Guest blogger: Jim Della-Giacoma is an Associate Director at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

Having lunch in Singapore recently, an Asian acquaintance who had just visited Dili for the first time said he came home feeling the capital of Timor-Leste was more like a Portuguese town than an Asian one. Having been back and forth to Dili over the last 14 years in many of its dramatic seasons, I readily disagreed.

Timor-Leste today is courting new friends in Asia rather than flattering old ones in Europe. A week driving the dusty and bustling streets left me feeling that the former Portuguese colony was increasingly integrating itself into Asia as it acquired all the sights, sounds, and smells of the region’s great cities.

In what could have been an apt description for a series of UN missions or its ubiquitous white vehicles with black logos, Alfred Russel Wallace observed in 1861 that, in Dili, 'officials in black and white European costume, and officers in gorgeous uniforms abound in a degree quite disproportionate to the size or appearance of the place'. However, with talk of downsizing the UN mission, the day could soon come when Chinese construction workers outnumber international civil servants.

1. Portugese embassy, Dili

The site for the future Portuguese embassy (photo 1, above) has been growing weeds for years, while the new Chinese embassy (photo 2) rises on the sea front framed by bamboo scaffolding. Within a kilometre, the new Chinese-built foreign ministry (photo 3) and soon to be completed Presidential Palace (photo 4) is testimony to Beijing’s growing influence. As are the two Type 62 Shanghai Class patrol boats and heavy fuel oil plant also coming Timor’s way from Chinese factories.

2. Chinese embassy, Dili

More...

Attending the annual Middle Eastern Studies Association meeting in Washington last week, it was hard not to be struck by the lively debate about any number of topics concerning a region which continues to be a central focus for US policy planners. 

The depth of academic expertise on show was very impressive, although the view that it has not been well utilized in the policy debate in the past was evidenced by the first night’s panel discussion. The feeling that serious scholarly understanding of complex regional issues that were deeply influenced by culture, religion and history had been largely ignored in the policy debate was a main concern. But there was also acknowledgement that some areas of the scholarly community had not kept up with areas that were of prime interest to policy professionals.

Naturally, the recent US election was an area of keen discussion outside the presentations, and it was fair to say that most people felt that, while the new administration was going top face a complex regional picture, their relative lack of ideological rigidity meant there was an opportunity for subject matter expertise to be used to a greater degree than under the current administration. But the conference provided few answers on the hard regional issues: Gulf states want the US to do something about what they see as Iranian expansionism but can’t articulate what the ‘something’ is; concerns are voiced about Hizbullah’s political strength without any ideas for diluting it. The list goes on.

Still, it wasn't all heavy Middle East policy discussion. There was time for some mildly amusing observations, such as the programing of presentations from the Association for Israel Studies and the Institute for Palestine Studies at the same time in adjoining rooms separated by a ‘temporary’ partition (I will remain silent on the respective attendances). Some also questioned the utility of a paper entitled ‘The Economy of Queer Sex in Francophone Maghrebian Literature as a Response to Western Identity Politics’.

A number of media outlets interviewed people trapped inside last week's Mumbai siege to get their perspective on breaking events. ABC Radio National's flagship current affairs program, AM, was among them, with anchor Tony Eastley interviewing Australian businessman Garrick Harvison, who was hiding in the Oberoi Hotel.

My colleague Rory Medcalf was quite right to point to the possibility that the terrorists, or their sympathisers in Pakistan, were monitoring the international media to gather intelligence about the siege. In that context, we must surely ask whether it was responsible for Eastley to pursue this line of questioning with Harvison:

TONY EASTLEY: When I look at a picture of the Oberoi Hotel and we see them on our television sets here, from the outside the building looks quite calm at the moment. Are you high up in the Oberoi? What level are you on?

 Guest blogger: Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the ADB Institute, Tokyo.

Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has written a useful summary of developments in the financial crisis for the New York Review of Books. Looking at immediate problems, Krugman highlights the distinction between, first, the need to tackle the credit squeeze choking global financial systems, and second, the broader macroeconomic challenge of propping up overall spending. Krugman argues that governments will need to pump out a lot more money to solve both problems. 

