few months, will take that idea into more provocative territory. The Orientalism collection in particular seems like an improbable focus for a museum in the Arab world. The collection, displayed in a town house until its new home is completed, centers on depictions of Arab life by 19th-century French and English artists. In one room a caricature of a squatting North African warrior hangs near a painting of Algerian women performing a seductive dance. There are also portraits of sultans and pashas by Italian artists, extending back to the 16th century, when the cultural scales were tipping away from the Ottoman Empire and toward Renaissance Europe.

To a Westerner, the 19th-century paintings can be especially uncomfortable — they present what now seem clichés of Arab life that reflect back our own prejudices. But to many Arabs they are also vividly detailed historical records of a period that is otherwise undocumented. Realistic painting did not exist then in the Arab world; photography was not common until the late 19th century. As Sheik Hassan saw it when he was building the collection, these were the only records of a life that was fast fading from memory.

“I recognize this life,” Sheik Hassan said. “The sheik sitting in his tent, I know these costumes are 100 percent right — even the tint of the button. The hare, it is from North Africa.”

The paintings are not simply relics of cultural imperialism, he added. “You should think of all of this as part of a cultural movement, an exchange of ideas.”

Still, by shining a light into the darker corners of Arab history, as well as at its ancient glories, the Orientalist museum suggests an understanding — rare anywhere — that the foundations of any healthy culture must be built on an unflinching appraisal of the past. Rather than airbrush that past, the government intends to put it up to public scrutiny.

A similar impulse is shaping Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which will open in a temporary home at the end of December. When I first visited the collection, which was still in storage, I felt the weight of the West’s cultural influence in frequent derivative references to artists like Picasso. Just as many works, however, were inspired expressions of the artist’s struggle to come to terms with that influence without losing touch with his or her own identity.

Piecing together the fragments of that 20th-century history and linking them to present-day Qatar will be one of the museum’s core missions, said Wassan al-Khudhairi, its Iraqi-born director, as she gave a tour of the rooms. “Baghdad, Cairo, Beirut, North Africa, Syria, Jordan,” she said. “This is the culture.”

Not that Doha is overlooking its own less glamorous past. In contrast to Mr. Foster’s evocation of the sport of Arabian kings in Abu Dhabi’s National Museum, Mr. Nouvel’s design for the Qatar National Museum draws on the forms of local sand roses: tiny pink encrustations buried just under the desert’s surface. The building will be composed of clusters of concrete discs that seem to have tumbled across the site, gently encircling a palm-shaded courtyard. Inside, displays of tents, fabrics, saddles and other objects, as well as enormous video screens that will immerse the visitor in the experience of the desert, are meant to convey both the humble origins of Qatar’s royal family and the nobility of Bedouin life.

Like all of Doha’s new cultural buildings, the National Museum is being carefully integrated into the city, rather than set apart in a special zone. It will be built within the boundaries of the original settlement, now the city’s center, on the site of an early-20th-century palace of a former emir. Mr. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art, though on a man-made island, stands just off the corniche, not far from the old souks. The government is considering several downtown sites for the permanent home of Mathaf.

Radical Social Transformation

Doha’s methodical approach to culture building is echoed in an even broader plan to re-engineer the demographics of the city, according to Stan Wypych, an Australian consultant for the city’s planning authority. The population of Doha is expected to grow to 2.3 million by 2032. By then, with the current construction boom over, the bulk of its 700,000 laborers, mostly from South and Southeast Asia, will have gone home, replaced, the government hopes, with the kind of educated, white-collar workers whom it sees as the future of the new society.

Some of these new professionals would be housed in places like Lusail City, a 14-square-mile district of apartment towers, villas and marinas under construction at the city’s edge. Other developments, designed with more traditional courtyards and within walking distance of mosques or plazas, are being marketed to Arabs, including Qataris who fled the city to suburban villas decades ago, as part of an effort to entice them to the historic city center. The idea is to integrate the new expatriates without sacrificing Doha’s Arab character.

“The social transformation is pretty radical,” Mr. Wypych said. “It’s happening pretty fast.”

As comprehensive as this vision seems, however, questions still linger, as in Abu Dhabi, about whom it will speak to. Few fundamentalists are likely to distinguish between one approach to modernization and another. Even many educated Arabs in and outside Qatar — among the museums’ target audience — see a disturbing inconsistency in these grand plans.

“Some have lived here 50 years,” said Fares Braizat, a Jordanian professor at Qatar University who has been working on a census of foreign nationals. “They speak Arabic with a Qatari dialect, but they are still not allowed Qatari citizenship” or any of the enviable perks that go with it: free education and health care, interest-free government loans, preference in hiring, a sense of equality.

Mr. Braizat’s point zeroes in on what could turn out to be the great flaw in the plans of both cities. Leaders are investing enormous amounts in these projects, and they are likely to leave behind some extraordinary buildings and institutions. But if they can’t get over that final hurdle and persuade enough people that they have a shared stake in this future, they will never realize their most ambitious goals. Worse, they may end up reinforcing the cynicism about engagement with the West that brought down Western-style modernism in this part of the world decades ago.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/design/27museums.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Poland: From Tragedy to Triumph (Foreign Affairs; January/February 2014)

2013-12-27T07:56:00.000-08:00

By Mitchell A. Orenstein

Anyone who knows Polish history cannot help but marvel at the country’s emergence from the ashes of its traumatic past. Over the last 25 years, Poland, after centuries of war and subjugation, has enjoyed peace, a stable and booming economy, and integration with the rest of Europe.

An independent kingdom for the previous 800 years, in 1795, Poland was wiped off the map of Europe and absorbed into three great neighboring powers -- the Prussian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires -- a state of affairs that lasted until 1918. Reborn following World War I, Poland spent a few short years as a democracy before proving ungovernable, succumbing to dictatorship, and then once again being conquered and divided, this time by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in 1939. Over the next six years, Poland found itself at the center of what the historian Timothy Snyder has called the “bloodlands” of Europe; an estimated five million Poles died between 1939 and 1945, more than half of them Polish Jews. The Nazis and the Soviets also wiped out the cream of the crop of Poland’s intelligentsia and clergy. Warsaw was reduced to rubble, and mass graves were sown across the landscape. Then came four gray and sooty decades of communist domination. Only the Catholic Church offered Poles any hope.

Since communism collapsed in 1989, however, Poland has experienced a remarkable reversal of fortune. After leading the protest movement that toppled the old regime, the trade union Solidarity won democratic elections and initiated aggressive, market-oriented economic reforms. The communist Polish United Workers’ Party turned into the capitalist Democratic Left Alliance, which won elections in 1993 and 1995 and led the country into NATO in 1999. And in 2004, Poland joined the European Union as a full member, cementing its close alliance with Germany, its erstwhile antagonist.

The Polish economy, meanwhile, has grown rapidly for two decades -- at more than four percent per year, the fastest speed in Europe -- and garnered massive investment in its companies and infrastructure. Poland’s is now the sixth-largest economy in the EU. Living standards more than doubled between 1989 and 2012, reaching 62 percent of the level of the prosperous countries at the core of Europe. All of this led the World Bank economist Marcin Piatkowski to conclude in a recent report that Poland “has just had probably the best 20 years in more than one thousand years of its history.”

How did Poland manage so decisively to move beyond the repeated tragedies of its past? The question is rarely asked by market analysts, whose sense of Poland seems to go no further back than the economic reforms of the 1990s. Those reforms are indeed part of the story -- but only part it, and focusing exclusively on them obscures the deeper causes of the country’s resurgence. Explaining Poland’s economic boom -- and why it is likely to last -- requires a deeper look into its troubled history.

WESTWARD HO!

For centuries, Poland’s tragedy was one of geography. Situated on the flat, open plains of northern Europe, with no natural boundaries separating it from Germany to the west and Russia to the east, Poland was often torn between the two. From 1569 to 1795, Poland had an eastward-looking empire of its own: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included large parts of present-day Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Today, however, Poland has decidedly joined the West -- so much so that Poles hate when their country is considered a part of eastern Europe, insisting that they live in central Europe. Although some attribute this shift to the warm embrace of the EU, the real author of Poland’s Western transformation was none other than Joseph Stalin.

Stalin’s unwitting contribution stemmed from the way the Soviet leader forcibly reshaped the country’s borders after World War II. His top priority was to expand the Soviet Union, and so he kept all the parts of eastern Poland that he had annexed in 1939 and compensated the country with a large chunk of the eastern German territories of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia. Apart from increasing the size of his own empire, Stalin was focused on punishing the Germans, and indeed, millions of them were expelled from their homes in the new Polish territories. Millions of Poles were then driven from the annexed east into the newly emptied west.

Today, Moscow’s decision to push Poland to the west must seem a massive strategic error. That’s because its long-term effect was to move Poland solidly into the orbit of Germany. Indeed, today’s Poland, to a large extent, is Germany, inhabited by Poles. Since Germany accepted this situation by signing a peace treaty with Poland in 1990, it has sought to draw Poland closer. And Warsaw has proved a willing partner.

Part of what makes Poland such a good place to invest today is the depth of the bond it has forged with Europe’s leading economy. The relationship benefits both countries. A large part of the German export machine is now based in Poland. Poland gets German investment and markets for its goods, and Germany profits from the opportunity to use Poland as a low-cost, high-quality production platform to compete with East Asia. Indeed, some German industries are able to produce goods in Poland for less than what they would cost to make in China. And Poland offers Germany a friendly business climate, plenty of skilled labor, and, above all, proximity.

Germany owes much of the success of its automobile industry to its eastern neighbor. At its factory in Poznan, Volkswagen employs 6,900 workers who produce intake-pipe modules, cylinder heads, and steering-gear housings, as well as 155,000 commercial vehicles each year. The MAN Group employs 4,000 workers in Poland who build heavy trucks, city buses, and bus chassis at three different factories. Cars and automotive components are now Poland’s leading export, despite the fact that the country has no internationally known brand; a large share end up as German marques. The same holds true for industries as diverse as household appliances and clothing; the German fashion house Hugo Boss, for example, produces its shoes at a factory in the Polish city of Radom.

Because Poland is now a key part of the German supply chain, it has become a great exporting economy -- exports now make up 46 percent of its GDP. A recent Morgan Stanley report estimated that 30 to 40 percent of Poland’s exports to Germany now end up as German exports to the rest of the world. This interdependence explains why Germany is by far Poland’s largest trade partner, buying or selling 25 percent of Poland’s exports and imports, which total about 12 percent of the overall Polish economy.

None of this could have happened if the German-Polish relationship were not embedded in the broader EU. Since Poland joined in 2004, the EU has done wonders for it and the rest of eastern Europe, ensuring democratic freedoms and administrative reforms and helping the region liberalize its markets. In the last decade, the EU has invested nearly 40 billion euros in Polish infrastructure, building the autobahns that Poland never had; replacing its outmoded, overcrowded, and often deadly two-lane highways; renovating its decrepit train stations and train lines; cleaning up its rivers; and setting up broadband infrastructure. In the process, Poland has become Europe’s biggest construction site. Between 2000 and 2013, the aggregate length of Polish highway and express roads grew fivefold, dramatically reducing the cost and the time it takes to transport goods to the west. And the benefits should keep coming: between 2014 and 2020, the EU is expected to pump 106 billion more euros into the country. That infusion of cash will equal nearly two percent of Poland’s annual GDP, a level of funding similar to what Washington provided to Europe under the Marshall Plan.

