Latest News Clips 2017.08.28

                      

1.      Why Afghanistan’s War Defies Solutions

The New York Times   AUG. 24, 2017

         

Boys in Kabul, the Afghan capital, last year. Afghanistan’s combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be beyond outside resolution. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The generals publicly supported their intervention in Afghanistan, but in private they worried they were trapped. After 16 years, they feared they had produced “a recipe for endless war,” according to an American ambassador who met with them. But the generals, the ambassador said, “felt there was no alternative, no realistic alternative” than to continue fighting a doomed mission.

Those generals were Pakistani. Their meetings with the ambassador, Tom Simons, took place in 1996. Mr. Simons recounted the experience to the journalist Steve Coll in 2002, one year into an American mission in Afghanistan that has now also lasted 16, and which President Trump announced on Monday that his administration would extend.

There is a reason that Afghanistan’s conflict, then and now, so defies solutions.

Its combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution.

“I’m not saying that state formation will never work in Afghanistan, but externally building, as we’re trying to do it, cannot work,” said Romain Malejacq, a political scientist at the Center for International Conflict Analysis and Management in the Netherlands.

American-led efforts, despite some successes, have ended up reinforcing and accelerating the broader cycles of violence and fragmentation that have been growing since the state’s collapse in the early 1990s.

 “The more we go on, the more fragmented it gets,” Professor Malejacq said. “I’m getting more and more pessimistic. I don’t really know how Afghanistan is going to get out of it, to be truly honest.”

The Peace-Building Paradox

There is a seemingly unresolvable contradiction at the heart of any Afghanistan strategy.

Two conditions are necessary for any agenda: ending the fighting and rebuilding the state, if only incrementally. Peace and governance would reinforce one another, creating space for other goals like rooting out terrorists or halting the exodus of refugees.

But scholars increasingly believe that when a state has failed as utterly as Afghanistan’s, improving either one can end up setting back the other.

Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College political scientist, documented this dynamic in his study of Somalia, a case that experts often compare to Afghanistan.

Somalis had adapted to their country’s disintegration, he found, by setting up local, informal institutions of their own — often under what might be called warlords. These systems were rife with corruption and injustice, but they produced something like relative peace.

But the more these groups grew, the greater the threat they posed to the central government, whose absence they thrived in. Rebuilding the Somali state became what Professor Menkhaus called “a conflict-producing exercise.”

Dipali Mukhopadhyay, a Columbia University political scientist, said the United States had tried to work both sides of this equation, apparently never realizing that “there’s actually a conflict between those two missions.”

The United States at times aided state building, reasoning that Afghan institutions could impose a more sustainable peace, although more slowly.

But this put the state at odds with local warlords and armed groups who had risen in its absence. Often, this increased conflict and deepened insecurity.

Other times, the United States aided peace building, working through local warlords who could fight the Taliban and impose order, even if just one village at a time.

In the short term, it worked. But in the long term, a 2016 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found, this strategy undermined the government, alienated Afghans and further pushed Afghanistan into a collection of fiefs run by strongmen whose interests cut against American aims.

Even the Afghan government has worked through local militias and warlords whose existence undermines its authority. With no other options, Professor Mukhopadhyay said, “that’s kind of the way the game is played.”

2.      Partition 70 years on: The turmoil, trauma - and legacy

BBC    27 July 2017

 

As India and Pakistan celebrate 70 years of independence, Andrew Whitehead looks at the lasting legacy of the Partition of British India, and the turmoil and trauma which marred the birth of the two nations.

t's about 700km (430 miles) from Delhi to Islamabad - less than the distance between London and Geneva. A short hop in aviation terms.

But you can't fly non-stop from the Indian capital to the Pakistani capital. There are no direct flights at all. It is only one of the legacies of seven decades of mutual suspicion and tension.

Take another example: cricket.

India and Pakistan played each other a few weeks ago in the final of the Champions' Trophy. Both countries are cricket crazy.

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Partition of India in August 1947

• Perhaps the biggest movement of people in history, outside war and famine.
• Two newly-independent states were created - India and Pakistan.
• About 12 million people became refugees. Between half a million and a million people were killed in religious violence.
• Tens of thousands of women were abducted.
• This article is the first in a BBC series looking at Partition 70 years on.