The broad line of Krugman's arguments are supported by many other economic commentators. The policy debate in northern hemisphere countries is therefore focused on two key questions: how much more money is needed, and how should it be spent? More...

As Mumbai’s full carnage emerges, some disturbing implications are also becoming clear. Contrary to earlier impressions, there is growing evidence to suggest a critical external element to this terrorism.

Perhaps some attackers were Indian nationals, as the early claim of responsibility by a supposedly homegrown militant group would suggest. They knew Mumbai well. But their seaborne arrival, their languages and vocabulary, and a reported confession all suggest the operation was launched from abroad, perhaps Karachi.

Their preparation, co-ordination and combat training underline that this was much more than a ragtag group of alienated Indian Muslim youth. And the targeting of Americans, British and Israelis bears the stamp of al Qaeda, whether through command or inspiration.

In short, the view that this was al Qaeda’s first direct strike on India must be taken seriously. More...

An American civics lesson, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:

Here we go. The blood is still flowing in Mumbai and the media is already jumping on the blame-DFAT bandwagon. Apparently — amidst the ongoing mayhem and carnage — Australian consular officials haven't been able to sort out the mess. What on earth the Australian Government is meant to do on top of existing efforts is a little unclear.

From the first report I read, a DFAT crisis line was already operational and the High Commissioner, who was in the area by chance, has now visited all the local hospitals, searching for Australians. But apparently anything short of rolling the ADF out across Mumbai seems like it will fall short of expectations. Surely there is enough gore to go around for the pack to lay off this hackneyed topic until there is an actual story to report.

•  The scale of India's terrorism problem is far beyond what the West faces, yet Indians show tremendous resilience.
• A photo of President Bush congratulating strident Bush critic Paul Krugman on his Nobel prize has inspired a caption contest. The winner will be judged by...Paul Krugman.
• Andrew Davies from ASPI shot me an email to say that, although Springsteen did write good recession songs, Woody Guthrie had the best one.
• Typealyzer analyses blog personalities. The Interpreter, it seems, is 'great at finding subtle connections between things and imagin(ing) far-reaching implications', but 'might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive'.  
• According to this blog, 'the only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II'. On the upside, the US government should get a big chunk of its money back.

So Indonesia has requested budget assistance from Australia. Whatever we might provide will be relatively small compared with the magnitude of the problem, so we have a choice: to go bilaterally and put our own 'label' on what will inevitably be seen as a modest amount, or join a larger group in the hope of leveraging our funds by influencing others to contribute more.

This is not a clear-cut choice, but here's an additional element favouring the second option. If offering some funding though the regional swap arrangements (the Chiang Mai Initiative) encourages China and Japan to put just a tiny part of their huge foreign exchange reserves into this support framework, we might give our money some substantial leverage and, as well, provide a demonstration of our interest in being treated as a serious regional partner.

Of course, for the Chiang Mai Initiative to be a viable assistance framework, it needs to shed the IMF conditionality that makes it politically unacceptable to those countries which need it most. See my new Lowy Institute Analysis paper for more.

Ben Davis writes: 

Just read Fergus Hanson's piece on Indonesia's response to Obama's election, and I must say the print media also seems to be quite the Obama fan. Calling him the 'anak Menteng' ('Menteng kid'), his time in Indonesia has encouraged a sense of fondness and hope among the majority of Indonesians. Check out this Facebook group, for example.

The academic community is interpreting Obama's win as hope for the future — possibly an improved US-Indonesian relationship. But interestingly, Obama's victory has also been an inspiration for the youth of Indonesia and the 'orang kecil' (lit. 'little people'; ordinary people).

On the funnier side, the Indonesian print media widely reported that Obama was keen to return to Indonesia and that he missed some Indonesian favourites; nasi goreng, rambutan and Bakso. Imagine the excitement if Obama was to speak bahasa in Jakarta next year just as Rudd spoke Mandarin when he was in China?