MANAGING POLAND’S RISE

Because of the centrality of foreign investment to Poland’s economy (most of its major banks and enterprises are foreign-owned), its reliance on foreign trade, and the fact that so many Poles work outside the country, political economists often characterize Poland as a “dependent market economy.” This dependence creates a fundamental dilemma: to attract foreign business and maintain its competitiveness, Poland must keep down its wages, which today stand at about one-third of those in the more developed countries of the EU. But Polish workers live adjacent to the rest of Europe, traveling and working there in great numbers, and thus aspire to a higher standard of living. This fact will make it difficult for Poland to maintain the advantages that come with cheap labor.

Poland should be especially worried about this dilemma given the presence of other low-wage countries in its neighborhood that could serve as manufacturing bases. In 2009, when the computer manufacturer Dell moved its main European factory from Limerick, Ireland, to Lodz, Poland, the mayor of Limerick predicted, with deep schadenfreude, that “Dell will probably head for Ukraine in six to eight years’ time.” One could say the same about the many call centers that have become mainstays of Polish employment.

To overcome this challenge, Poland must rise up the value-added ladder and begin producing more high-tech and knowledge-intensive exports. At the moment, Poland does not invest much in research and development relative to its more developed neighbors -- only 0.7 percent of GDP, compared with about 2.0 percent in the EU as a whole. But there is reason to believe that Poland can change course. The country’s greatest asset is its mass education system. One of the very few benefits of communist rule was that it left Poland with one of the highest literacy rates in the world. And since 1989, Poles have continued to invest heavily in their education, learning English, building new private universities, and participating in the Erasmus student-exchange program among European universities. Poland now has the second-highest rate of college enrollment in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Meanwhile, as small, innovative Polish technology companies boom, the path to a high-tech future is presenting itself.

Yet the greatest long-term risk to Poland is that its consumption and wages will rise too fast, crowding out domestic investment and deterring foreign business. In managing their country’s rise, Polish politicians must walk a fine line between satisfying voters’ concerns and maintaining the country’s cheap labor costs.

This dilemma of dependence also explains why Poland is unlikely to join the eurozone, at least not anytime soon. Although the Polish government and Polish elites initially clamored to adopt the common currency, the financial and sovereign debt crises changed their minds. Part of the reason Poland weathered the 2008 global financial crisis well was that it was able to devalue the zloty, which helped Warsaw maintain its exports and keep jobs in the country. And when the sovereign debt crisis hit in 2009, Poland relied on devaluation and government stimulus to avoid a recession, making it the only European country to do so. Warsaw knows that keeping its own currency means that investors will pay transaction costs, but it will also help the country keep wages down. So don’t expect to see euro notes on the streets of Krakow or Gdansk until Poland’s and the eurozone’s living standards get much closer to each other.

WHY POLAND?

A final challenge facing Poland, and one potential investors should take note of, is the extent to which it, like other countries in its neighborhood, has struggled to build an effective bureaucracy. Poland still ranks only 41st and 55th, respectively, on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index and the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index -- below all western European countries with the exception of Italy. Although there is little political risk to doing business in Poland -- especially compared with doing business in Russia -- it takes months to establish a company there, with as many as 33 separate stamps needed from different agencies. Some businesses complain that Warsaw favors partially-state-owned enterprises, using regulation as a tool to pick winners, or that the government has not worked aggressively enough to remove administrative barriers to growth. Even though opportunities for investment abound, the government is unlikely to help.

Although some other central and eastern European countries offer similar opportunities, Poland is still an attractive choice relative to its neighbors. Its population of 38 million -- approximately four times the population of the Czech Republic or Hungary -- means that it has a large domestic market. Whereas the Czech Republic and Hungary have richer and more open economies, Poland has much lower labor costs and has grown more rapidly. At the same time, its governance structures are more rule-bound than those of its low-wage competitors, such as Bulgaria, Romania, or others outside the EU. All these countries need to continue to move into more technologically sophisticated industries over time, in order to enable their citizens to increase their living standards.

In some ways, Poland is the template for the Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel hopes to create. It has carved out a profitable niche in the German production machine, and it can thrive with an export-oriented economy based on a strong currency and dampened domestic demand. This German model has provoked the ire of southern Europe, but for Poland, it works.

Warsaw is sometimes called “the phoenix city” because of the way it rose, like the mythical bird, from the ashes of World War II. Today, many ordinary Poles and investors are wondering just how high the phoenix can fly. Economic projections suggest that Poland’s economy will grow by about 2.5 percent per year through 2030, becoming one of the top 20 economies in the world before eventually succumbing to demographic decline. If the country can create a more hospitable business environment, build a knowledge-based economy, and encourage immigration and higher birthrates, it may keep growing even faster. After all, the Poles have a knack for beating expectations.

Think like a champion by Maria Sharapova

2013-12-23T14:20:00.000-08:00

Even though I do not consider myself a devoted fan of Maria Sharapova, I always like to listen to people how share their view on how they became successful. Here are some insights from Maria Sh. They may not be supper fresh and sophisticated, but still how many of you (or better us) have achieved what she has?

Don’t have any regrets. “If you’re thinking of doing something, really go for it. If you have any incredible opportunities or chances, you really want to take them, because you don’t want to look back after however many years and think that you weren’t there when you wanted to be, whether that’s physically or mentally. It’s important to give everything you have, and to commit to the sport.”

From a young age, you need discipline. You need to sacrifice a lot. “The moments that you look back to – if you are victorious – are the moments when you really knew that it was tough, and that you had to push yourself. That you faced adversity and showed that you can dig deep. I look back at those moments and think, ‘yeah, that was tough, but I got through it’. Friends would have sleepovers at the weekend, and I would have a tennis tournament on the weekend, and wouldn’t be able to join them. As a young girl, that’s a huge deal. Even to this day, my friends have vacations in the summer – they’re going off on holidays – and I’m playing the French Open and Wimbledon back-to-back so my holiday doesn’t come until November when the season’s over. Maybe my life isn’t as normal as my friends’ lives, but the great thing is that my friends respect that, and we always make it work.”

Enjoy every experience. “Or at least try to. Enjoy the good experiences, enjoy the not-so-good experiences. Enjoy it all. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s all a roller-coaster. There are going to be lots of ups and downs. Take it all in. Learn from everything.”

Become mentally stronger with every experience. “I don’t think you can teach someone to think like a champion. I think you have to have that mentality. I think you can learn how to be stronger mentally. You can learn how to control your emotions a bit better. But you can’t teach someone to think like a champion. You can’t put that pressure on someone. I hope that I’ve grown as a person and as a player, that I’ve become stronger mentally and emotionally. I’m obviously a lot more experienced now than I was as a teenager. I’ve been through so much. I’ve experienced so much during my career, on and off the court.”

Source: http://www.thetennisspace.com/sharapova-exclusive-how-to-become-a-champion/

Dirty bombs - Glowing in the dark (the Economist; 2013/12/14)

2013-12-13T02:37:00.000-08:00

In the fight against trafficking in radiological materials, experts see some cause for cautious optimism

COMPARED with a thermonuclear detonation, the destructive power of even a large amount of conventional explosives wrapped in nuclear fuel or other radiological material is rather tame, notes Thomas Reed, who has designed two American nuclear weapons. But a “dirty bomb” (technically a radiological-dispersal device) is far easier to build than a nuclear weapon and would spread not just radiation but panic, adds Mr Reed, who later served as secretary of the air force. Little wonder, then, that nerves were rattled after the theft on December 2nd of a lorry carrying highly radioactive cobalt-60 from a radiation-therapy unit in Tijuana to a nuclear-waste facility near Mexico City.
Nuclear and radiological materials slipped out of regulatory control 2,331 times between 1995 and the start of this year, according to the Incident and Trafficking Database compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The materials are widely used in industry, agriculture and medicine. They are kept in many poorly guarded X-ray and cancer-treatment clinics. Such places are often not overseen with terrorism in mind. They have even been bought by crooks as front operations, says Rajiv Nayan, of India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Raids on abandoned uranium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo are more frequent, according to that country’s General Atomic-Energy Commission. The problem is most acute in the former Soviet Union: in Ukraine alone, roughly 2,500 organisations use radiological materials.

In Georgia a counter-trafficking unit set up by the interior ministry seven years ago has arrested two or three teams smuggling radiological material every year save 2009. The lure of profits is so strong that some ex-cons get back into the business, says Archil Pavlenishvili, leader of the unit. Interpol has said such trafficking is growing: an acute “real threat to global security”.

It all sounds scary enough. But the reality has been less so. Moreover, by many accounts the most plausible dangers appear to be declining.

G-men with Geiger counters

For a start, an “overwhelming” number of buyers turn out to be undercover cops, says Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. A sizeable network of informers helps Georgia’s interior ministry to keep a close eye on the four or five cells in the country currently trying to obtain or sell radiological material, says Mr Pavlenishvili. When one of them is lining up a potential deal, it is almost always because his or a foreign unit is preparing a sting operation, he adds. Mr Pavlenishvili’s unit has not got wind of a single profitable sale—Georgia’s underworld makes its money on other crimes such as drug-running.

Considering the growing risk and persistent lack of money to be made, it is amazing that smugglers continue to give it a shot, says Lyudmila Zaitseva, an academic working on a University of Salzburg database on nuclear and radiological trafficking. Many traffickers no doubt reckon that terror groups will pay dearly for dirty-bomb ingredients. After all, counterterrorism officials citing seized al-Qaeda documents have said as much. Yet although a terrorist-made dirty bomb of mass destruction cannot be excluded, it remains unlikely. For one thing, rooting around to obtain dangerously radioactive material is a great way to attract the attention of the authorities. A bust could doom a painstakingly assembled terror cell.

In any case, most of the stuff being peddled is fraudulent rather than dangerous, says Adrian Baciu, head of the Romanian police’s nuclear and radiological unit until 2004 (he later worked for four years in Interpol’s counter-terrorism directorate). To hype their products, sellers typically describe it as material used in a nuclear bomb, a reactor, the Space Shuttle or the like. “Excuse my language…just bullshit,” says Mr Baciu. In one sting, he arrested four men trying to sell, for several hundred thousand dollars, material from a calibration kit for radiation-detection equipment. It could be safely handled with cotton gloves. Another cell tried to pass off as dangerously radioactive a piece of ordinary iron. Trafficking in Romania, he says, has tapered to almost nothing.

Russia and other countries have greatly tightened control over radiological materials since thefts peaked in the early post- Soviet years. No highly enriched weapons-usable uranium or plutonium has been reported stolen since the 1990s, according to Ms Zaitseva. (The small amount intercepted since then appears to have been stolen earlier.) Losses of less hazardous low-enriched fissile material have fallen sharply. Employers are getting better at identifying potential risks, says Ray Landis of the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, DC. Employees’ travel itineraries are reviewed. An industry-wide computer system flags workers whose changing circumstances might lead to stress or need of money, perhaps to prevent a home foreclosure or to keep custody of a child.

Beyond this, intelligence agencies are hunting down traffickers with help from special “link analysis” computer programs. Also known as “network analysis” software, this crunches data from numerous sources to identify people whose travel, purchases, web searches, communications, schooling and so forth may spell trouble—perhaps an employee in radiation therapy who begins frequenting an inconveniently located bar whose owner receives phone calls from a drug-runner with growing operations.

Half a dozen Western governments “pay huge amounts of attention” to this, says an executive at a developer of the software. At least one spy agency in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and an unnamed European country pays more than $1m a month to use it. The counter-trafficking units in both Georgia and Romania note that link-analysis software made by i2, owned by the giant IBM computer company, has helped to nab traffickers. Atsuko Nishigaki, the unit’s boss, says Japan’s economy ministry employs ten analysts to use a competitor’s software to identify traffickers in nuclear or radiological material.

