Apr 8th 2009 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

Most Americans like having a leader whom foreigners adore. But some wish he was feared a bit more





AFTER Barack Obama’s first long jaunt abroad as president, Americans are in two minds. Some are delighted that so many foreigners love him. Others fret, like Machiavelli, that it is often better to be feared than loved, and that the people who ought to fear America don’t take Mr Obama seriously.
Everywhere you go, optimists note, Mr Obama is more popular than his predecessor. European leaders jostle to be snapped standing next to him. Star-struck crowds strain their necks for a glimpse of his wife. At the G20 summit in London last week, the world’s rich nations rallied behind him to tackle the global financial crisis. Mr Obama is well-received even in Muslim countries such as Turkey, where George Bush would struggle to fill a single room with friendly faces. All this goodwill must be in America’s interest.

So far, the optimists form a sizeable majority. Pundits lauded Mr Obama’s performance in Europe. Public approval for his handling of foreign policy rose from 54% in February to 61% at the end of March, according to Gallup. These are impressive numbers. But the same poll found that disapproval of his handling of foreign policy had also gone up by six points, from 22% to 28%. Only the “don’t knows” declined. As Mr Obama starts to have a track record, more Americans are forming opinions about it.

It is all very well, say the sceptics, for Mr Obama to make airy promises about everyone standing together for “the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century”. But his main policy proposal towards that end—the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons—is “a dangerous fantasy”, said Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, in an online chat with readers of Politico, a newspaper.

On April 5th in Prague, Mr Obama reiterated a campaign promise to hold talks with Russia to reduce both American and Russian nuclear stockpiles, to push for a global nuclear test ban and to set up an international nuclear fuel bank to help with peaceful nuclear-energy programmes. The same day, North Korea, which has already made at least one illegal nuclear bomb, fired a test missile over Japan.
Though the missile crashed into the sea, many Republicans think it illuminated Mr Obama’s naiveté. The problem is not the great powers with nuclear stockpiles, they say, but rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran. Hawks scoff that Mr Obama approaches such rogues with fine words but no stick. He promises that North Korea’s treaty-breaking will have consequences, but so far these have consisted mostly of ineffectual scolding.

The conservative critique of Mr Obama is that he is Jimmy Carter redux: a woolly idealist who thinks he can sweet-talk bad guys into behaving. While he pursues talks with Iran, Republicans fret, Iran’s leaders chuckle behind their beards and carry on enriching uranium. For many conservatives, the defining image of Mr Obama’s European tour was not the adoring crowds but the way America’s new president bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia. Bloggers juxtaposed his cursory nod to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth with the deep bow he gave to the dictatorial ruler of a far less reliable ally.
Such complaints reflect increasing polarisation. A Pew poll this month found that the gap between Mr Obama’s early approval ratings among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) was wider than that of any president in the past four decades. But since the number of Republicans is dwindling, that still leaves Mr Obama with a healthy level of support. For example, 81% of Americans agree with his goal of improving relations with the Muslim world, and 65% trust him to pursue that goal in a way that is “about right”, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week. (Meanwhile, roughly one American in ten still believes, incorrectly, that Mr Obama is a Muslim.)

Most Americans also reckon that, despite his touchy-feely manner, their new president is tough enough. His surprise visit to Iraq on April 7th attracted favourable headlines. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now believe the war there is winnable. Most think Mr Obama is doing a good job in Iraq, and a plurality think his plan to withdraw most American troops by the end of 2010 is about right.

Americans are less confident, however, that things are going well in Afghanistan. Many view Mr Obama’s plan to send more American forces there as a necessary evil. By 51% to 41%, they would rather concentrate on crushing the Taliban militarily than rebuilding the Afghan economy. Conservatives note that, despite Mr Obama’s popularity abroad, America’s allies are sending precious few troops to help him do this.

One or two aspects of Mr Obama’s foreign policy are unpopular at home.
The attempts of his secretary of homeland security to replace the word “terrorism” with “man-caused disasters” attracted much ridicule. More seriously, Americans disapprove of Mr Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay by 50% to 44%. But since it is unclear what he will do with the inmates—he has left open the possibility of detaining the most dangerous ones indefinitely—that could change. Even less popular is Mr Obama’s lifting of the ban on federal aid for groups, such as Planned Parenthood, which provide abortions or advise about them in foreign countries. Only 35% of Americans approve of this, with 58% opposed.
For the most part, however, Mr Obama’s foreign policies run with the grain of public opinion. For example, he proposes a slight thawing of relations with Cuba. Most Americans have long favoured full normalisation. An embargo persists only because its advocates are more passionate than its opponents, but that too is changing. Cuban-Americans who fled Fidel Castro’s dictatorship for the barrios of Miami still favour sanctions, but their children have long been less sure about them. And since the diehards seldom vote Democratic anyway, Mr Obama may see little risk in upsetting them.

There are even fewer risks in Mr Obama’s recent announcement that he may send extra troops to the Mexican border to curb violence by drug gangs. Alarmed by sensational television coverage—for example, a CNN correspondent breathlessly asked a Mexican gangster how much it would cost to assassinate someone in America—85% of Americans support this idea.

In general, Americans are comfortable with Mr Obama’s preference for talking to troublesome foreigners, rather than blacklisting them. But not if he starts talking to the guys who once sheltered al-Qaeda. An ABC poll last month found that 53% of Americans would oppose negotiating with the Taliban even if they agreed to suspend attacks on American and Afghan forces. And Americans have little faith in global talking-shops: nearly two-thirds think the UN does a poor job of tackling the problems it faces..


Source: The Economist

Apr 8th 2009 | LIMA

From The Economist print edition

A victory for the rule of law


HE WAS widely credited with having saved his country from economic collapse and a murderous guerrilla insurgency. But for Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s president from 1990 to 2000, the end always justified the often-authoritarian means. On April 7th he became the first elected Latin American president to be found guilty of human-rights abuses by a court sitting in his own country.