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However, the game was played not in South Asia, but in London. India and Pakistan don't play cricket in each other's countries any more, although they have met in one-day matches around the world, including in countries in their region like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

But it is almost 10 years since they faced each other on South Asian soil in a Test match. Despite a lot of shared culture and history, they are not simply rivals, but more like enemies.

In the 70 years since India and Pakistan gained independence, they have fought three wars. Some would say four, although when their armies last fought in 1999, there was no formal declaration of war.

The simmering tension between India and Pakistan is one of the world's most enduring geopolitical fault lines. It has prompted both countries to develop their own nuclear weapons.

So the uneasy stand-off is much more than a regional dispute: it is fraught with wider danger.

India and Pakistan gained their independence at the same moment. British rule over India, by far its biggest colony, ended on 15 August 1947.

After months of political deadlock, Britain agreed to divide the country in two.

A separate and mainly Muslim nation, Pakistan, was created to meet concerns that the large Muslim minority would be at a disadvantage in Hindu-majority India.

This involved partitioning two of India's biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. The details of where the new international boundary would lie were made public only two days after independence.

Partition triggered one of the great calamities of the modern era, perhaps the biggest movement of people - outside war and famine - that the world has ever seen.

No one knows the precise numbers, but about 12 million people became refugees as they sought desperately to move from one newly independent nation to another.

3.      Can young blood really rejuvenate the old?

Research in mice seems to suggest it can

The Economist   Jul 21st 2017

THE vampire jokes write themselves. In the past few years a steady trickle of scientific papers has suggested something straight out of an airport horror novel: that the blood of young animals, infused into the old, has rejuvenating effects. Scientists are excited enough that at least two clinical trials are currently running in humans. But is it true? And if it is, how does it work?

The answer to the first question seems to be a qualified yes, at least in animals. The rejuvenating effects are seen when lab mice are joined together in a rather gruesome procedure called parabiosis. That involves making cuts in the skin of two animals, then suturing them together at the site of the wound. As the cuts heal, the pair’s blood vessels will grow together and merge. The result is two animals that share a circulatory system, with both hearts pumping both sets of blood around both bodies. Doing this with an old mouse and a young mouse has some spectacular effects. As with humans, old mice have a harder time healing from injuries. But link an old mouse to a young one and it becomes able to repair muscle injuries nearly as well as its younger counterpart. Similar benefits are seen in liver cells and the nervous system. And it works in reverse, too: old blood can have a decrepifying effect on the young. 

Exactly how this all works is much less clear. The best guess is that some combination of hormones, signalling factors and the like in the young blood affect the behaviour of stem cells in the old animal. Like everything else, stem cells—which are vital for healing wounds and for general maintenance—begin to fail with age. But that process seems to be reversible, with young blood restoring the cells’ ability to proliferate and mend broken tissue. Another theory is that the old animal benefits from access to the organs (kidneys, liver and so on) of its young companion. It may be that both are true: experiments in which animals are given quick transfusions, rather than being stitched together for weeks, still show benefits, though not as many as with full-on parabiosis. 

That uncertainty has not stopped people jumping into trials with humans. One company, called Alkahest, has recruited 18 people with Alzheimer's disease. It plans to give them regular blood transfusions from young donors. The trial is primarily designed to prove that the treatment is safe. But because blood transfusions are already routine, Alkahest hopes that will be easy, and plans to look for mental benefits, too. Another company, Ambrosia, has raised eyebrows by charging people $8,000 to take part in its clinical trial, which will see people over 35 receiving blood from under-25s. It is far from clear whether any of this will work (anti-ageing research is dogged by cycles of hype and disappointment). And if it does, there is already a perennial shortage of donated blood, and that is needed for surgery and medical emergencies more than for speculative anti-ageing therapies. The best-case scenario is that blood compounds do indeed turn out to be responsible for the salutary effects; scientists can identify them; and biochemists can work out a way to mass-produce them as drugs. Even then, the result would not necessarily be a life-extension potion. The hope instead is to extend “healthspan”, keeping elderly people hale and hearty for longer. Which would itself be quite something.