America’s National Nuclear Security Administration has sponsored the installation of radiation-detection kit at ports in 23 countries and counting. The Megaports Initiative, as it is called, aims to have half of the world’s maritime container cargo routinely scanned by 2015. Networked systems are also being developed with detectors small enough to be worn on a police officer’s belt. The idea is to relay data on potentially dangerous radiation through a mobile-phone network to a central computer. Knowing each device’s location and the strength of the radiation it detects, the computer can “triangulate” the source’s approximate location.

Negative isotope effects

Difficult problems remain. False alarms triggered by anything from a pallet of cat litter to radiation-therapy patients and nuclear-power-plant shipments have slowed research and development on one such network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says Simon Labov, a co-ordinator there. Even so, the lab’s work continues to be financed by America’s defence, energy and homeland-security departments. In October 2013 the latter’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office asked for proposals for a similar system, dubbed Human Portable Tripwire. Other outfits that have developed technology for such schemes include Smiths Detection in Britain and, in America, Berkeley Nucleonics, General Electric, GENTAG, Passport Systems and Purdue University.
The sheer danger of making a dirty bomb is a factor too. Without the right equipment and expertise, the really nasty stuff can kill the maker of a bomb before it is ready—part of the reason, perhaps, that no spectacular dirty-bomb attack has yet been launched. Following the cobalt-60 theft in Mexico, an IAEA statement noted that, if unshielded, its gamma rays would probably kill people next to it in an hour—or perhaps just minutes.

In the event, five of the six people arrested for the theft on December 5th had avoided exposure and the sixth appeared unharmed. Mexican authorities believe that their aim was to steal the Volkswagen lorry, not the cobalt. Its movable platform and crane made it a valuable prize.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21591614/print

Warsaw - the Capital

2013-12-10T04:56:00.000-08:00

The NRC and Nuclear Terrorism: Still Out of Step on the Insider Threat

2013-12-06T06:31:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest challenges in protecting sensitive facilities, materials and information from terrorists is the “insider threat.” All the guns, guards and gates in the world can be rendered useless if individuals with malevolent intentions can get unrestricted access to facilities under false pretenses, or individuals with access are recruited for terrorist causes.

The recent cases of Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden have illustrated the vulnerability of the most highly secure facilities and systems to insiders.

The Two-Person Rule

The nuclear realm is no exception. Effective prevention of nuclear terrorism—that is, protecting against the theft or diversion of nuclear weapon-usable materials by non-state groups—depends crucially on mitigating the insider threat.

Given this danger, it is difficult to comprehend a recent decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NRC commissioners rejected the advice of their staff and indefinitely tabled consideration of a new requirement that could greatly reduce the insider threat at U.S. nuclear facilities handling nuclear weapon-usable and other sensitive nuclear materials.

In 2011, as part of a package of revisions to NRC requirements for material control and accounting at the nuclear facilities that it regulates, the NRC staff proposed that the agency introduce a “two-person rule” “to make the unauthorized diversion of material less likely.” The two-person rule would ensure that “two qualified and authorized individuals are present” when working with sensitive nuclear materials, such as transferring or handling materials, placing seals on containers, or conducting inventories.

A two-person rule is a commonly used anti-insider security measure that ensures that a lone individual never has the opportunity to steal material or take other actions to facilitate a theft without being observed. A two-person rule cannot provide complete protection against insider conspiracies involving more than one person, but it can make life more complicated even for small groups of insiders. It’s such a good idea that the Department of Energy has had a two-person rule at its facilities for decades. Regardless, the NRC has never imposed an explicit, comprehensive two-person rule, even for facilities handling such strategically important quantities of weapon-usable materials as plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

The NRC Needs a Two-Person Rule

The NRC staff has estimated that the cost of implementing a two-person rule at the small number of Category I facilities that it regulates—two plants that manufacture highly enriched uranium fuel for naval reactors and the plutonium mixed-oxide fuel fabrication plant under construction in South Carolina—would be a mere $165,000. For eight other less sensitive facilities, including uranium enrichment plants, the total cost would be about $550,000. Yet even this relatively small price for a big security gain is apparently too much for the nuclear industry to swallow. The NRC staff noted that “existing licensees have expressed concern about the potential impact of the two-person rule.”

The industry’s complaints appear to have found a receptive audience at the NRC, specifically commissioners Kristine Svinicki and William Magwood, who questioned the value of the two-person rule provision and voted to exclude it from the draft regulation. They were in the minority at that time, however, and the commissioners ultimately approved publication of the draft rule in the Federal Register for comment. Even so, the commissioners also told the NRC staff to either subject the two-person rule and other proposed changes to a cost-benefit analysis under the NRC regulation called the “backfit rule” or explain why the backfit rule does not apply.

The staff maintained that they were merely following precedent: The NRC had not applied the backfit rule to new material control and accounting regulations in the past. In fact, there is no sensible way to perform a quantitative cost-benefit analysis if the benefit is preventing the theft of sufficient material to make a nuclear weapon. The benefits are self-evident, and the costs are minimal.

Nevertheless, in 2013 the commission—including the new chairman, Allison Macfarlane—reversed its previous decision and blocked publication of the draft, voting that the staff had to do a backfit analysis on the two-person rule. The commissioners also said that if the staff didn’t want to hold up the rest of the rule while it did the analysis, they could simply drop the two-person provision and defer it to an unspecified future date. That’s what the staff decided to do in the Federal Register notice published on November 8: postpone the decision, possibly forever.

The NRC is not the only federal agency that lacks a common-sense two-person rule. Even the NSA apparently didn’t have such a rule governing access to highly classified information. In the wake of the Edward Snowden fiasco, it finally made a commitment to implement one.

Unfortunately, the NRC has not gotten the message. Let’s only hope that the agency doesn’t have to experience a similarly disastrous wake-up call before it appreciates the need to strengthen measures to thwart an inside job at U.S. nuclear facilities.

About the author: Dr. Lyman received his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 1992. He was a postdoctoral research scientist at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and then served as Scientific Director and President of the Nuclear Control Institute. He joined UCS in 2003. He is an active member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and has served on expert panels of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. His research focuses on security issues associated with the management of nuclear materials and the operation of nuclear power plants, particularly with respect to reprocessing and civil plutonium. Areas of expertise: Nuclear terrorism, proliferation risks of nuclear power, nuclear weapons policy

Source: http://allthingsnuclear.org/the-nrc-and-nuclear-terrorism-still-out-of-step-on-the-insider-threat/

Al Qaeda pursued a ‘dirty bomb’ (2003; The Washington Times)

2013-12-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

A key al Qaeda terrorism suspect was in Canada looking for nuclear material for a “dirty bomb,” The Washington Times has learned.

Adnan El Shukrijumah is being sought by the FBI and CIA in connection with a plot to detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material. According to an FBI informant, El Shukrijumah was spotted last year in Hamilton, Ontario, posing as a student at McMaster University, which has a 5-megawatt research reactor. U.S. officials believe El Shukrijumah, whose photograph was posted on the FBI’s Web site in March, was in Hamilton trying to obtain radioactive material. One U.S. official said El Shukrijumah is a key North American al Qaeda member who is useful to other Middle Eastern members of the terrorist group because of his knowledge of the United States and his ability to speak English.

El Shukrijumah was identified by the informant after his photograph was made public by the FBI in March. He is believed to be part of an al Qaeda cell in Canada and the United States that was planning a dirty-bomb attack. The status of the bomb plot is not known.Spokesmen for the FBI, CIA, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Royal Canadian Mounted Police declined to comment on El Shukrijumah’s stay in Canada.
Jane Johnson, a spokeswoman for McMaster University, declined to comment on whether El Shukrijumah was ever a student at the school. She said such information is confidential.
A Homeland Security Department official said earlier this week that recent information indicates al Qaeda is continuing to plan attacks, including strikes within the United States. “We have received a lot of good information from these detainees over the past several weeks and corroborated the fact there were active plans, ongoing, to conduct another attack in the United States,” William H. Parrish, an intelligence official with the department, told the Associated Press. “This attack, as they indicated, was probably going to be multiple attacks — simultaneous,” he said. Another U.S. official said al Qaeda could strike targets in several places, including the Persian Gulf, East Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as Europe and the United States.
In addition to El Shukrijumah, the informant said that at least three other al Qaeda terrorists were seen in Hamilton in 2002. They include Anas al-Liby, one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, Jaber A. Elbaneh and Amer El-Maati. Al-Liby has been linked by U.S. authorities to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. El Shukrijumah and El-Maati are being sought for questioning by the FBI in connection with terrorist threats against the United States, according to the bureau’s counterterrorism Web site. Elbaneh is wanted by the FBI as part of a federal criminal complaint made public in May on charges of providing support to al Qaeda as part of a terrorist cell near Buffalo, N.Y. FBI officials have said El Shukrijumah lived in southern Florida and was identified by captured al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He left the United States in May 2002 and is believed to be in the Middle East, one U.S. official said. El Shukrijumah’s connection to the dirty-bomb plot is based on his stay in southern Florida at the same time as another al Qaeda suspect, Jose Padilla. Padilla is a Muslim convert who was arrested in May 2002 in Chicago after returning from Switzerland. He was detained as an enemy combatant and transferred to U.S. military custody. Padilla has not talked to U.S. officials, but intelligence agencies believe he and El Shukrijumah were conspirators in the bomb plot.
U.S. intelligence officials said earlier this year that al Qaeda planned to detonate a dirty bomb inside the United States, a plot directed by Mohammed. According to the officials, the al Qaeda members were sent to North America and assigned with making the bomb from materials acquired there, rather than trying to smuggle conventional explosives and radioactive material into the United States. The terrorists were to buy or steal radioactive material with help from people who had access to research reactors or radioactive medical waste.
El Shukrijumah was also identified from documents obtained in connection with the 2002 arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner of the September 11 attacks. El Shukrijumah is believed to be a terrorist organizer similar to Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2003/oct/16/20031016-110337-4698r/#ixzz2mWQbuXo6

Achilleion Palace - Corfu - Greece

2013-12-02T15:23:00.000-08:00

Achilleion Palace is one of the landmarks of a lovely Greek island of Corfu, located at the Ionian Sea. The Palace was built following a wish expressed - in 1888 - by Sisi aka Austrian Empress Elisabeth. The man behind the design was an Italian architect Raffaele Caritto. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II purchased Achilleion in 1907. During Kaiser Wilhelm's visits a lot of diplomatic activity used to take place in Achilleion and it became a hub of European diplomacy.

During World War I, the Achilleion was used as a military hospital by French and Serbian troops. After World War I, it became the property of the Greek state according to the treaty of Versailles and the war reparations that followed in 1919.

In the years between World War I and World War II the Achilleion property was used to house various government services and at the same time a number of artifacts were auctioned off.

During World War II, the axis powers used the Achilleion as military headquarters. After World War II, the Achilleion came under the management umbrella of the Hellenic Tourist Organisation (HTO).

In 1962 the Achilleion was leased to a private company that converted the upper level to a casino and the lower grounds to a museum. In 1983 the lease was terminated and the palace management was returned to the HTO. In 1994 the European Union Summit Meeting took place in the Achilleion.

The James Bond fans should consider visiting the Achilleion Palace for a simple reason: the casino scene of the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981) was filmed there...

© Photographer: Lyngbyvej | Agency: Dreamstime.com
© Photographer: Lyngbyvej | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Dirty Bombs Revisited: Combating the Hype by Stratfor

2013-11-25T08:29:00.000-08:00

By Scott Stewart

As STRATFOR has noted for several years now, media coverage of the threat posed by dirty bombs runs in a perceptible cycle with distinct spikes and lulls. We are currently in one of the periods of heightened awareness and media coverage. A number of factors appear to have sparked the current interest, including the recently concluded Nuclear Security Summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. Other factors include the resurfacing rumors that al Qaeda militant Adnan El Shukrijumah may have returned to the United States and is planning to conduct an attack, as well as recent statements by members of the Obama administration regarding the threat of jihadist militants using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A recent incident in India in which a number of people were sickened by radioactive metal at a scrap yard in a New Delhi slum also has received a great deal of media coverage.