Overnight, the Iraqi parliament officially ended, for all intents and purposes, America’s war in Iraq (though not necessarily Iraq’s war in Iraq) when it ratified Iraq’s security agreement with the US (full and final text here). 

It doesn’t mean the fighting will end, or that US troops will leave tomorrow, and apparently there is still some question about how the agreement is being interpreted by the two sides. Nevertheless, the withdrawal of US combat troops is now largely a technical matter rather than a political one. And all this has happened without much fanfare on the American side – certainly no carrier landings by erstwhile national guard pilots or ‘mission accomplished’ bunting (there is a separate question about the future of US bases in Iraq but I will leave that for someone else to muse over).

There will be a referendum on the agreement in the middle of next year. If the agreement is rejected it would bring forward the deadline for withdrawal by 18 months (under the provision that the Iraqi Government would need to give the US a year’s notice of any request to leave). But by that stage I am not sure it would matter. 

According to the agreement, US forces are required to leave Iraq by 31 December 2011. More significantly, however, US combat forces are required to withdraw from all Iraqi ‘cities, villages and localities’ by 30 June 2009, a bit over six months from now. I am no military expert but, presumably, a significant number of the troops hitherto needed to conduct patrols and so on will now no longer be required and can be gradually withdrawn, leaving a smaller (but still significant) core force to conduct training, provide rapid reaction and hunt remnants of al Qaeda, among other things.

It is true there are caveats to the agreement, and some may argue that events could still conspire keep the US in Iraq for longer. But I don’t think so. America’s adversaries in Iraq either have no interest in prolonging the US presence by ramping up the conflict again (eg. Iran, Syria, Muqtadr al-Sadr) or lack the means to do so (al Qaeda). 

Against this background, Obama’s campaign promise of a 16-month withdrawal of combat forces, give or take a few months, is looking less like wishful thinking and more like the emerging consensus. It is also built upon a significant shift in the Bush Administration’s approach to Iraq over the last year and a half, for which it will no doubt receive little credit, beyond perhaps the implicit acknowledgement contained in Obama’s apparent decision to retain Robert Gates as his Secretary of Defence.

Beyond this I can offer no more useful analysis than the words of Jim Morrison in his epic song, ‘The end’: More...

Guest blogger: Jim Della-Giacoma is an Associate Director at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

Last week, Dili was a busy place. While not changing at the speed of Jakarta, where a new shopping mall sprouts between my annual visits, the Timor-Leste capital is not the sleepy backwater I used to know.

It keeps evolving in surprising ways. It used to be a '10-minute town', defined by the time it took to drive from anyone place to another. But as I went about my business driving a local rental car (found on a blog) I started to allocate 15-20 minutes for every journey, particularly during rush hour.

The fact that Dili does indeed have a rush hour demonstrates that its narrow and dusty roads are being filled by a level of unprecedented economic activity – not all of it driven by international largesse. The seaside capital has traffic lights, too, and when they are working I can testify that they are obeyed, with or without a police officer present. It's a sign that would have warmed my heart in days when I traveled the post-conflict world working on democratic development and rule of law.

While my inner political economist would like to see more data and conduct deeper analysis than a week-long visit allows, I feel the story behind the traffic jams is, at its heart, a tale of two documents. First, the last UNTAET budget approved on July 2001 showed a total of USD$65 million with about $23 million for wages and salaries, $32 million for goods and services and a mere $9 million for capital expenditure.

The second came into my inbox this week. Dated 24 November, the Government of Timor-Leste press release announced the Council of Ministers had approved the draft law on the State General Budget for 2009. The Government has announced it intends to allocate about USD$93 million for salaries and wages, $248m for goods and services, $35m for minor capital, $205m for capital development, and $95m for public transfers (aka handouts?). For a small country with high unemployment, this spells a lot of jobs.