After a televised trial lasting 16 months, three judges unanimously found that Mr Fujimori had known about and authorised the activities of an army death-squad, known as the Colina group, which killed 15 people attending a barbecue at a house in Lima in 1991 and kidnapped and murdered ten people from a teacher-training college the following year. These killings occurred as the army was battling the Shining Path Maoist terrorist group. His knowledge of the death squad made him the “indirect perpetrator” of these killings, the court ruled. He was also found guilty of two brief kidnappings of opponents by intelligence agents. The court sentenced him to 25 years imprisonment. He immediately appealed against the verdict.
Mr Fujimori was extradited in 2007 from Chile, where he had flown from voluntary exile in Japan in the hope of launching a political comeback. He is already serving a six-year sentence on charges of abuse of power. He faces three further trials, one for misuse of public funds.
In a lengthy address to the court this month he accused his prosecutors of failing to “distinguish between hate and evidence”. But human-rights groups said that the trial had been fairly conducted. “This trial has shown that the law is the same for everyone, including ex-presidents,” said Avelino Guillén, the prosecutor.
Reuters

Fujimori and the judges he scorned
For most of his decade in office Mr Fujimori was hugely popular among Peruvians. Previously a little-known university rector, he won a presidential election in 1990, defeating Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s best-known novelist. He tamed hyperinflation, opened up the economy and launched two decades of rapid economic growth. With the help of the population, the Shining Path was crushed. When a smaller guerrilla group kidnapped 72 people attending a reception at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima in 1996, he organised a dramatic rescue after a four-month siege.
His methods were often heavy-handed. In 1992 he used troops to shut down the Congress and the courts. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence, systematically bribed potential opponents. Mr Fujimori’s regime collapsed after he illegally sought a third term, winning a rigged election in 2000. Investigators found that more than $1 billion was stolen from public funds and stashed in secret accounts during his rule.

In finding him guilty, the court rejected his claims that he was ignorant of the crimes of Mr Montesinos and of his army chief, General Nicolás Hermoza (who is also in jail). Mr Fujimori complained of a double standard, noting that more people were killed under his predecessor, Alan García, who is Peru’s current president.

As his misdeeds have been revealed, Mr Fujimori has lost public support. Polls have found that around 70% of those asked thought he was guilty. But his daughter, Keiko, is one of several contenders for the 2011 presidential election. She says that if elected she would pardon him.
Democracy has often struggled in Peru, and the country has suffered from the patchy application of the rule of law. Despite his achievements, Mr Fujimori exacerbated these flaws. Peruvians must hope that the court’s verdict marks a lasting triumph for the law.

Source: The Economist

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Apr 8th 2009 | BEIJING, SEOUL AND TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

In a world with much else on its mind, an ugly little dictatorship manages to make its presence felt





THE launch of its three-stage rocket on April 5th, North Korea declared, was an outstanding success. The experimental communications satellite sent into orbit was already beaming back revolutionary songs to a grateful nation, and rocket technicians were weeping “tears of joy”.
Yet the United States, South Korea and Japan, over whose main island the rocket flew, said that the launch was a front for testing a Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile. What is more, they claimed, it was a flop. The booster rocket appears to have dropped as it should have done into the Sea of Japan, but the rocket’s remaining stages along with its payload ditched in the Pacific some 3,200 kilometres (2,000 miles) from the launch-pad.

Missile engineers like to say that failure is more useful than success when it comes to learning about design flaws. On the only other occasion a Taepodong-2 was tested, in 2006, it crashed seconds after take-off, and a Taepodong-1 launched in 1998 got only half as far as this one. Even so, North Korea’s long-range missile programme, despite a lot of chest-puffing, is still a long way from impressing anyone.

That, in essence, is the case for the outside world to feign indifference. Don’t respond with table-thumping anger, argues the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. It would be better to channel energies towards persuading North Korea to re-engage with the six-party process meant to get it to scrap its nuclear programmes and to bring about peace on the divided Korean peninsula (the talks have been stalled since the autumn, when North Korea refused to allow its nuclear declaration to be properly verified). But such a sanguine approach comes harder to those countries, namely South Korea and Japan, which are the butt of warlike rhetoric—and the target of potential North Korean rockets.

Before the launch, the United States, South Korea and Japan each deployed destroyers to nearby waters equipped with Aegis anti-missile systems. Japan had also threatened to shoot down the rocket with land-based batteries if it seemed to endanger its territory. North Korea had said that this would be an act of war.

In the event, no debris landed on Japan, which was nevertheless angered, calling the launch “extremely regrettable”. South Korea berated North Korea for “provocative behaviour” (our picture shows South Koreans watching a rerun of the 1998 launch). Meanwhile, President Barack Obama’s administration declared that the North “cannot threaten the safety and security of other countries with impunity.”

Possibly it can, at least this time. Japan is pushing hardest for fresh United Nations sanctions on North Korea, to add to those unanimously imposed in 2006, after missiles were fired and a nuclear device exploded deep in a North Korean mountain. Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, insists that the UN take a strong stance. Japan, South Korea and America all agree that the launch breaches the 2006 UN resolutions. Yet if it offends the spirit of the sanctions, it does not appear to break the letter, which talks of a ban on “missile” launchings, not satellites.

China, for one, has so far sided with North Korea’s protestation that this was a satellite launch, pure and simple. It is clearly anxious to avoid the kind of rebuff it got in October 2006, when the North went ahead with its nuclear test even after a public Chinese warning of “serious consequences”. This time, China has appeared unruffled about the event. Even after North Korea announced its intention to launch a satellite, China entertained a visit in March by North Korea’s prime minister, Kim Yong Il, with all the usual honour-guard pomp. President Hu Jintao told Mr Kim with fine hyperbole that the two countries’ friendship had become “the common treasure of both nations.”

This time, too, North Korea has behaved with a scintilla of responsibility. It joined the Outer Space Treaty in March and alerted commercial airlines and the International Maritime Organisation to the launch schedule. With permanent seats in the UN Security Council, China and probably Russia will veto any attempts at fresh sanctions. In private, Japanese diplomats say that perhaps the best they can hope for is a resolution to enforce the earlier resolutions.