In spite of the fact that dirty bombs have been discussed widely in the press for many years now -- especially since the highly publicized arrest of Jose Padilla in May 2002 -- much misinformation and disinformation continues to circulate regarding dirty bombs. The misinformation stems from long-held misconceptions and ignorance, while the disinformation comes from scaremongers hyping the threat for financial or political reasons. Frankly, many people have made a lot of money by promoting fear since 9/11.

Just last week, we read a newspaper article in which a purported expert interviewed by the reporter discussed how a dirty bomb would "immediately cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths." This is simply not true. A number of radiological accidents have demonstrated that a dirty bomb will not cause this type of death toll. Indeed, the panic generated by a dirty bomb attack could very well result in more immediate deaths than the detonation of the device itself. Unfortunately, media stories hyping the threat of these devices may foster such panic, thus increasing the death toll. To counter this irrational fear, we feel it is time once again to discuss dirty bombs in detail and provide our readers with a realistic assessment of the threat they pose.

Dirty Bombs Defined

A dirty bomb is a type of radiological dispersal device (RDD), and RDDs are, as the name implies, devices that disperse a radiological isotope. Depending on the motives of those planning the attack, an RDD could be a low-key weapon that surreptitiously releases aerosolized radioactive material, dumps out a finely powdered radioactive material or dissolves a radioactive material in water. Such surreptitious dispersal methods would be intended to slowly expose as many people as possible to the radiation and to prolong their exposure. Unless large amounts of a very strong radioactive material are used, however, the effects of such an exposure will be limited. People are commonly exposed to heightened levels of radiation during activities such as air travel and mountain climbing. To cause adverse effects, radiation exposure must occur either in a very high dose over a short period or in smaller doses sustained over a longer period. This is not to say that radiation is not dangerous, but rather the idea that the slightest amount of exposure to radiation causes measurable harm is not accurate.

By its very nature, the RDD is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area. Additionally, the use of an explosion to disperse the radioisotope alerts the intended victims, who can then evacuate the affected area and be decontaminated. These factors make it very difficult for an attacker to administer a deadly dose of radiation via a dirty bomb.

It is important to note that a dirty bomb is not a nuclear device, and no nuclear reaction occurs. A dirty bomb will not produce an effect like the nuclear devices dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A dirty bomb is quite simply an RDD that uses explosives as the means to disperse a radioactive isotope, and the only blast effect will be from the explosives used to disperse the radioisotope. In a dirty bomb attack, radioactive material not only is dispersed, but the dispersal is accomplished in an obvious manner, and the explosion immediately alerts the victims and authorities that an attack has taken place. The attackers hope that notice of their attack will cause mass panic -- in other words, the RDD is a weapon of fear and terror.

The radioisotopes that can be used to construct an RDD are fairly common. Even those materials considered by many to be the most likely to be used in an RDD, such as cobalt-60 and cesium-137, have legitimate medical, commercial and industrial uses. Organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that such radioisotopes are readily available to virtually any country in the world, and they are almost certainly not beyond the reach of even moderately capable non-state actors. Indeed, given the ease of obtaining radiological isotopes and the ease with which a dirty bomb can be constructed, we are surprised that we have not seen one successfully used in a terror attack. We continue to believe that it is only a matter of time before a dirty bomb is effectively employed somewhere. Because of this, let's examine what effectively employing a dirty bomb means.

Dirty Bomb Effectiveness

Like a nonexplosive RDD, unless a dirty bomb contains a large amount of very strong radioactive material, the effects of the device are not likely to be immediate and dramatic. In fact, the explosive effect of the RDD is likely to kill more people than the device's radiological effect. This need for a large quantity of a radioisotope not only creates the challenge of obtaining that much radioactive material, it also means that such a device would be large and unwieldy -- and therefore difficult to smuggle into a target such as a subway or stadium.

In practical terms, a dirty bomb can produce a wide range of effects depending on the size of the improvised explosive device (IED) and the amount and type of radioactive material involved. (Powdered radioisotopes are easier to disperse than materials in solid form.) Environmental factors such as terrain, weather conditions and population density would also play an important role in determining the effects of such a device.

Significantly, while the radiological effects of a dirty bomb may not be instantly lethal, the radiological impact of an RDD will in all likelihood affect an area larger than the killing radius of the IED itself, and will persist for far longer. The explosion from a conventional IED is over in an instant, but radiation released by a RDD can persist for decades unless the area is decontaminated. While the radiation level may not be strong enough to affect people exposed briefly in the initial explosion, the radiation will persist in the contaminated area, and the cumulative effects of such radiation could prove very hazardous. (Here again, the area contaminated and the ease of decontamination will depend on the type and quantity of the radioactive material used. Materials in a fine powdered form are easier to disperse and harder to clean up than solid blocks of material.) In either case, it will be necessary to evacuate people from the contaminated area, and people will need to stay out of the area until it can be decontaminated, a process that could prove lengthy and expensive.

Therefore, while a dirty bomb is not truly a WMD like a nuclear device, we frequently refer to them as "weapons of mass disruption" or "weapons of mass dislocation" because they may temporarily render contaminated areas uninhabitable. The expense of decontaminating a large, densely populated area, such as a section of London or Washington, is potentially quite high. This cost would also make a dirty bomb a type of economic weapon.

Historical Precedents

The world has not yet witnessed a successful dirty bomb attack by a terrorist or militant group. That does not necessarily mean that militant groups have not been interested in radiological weapons, however. Chechen militants have perhaps been the most active in the realm of radioactive materials. In November 1995, Chechen militants under the command of Shamil Basayev placed a small quantity of cesium-137 in Moscow's Izmailovsky Park. Rather than disperse the material, however, the Chechens used the material as a psychological weapon by directing a TV news crew to the location and thus creating a media storm and fostering public fear. The material in this incident was thought to have been obtained from a nuclear waste or isotope storage facility in the Chechen capital of Grozny.

In December 1998, the pro-Russian Chechen Security Service announced it had found a dirty bomb consisting of a land mine combined with radioactive materials next to a railway line frequently used to transport Russian troops. It is believed that Chechen militants planted the device. In September 1999, two Chechen militants who attempted to steal highly radioactive materials from a chemical plant in Grozny were incapacitated after carrying the container for only a few minutes each; one reportedly died. This highlights another difficulty with producing a really effective dirty bomb: The strongest radioactive material is dangerous to handle, and even a suicide operative might not be able to move and employ it before being overtaken by its effects.

Still, none of these Chechen incidents really provided a very good example of what a dirty bomb detonation would actually look like. To do this, we need to look at incidents where radiological isotopes were dispersed by accident. In 1987, in Goiania, Brazil, a tiny radiotherapy capsule of cesium chloride salt was accidentally broken open after being salvaged from a radiation therapy machine left at an abandoned health care facility. Over the course of 15 days, the capsule containing the radioisotope was handled by a number of people who were fascinated by the faint blue glow it gave off. Some victims reportedly even smeared the substance on their bodies. The radiation was then dispersed by these people to various parts of the surrounding neighborhood, and some of it was even taken to nearby towns. In all, more than 1,000 people were contaminated during the incident and some 244 were found to have significant radioactive material in or on their bodies. Still, only four people died from the incident, and most of those who died had sustained exposure to the contamination. In addition to the human toll, the cleanup operation in Goiania cost more than $100 million, as many houses had to be razed and substantial quantities of contaminated soil had to be removed from the area.

In a more recent case involving a scrap dealer, this time in a slum outside New Delhi, India, eight people were admitted to the hospital because of radiation exposure after a scrap dealer dismantled an object containing cobalt-60. The material apparently arrived at a scrap shop March 12, and the owner of the shop was admitted to the hospital April 4 suffering from radiation-poisoning symptoms (again another case involving prolonged exposure to a radiation source). The radiation source was found at the scrap yard April 5 and identified as cobalt-60. Indian authorities hauled away eight piles of contaminated scrap. The cleanup operation was easier in the Indian incident, since the radioactive material was in metallic form and found in larger pieces rather than in powdered form seen in the cesium in Goiania. Intriguingly, a nearby scrap shop also was found to be contaminated April 16, but it appears from initial reports that the second site was contaminated by a second radioactive source that contained a weaker form of cobalt-60. Though we are watching for additional details on this case, so far, despite the long-term exposure to a potent radioactive source, no deaths have been reported.

At the other end of the spectrum from the Goiania and New Delhi accidents is the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine, when a 1-gigawatt power reactor exploded. It is estimated that more than one hundred times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb was released during the accident -- the equivalent of 50 million to 250 million grams of radium. More than 40 different radioisotopes were released, and there was a measurable rise in cesium-137 levels across the entire European continent. No RDD could ever aspire to anything close to such an effect.

Chernobyl wrought untold suffering, and estimates suggest that it may ultimately contribute to the deaths of 9,000 people. But many of those affected by the radiation are still alive more than 20 years after the accident. While STRATFOR by no means seeks to downplay the tragic human or environmental consequences of this disaster, the incident is instructive when contemplating the potential effects of a dirty bomb attack. In spite of the incredible amounts of radioactive material released at Chernobyl, only 31 people died in the explosion and immediate aftermath. Today, 5.5 million people live in the contaminated zone -- many within or near the specified EU dosage limits for people living near operational nuclear power plants.

It is this type of historical example that causes us to be so skeptical regarding claims that a small dirty bomb will cause hundreds or even thousands of deaths. Instead, the most strategic consequences of this sort of destruction are economic. By some estimates, the Chernobyl disaster will ultimately cost well in excess of $100 billion. Again, in our opinion, a dirty bomb should be considered a weapon of disruption -- one that will cause economic loss, but would not cause mass casualties or any real mass destruction.

Fighting Panic

Analytically, based upon the ease of manufacture and the historical interest by militants in dirty bombs -- which ironically may in part be due to the way the RDD threat has been hyped -- it is only a matter of time before militants successfully employ one. Since the contamination created by such a device can be long-lasting, more rational international actors probably would prefer to detonate such a device against a target outside their own country. In other words, they would lean toward attacking a target within the United States or United Kingdom rather than the U.S. or British embassies in their home country.

And since it is not likely to produce mass casualties, a dirty bomb attack would likely be directed against a highly symbolic target -- such as one representing the economy or government -- and designed to cause the maximum amount of disruption at the target site. Therefore, it is not out of the question to imagine such an attack aimed at a target such as Wall Street or the Pentagon. The device would not destroy these sites, but would limit access to them for as long as it took to decontaminate them.

As noted above, we believe it is possible that the panic caused by a dirty bomb attack could well kill more people than the device itself. People who understand the capabilities and limitations of dirty bombs are less likely to panic than those who do not, which is the reason for this analysis. Another important way to help avoid panic is to carefully think about such an incident in advance and to put in place a carefully crafted contingency plan for your family and business. Contingency plans are especially important for those who work in proximity to a potential dirty bomb target. But they are useful in any disaster, whether natural or man-made, and something that should be practiced by all families and businesses. Such knowledge and planning provide people with the ability to conduct an orderly and methodical evacuation of the affected area. This allows them to minimize their exposure to radioactivity while also minimizing their risk of injury or death due to mass hysteria. For while a dirty bomb attack could well be messy and disruptive, it does not have to be deadly.

"Dirty Bombs Revisited: Combating the Hype is republished with permission of Stratfor."