The controversy still rages after three judges of the Timor-Leste Appeals Court ruled against the government in a case brought by the opposition FRETILIN party that called into question the constitutionality of the decision to exceed by $180 million the 'sustainable income' or allowable drawdown on the Petroleum Fund. The 'aid watch' group Lao Hamutuk has a comprehensive but succinct summary of the case here. Whatever the outcome of this legal, political, and fiscal battle, these days the Government of Timor-Leste seems to be in good global company when it comes to stimulating economic growth through government spending.

Photo, of a Pantai Kelapa sunrise, by the author.

Unfortunately, the Lowy Institute's recording technology failed us yesterday, so I cannot direct you to an mp3 of Professor Harry Harding's (George Washington University) excellent Wednesday Lowy Lunch address on America's China policy.

But you can listen to the interview I conducted with Professor Harding after his speech. We discussed the four major themes of US China policy, and why they will endure under the Obama Administration. Professor Harding also talks about why he worries more about US Asia policy than he does about its China policy.

I was in Indonesia recently and, in between reading Interpreter posts on corruption, I got to experience it first hand, as my taxi driver got pulled over by police road blocks for a compulsory Rp20,000 contribution to their pay cheques (progressively levied, as I discovered when I did the trip alone on a motorbike).

But other interesting things happened during the stay. While I was in Yogyakarta, the revered Sultan announced his candidacy for the Presidential election — which plenty of people seemed to think was fantastic news. The Bali bombers were also executed and it was quite remarkable to see the economic devastation that a blanket Australian travel warning can wreak.

But perhaps most interesting to me was the response to the election of Barack Obama. More...

The violence in Mumbai is reportedly not over, with the death toll now passing 100 and some of the assailants holding hostages and under siege. The chief questions now are: who is responsible and what do they want?

This warning of an impending assault on Mumbai, issued by the Indian Mujahideen earlier this year, adds to the theory that this essentially home-grown Indian terrorist organisation or one of its offshoots is behind the attacks. Meanwhile Foreign Policy’s Passport blog has this speculation about Pakistan’s ISI. Certainly not a possibility to be dismissed, but a dangerous conclusion for an Indian government to leap to.

But a few other puzzles remain. More...

A new day has begun in shattered Mumbai. Despite thousands of media reports,  it remains hard to get a clear picture of the many-pronged terror attacks that have shaken the world’s maximum city and reportedly left at least 80 dead and hundreds injured.

So the following thoughts on what these atrocities mean should be taken as very preliminary indeed:

The fact that perhaps as many as nine locations were struck simultaneously underscores that co-ordination is now the norm in terrorism on Indian soil. This compounds the difficulties for emergency response: one of the attacks was even apparently on one of the hospitals to which casualties would have been taken. And the everyday crowding and chaos of Indian urban life makes this country unusually vulnerable to terrorist tactics.

Even if the reports that the terrorists were seeking out American and British nationals turn out to be false, this violence was disproportionately aimed at foreign visitors and at India’s cosmopolitan elite More...

Over at his Meganomics blog, political reporter George Megalogenis argues that economic downturns produce the best music, and he calls for nominations for the best recession songs.

I'll give an honourable mention to the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush anti-Thatcher weepie, Don't Give Up, but my vote goes to Springsteen's The River:

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company
But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don't remember
Mary acts like she don't care

Full lyrics here.

Guest blogger: Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the ADB Institute, Tokyo.

Stephen Grenville suggests that Australia should aim for an 'EAS plus G20' grouping to bolster Australia's role in regional diplomacy in the Asian region. This may indeed be the best way to go. However we need to bear in mind that these discussions about 'regional architecture' are very difficult for at least four reasons.

First, there is a formidable array of domestic lobbies in every country bent on trumpeting both their domestic and international importance.  Second, the regional architecture is already byzantine. Third, every country tends to promote its own interests with but limited attention to the common interest. And fourth, there is a wide gap in attitudes and approaches between rich countries and poor countries.

The last issue — the gap in attitudes between rich and poor countries — is something that Australian policy-makers need to consider carefully. More...

After visiting 13 countries Richard Woolcott has discovered there is 'no appetite' for a new Asian regional body to discuss political and strategic issues at heads of government level.