So there you have it: despite the world’s anger at North Korean provocations in 2006, the regime’s head, Kim Jong Il, and his cronies can still lay their hands on a case of cognac when they feel like one, easily obtainable like so much else from the cross-border trade with China. Meanwhile, Iranian and Syrian military types pop in and out of the country with impunity, making a mockery of attempts at preventing weapons proliferation. Iran and North Korea are known to be co-operating on their missile programmes.

The nuclear option

If strong collective action is unlikely, the question is what else might be done. Though American military spooks had for weeks been using their own satellites to follow the launch preparations at the Musudan-ri missile site near North Korea’s eastern coast, the policy of Mr Obama’s administration towards North Korea has yet to be fleshed out. Mr Kim has at least managed to add urgency to that process.

Later on the day of the launch, Mr Obama in Prague unveiled a lofty vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. On cue, Mr Kim had furnished him with a dramatic reason to pursue his dream. But the president has still to fill many of the seats in his foreign-policy and security teams. A policy on North Korea may not be unveiled for weeks or months. In the meantime American hawks are already accusing Mr Obama of succumbing to mere “hand-wringing” over the regime’s actions.

They are probably right in guessing that Mr Obama’s instincts for inclusion and dialogue will mean a form of engagement that is more akin to George Bush’s Korean policy in his second term than the confrontational approach of his first, during which North Korea became a charter member of the “axis of evil”. For a start, Mr Obama’s special representative for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, is a proponent of engagement over confrontation as the means to draw the country out of its shell.

Such an approach might irk Japan. Even if North Korea’s long-range missiles are a threat only if they break up as they fly over its islands, Japan has other grudges and worries. There is the matter of the Japanese kidnapped during the 1970s and 1980s and taken to the North to be trained as spies or language teachers. Mr Kim refuses to give more information about the fate of the abductees and, until he does, Japan will continue to play no more than a bit-part in the six-party process—even though it expects to have to fork out gazillions for North Korea’s economic development if it agrees to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Kim amid his rocket scientists

There is also the matter of North Korea’s shorter-range missiles, which are likelier to be aimed at Japan and whose development has been much more successful than intercontinental ones. The International Crisis Group in a new report quotes intelligence sources who claim that North Korea has recently assembled and deployed miniaturised nuclear warheads for its Nodong medium-range missile, which is in theory capable of reaching Japan. If true, this is alarming news, and the only surprise is that Japan has not publicised it.

A softer approach may not entirely please South Korea either. Relations between the North and South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, have been sour since the start of his administration last year when Mr Lee made generous dollops of aid conditional on progress in the six-party talks. These conditions have infuriated Mr Kim and his henchmen: Mr Lee’s appeasing predecessors were profligate with their help for the Dear Leader. But Mr Lee believes that aid money was diverted from the North’s hungry population in order to finance military expansion, including spending on the country’s nuclear and missile programmes.

Mr Lee has been the target of a wave of personal insults unleashed by the North. On a couple of occasions this year, North Korea closed the border without notice, jeopardising the operations of South Korean companies in the North’s Kaesong industrial complex, a chief source of hard currency for the regime and a supposed symbol of successful inter-Korean relations. North Korean officials have refused to meet South Korean counterparts who are currently seeking the release of a South Korean man detained at Kaesong for “insulting” the government. Last year a South Korean tourist in North Korea was shot dead. The latest bout of bad feeling came when the North Korean government claimed its national soccer team had been poisoned during a visit to Seoul to play a world-cup qualifying game (the team lost).

Yu Myung-hwan, the South’s foreign minister, says he is in no rush to talk to North Korea—and that the North Koreans have anyhow been refusing to pick up the hot-line telephone. For now, South Korea is keen that Mr Bosworth should not meet North Korean diplomats or travel to Pyongyang. It fears that talks will merely reinforce the North’s perception that bellicose actions lead to good results. Yet if America does reach out to the North, South Korea will have no choice but to go along.

You have our full attention

As has been said of other dictators, reading the mind of Kim Jong Il is like looking for a black cat in a darkened room, when you do not know if the cat is there. But it can be assumed that in ignoring appeals for restraint and going ahead with the Taepodong-2 launch he had several aims in mind. One is to test a military deterrent North Korea still acutely feels it needs in a hostile world where, or so it believes, America is plotting its downfall. He must also have desired to get the attention of the new Obama administration. He may have wanted to show off to his own unhappy people that his regime is still capable of impressing the world, and that he, having recovered from what is thought to have been a stroke last year, is in full command. He could also have thought it wise to give the armed forces a boost, as they will be crucial to securing the succession of whichever member of his ghastly family he decides to bequeath his dictatorship to.
Most of all, perhaps, he wanted to sow dissent among North Korea’s foreign partners in the six-party talks, and so strengthen his own bargaining position. Like his father, Kim Il Sung, he has made an art of dividing the outside world to rule at home. And on this count at least, even if the missile launch was another spectacular failure, it has achieved its end. The tears of joy may be genuine after all.

Source: The Economist

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~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Financial sleaze is frustrating the government’s political recovery


A DEAL was struck, the French president stayed in the room and Barack Obama threw stardust on his beleaguered host. The G20 summit on April 2nd in London went well for Gordon Brown and, though it was unrealistic to hope the event would single-handedly revive his struggling premiership, there are nevertheless tentative signs of a bounce in his popularity.
A YouGov poll published on April 5th showed the Labour Party narrowing the Conservatives’ lead to seven percentage points. More than half of the respondents thought the summit a success (a finding echoed in an ICM poll released the same day) and Mr Brown and his chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, were preferred to the Tory team of David Cameron and George Osborne as managers of the economy. There were even signs that voters’ despair over the state of the economy and their own finances had bottomed out.