CBRN Weapons and Non-State Actors

2013-11-12T03:02:00.000-08:00

What type(s) of non-state actors, according to their characteristics and objectives, are most likely to use CBRN weapons? by Amaury Vergely

Ever since the 1995 sarin attack of the Tokyo Subway by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo (“Aum Supreme Truth”), there has been a growing fear that non-state actors, especially terrorist groups, might decide to resort to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear weapons (CBRN) on a large scale. Governments and counter-terrorism agencies have set up measures to minimize the threat, while academics and experts have tried to profile the groups interested in acquiring and using such weapons. First of all, it is important to explain why this paper will deliberately focus on terrorist groups, which are only one sub-category of non-state actors (other groups would include political lobbies, criminal organisations, separatist groups or even single individuals). When it comes to CBRN weapons, this paper argues that any group willing to use them could be defined as a terrorist organisation (but not automatically, insofar as “terrorist” remains a label that does not have a globally shared definition), whatever its personal objectives or characteristics. Indeed, although CBRN weapons can be very different from one another, they share some key aspects that make them all identifiable as “terror weapons” (their ability to provoke mass destruction and generate unprecedented fear among the population, to name a few). The few case studies of previous CBRN incidents have lead experts to identify key characteristics of terrorist groups that would potentially have an interest in CBRN weapons. Most of them agree that apocalyptic or religious extremist groups are the most likely to use CBRN weapons. However, although groups that present such characteristics might be the most dangerous ones regarding the subject matter, I think that the assumptions underlying these conclusions are misleading. To overcome these issues, this paper will attempt to follow the same analytic pattern, identifying shared characteristics of groups that have turned to CBRN terrorism through four case studies. It will then present the conclusions drawn by academics and experts in major research papers and discuss them, stressing the risk of misconceptions regarding CBRN weapons. Finally, this paper will argue that the type of a group is too reductive to determine effectively which group(s) are most likely to use CBRN weapons and is not as crucial as the combination of factors that might lead the group to this decision.

Four different case studies are usually discussed when experts want to determine the characteristics of potential users of CBRN weapons. Three of them are large-scale “successful” CBRN attacks, while the last one is a potential threat that seems to be a major concern for the US government and the international community as a whole. Chronologically, the first successful CBRN attack happened in 1984, when the Rajneeshee religious cult poisoned 751 people, spreading Salmonella typhimurium bacteria over ten salad bars. No fatality was reported. The aim of the attack was to influence a local vote in Oregon by limiting the voter turnout. Another deadly agent, Salmonella typhi, had been suggested to the leader of the group, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, but he reportedly refused, claiming that the attack was aiming at incapacitating people, not killing them. The second case occurred in 1990 in Sri Lanka. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist militant organisation active in the north of the country, assaulted a military facility using chlorine gas. At least 60 soldiers got sick due to gas exposure, although no fatality was reported. The operation was a success, despite that members of the LTTE got exposed to chlorine when the wind shifted. The third case, previously mentioned, was the 1995 release of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. The attack killed 12 people and injured 200, while up to 5,000 stormed in hospitals believing they had been exposed. Finally, the last case study is Al Qaeda’s reported attempt to acquire and intention to use a CBRN weapon. Extensive evidence can be found to support this statement: the declaration of bin Laden in 1998 that acquiring CBRN weapons ‘is a religious duty’ (remaining very vague regarding its actual possession of such weapons), the 2003 fatwa (a religious decree) condoning the killing of 4 Million of Americans, described as a legitimate act of vengeance, as well as numerous documents found in Afghanistan attesting of active researches and experiments in CBRN weapons. A whole volume of Al Qaeda’s “Encyclopaedia of Jihad” even details the construction of Chemical and Biological weapons. Although it is not clear whether Al Qaeda remains at an early stage of development of CBRN weapons, there is no doubt regarding the organisation’s interest in such weapons.

Even though these case studies differ by many more aspects than they resemble each other, they share a few common points. In all four cases, a charismatic leader was involved: Prabakaran, leader of the LTTE, controlled the entire life of his followers up to their diet, bin Laden required that Al Qaeda’s members swore allegiance to him (bay’ah), while Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Shoko Asahara were the spiritual leaders of their cult. In the case of Asahara, he had a huge influence over his followers, predicting the end of the world and promising salvation to all members of Aum. Indeed, a charismatic leader is an important factor for a group that would turn to CBRN terrorism: the influence of the leader can be so important that his decisions are enough to suppress any moral constraint that a member would have, because he holds the truth and the justification of all the actions carried out by the group. Moreover, he is the only one bearing responsibility for them, the individual fading away in the group as a whole. An analogue argument regarding a divine justification of religious groups’ actions is also often put forward. In two cases, members of the group had a personal interest or obsession with CBRN weapons: Ma Anand Puja, the member of the Rajneeshees who suggested the use of Salmonella typhi, was suspected of being a ‘serial poisoner’, while Aum Shinrikyo had a very hierarchical organisation with scientists as head of chemical and biological departments, not to mention Asahara personal fascination with unconventional weapons. He even wrote a song about sarin, titled ‘Song of Sarin, the Magician’. Social alienation also played an important role in the Aum and Rajneeshee cults: after losing the 1990 elections, Aum decided that no one from outside of the group could be saved, drawing a clear line between “us” and “them”, while the Rajneeshees were living in a small community in Waso County, isolated from anyone else. The consequence of this alienation was that any exterior social constraint regarding violence would have no impact on the group’s decisions. Finally, religion was a factor in three of these cases, or at least a major characteristic of the groups involved.

But that is as far as this comparison goes. The use of CBRN weapons was a rational choice that addressed very different needs and objectives in each case. While it played a central role in Aum’s prophesised apocalypse (although the 1995 sarin attack was a desperate action triggered by a planned operation of the Japanese police to close in on the group’s facilities), the LTTE only resorted to chemical weapons that one time because of a shortage of conventional weapons and has never used chlorine again. While Al Qaeda might be willing to use CBRN weapons for their psychological and symbolic impact, which requires visibility, the Rajneeshees’ attack went unnoticed for over a year. According to John Parachini, Director of the Intelligence Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, the role of religion has been played up, even in the cases of Aum and Al Qaeda. Asahara had an egocentric personality and wanted to be the emperor of the post-Armageddon world, one of the few to actually survive the end of the world. Bin Laden’s divine justification of a holy war can be regarded as a personal vanguard against the United States and its allies. The Rajneeshee was a religious cult but had a secular objective (winning a local election). Therefore, it seems that a simple profile of a group willing to use CBRN weapons cannot be deducted from these case studies only.

The literature on the subject reveals two different trends: one that mostly expends on the case studies mentioned above as well as minor CBRN incidents, using a qualitative approach to establish a typology of groups most likely susceptible to resort to CBRN weapons, and a second one using a quantitative approach, exploiting the CBRN terrorism database of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. It is worth noticing that the findings of both the approaches differ at some point. Regarding the qualitative approach, the different typologies are very similar in their content. I present here Drs. Charles Ferguson and Wiliam Potter’s typology of terrorist groups according to their potential interest in nuclear terrorism, but it differs very little from Professor Robin Frost’s. Ferguson and Potter focus their study on four types of groups: ‘apocalyptic groups’, ‘politico-religious groups’, ‘nationalist/separatist groups’ and ‘single-issue terrorists’. According to them, apocalyptic groups pose the greatest threat when it comes to nuclear terrorism, because some of them might want to bring about the Apocalypse they foresee, in which case the means becomes the end itself. The key characteristics of such groups are ‘charismatic leaders, isolation and alienation from the larger society, sense of paranoia and grandiosity’. It is obvious that this category refers directly to Aum Shinrikyo, which is nonetheless a very specific religious cult that cannot be compared to any other existing terrorist group.

The second category they mention is ‘politico-religious groups’, cause and offspring of the 9/11 attacks. They call such groups ‘hybrids’ as an answer to those who claim that Al Qaeda’s objectives are not only religious, but also political (creation of a global caliphate, but also pushing the United States out of the Middle East). Ferguson and Potter contend that nuclear weapons might appeal to such groups, using the example of Al Qaeda that is willing to inflict mass casualties to the West. Whether the group would actually use a nuclear weapon if it managed to acquire one is not discussed by the authors, but that is a debatable point to which we will come back later. Interestingly, Frost puts apocalyptic groups and politico-religious groups into one single category, ‘religious terrorism’, that encompasses altogether the Rajneeshee, Aum Shinrikyo and Al Qaeda. He insists on the threat posed by a divine justification of an act presented as a religious imperative.

The third category of Ferguson and Potter’s typology, nationalist/separatist groups, also appears in Frost’s typology. The authors all agree on the disincentives such groups might be confronted with when it comes to using nuclear weapons. These groups, like the Irish Republican Army or Chechen rebels to name a few, are depending on their base constituency’s support and therefore cannot risk to alienate them by undertaking actions that they would not approve of. It was the case for the Real IRA, an offshoot of the IRA responsible for the bombing of a shopping centre in Omagh, Northern Ireland, which lost the support of the population after this operation, leading to its dismantlement. These groups present themselves as “freedom fighters” in order to gain international support and claim to merely target military and governmental installations, although Frost mentions that their rhetoric does not deceive anyone: out of 1,800 victims of the IRA between 1969 and 1994, 600 were civilians. Using a nuclear weapon would be counterproductive according to their strategy, although Ferguson and Potter claim that they ‘might benefit from appearing to have the capability’, an argument that they oppose themselves, mentioning the radicalisation of the government’s stance every time Chechens have mentioned resorting to CBRN weapons. Finally, being geographically focused, they would risk a massive retaliation from the country they would attack, potentially leading to their annihilation.

The last category of Ferguson and Potter are single-issue terrorists (eco-terrorists, anti-nuclear activists, animal liberationists, anti-abortionists, etc…). According to them, these groups do not represent a threat insofar as they have very targeted goals that do not include mass casualties. In this category, Frost mentions an exception: ‘green anarchists’, terrorists who advocate a rebirth of the earth through the annihilation of the human race. This sub-category presents similarities with apocalyptic groups and might very well be willing to use a nuclear weapon to achieve its end, with very little moral constraint whatsoever. Frost also adds ‘social-revolutionary’ and ‘right-wing’ groups in his typology, but argues that nuclear weapons would probably not appeal to them, as they present similarities with nationalist/separatist groups.

Other qualitative studies have also addressed the typology of groups that would be interested in using biological weapons, which is considered to be the most likely scenario of a CBRN attack by most articles in the literature. According to Francisco Galamas, Islamic extremist groups are the most likely to use biological weapons, because they are set on killing non-believers in an indiscriminate manner. Biological weapons have the potential to kill thousands and could be effectively combined with suicide tactics to provoke mass casualties, such as using a contaminated terrorist to propagate a pathogen in a public area. This argument would however be refuted by Adam Dolnik, who underlines the differences between a suicide bomb attack and a suicide CBRN attack, the latter lacking any of the incentives of the former. According to Galamas’ typology, the second group that is most likely to use a biological weapon are religious cults. The author draws his argument from the examples of the Rajneeshee’s Salmonella poisoning and Aum’s numerous attempts to produce and use Botulinum toxin and anthrax between 1990 and 1993. It is worth noticing that religion remains the primary factor in biological weapons qualitative studies.