That seems to leave him with the option of tweaking an existing body. In a speech at the Lowy Institute in July, Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, seemed to foreshadow this possibility. He said:

There could be a new piece of architecture, as ASEAN and APEC once were. Or it could evolve and emerge from and through the existing architecture….As currently configured, none of the current architecture is comprehensive in membership, scope or purpose. India is not a part of APEC. The United States is not part of the East Asia Summit.

Indeed, Mr Woolcott has said he is now looking 'at adapting either APEC or the East Asia Summit or an existing organisation in a way which can achieve the objective.' But at a time when APEC is being sidelined or diminished how will this impact Woolcott's efforts More...

Yesterday’s Financial Times has a long piece pointing out that this has been a particularly bad year for economic forecasters. While I enjoyed the story, the only news here is that forecasting failures are still news. As Tim Harford noted in the same newspaper back in August, people often chuckle about the (lack of) forecasting skills of economists, but once the sniggers are over, they are back asking for more forecasts.

So why do people continue to pay so much attention to economic forecasts, despite repeated evidence that the forecasters will get their numbers wrong? Doesn’t a record of continuous forecasting failure mean that the whole process has no real value? I think one reasonable defence of this particular black art (aside from the pecuniary one that goes, ‘they keep paying me to do it and who am I to turn down good money?’) is that the real value of forecasting exercises is to be found in the overall analysis and the discussion of risks that accompany the projections, rather than the projections themselves. 

If so, why not skip the numerical forecasts altogether, and stick to some broad, descriptive scenarios? Well, at a practical level, its actually pretty difficult to talk about what you think is going on in an economy without throwing at least a few numbers around (if you say that you think growth is going to slow by a lot, for example, the immediate question that comes back is, 'how much is a lot?').

Also, doing the numbers should serve as a consistency check to make sure that those interesting stories you are telling about the world actually add up.

Finally, I should emphasise that failure to forecast is not just a shortcoming of economists. As Sam commented back in December last year, it turns out that most experts just aren’t that good at prediction.

Towards the end of last year, The Interpreter hosted a series of posts on the topic of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). Norway’s Government Pension Fund – Global, the world’s second largest SWF, has just reported that it has suffered its biggest quarterly decline since the fund’s inception in 1996. 

In this context, Brad Setser has a thoughtful post up on his very useful blog at the Council For Foreign Relation’s Center for Geoeconomic Studies. In line with the Norwegian results, Setser notes that the financial crisis is likely to have produced a significant decline in the value of assets managed by SWFs.

He then suggests four reasons to believe that ‘the sovereign wealth fund moment has passed — at least for the time being’. These are: the poor performance of the markets that SWFs were established in to invest in; the impact of lower oil prices on the flow of funds into some SWFs; the pressure for SWFs to use their resources to fund domestic bailouts; and finally, the way in which the crisis has emphasized the relative attractiveness of more traditional – and more liquid – foreign exchange reserves. 

For my part, I have argued for a while that some of the focus on SWFs was a bit misplaced, since the rise (and if Setser is right, fall) of SWFs is just one part of a bigger story. That story is the growing role of state-controlled capital flows in the world economy, regardless of whether this comes in the form of investments by SWFs, state-owned enterprises, state-owned banks or foreign exchange reserves. That story still has a fair way to run.

• Visit New Mandala and Bangkok Pundit for blog coverage of the violence in Bangkok.
• Eighteen thousand party officials have fled China with misappropriated money since the mid 1990s.
• I said yesterday that it would be interesting to see an Australian equivalent to the NIC Global Trends paper, but Global Dashboard argues we're suffering from analysis overload.
• Gideon Rachman confidently predicts the ruination of the G8. Why? Because next year, Berlusconi's going to be in charge, that's why.
• Foreign Policy has five physics lessons for Barack Obama. My favourite: 'Explain to the public that putting humans in space is not only very dangerous; it usually slows the advance of science.'
• Further to Allan Gyngell's post bemoaning the crapiness of many Australian government websites, Dan Flitton, diplomatic editor at The Age, reminds me of his piece from March about how US spy agencies are using their websites to recruit the very young.