The beginnings of a comeback, then, for Mr Brown, though a subsequent Populus poll gave him less reason to smile. But Mr Brown is swimming against a powerful tide of sleaze stories concerning his cabinet colleagues. A week after it was revealed that Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, had claimed a couple of adult films ordered by her husband on parliamentary expenses, Mr Darling and the transport secretary, Geoff Hoon, became ensnared in controversies of their own. It emerged on April 5th that they had made use of the so-called second-home allowance to maintain properties in their constituencies while living in taxpayer-funded ministerial residences and renting out their privately owned London homes.




The Darling chapter

Mr Darling paid local taxes on his ministerial property, as well as income taxes on the imputed benefit of living there rent-free, and claimed less than he was allowed on his second home in Edinburgh. Mr Hoon, whose enjoyment of three properties occurred during his stint as defence secretary, says that living in secure state premises was a cheaper option for the taxpayer than having round-the-clock security at his private home. Few quibble with the notion that certain ministers should be entitled to safe and convenient official residences; it is making money by renting out their own properties while asking the taxpayer to support yet another residence that raises hackles. And both men’s denial that rules had been broken merely draws attention to the difference between obeying the letter of the law and behaving ethically.

Labour MPs are not the only ones to make the most of their expenses and allowances, as the Tory leader, David Cameron, acknowledges. And the recent spate of sleaze stories involving ministers (parliamentary authorities are investigating the second-home claims of Tony McNulty, a welfare minister, and of Ms Smith herself) is not the only reason why Mr Brown is making only modest gains in the polls. A bigger problem is his failure to show the same endeavour and creativity at home as he displays on the international economic circuit; noteworthy policies on the domestic front are few and far between.

But the cascade of sleaze helps to diminish what momentum Mr Brown does have. This makes the wait for a review of Westminster’s expenses regime by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life, which will propose reforms, all the more frustrating. Despite a plea for haste from Mr Brown, it is not expected until towards the end of the year. Harriet Harman, the leader of the House of Commons, promises “big changes”. An idea that has the backing of Mr Cameron is to ban ministers with grace-and-favour residences from claiming any allowance for a second home. In the meantime the damage to the government—and, as the Tories are grimly aware, to the whole political class—goes on.

Source: The Economist

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~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 2nd 2009 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition

What Jacob Zuma’s tortuous legal battles reveal about the country’s courts, judges, politics—and its likely next president



Illustration by Peter Schrank

THE National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) looks set to drop all charges of corruption, racketeering, tax evasion, money-laundering and fraud against Jacob Zuma, leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). But whether it does or not, he is still pretty sure to become South Africa’s next president after this month’s general election, when the new parliament then elects the head of state. That may end a legal drama that has captivated the country for the past eight years.

But what would it say about the independence of the criminal-justice system? Some may argue that it will have succumbed to political pressure and that democratic South Africa may go the way of other postcolonial African states dominated by self-serving liberation movements. Others are more hopeful.

From the outset, Mr Zuma, the country’s deputy president until he was sacked in 2005 by its then president, Thabo Mbeki, has claimed to be the victim of a political conspiracy aimed at blocking his chances of becoming president. Now the NPA is reported to have received firm evidence of collusion between its former officials and Mr Mbeki in prosecuting a man who was one of his closest friends and colleagues for three decades but whom he had come to regard as his most dangerous rival.

Yet evidence of a plot against Mr Zuma, who has always denied all charges, does not necessarily mean he is innocent. As Louis Harms, deputy chief judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal, said in January when he overturned a lower-court ruling that had quashed charges against Mr Zuma on technical grounds, “a prosecution is not wrongful merely because it is brought for an improper purpose. It will only be wrongful if, in addition, reasonable and probable grounds for prosecuting are absent.” If it is to preserve its integrity and that of the justice system, the NPA has to show that this indeed was the case.

On the face of it, the case against Mr Zuma, who has presided over the ANC since defeating Mr Mbeki for the party post just over a year ago, looks grave. Yet when his friend and financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, was charged in 2003 with corruption and fraud over a $5 billion government arms deal, the NPA announced oddly that, though it had a “prima facie” case against Mr Zuma, it did not feel it had a “winnable case”, so it would not prefer charges. That prompted immediate suspicions of political interference—at that time in favour of Mr Zuma.

Two years later Mr Shaik, controversially freed last month on medical parole after only two years behind bars, was jailed for 15 years after being found guilty of, among other things, giving Mr Zuma more than 1m rand (then worth $165,000) in bribes and of negotiating a further payment of 1.5m rand from a French arms company. Mr Zuma was promptly sacked as Mr Mbeki’s deputy before being charged in turn. But even then the NPA did not seem to have enough evidence against him and when, 15 months later, it asked for yet another postponement of the trial, the courts threw the whole case out.

But the matter did not end there. In December 2007, ten days after Mr Mbeki was ousted as the ANC’s leader, new charges were brought against Mr Zuma in relation to alleged bribes totalling more than 4m rand that he was accused of taking between 1995 and 2005 in connection with various business deals, not just the arms contract. Nine months later these charges were thrown out too, on the ground that the NPA had not invited Mr Zuma to give his side of the case before recharging him, thus violating his rights.

Zooming into power

That was not, however, the part of the court ruling that caught the public eye. Rather it was the judge’s electrifying assertion that the whole case appeared to have been subject to a “baleful political influence”. It was a “matter of grave concern”, he said, that such interference in the criminal process had taken place “in the new South Africa, given the ravages it caused under the apartheid order.” Those observations, later condemned by the Supreme Court of Appeal as “inappropriate”, were seized upon by Mr Zuma’s people, now in charge of the ANC’s ruling body, as a reason for dumping Mr Mbeki as South Africa’s president.

Several points emerge from this sorry tale. Whether or not the NPA was nobbled, the judges continued to hand down robust judgments based solidly on the law. Despite ferocious attacks on their integrity, often by Mr Zuma’s supporters, and even death threats, they have stood firm.

Under apartheid, South Africa’s courts were part of a highly repressive system, yet many judges earned a reputation for fairness and intellect. On the eve of the first truly democratic elections in 1994, only three of the 166 judges in the country’s higher courts were black. Today, non-whites account for nearly half the 200-plus judges in those higher courts. Most of the newcomers are doing a good job. South Africa’s judiciary is widely respected.