The main quantitative studies have been conducted by Kate Ivanova and Todd Sandler in 2006 and 2007, using data of hundreds of CBRN attacks indexed on the Monterey Institute’s CBRN terrorism database from 1988 to 2004. Their findings indicate that democracy, past CBRN incidents, corruption and transnationalism increase the risks of a CBRN attack. However, Ivanova and Sandler have also found that ‘religious fundamentalists and nationalists/separatists do not present (…) a CBRN concern’. According to them, non-religious groups are five times more likely to use CBRN weapons than religious groups. However, these results are not entirely at odds with qualitative studies, because Ivanova and Sandler found that religious groups that are also transnational – such as Al Qaeda – were the most likely to use CBRN weapons. Nevertheless, it would seem that the factor “transnational” is of the uttermost importance and that religion alone does not support the use of a CBRN weapon.

All these studies attempt to profile groups that would be interested in using CBRN weapons. However, some of the assumptions they base their arguments on can be misleading. I will discuss three points that are often overlooked in the literature. First of all, I do not think like Frost that ‘the decision to “go nuclear” would necessarily involve the intention to do so’. For example, in my opinion, Al Qaeda would probably benefit more from pretending to have a CBRN weapon than using one. The group is not insensitive to its followers’ opinion, otherwise the organisation would not have felt the need to justify the killings of 9/11. However, claiming to “potentially” have a CBRN weapon is a cost free psychological weapon in itself. Therefore, whether Al Qaeda would actually use a CBRN weapon is debatable. Another misconception is that CBRN weapons are necessarily weapons of mass destruction, and that terrorists would automatically use them to kill a lot of people and carry out an attack more spectacular than 9/11. Given its psychological impact, a CBRN attack does not need to make mass casualties to reach what Ivanova and Sandler call the ‘media bar’ of 9/11. Moreover, to date, conventional attacks have proven far more lethal than CBRN attacks. Therefore, it appears that the “mass casualty” factor is not necessarily fundamental to explain the choice of a group to use a CBRN weapon.

This paper has attempted to show that the traditional approach consisting in determining the type of non-state actors most likely to use CBRN weapons through typologies and case studies might lead to false conclusions, when trying to fit all groups in one single model. CBRN weapons are very different from each other, and the motives explaining why one group would choose to develop and use one particular agent depends on its own objectives and characteristics. While these characteristics can be shared with other groups, they are not self-sufficient. Therefore, this paper argues that a correct approach to the issue would be to think of it as a threshold depending on a combination of all the characteristics mentioned above. Religion is not enough to resort to CBRN weapons, but if a religious group is also transnational, apocalyptic and lead by a charismatic figure, it becomes much more likely to use a CBRN weapon. This proposition would also explain why the Aum Shinrikyo case, symbol of CBRN terrorism, is unique and unlikely to be replicated: many positive factors have simultaneously converged to one very specific group.

Source: http://theriskyshift.com/2013/05/cbrn-weapons-and-non-state-actors/#ixzz2kQaNqIQV

Zostać rentierem

2013-11-05T05:14:00.000-08:00

Wynajem nieruchomości może być wciągającym i dochodowym biznesem. Zwłaszcza jeśli jest to najem krótkoterminowy. Jak wygląda ten coraz bardziej popularny biznes od środka?

Centrum stolicy. Z okien klimatyzowanego apartamentu na 20. piętrze wieżowca rozciąga się panorama Warszawy. Najlepiej ogląda się ją, siedząc na stylowej kanapie z kieliszkiem białego wina w ręku. Na stoliku kawowym czekają bilety na premierę nowego spektaklu. Skoro tak może wyglądać scenariusz biznesowej wizyty w Warszawie, dlaczego nie wybrać go zamiast noclegu w sieciowym hotelu?

Wynajem apartamentów stał się ostatnio popularną alternatywą dla tych, którzy nie lubią anonimowości hoteli, ale cenią sobie wysoki standard pokoi. Są skłonni zapłacić sporo, bo takie lokum zapewnia większą prywatność, dostęp do własnej kuchni, a zdarza się, że właściciele oferują też dodatkowe usługi, jak drobne zakupy czy rezerwacje biletów.

Ale nie trzeba oferować luksusów, by znaleźć chętnych na wynajem na krótki okres. Rodziny podróżujące z dziećmi i grupy znajomych chętnie wynajmują całe mieszkania, bo przy większej grupie jest to bardzo opłacalne. W Warszawie noc w apartamencie dla dwóch osób kosztuje 150–240 zł, trzypokojowe mieszkanie dla sześciu osób to koszt ok. 350 złotych za noc. Chętnych jest coraz więcej także dzięki serwisom społecznościowym jak Wimdu czy Airbnb, które popularyzują najem pokoi i mieszkań zamiast miejsc noclegowych w hostelach.

Mając zatem do dyspozycji wolne mieszkanie, warto zastanowić się, czy najem krótkoterminowy nie jest bardziej opłacalny od wynajmu na długi okres. Są tacy, którzy uczynili z tego prężny biznes. Tak jak każdy ma on jednak swoje cienie, a i konkurencja na rynku jest już niemała.

Euro 2012 – złote czasy dla wynajmu

Sylwia Pochelska ma 28 lat. Od trzech utrzymuje się z wynajmu apartamentów. Obecnie jej firma Mieszkanie na Zawołanie ma ich w ofercie sześć, a wkrótce dojdą dwa. Żadne nie jest jej własnością – wynajmuje je od osób, które wolą podpisać długoterminową umowę i mieć święty spokój. Zachęcona sukcesami w lutym otworzyła hostel w centrum Warszawy. W tym celu wynajęła 200-metrowe mieszkanie w starej kamienicy, które starannie wyremontowała. Czy odniesie sukces? Za wcześnie, by to oceniać, bo sezon wakacyjny dopiero się rozpoczął, ale Sylwia jest dobrej myśli.

Przygodę ze stołecznym rynkiem nieruchomości zaczęła jeszcze jako studentka od jednego mieszkania, które udostępniono jej na kilka miesięcy w zamian za odświeżenie wnętrz. Remont przeprowadziła za pieniądze z dotacji unijnej dla młodych przedsiębiorców. Z czasem do oferty dołączała kolejne lokale, które wyposażała już za własne pieniądze. W czasie rozgrywek Euro 2012 miała do dyspozycji aż 15 mieszkań w Warszawie i cztery we Wrocławiu.

– Okres piłkarskich mistrzostw Europy to było prawdziwe szaleństwo. Ceny dwukrotnie wyższe niż normalnie, a zainteresowanie ogromne – wspomina. – Zaraz potem rynek się jednak gwałtownie skurczył i wiele firm, które powstały w tym czasie, dziś już nie istnieje.

Podobne obserwacje ma Piotr Iwaniuk, właściciel PiotrApartments.pl, w branży wynajmu krótkoterminowego od trzech lat. Na rynek nieruchomości uciekł z etatu w sektorze bankowym. Za oszczędności i kredyty kupił cztery małe mieszkania, które wykończył w wysokim standardzie. Choć na etacie nie narzekał na wynagrodzenie, dopiero jako przedsiębiorca poczuł wiatr w żaglach.

– Wcześniej pracowałem osiem godzin dziennie. Dziś pracuję także osiem, ale tygodniowo. I zarabiam tyle samo – przyznaje Piotr Iwaniuk.

Od czasu do czasu zatrudnia do pomocy jedną osobę, ale większość spraw, np. porządki w mieszkaniach czy przekazywanie kluczy, załatwia sam. W zależności od pory roku, bo wynajem nieruchomości to biznes sezonowy, na czysto zostaje mu nawet kilka tysięcy.

Piotr utrzymuje obłożenie w apartamentach na poziomie 80 procent. W porównaniu z innymi firmami to bardzo dużo. Jak mu się to udaje? Dzięki rosnącej grupie stałych klientów, głównie biznesmenów, których kusi zniżkami. Ceni sobie długofalowe relacje, bo znając swoich gości, nie musi się martwić o ewentualne zniszczenia i skargi sąsiadów. Mniej więcej jedna czwarta jego klientów pochodzi z serwisu Wimdu, rzadziej z Airbnb.

Sylwii Pochelskiej udaje się utrzymać obłożenie w swoich mieszkaniach w granicach 60–70 procent. Wylicza, że z każdego ma po odliczeniu kosztów około tysiąca złotych miesięcznie. Z tego trzeba odliczyć ok. 1,5–2 tys. rocznie na drobne naprawy i doposażanie lokali.

Jak sama przyznaje, finansowo bywało lepiej. Od roku przyjeżdża do niej coraz mniej rodzin, które kryzys zmusił do oszczędności. Sytuację ratują rodziny polonijne, które spędzają w Polsce nawet po kilka tygodni.

Inwestowanie w przyszłość

Nieco inaczej wygląda sytuacja Jana Szumowskiego, który ze wspólnikiem, Dariuszem Olszewskim, od pięciu lat prowadzi firmę Apartment4You. Na rynku apartamentów są znaczącymi graczami – oferują w sumie 75 mieszkań: 55 w Warszawie i 20 w Poznaniu.

Zatrudniają ponad 20 osób; do sprzątania, do prac biurowych, obsługi telefonicznej, drobnych napraw. Szacują, że pełne obłożenie mają przez 6–7 miesięcy w roku. Z serwisów społecznościowych nie korzystają, bo przy takiej skali są one kłopotliwe w obsłudze. Ale Szumowski przyznaje, że samo ich pojawienie się zwiększyło obroty o 3–5 procent.

Obaj weszli na rynek wynajmu z doświadczeniem w zupełnie innych branżach. Jan Szumowski pracował w marketingu i reklamie, Dariusz Olszewski – w finansach. Startowali z niedużą pulą własnych lokali. Około połowy z nich jest ich własnością. Podnosząc standard, w zakupach posiłkowali się kredytami. W każdy lokal zainwestowali ok. 1,5 tys. złotych na metr kwadratowy.

– Jako firma nie dostaliśmy kredytu na dobrych warunkach, zatem rentowność tych mieszkań nie jest bardzo wysoka – przyznaje Jan Szumowski. – Ale przecież nie chodzi o to, by odkładać zarobione pieniądze na kupkę, tylko by inwestować w przyszłość. Na przykład w przyszłość moich dzieci.

Spłacanie kredytów nie spędza mu snu z powiek, bo pożyczki zostały wzięte pod hipotekę.

Piotr Iwaniuk, który też spłaca kredyty, radzi, by pamiętać o sezonowości biznesu i mieć odłożone pieniądze na czas, kiedy rynek przeżywa okres zastoju.

– Najlepszy okres to miesiące od września do października, a potem wiosna – od kwietnia do czerwca. Wbrew pozorom latem nie ma aż tak wielu zainteresowanych, bo zamiast do miasta ludzie wolą pojechać nad morze czy do lasu. Nie ma w tym czasie także wielu konferencji, które zapewniają mi klientów – tłumaczy.

– Wrzesień, październik rzeczywiście są świetne. Grudzień jest za to fatalny. W ogóle miesiące świąteczne nie są najlepsze – potwierdza Jan Szumowski.

Sezonowość jest jeszcze bardziej widoczna w mieście targów – w Poznaniu.

– W tygodniach targowych mamy stuprocentowe obłożenie. Ale gdyby nie targi, utrzymywanie mieszkań w Poznaniu byłoby dla nas nieopłacalne – przyznaje współwłaściciel Apartment4You.

Życie rentiera nie jest wolne od stresów

Na rynku najmu długoterminowego można rozważnie dobrać najemcę, a przed stratami zabezpieczyć się choćby wysoką kaucją i odpowiednimi zapisami w umowie. W przypadku najmu krótkoterminowego wpływ na to, kto wynajmuje lokal, jest znacznie mniejszy, a żądanie kaucji nie jest powszechne.

– Inne firmy nie żądają na wejściu kaucji, więc gdybym ją wprowadziła, byłabym po prostu niekonkurencyjna – przyznaje Sylwia Pochelska. – Parę razy się na tym przejechałam. Jeden z gości gasił papierosy na parapecie, ramie lustra, kanapie... Wszędzie zostały po nim wypalone dziury.