Another week, another bailout. 

Citigroup has become the latest US financial institution to benefit from US taxpayer support. After the so-called megabank incurred more than US$65 billion in losses, write-downs for troubled assets and charges to account for future losses, Washington agreed to back US$306 billion of loans and securities as well as directly invest US$20 billion in Citigroup. 

This comes on top of some US$25 billion already pledged by the US Treasury. With more than US$2 trillion in assets and operations in more than 100 countries, Citigroup is one more institution that has been deemed too big to fail. A key lesson for financial institutions from the current crisis is that bigger is better: the bigger you are, the more you can rely on a government bailout when things go wrong.

What went wrong with Citigroup?  This NY Times piece points to the risks created by Citigroup’s holdings of US$43 billion of mortgage-related assets. Brad de Long thinks the NY Times account fails to explain fully why US$43 billion of dodgy assets ended up destroying US$224 billion of value, and provides an explanation of his own. John Hempton at Bronte Capital provides an alternative answer.

Meanwhile, the verdict is in on the details of the bailout, and it is far from good. As this round-up of posts from the excellent Economists View makes clear, this is certainly not a good deal for the increasingly put-upon US taxpayer. So how come the taxpayer is getting stiffed? Perhaps it has something to do with Citigroup’s long-running success in lobbying the US government. As this blog post at the Wall Street Journal points out, Washington lobbying seems to be one investment on which Citigroup is still making a good return.

Photo by Flickr user H2S04, used under a Creative Commons license.

John Hannoush writes:

I greatly appreciate the material on the NIC estimate. Graeme Dobell's interesting back comparison seem to suggest that forward looking stuff  is a linear (or some other functional) projection of the present.
 
One question: the competitive advantage of governments is presumably the superior access to intelligence material and what other countries are thinking. But this kind of long-term analysis would not benefit as much from such an advantage — and the sources they use are presumably largely public. So why should people be excited about it, and why should we be so keen to have Australian agencies publish thieir own speculations? 

In my experience of the intelligence world, John is absolutely right. When it comes to making long-term strategic assessments, secret intelligence is rarely more valuable or useful than publicly available sources. But there remains in our intelligence community and in government a tendency to believe that information gathered secretly is inherently more valuable than that which comes from open sources. More...

As we ponder the first year of the Rudd Government, it is worth reflecting on how much better Prime Minister Rudd and his government have performed than their democratic peers in East Asia. Today’s Australian reports that Rudd and the Labor Party are still very popular and would easily win an election if one were called today.

Yet, to our north, democratically elected governments and leaders are suffering from bad and declining popularity. East Asia’s democracies from Taiwan and Japan to Malaysia to Thailand, with the Philippines and South Korea in the middle, are all discontented. Only President SBY in Indonesia looks relatively comfortable in the run-up to next year’s elections, and even he may face a credible threat from Megawati. More...

Amid a strong consensus that the Iraq war was a mistake, it is refreshing to see the case in favour of the war made in such dispassionate terms as these.

University of Chicago professor Eric Posner does not mount an ideological or moral argument for the war, but a utilitarian one, using the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index to show that by many metrics, life has improved considerably for Iraqis since Saddam was overthrown. Posner does not ignore the human costs of the war, but argues that if Saddam had been allowed to stay in power, many more Iraqis would have died.

The post is worth reading in full. I would make a few objections:

• Posner adopts a consequentialist ethic, which is to say that he judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by its consequences rather than by whether it is intrinsically good or bad. Needless to say, this leads us down some uncomfortable moral alleys: is it right to murder one person to save ten more?
• Posner does not consider the opportunity cost of the war. What else might have been done with the resources used in fighting it? (Likely US$1-2 trillion.)
• Posner compares the costs of the war with the likely costs of a continued sanctions regime. He does not allow for the possibility that there were other options available to the US than those two. For me, Michael Walzer presented the best case for a third way.