Another friend in need

But not all the newcomers are held in high regard. Last year John Hlophe, president of the Western Cape’s High Court, was suspended after he was accused of approaching two judges on the 11-member Constitutional Court in an alleged attempt to influence the outcome of one of the cases pending against Mr Zuma. The court lodged a complaint with the Judicial Services Commission, the judges’ independent disciplinary body. Mr Hlophe, who is close to Mr Zuma and has been tipped as a possible replacement for Chief Justice Pius Langa, hit back, accusing the judges of breaching his right to dignity and equality.

On March 31st the Supreme Court of Appeal rejected a case brought by Mr Hlophe against the Constitutional Court judges, finding that they had not acted unlawfully; he is still suspended. This may not, however, stop his elevation to the highest court in the land, when three of its number step down in October. It will be up to Mr Zuma, if elected president, to appoint their replacements from a shortlist provided by the Judicial Services Commission. Despite his supporters’ antics, he says he supports an independent judiciary as “one of the pillars of our peaceful, stable and orderly co-existence”. But he also calls for an “accelerated transformation of the entire court system”.

A recent opinion poll suggests that the stream of accusations and leaks against Mr Zuma has led many South Africans to conclude that he is no angel. He makes whites, who comprise less than a tenth of the electorate, distinctly queasy. But the same poll also suggests that his popularity is undented, at least among blacks, who still seem to support him overwhelmingly. For the poor majority in South Africa it is bread-and-butter issues, such as housing, health and education, that matter most, not the niceties of the law.

Source: The Economist

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~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Defying calls not to, North Korea launched a rocket that it said put a communications satellite into orbit. America and other countries believe the launch was in fact a test of a Taepodong-2 missile, capable of carrying nuclear warheads as far as Alaska, but that it failed, falling into the sea beyond Japan. Efforts to persuade the UN Security Council to issue a strong condemnation of the launch proved difficult; China and Russia backed North Korea’s explanation, and said it was within its rights. Meanwhile, Barack Obama proclaimed that America had a “moral responsibility” to lead a campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Najib Razak was sworn in as Malaysia’s prime minister, promising far-reaching reform to revive the government’s popularity.

Cambodia and Thailand again exchanged gunfire on their border, around the disputed temple of Preah Vihear. Thailand said at least two of its soldiers had died. Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, sought to play down the fighting as a dispute between neighbours.

Sri Lanka’s army said it had driven Tamil Tiger rebels from all the territory the group once controlled, apart from a small coastal area designated a “no-fire zone” by the government. Aid agencies continued to express concern about the safety of as many as 150,000 civilians prevented from leaving by the Tigers.

Richard Holbrooke, America’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, visited Pakistan. President Asif Zardari told Mr Holbrooke that Pakistan was fighting for its survival. Just before the visit, at least 40 people died in three suicide attacks in different parts of the country, blamed on Islamist extremists.

Climbing Jacob’s ladder



South Africa’s prosecuting authority dropped all charges, including those of fraud and racketeering, against Jacob Zuma, who heads the ruling African National Congress. The path is thus cleared for him to become the country’s president after an election on April 22nd. The decision raises fears that the judiciary’s independence may be weakening under political pressure.

According to a London-based research institute, 2008 was the deadliest year ever for aid-workers; 122 were killed and 260 attacked. The most dangerous countries to work in were Somalia and Afghanistan.

Somali pirates took advantage of improved weather conditions at sea and stepped up their attacks on foreign ships. They seized six vessels within a week, including a freighter with 21 American crewman on board about 450km (280 miles) off the Somali coast.

Israel’s hawkish new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said that Western-backed efforts to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians had reached a dead end.

Tour de force

Barack Obama completed his whirlwind tour of Europe in Turkey, before paying a flying visit to Baghdad. The American president promised the Turkish parliament that America was not at war with Islam. He also urged the European Union to admit Turkey.

At the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl, Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was chosen as the alliance’s next secretary-general. France formally rejoined the military-command structure, and Albania and Croatia joined NATO.

Spain’s prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, shuffled his cabinet, replacing the long-serving Pedro Solbes as finance minister with the public-services minister, Elena Salgado. Financial markets, usually respectful of Mr Solbes, were fretful.

Crowds of students and fellow protesters violently attacked Moldova’s Parliament after the Communist Party won a general election, which the protesters say was fraudulent.

Ireland brought in an emergency budget to raise taxes and cut spending so as to curb its mushrooming budget deficit. The government expects Irish GDP to shrink by 8% this year.


An earthquake around L’Aquila, a mountain town in Italy’s central Abruzzo region, killed at least 250 people and left 17,000 homeless.

Presidential term

After a 16-month televised trial, a court in Peru convicted Alberto Fujimori, the country’s president from 1990 to 2000, of authorising an army death-squad that killed 25 people during efforts to crush a Maoist insurgency, and for the brief kidnap of two opponents. He was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.

In a crackdown against opposition leaders in Venezuela, the recently elected mayor of Caracas was stopped by police from delivering a letter to the National Assembly protesting against a bill that would strip him of most of his powers. A former defence minister, once a close ally of the president, Hugo Chávez, was jailed.

A delegation from the black caucus of the United States’ Congress met Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, in Havana. The visit came as Barack Obama was expected to announce the scrapping of curbs on visits and remittances to the island by Cuban-Americans, ahead of a Summit of the Americas at which some Latin American governments are expected to press for Cuba’s readmission to the Organisation of American States.
Love your fellow man

Iowa and Vermont became the latest American states to legalise gay marriage. Iowa’s Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and violated the rights of gay couples. In Vermont, lawmakers overrode the governor’s veto of a bill, making it the first state where gay marriage is made legal by a legislative act and not by a court decision.

A gunman opened fire at a centre for immigrants in Binghamton, in upstate New York, killing 13 people before committing suicide. The gunman, Jiverly Wong, came to America from Vietnam as a young man and had taken English lessons at the centre.