Znacznie gorsze doświadczenia ma założyciel Apartment4You. Zniszczenia i kradzieże w mieszkaniach to dla niego chleb powszedni, więc w biznesplanie ma wkalkulowane, że 10–15 proc. przychodu za mieszkanie trzeba reinwestować w skradzione sprzęty i drobne prace remontowe. Ale nigdy nie zapomni dnia, kiedy do jednego z jego lokali musiał się wdzierać oddział antyterrorystów.

– W mieszkaniu urządzono głośną imprezę. Sąsiedzi trzykrotnie wzywali policję, która próbując dostać się do mieszkania, zorientowała się, że przebywają tam kryminaliści. Przyjechała grupa antyterrorystów, wyłamali drzwi, użyli nawet gazu łzawiącego. Panów wyprowadzano w kajdankach – wspomina.

Dziś Jan Szumowski uważa, że lata doświadczenia nauczyły go pewnego wyczucia. – Kiedy widzimy kogoś, kto ewidentnie przyjechał balować, pobieramy pewną kwotę na poczet ewentualnych zniszczeń – mówi.

Jak zatem wygląda rentowność tego typu biznesu? Wszyscy podkreślają, że krótki termin nie opłaca się przy jednym, dwóch mieszkaniach, bo zachodu jest sporo, a dochody nie większe niż przy długofalowej umowie. Sensowne zarobki zaczynają się wtedy, kiedy pod opieką wynajmującego znajdzie się co najmniej 4–5 apartamentów. Wtedy częste wizyty w mieszkaniu i czas poświęcony na poszukiwanie klientów są wynagradzane wynikami finansowymi.

Według Sylwi Pochelskiej przy 10 mieszkaniach różnica w zarobkach wcale nie jest proporcjonalna, ponieważ na tym etapie trzeba już opłacić osoby do pomocy, a to pożera sporą część dochodu. Dopiero przy 15 lokalach zaczyna na dobre działać efekt skali.

Zrodlo: http://pierwszymilion.forbes.pl/zarabianie-na-wynajmie-mieszkan-zostac-rentierem,artykuly,158294,1,3.html

14 Things Successful People Do On Weekends (Forbes)

2013-10-28T04:20:00.002-07:00

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/02/22/14-things-successful-people-do-on-weekends/2/

Here are 14 things successful people do (or should be doing) on weekends:

1. Make time for family and friends. This is especially important for those who don’t spend much time with their loved ones during the week.

2. Exercise. Everyone needs to do it, and if you can’t work out 4 to 5 days during the workweek, you need to be active on weekends to make up for some of that time, Vanderkam says. It’s the perfect opportunity to clear your mind and create fresh ideas.

“I know an owner of a PR firm who takes walks in the park with his dog to spark ideas about how to pitch a new client, or what angle to take with the press for a story,” Kurow says.

Cohen suggests spin classes and outdoor cycling in the warmer months. “Both are energizing and can be organized among people with shared interests. For example, it is not uncommon for hedge fund folks and Wall Street professionals to ride together on weekends. It is a great way to establish and cultivate relationships based on membership in this elite professional community.”

3. Pursue a passion. “There’s a creative director of a greeting card company who went back to school to pursue an MFA because of her love of art,” Kurow says. “Pursuing this passion turned into a love of poetry that she now writes on weekends.”

“Successful people make time for what is important or fun,” Egan adds. “They make space for activities that add to their life balance.”

4. Vacation. Getting away for the weekend provides a great respite from the grind of an intense week at work, Cohen says.

5. Disconnect. The most successful people avoid e-mail for a period of time, Vanderkam says. “I’m not saying the whole weekend, but even just a walk without the phone can feel liberating. I advocate taking a ‘tech Sabbath.’ If you don’t have a specific religious obligation of no-work time, taking Saturday night to mid-day Sunday off is a nice, ecumenical time that works for many people.”

6. Volunteer. “I know a commercial real estate broker who volunteers to help with cook-off events whose proceeds are donated to the Food Bank,” Kurow says. “The volunteer work provides a balance to the heavy analytical work she does all week and fulfills her need to be creative — she designs the promotional material for the non-profit.”

Cohen says a lot of successful people participate in fundraising events. “This is a great way to network and to meet others with similar interests,” he says. “The visibility also helps in branding a successful person as philanthropic.”

7. Avoid chores. Every weekend has a few have-to-dos, but you want these to take the minimum amount of time possible, Vanderkam explains. Create a small window for chores and errands, and then banish them from your mind the rest of the time.

8. Plan. “Planning makes people more effective, and doing it before the week starts means you can hit Monday ready to go, and means you’ll give clear directions to the people who work for you, so they will be ready to go, too,” Vanderkam says.

Trunk agrees. She says successful people plan their month and year because “if you get stuck on short-term lists you don’t get anything big accomplished.”

9. Socialize. “Humans are social creatures, and studies of people’s experienced happiness through the day finds that socializing ranks right up there, not too far down below sex,” Vanderkam says.

Go out with friends and family, or get involved in the local community.

“It has been demonstrated that successful people find great satisfaction in giving back,” Cohen says. “Board membership, for example, also offers access to other successful folks.”

10. Gardening/crafts/games/sports/cooking/cultural activities. This is especially important for those cooped up in an office all week.

“For the pure joy, some folks find great satisfaction in creating beautiful gardens,” Cohen says.

Kurow knows an attorney who uses her weekends to garden and do mosaics and tile work to satisfy her creative side. “Filling her life this way enables her to be refreshed on Monday and ready to tackle the litigation and trial prep work. Artwork for her is fulfilling in a way that feeds her soul and her need to connect with her spiritual side.”

Bridge lessons and groups can also sharpen the mind and often create relationships among highly competitive smart professionals, Cohen says. “I once saw a printout of a bridge club’s membership list; its members were a who’s who of Wall Street.”

Theatre, opera and sporting events can also enrich one’s spirit, he adds.

11. Network. “Networking isn’t an event for a successful person, it’s a lifestyle,” Trunk says. Wherever they go and whatever they do, they manage to connect with new people.

12. Reflect. Egan says truly successful people make time on weekends to appreciate what they have and reflect on their happiness and accomplishments. As Rascoff said, “weekends are a great chance to reflect and be more introspective about bigger issues.”

13. Meditate. Classes and private instruction offer a bespoke approach to insight and peace of mind, Cohen says. “How better to equip yourself for success in this very tough world?”

14. Recharge. We live in a competitive world, Vanderkam says. “Peak performance requires managing downtime, too–with the goal of really recharging your batteries.” That’s how the most successful people get so much done.

Successful people know that time is too precious to be totally leisurely about leisure, Vanderkam concludes. “You’re not going to waste that time by failing to think about what you’d like to do with it, and thus losing the weekend to TV, puttering, inefficient e-mail checking, and chores. If you don’t have a busy workweek, your weekend doesn’t matter so much. But if you’re going from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, it certainly does.”

My Wife is Always Late - Lose the Resulting Stress and Conflict

2013-10-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

The following letter describes a problem experienced by millions of men and women:

"My wife is late to everything, which of course makes me late too. I've talked to her about it, over and over, but it doesn't make any difference. It makes me so mad, but then she gets mad too, and then we don't speak to each other the rest of the evening. There's got to be a way out of this."

First, you need to see that your wife doesn't make you angry. I know it seems like she does, but really she has little to do with it. We react to events with anger only when we are already empty and afraid-when we don't have enough Real Love in our lives. Without enough of the single most important ingredient for happiness, we're in pain all the time, and in that condition it takes virtually nothing to make our pain intolerable and push us over the edge.

When your wife is late, it's just plain inconvenient. When you already don't feel loved-as a result of an entire lifetime of unloving experiences-that inconvenience alone is enough to throw you off the tracks. But the truth is, there's a lot more than just the inconvenience going on. Each time she's late, you also hear her saying that she doesn't care about you--that she doesn't love you--and after a lifetime of hearing that, it's more than you can stand. When you get angry, you don't feel quite as helpless-you get a taste of Imitation Love in the form of power-and sometimes you actually motivate her to change her behavior, so that you're not inconvenienced.

But does your anger really get you what you want? Of course not. What you really want is a loving relationship with her. That's a lot more important than being on time--really--and every time you get angry at her, you make the higher goal pretty much impossible. Not the best move, would you say? Imagine: The Titanic is sinking, but you've left your wallet in your room. You'd like to get your wallet, but are you willing to get it at the price of your life? That really is what's happening here. You're trying to be on time at the cost of your marriage. Is it really worth it?

Now, you have to wonder, is it possible to have both? A happy marriage and being on time? Yes, as long as you remember to put Real Love first in the equation.

Right now, when you talk about being on time, because of your anger she can only hear that you don't love her-so that's pretty much the end of the conversation. Nothing good can happen after she hears that message. So how can you change that? How can you be more loving?

First, don't talk to her about being late while she's late. By that time, you're upset, and she's feeling pressured, and you will not have a productive conversation. Talk to her when neither of you is distracted by anything else, and say to her,
"Sweetie, for years I've been nagging you about being late, and I'm just beginning to see what an idiot I've been to do that. Every time I get angry at you, I'm only thinking of myself, and you can feel that. You hear me say with my behavior that I don't care about you, and I'm sorry for that-it's been a huge mistake on my part. Now, I'm not going to promise you I won't make the same mistake again, but now that I recognize it, I really do think I'll do it less."

I make you a promise: In the moment you say this, you will have her attention, because when you're admitting your selfishness-when you're not defending yourself and trying to be right-you're communicating that you care about her.

Does this mean you have to put up with being late to everything for the rest of your life? No, it doesn't. After apologizing for being selfish, you keep talking to her. Say something like, what "There's no excuse for my nagging you and being selfish-It's wrong, and I'm going to work on that-but I also want to be on time from now on. Notice that I said that *I* want to be on time. I am not telling you what you have to do. So let's talk about how we could make that possible."

Now there are lots of options you could discuss with her.

First you need to understand that you don't have the right to control her. We all get to make our own choices in life, even the ones that inconvenience other people. That's the Law of Choice that we read about in the book, Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love and Fulfilling Relationships.

A relationship is a natural result of the choices people make independently. Your wife has chosen to be late-that's her right to do-but that doesn't keep you from independently making the choices you want. You can still choose to be on time, but it should be obvious that if you choose to be on time to an event, and she chooses to be late, you won't be able to travel together to that event.

Tell her that you are not going to be angry anymore, but you're also going to be on time, so on occasion that might require that you take separate transportation. Tell her that each time the two of you are going somewhere together, you'll tell her ahead of time exactly what time you'll be leaving, and if she wants to go with you, she'll need to be in the car by that time. You are not telling her what to do-is that clear?-you're simply choosing to be on time yourself, and then you're giving her the choice of whether or not she wants to go with you. If she chooses not to be on time-no problem-she can still go to the event, and she can still spend time with you AT the event, but she won't be able to travel there with you.

So how would that look? You could go in separate cars (if you have more than one), or one of you could figure out another way to get where you're going-borrow a car, take a taxi or a bus or whatever. Lots of options.

After you've described this to her, start leaving at the time you've said. Don't look back as you drive away, do not feel guilty, don't be angry, and don't deliver any lectures about being on time. Just do what you've said you'd do, and you'll discover that you don't have to get upset at the choices of other people anymore. You simply make your own choices and allow other people to make theirs.