(I note the first comment made in response to Posner's post, suggesting Posner is not being entirely serious with his argument. Useful exercise, though.)

• Lowy Institute visiting fellow Hugh White made an appearance on episode 2 of the ABC documentary The Howard Years last night, discussing the 1999 Timor operation. Here's a paper Hugh wrote earlier this year with more detail on the strategic decision-making process.
• Europeana is a huge new digital library of Europe's cultural and intellectual heritage. The website opened recently and crashed soon after, due to overwhelming demand.
• Obama as kitsch: '...kitsch is the willed absence of doubt, it acts as a neatly closed emotional system, impervious to skepticism and hostile to introspection...'
• Further indications that the Afghan surge will be bigger than previously thought.
• Some cool footage, taken from a police car, of a meteor strike in Canada.

Guest blogger: Andrew Selth, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, and author of  Burma and the Threat of Invasion: Regime Fantasy or Strategic Reality?

Burma’s opposition movement has always been strong, but never united. After 20 years of struggle, with no sign that the military government is weakening, the fissures in the movement seem to be more pronounced and the divisions more obvious. This could have far-reaching consequences.

Burmese politics has long been known for its fissiparous tendencies. Institutional structures and processes have been weak. Ideological, ethnic and religious loyalties have been strong. Parties and pressure groups have formed around key personalities, rather than durable policy platforms. Patron-client relationships have been the norm, including in the armed forces. And power has been seen as an absolute, making political contests into zero sum games. All this has led to factionalism and instability. Such traits can also be found in the opposition movement. More...

Showpiece green building projects like the Bahrain World Trade Center (pictured), with inbuilt wind power generation, are pretty impressive to look at.

But the big gains in greenhouse emission reductions are likely to come from less spectacular technical innovation and policy change, as this report from the American Physical Society lays out. The good news is that a lot of the necessary technology already exists, and that a focus on efficiency has worked before. (H/t Fallows.)

Photo by Flickr user clearbrian, used under a Creative Commons license.

The US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World is available now on the web. It’s well worth your attention: a thought-provoking, judicious and geographically and thematically sweeping account of how the world may change between now and 2025. It doesn’t try to predict the future but to identify the trends and drivers that will shape it. 

It’s not just the content that is impressive but the methodology: in contrast to the conventional public view of the intelligence agencies’ obsession with secrecy, the NIC consulted very widely in the report’s preparation and the final product was shaped, as it acknowledges, by a wide range of discussions and debate with outsiders (including some of us at the Lowy Institute).  It shows the American intelligence community at its best.

Australian agencies like ONA and DIO have been good at staying in touch with outside views, but are much less comfortable about contributing to the public debate. There are some sound reasons for this – including the resource costs of re-writing classified material — but Global Trends 2025 shows how usefully the analytical agencies can strengthen the foundations for a sounder, more balanced, discussion about the national future. 

The time has come for more of it. There is no need to go as far as the FOI – the aptly-named Swedish defence research institute, which makes all its reports available to the public — but we have a long way to go before that’s anywhere near in prospect.

My colleague, Rory Medcalf,  has been urging an Australian version of the 2025 report. The nearest Australia has come to this was an excellent speech to ASPI in September by ONA’s Director General, Peter Varghese, looking at the Australian strategic environment to 2030, available on ONA's website. 

By the way, Sam, does ONA have the most boring Australian government website? It’s a tightly-fought competition, I know, but surely one The Interpreter would find worth running. (Ed. note: Interesting challenge, Allan. The DFAT site is pretty grim too, and what about the Department of Education? That one gets extra points for irony, as standing out from its grim utilitarianism is a brightly coloured button for the 'Digital education revolution'! But over to you, readers. Give us your nominations via the Email the Editor button below.)

There is a view that the creation of the G20 leaders meeting will diminish the role of APEC. There will be some resistance to this idea among Canberra’s long-standing APEC aficionados, but it might not work out too badly for Australia. Let’s leave to another day the debate about whether APEC has become a bloated, directionless and messy hodge-podge of disparate countries in search of something useful to do, and look at how this latest development might be turned to our advantage.