The Pentagon allowed the media to cover the ceremony at the bringing home of a fallen American serviceman’s body for the first time since Mr Obama overturned a ban imposed in 1991. Phillip Myers was killed in Afghanistan. Journalists recorded the return of his coffin at Dover air force base in Delaware after his family gave their consent.

Source: The Economist

__________________
~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 16th 2009 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition

Jacob Zuma is bound to be South Africa’s next president. But what sort of country will he make it?




THE outcome is not in doubt. But the elections that will be held on April 22nd will still be the most important since South Africa’s first fully democratic ballot in 1994. The African National Congress (ANC) will win by a landslide, as it has always done over the past 15 years. The new parliament will then elect the country’s president, now certain to be the ANC’s leader, Jacob Zuma. But what will happen afterwards? Will Africa’s biggest economy continue along the path to a stable multi-party democracy? Or will it sink into despotism, as so many other African countries did after liberation?
South Africans may well consider that outcome impossible. Democratic institutions are robust. Elections are free. As a member of the G20, South Africa hobnobs with the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Its post-apartheid constitution is among the most progressive. Its judiciary is impressively independent, its press unfettered, its civil society vibrant. Many Africans are nevertheless deeply worried about what might happen to the country under a President Zuma and an all-powerful, perhaps even vengeful, ANC.

The heady ideals of Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation” were bound to give way to greater realism. But it has gone beyond that. Many now share the “disillusionment, resentment and rage tinged with despair”, of which André Brink, an Afrikaans author and former anti-apartheid campaigner, writes in his recent memoir. Since the ANC first came to power in 1994 an estimated 800,000 whites have left the country, taking their skills with them; 4.5m, representing 9% of the population, remain. Crime has certainly played a part: though figures are hard to compare, South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates. But the dominance of the ANC has also been a powerful factor.

Whites are not alone in their pessimism. “We are in a bad place at the moment in this country,” laments Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a liberation hero turned government scourge. After the nation had thrown off the shackles of injustice and oppression, he had hoped to see a new age of freedom and justice for all. But “we have let down our guard and quickly forgotten the struggles of our past…Please allow us old people to go to the grave smiling, not with our hearts broken.”

The manner in which Mr Zuma’s eight-year tussle with the courts was brought to an end has shocked South Africans. On April 6th the supposedly independent National Prosecution Authority (NPA) announced that it was withdrawing all charges of corruption, racketeering, tax-evasion, money-laundering and fraud against the ANC leader. The actual merits of the case were not in question, it said. Nor was the prosecution in any way flawed. The issue was the (alleged) manipulation of the timing of the announcement of the charges in an apparent attempt to thwart Mr Zuma’s political ambitions. This made it “neither possible nor desirable” to continue with the prosecution.



Yet the grounds for dropping the case were puzzling. The charges against Mr Zuma had been serious. He was accused of accepting more than 4m rand ($596,000) between 1995 and 2005 from his friend and former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, in exchange for using his influence to help secure government contracts for Mr Shaik’s companies. Sentencing Mr Shaik to 15 years imprisonment in 2005, the presiding judge said that the payments to Mr Zuma “can only have generated a sense of obligation in the recipient”. President Thabo Mbeki promptly sacked him as his deputy. A few days later Mr Zuma was indicted in his turn. He has always denied the charges.

Both Mr Zuma and Mr Shaik claim that the money was intended as a loan, part of which Mr Zuma says he has now repaid, though he does not say how much. Now that the charges have been dropped, he says he feels vindicated; but he has not been acquitted. A cloud of suspicion still hangs over him. He has never properly explained his relationship with Mr Shaik. It did not help when, last month, he announced that if elected he would consider granting a pardon to his friend. Three days later Mr Shaik, suffering from hypertension and depression, was released from jail on “medical parole”, normally reserved for the dying. He had served two years and four months of his 15-year sentence.

The rise of the goatherd

Born of Zulu peasant stock, Mr Zuma herded his grandfather’s goats rather than going to school. He joined the ANC in his mid-teens. From then until he was almost 50 he devoted his life to the liberation struggle, first as a prisoner on Robben Island (with Nelson Mandela), then as an activist in the armed underground, and finally as the ANC’s head of intelligence. He never had to worry about money; the party took care of that.

But on his return from exile at the end of apartheid in 1990, he found himself with no settled home, no solid job and no money. It would not surprise South Africans if, like many others who had sacrificed their lives to the cause while others at home grew rich, he felt he was owed something.
Financial wrongdoing within the ANC’s ranks is widespread and tolerated, though many have been prosecuted. A poll taken shortly before Mr Zuma’s charges were dropped showed that just half of ANC members believed him to be innocent. Yet nearly three-quarters continued to support him “wholeheartedly”.

From 1994 until 1999 Mr Zuma served as the local minister for economic affairs and tourism in his native KwaZulu-Natal. But his pay was meagre, his lifestyle lavish and he already had three wives and numerous children to support. At one point he thought he might throw it all in. But Mr Shaik and his brothers, who had worked alongside him in the underground, persuaded him not to, arguing that the country needed leaders like him. For ten years Mr Shaik picked up Mr Zuma’s tab for virtually everything, from his luxury homes and expensive cars to his traffic fines and children’s schooling. All this is well documented. In African culture there is a sense of obligation to help relatives and friends in times of need. Mr Shaik’s level of care, though, appears to have gone beyond the call of duty.

Mr Zuma insists that there was never any case against him. Nevertheless, after the dismissal of the charges, he strove to sound presidential. Now was not the time for vengeance, he told reporters: “We have a country to run, not individuals to chase.” His allies take a different view. They are baying for blood, accusing Mr Mbeki—whom Mr Zuma’s allies in the ANC ousted as party and then as national president—of being behind a plot to bring down Mr Zuma. At a “victory” rally on April 7th Zwelinzima Vavi, leader of Cosatu, South Africa’s biggest trade-union federation and one of the ANC’s partners in the ruling tripartite alliance with the Communists, demanded that “Number One, that big man…must answer in court.”