She probably won't believe you're serious about this until the first time you leave without her. People who are chronically late are pretty selfish. They just don't think about the time and convenience of other people. They just can't believe that the world doesn't revolve around them. The first time you leave before her, she might get angry and say some unkind things. Do not defend yourself. Simply explain to her again-without irritation or a need to be "right"-that you are not making her be on time. You're just choosing to be on time yourself. If she wants to go with you, she only has to get ready earlier and be ready at the prescribed time. Tell her that you'd love it if she went with you.

This approach could seem harsh to some, but it's much better than continuing to allow your marriage to be destroyed by the anger and blaming you're experiencing now. You're not controlling her in any way. She can still do whatever she wants, but she can't choose any longer to make you late.

You'll work this out just fine as long as you remember that it's always about Real Love. If you become irritated-if she hears that you don't love her-the conversation is over. You have to accept her completely, and if she really feels that, one of two things will happen:

First-without the deadly distractions of anger and contention, you'll be able to come up with a way to get both of you there separately: two cars, cab, whatever.

Second-and I've seen this happen with many couples-she'll quit being late. Really. Think about it: Right now, why should she go out of her way to be on time for somebody-you in this case-who gets mad at her and who with his behavior tells her he doesn't love her. Most of the time, she probably doesn't want to be with you at all, much less be with you on time. This is no criticism of you-98% of marriages run like this.

As she feels more and more loved by you, though, the odds will improve dramatically that she will want to be with you, and that will include being with you on time.

Dr. Greg Baer is the author of 16 books, DVDs, and CDstwo of which are internationally published by Penguin Putnam Groupand has presented the life-changing message of Real Love to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/329566

'Limitless' Has Wisdom By Paul Kyriazi

2013-10-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

This article contains many spoilers about Limitless. See the movie first, then come back to this article.

Our hero Eddie gets access to 100% of his brain by using a smart pill called NTZ. He tells us via narration,"Everything I'd ever read, seen and heard was now organized and available."

Us in the real world can't access that much brain power, but with Google Search, smart phones and some clarity of mind on our part, we can have tons of information ready to use, if only we make the decision to do so.

"All fear and shyness was now gone," Eddie tells us. Yes, those are success blocks. But we don't need a pill to rid ourselves of those blocks. Classes, books, hypnosis or just diving into where we have to go, can start eliminating fears.

After hooking up with higher caliber friends (his useless relationships are "better forgotten and put away in mothballs," he says) and going to Puerto Valletta, Eddie says,"Mere lounging wasn't enough."

Yes, being a 'lounger' will not move us closer to what we really want. In that scene Eddie gets it: "Suddenly I knew what I needed to do. But it would take money to get there."

Ah money. Here's where we lose a lot of people. My success teacher Dr. Paul Mastrodakus once said: "I can announce a seminar that says this coffee pot is God and I'll get 100% sign up. But any seminar that has 'money' as the subject, people just don't seem to want." I wonder why? Maybe getting money sounds like work. But money, that symbol of energy, is a must in the real world to accomplish our goals and live our dreams.

With increased brain power, Eddie apologizes to his ex-girlfriend saying, "My power for self sabotage wasn't boundless after all." He then asks her, "Why did you stay with me for so long?"

When she asks when his book is coming out, he replies, "Next year," and then immediately asks her about her job. It seems our hero has got off of his own problems and is now giving out interest to other people.

In the beginning of the film, when Eddie is standing on the ledge of the building ready to jump, he talks about "Wanting to make an impact on the world, instead of the pavement." When explaining his book in the bar, Eddie mentions a 'utopian society.' So we can guess that his final goal might be helping the world.

When Eddie is accused of having 'delusions of grandeur' he retorts with, "I have an actual recipe for grandeur." Ah, a plan. Definite plans get definite results. Indefinite plans do not get 'indefinite results', they get NO results. Eddie says, "I was clear. I knew what I needed to do, and how to do it."

Notice the first thing that Eddie does once he's on NTZ. He cleans up his 'base of operations,' his apartment. Where have you heard this before? Actually he first smoothes over his bad relationship with the landlord's wife and helps her write her law class paper. Eddie is a giver.

Next as the 'enhanced Eddie', he gets a haircut, new clothes, exercises and starts learning; studying languages. Yes, sounds like the Rules Of Living the James Bond Lifestyle. He then finishes his novel in four days. This is possible without NTZ if you type 5 pages an hour,16 hours a day, for four days = 320 page book.

Yes, all this can be done without the NTZ. It just might take a little longer to reach the success level that we want. Eddie says, "There are moments in your life when you cross a bridge and know that your old life is over." This can scare some of us as it gets us out of our comfort zone to accept a change, even a positive change. But if a new life means, not having to run to the bank in 100 degree weather, because my car is broken, to make a $20 deposit to cover my overdue electric bill, then I'll take that new life.

And while a high level of success is necessary to express our true selves, Eddie cautions us with, "We are all wired to over reach. Look at history, all the countries that ruled the world. No one stopped and said, 'We've got France, Poland, a big Swiss bank account. Let's not invade Russia in the winter. Let's go home, pop a beer and live on the interest.'" Yes, better not fulfill the Peter Principle and rise to our level of our incompetence.

We see that Eddie can access classic literature when he compares Robert DeNiro's energy customers to "Oliver Twist begging for his bowl of gruel." Not bad to have an understanding of a few classics under your belt.

DeNiro makes a good point about earning your power by experience. He tells Eddie: "Your super intellect is a gift from God, but you didn't earn it because you're careless with your power, flashing it around like a trust fund child. You never had to earn it year by year. You don't know how to assess your competition because you never had to compete."

Finally Eddie overcomes his challenges to get where he wants to go, the U.S. Senate. His next step will be the Presidency where he can accomplish the most good. However, the now evil and manipulative DeNiro wants to control Eddie so Eddie can pass laws to benefit DeNiro's various companies. But now Eddie has learned to compete and gets rid of DeNiro with verbal strategy. Eddie won't be corrupted.

Leaving the theater, after watching Limitless, I heard a patron remark, "I wish I had that pill." To me it sounded like, "I'm not going to even try to 'enhance' myself' like Eddie. I want a free ride."

In fact, even on NTZ, Eddie worked hard, studied, exercised, worked on his finances and upgraded his appearance. Things anyone can do without NTZ.

To me, real NTZ is water, as 90% of the human brain is made of it. Just Google 'benefits of water' and see the 10 things water does for humans and how much more we should be drinking. In fact, it's Eddie's 'baptism' in water, after he dives into the ocean, where he realizes his real purpose in life, which seems to unfold as: Improve himself to the point of being able to serve others and make a positive difference in the world.

Finally, like all success that we accept as ours, Eddie's success in now internalized and natural. When he speaks to a waiter in Chinese, his girlfriend looks at him in awe. Eddie turns to her, sees her expression and says, "What?"

END -

Written in 45 minutes, without NTZ.

Source: http://www.authorsden.com/categories/article_top.asp?catid=5&id=63596

Asking Paul Kyriazi: Can we really live like James Bond?

2013-10-16T06:37:00.002-07:00

FLORIDA, August 31, 2012 — Who among us men can honestly say that he has never looked up to James Bond at one time or another?

The legendary British secret agent stands as one of our time’s most recognized characters in both literature and film. It is Bond’s unique philosophy of refined, yet edgy living that has captivated untold billions over much of the last century.

Replicating this lifestyle — though without the villains scheming for world domination, one might hope — could very well seem to be impossible. After all, Bond is fictional, and besides, how can the average guy even hope to rival the exploits of an international spy?

Entertainment industry veteran Paul Kyriazi has devoted much of his career to educating people about the Bond philosophy. He devised a now world famous seminar regarding this, and it since has been released in book form.

In a detailed interview with me, he speaks about far more than the cliches of James Bond. From why the character has such enduring appeal to how one can finance a 007 caliber lifestyle, nary a stone is left unturned.

****

Joseph F. Cotto: Many of us grew up with James Bond as a role model of sorts. Why do you believe that the character holds such enduring appeal?

Paul Kyriazi: Bond endures because, even though he’s a man of action as all heroes are, he is also a man of prosperity and leisure. When another hero goes on a mission, such as Rambo, he’s in prison or catching cobras in the jungle. Rocky lives in a cheap apartment, so does Dirty Harry. But before James Bond goes on a mission he’s in a high class casino, wearing a tuxedo and meeting beautiful women. That’s where us men want to be. It’s never boring around 007.

Before Bond came on the scene, Frank Sinatra was the number one male icon. Every man wanted to be Sinatra in a casino wearing a tuxedo and choosing whatever fun he wanted at the moment.

That all changed when the 3rd James Bond movie ‘Goldfinger’, made 007 the international icon of masculine adventure and lifestyle. And he’s endured for 50 years. When Bond is in trouble, he doesn’t fold, he focuses. He calls up his talent at will and delivers on a deadline, like he did with the ticking time-bomb in Ft. Knox. Men want to be that cool under pressure and get the job done with that style.

Cotto: How can one go about adopting the Bond attitude toward life? What is required in order to accomplish this?

Kyriazi: When you ask someone “Why do you like James Bond?” the answer often comes back, “Because he’s so cool.” And the only way that a person can be cool is to start taking control of the three parts of his personality; the body, mind and feelings. Especially the feelings.

Bond has his fear, panic and anger under control. Bond also has a knowledgeable mind (on almost any subject, it seems) and though his body is often beat up, he is never sick. So to adopt Bond’s attitude toward life, an intelligent mind, healthy body and feelings under control are of upmost importance.

Cotto: If one wishes to live like Bond, can this be done on a fairly standard budget?

Kyriazi: We have to remember that Bond is a civil servant, a working man, but he surely has his finances under control. To get the most bang for our bucks, Q Branch provides us with two powerful “gadgets“. They are the calendar and the calculator.

The calendar is used to set a date for achieving our goals. The calculator is used to make a budget,so that we how the cost of our upcoming goals. And it usually turns out that they are not as expensive than we imagined. By judicially choosing what we want to spend our money on, we can accomplish great things.

Three of the 21 Rules of the James Bond Lifestyle are; # 1- I never run out of cash. # 7 - I carry enough cash and credit to operate efficiently. # 10 - I’m not afraid to spend money on what I want.

So yes, we can accomplish our goals on a ‘standard budget’, but we need to know exactly what we want for ourselves and an exact plan on how to get it.

Cotto: How important is personal attire? Is it pretty far down the list, or an essential element of self-definition?

Kyriazi: It is essential to upgrade our clothing to at least staying away from T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes as our daily attire.

Stay away from loose and baggy clothes. Well fitting clothes that are comfortable give the wearer subconscious power. This is especially important when we are first starting out to reinvent ourselves.

The new Bond movie Skyfall is all about Bond’s “resurrection” as he puts it. Upgraded clothes, cash in our money clips and a plan of action, will give our “resurrection” some empowerment.

In he ‘50s when Frank Sinatra was trying to make a comeback he said, “I changed my agent, my manger, my recording company, my clothes and got back to work.” Notice that “clothes” was in that list, along with that all important word “work”.

Cotto: Would Bond take something along the lines of a career setback in stride, or quite seriously? Can we learn from his example?

Kyriazi: In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when Bond thought that he was fired, he first got distressed when clearing out his desk, then took it in stride with a toast to the picture of the Queen on his wall, saying, “Sorry Ma’am.” But we know for sure that Bond will snap into action and find another job, probably as a mercenary. However, in Bond’s case, his secretary, Miss Moneypenny, saved the day and Bond kept his job.

When we have a setback, we have to ask ourselves, “What would James Bond do?” and the proper answer will come back: He’d focus, make a plan and take immediate action.

Source: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/life-stories/2012/aug/31/asking-paul-kyriazi-can-we-really-live-james-bond/#ixzz2htKDyCwS