First, the main plus for APEC was the Leaders Meeting, and G20 could replace this, for Australia, without loss.

But what about the benefits of keeping the US engaged in Asia? If the East Asia Summit could become the principal regional debating ground. Its 17 members include six G20 members, so this could be the venue where Asian positions are sorted out (no easy task, but well worth taking as far as it will go), with the distilled position then being carried to G20. G20, in turn, is much better linked into the still-evolving global rule-setting framework than APEC: whatever new rules come out of the current financial crisis, they will be developed in bodies such as the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Forum, which link more logically to G20 than to APEC.

This strong presence in G20 – almost one third of the members – gives the EAS a head-start over the slightly smaller Asian groups (ASEAN and ASEAN+3 include only four G20 members) which at present are seen by most of the region as the principal vehicles for regional cooperation. It would take some slick diplomatic work on Australia’s part to shift the action to EAS, but the logic of the EAS plus G20 is compelling.

Pretty good speech from the Prime Minister last night on the Asia Pacific and Australian foreign policy. Yes, he lapsed into Rudd-speak occasionally in the Q&A ('...drawing the threads together of our pan regional cooperation in order to encourage and institutionalise the habits of cooperation across the policy spheres') but the speech itself was commendably jargon-lite and contained some pretty good jokes. Score one for Annabel Crabb?

There was even some detail about Rudd's Asia Pacific Community initiative. I may have missed this previously, but Rudd's insistence that ASEAN should be 'at the core' of the APC seemed new to me, and implied that ASEAN's role would be subsumed by the APC. Rudd also suggested the APC could take over the functions of APEC, though he was quick to say such decisions would be a matter for 'our friends and partners in the region'.

Rudd was at pains to say that, when it came to the APC, his Government was listening, not dictating. Perhaps the aim is to create a sense of regional ownership when it eventually comes time to propose a specific structure.

Oh, and Mr Rudd also promised a National Security Statement 'soon', which I take to mean this parliamentary year. That gives him until 4 December to make an announcement. The defence white paper, meanwhile, will now come out 'in the first half' of next year.

Courtesy of Newstopia, an interview with the Dalai Lama. Who knew he was such a Scorsese fan? Have a good weekend.

Yesterday, the Lowy Institute released a report on the effects of climate change on malaria and dengue to the north and in the north of Australia. The nub of the paper is that climate change will make a bad dengue and malaria story worse.

I wish we had released it today, so we could have incorporated this good news story on the war against mosquito-borne diseases. The US Army is full engaged in this particular war and has come up with what sounds like a promising weapon. While climate change may be good news for disease-carrying mosquitoes in maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands and northern Australia, help is at hand.

Photo by Flickr user t_buchtele, used under a Creative Commons license.

The ABC reports this morning that, due to an industrial dispute in Tahiti, the PM has been forced to take the long way to Peru for the APEC Conference. And I mean long — a 32 hour journey, 28 of them in the air. Prime Ministers don't fly commercial anymore, but in this case, perhaps he should have. Because as Crikey reminded us last year, the 737 business jets the Air Force uses for these trips are not fitted with beds.

I just spoke with Graeme Dobell, who has flown on one of these planes. He reckons they're pretty comfortable, and a bed can be fashioned out of the reclining seats near the front. But after 32 hours, no reclining seat is going to be all that comfortable, and I'm not sure even our workaholic PM is going to come away from this flight in the best possible shape to serve Australia's interests. And that's not even to mention his staff. Time to upgrade, I think.

Jon writes in, and my comment (with bonus South Park clip!) follows:

First up, the usual courtesies about being a long time reader etc. of the site. Its always a great way to start the morning with a bit of international security and political thinking. It gets the blood pumping, you know?
 
Anyway. in regards to your post yesterday on the 'newly evinced racism' of al Qaeda, I'd firstly agree with you that suddenly having their racist sensibilities thrown open for all to see isn't really going to hurt their case all that much. But I'm not sure if mocking them is really going to be the most effective route. More...