This is typical of Mr Zuma’s tactics: he lets others do the dirty work for him. One of his most-feted “bully boys” is Julius Malema, leader of the ANC’s powerful Youth League. Decried by his detractors as an arrogant dimwit but lauded by his comrades as a sharp and gifted speaker, the chubby-cheeked 28-year-old delights in provocation. The woman who accused Mr Zuma of rape in 2005 must have had a “nice time”, he suggested, otherwise she wouldn’t have stayed for breakfast. Helen Zille, the feisty (white) leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and a former anti-apartheid campaigner, was a “racist” and “colonialist”. The Congress of the People (COPE), a new party set up by ANC rebels after Mr Mbeki’s undignified ouster last September and now the ANC’s first serious black-led challenger, was nothing but a “Western puppet”.

Occasionally Mr Malema is deemed to have taken a step too far, as when he declared last summer that the Youth League was “prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma” if his prosecution went ahead. The public uproar was such that the ANC felt obliged to rap him over the knuckles. But otherwise he is almost never reined in, leading to the assumption that the ANC top brass, including Mr Zuma, do not altogether disapprove.
Dressed in natty designer suits and matching silk ties, the beaming Mr Zuma, seeks to reassure his white audiences, gathered in air-conditioned five-star hotels, with his down-to-earth wit and technocratic (often rather boring) speeches. But dressed in a bright-yellow ANC T-shirt and shades, belting out his “Umshini Wami” (“Bring me my machinegun”) theme song to his adoring black supporters in sweltering sports stadiums, he is a different man. Then he makes blunter, more sinister remarks, as when he called on potential defectors to COPE to think again. “It is cold out there if you are
out of the ANC,” he warned them. “Very cold.”



The positive side

After 15 years of uninterrupted, virtually unchallenged power, the ANC has evidently succumbed to many of the vices of one-party states: arrogance, nepotism, corruption, intimidation. Hardly a day seems to go by without some new scandal. Yet it has notched up some remarkable achievements, starting with the bloodless transition from white minority rule to full multiracial democracy. The ANC government has set up Africa’s only broad-based welfare state, providing cash benefits to 12.5m people compared with just 3m in 1996. To help get people out of the sprawling, squalid shanty towns it has built 2.7m low-cost homes, housing around 10m people. Some 80% of all households are now connected to electricity and clean water—up by a third since 1996. More than half of state schools no longer charge fees. Free health clinics are gradually being set up. After years of shameful denial of any link between the HIV virus and AIDS, some 60% of the 5.7m infected are at last receiving antiretrovirals. Violent crime may still be appallingly high, but it has been falling in almost all categories.
At the same time, a new black middle class has sprung up. An estimated 2.6m of South Africa’s 39m blacks (about 80% of the total population) now earn at least 6,000 rand a month, with many earning a lot more. That may not seem much by Western standards, but it is more than what nearly half of their compatriots earn in a year. These new rich go out to restaurants, drive cars and buy the latest fashions in air-conditioned malls. Most of the wealth, though, is still in the hands of whites—not so much because of discrimination, but because they have higher skills. Although absolute levels of poverty have dipped, the gulf between rich and poor is still widening. South Africa is now one of the most unequal countries in the world.
This has changed voting patterns. For the first time, South Africans will probably vote along socioeconomic lines as much as racial ones. Of the ANC’s supporters, the vast majority are black (96%), poor and little educated. The DA has an exactly opposite profile: predominantly white (around 64%), with a good sprinkling of Indians and coloureds (mixed-race), but almost no blacks. Its supporters are also older, richer and much better educated.

COPE fits neatly between these extremes. Its supporters are multiracial (about 60% black and 18% white), middle class, relatively well educated and well balanced across all age groups. Like the DA, the new party, with a bishop as its presidential candidate, likes to present itself as morally upright, with a commitment to rooting out corruption and upholding the constitution. But its image has been tarnished of late by the alleged link between a number of its main backers and the “conspiracy” against Mr Zuma.

South African elections are based on strict proportional representation. In the last national poll, in 2004, the ANC won a record 70% of the vote; the DA came second with 12.4%. This time the situation is more complex. About 3m more people have registered to vote and, with the buzz surrounding the emergence of COPE, turnout is also expected to be higher. This, combined with an unusually large number of undecided voters, makes it difficult to predict the results. Most pollsters are suggesting that the overall ANC vote will fall only slightly, to 61-64%, that the DA will get 11-16%, and that COPE will come a close third with a commendable 9-15%.
Because of Mr Zuma’s closeness to Cosatu and the Communists, some predict that he may preside over a radical shift to the left. But this seems unlikely, not least because some of his staunchest allies include wealthy black capitalists, who would resist such a move. Like many liberation fighters, Mr Zuma was once a member of the SACP, but quit in 1990 and went on to give his full backing to Mr Mbeki’s market-friendly economics. Although he has big plans to extend the welfare state, he also thinks it important to attract foreign investors. The high (fourth) place given to Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s highly regarded finance minister, on the ANC’s list of parliamentary candidates suggests he may want to keep Mr Manuel on in the post he has occupied since 1996.

Mr Zuma remains an enigma. When asked about his intentions when he comes to power, he simply says the ANC’s policies are his too—abroad, apparently, as well as at home. Asked for his reaction to the government’s “quiet diplomacy” on Zimbabwe and its backing for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, in his struggle with the International Criminal Court, Mr Zuma merely said that his approach would be the same as his predecessors’.


Recession’s shadow

With South Africa sinking into its first recession after 16 years of expansion, the challenges facing the next president are daunting. Business confidence is at a ten-year low. After growth averaging around 5% a year between 2004 and 2007, the economy is expected to contract by around 0.8% this year. Mining and manufacturing have been in free fall for six months. Exports and retail trade are following suit. Despite the boost given to the economy by preparations for next year’s football World Cup, which South Africa is hosting, and a government stimulus package of 690 billion rand over the next three years, the downturn will cut jobs and increase poverty. Only those who have held a “formal” job for at least four years may claim unemployment benefit. But, for the moment, voters seem to blame the global downturn rather than the government.

Will Mr Zuma be up to the job? Whites, in particular, are alarmed by his lack of formal education; his flamboyant polygamy (he recently married his sixth wife, 30 years his junior); his irresponsible attitude toward HIV/AIDS, as revealed at his rape trial; and his hidden years with the ANC underground, particularly as head of intelligence. In its 1998 report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission accused the ANC in the 1970s and 1980s of “gross violations of human rights” and of “routine [use of] torture to extract information”.


A puzzling future for him, too
Then there are those worrying stray comments. He wants to review the status of the Constitutional Court (which has several times found against him), “because I don’t think we should have people who are almost like God in a democracy.” He loathes the press, which has certainly not been kind, slamming a “vicious media campaign designed to find me guilty in the court of public opinion”. His talk of rooting out the “lazy, corrupt and incompetent” from government sometimes suggests a purge of those he dislikes.

But Mr Zuma is as adored as much as he is loathed. After the heroic, aristocratic Mr Mandela and the aloof, technocratic Mr Mbeki, most South Africans seem to welcome the prospect of having a man of the people as their president. Mr Zuma is a good listener and a skilled conciliator. He works hard, and has impressive energy for a man just turned 67. He can exude great charm when he wants to.

Will he make a good president? That is hard to tell. It could go either way. The hope is that South Africa will continue along its current path of democratic progress and growing prosperity. But Mr Tutu will have to wait a little longer before being certain whether he can go to his grave smiling, or with a broken heart.

Source: The Economist

__________________
~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Why do professional paths to the top vary so much?


Illustration by David Simonds



WHEN Barack Obama met Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, at the G20 summit in London, it was an encounter not just between two presidents, but also between two professions and mindsets. A lawyer, trained to argue from first principles and haggle over words, was speaking to an engineer, who knew how to build physical structures and keep them intact.

The prevalence of lawyers in America’s ruling elite (spotted by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 1830s) is stronger than ever. Mr Obama went to Harvard Law School (1988-91); his cabinet contains Hillary Clinton (Yale Law, 1969-73) as secretary of state, Eric Holder (Columbia Law, 1973-76) as attorney-general, Joe Biden (Syracuse University law school, 1965-68) as vice-president and Leon Panetta (Santa Clara University law school, 1960-63) as director of the CIA. That’s the tip of the iceberg. Over half of America’s senators practised law. Mr Obama’s inner circle is sprinkled with classmates from Harvard Law: the dean of that school, Elena Kagan, is solicitor-general; Cass Sunstein, a professor there, is also in the administration.

President Hu, in contrast, is a hydraulic engineer (he worked for a state hydropower company). His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, was an electrical engineer, who trained in Moscow at the Stalin Automobile Works. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, specialised in geological engineering. The senior body of China’s Communist Party is the Politburo’s standing committee. Making up its nine members are eight engineers, and one lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of one petroleum and two chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover.

Why do different countries favour different professions? And why are some professions so well represented in politics? To find out, The Economist trawled through a sample of almost 5,000 politicians in “International Who’s Who”, a reference book, to examine their backgrounds.


Some findings are predictable. Africa is full of presidents who won power as leaders of military coups (such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir) or as guerrilla chiefs (Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame). Naturally, they rely on old comrades-in-arms. The army’s influence can outlast its direct control. In Indonesia, military rule ended in 1998 but generals are still big in politics because, in a country of 17,000 islands, the army is among the few nationwide institutions. But selection bias in politics (the tendency of people of similar backgrounds to cluster together) goes far beyond the armed forces. Many countries, including America, have political dynasties; in Britain, networks are formed at Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Personal ties matter in China (Vice-President Xi Jinping is the son of a Long March veteran). Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, has an inner circle dating from his time at St Petersburg city hall and his career in the old KGB.
Different countries—because of their history, or cultural preferences, or stage of development—seem to like particular qualities, and these qualities are provided disproportionately by only a few professions. Lawyers and business executives are common; economists, academics and doctors do surprisingly well (see chart 1).

Countries often have marked peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors (see chart 2). Some emerging-market
countries are bedevilled by large numbers of criminals, even if this doesn’t usually show up in their “Who’s Who” records.


In democracies, lawyers dominate. This is not surprising. The law deals with the same sort of questions as politics: what makes a just society; the balance between liberty and security, and so on. Lawyerly skills—marshalling evidence, appealing to juries, command of procedure—transfer well to the political stage. So, sadly, does an obsession with process and a tendency to see things in partisan terms—us or them, guilty or not guilty—albeit in a spirit of loyalty to a system to which all defer. In common-law countries, the battleground of the court is of a piece with the adversarial, yet rule-bound, spirit of politics. Even in places with a Napoleonic code, lawyers abound. In Germany, a third of the Bundestag’s members are lawyers. In France, nine of Nicolas Sarkozy’s first cabinet of 16 were lawyers or law graduates, including the president, the prime minister and the finance minister, an ex-chairman of Baker & McKenzie, an American law firm.

In China, the influence of engineers is partly explained by history and ideology. In a country where education was buffeted by the tempests of Maoism, engineering was a safer field of study than most. In fact, communist regimes of all stripes have long had a weakness for grandiose engineering projects. The Soviet Union, which also produced plenty of engineer-politicians (including Boris Yeltsin), wanted to reverse the northward flow of some great Russian rivers, for example.

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking. An engineer’s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds. The process by which projects get built is usually secondary. That also seems true of Chinese politics, in which government often rides roughshod over critics. Engineers are supposed to focus on the long term; buildings have no merit if they will collapse after a few years. So it is understandable that an authoritarian country like China, where development is the priority and spending on infrastructure is colossal, should push engineers to the top.

A Gallic compromise

France, you might say, has elements of both American and Chinese political cultures: it is a democracy with a strong, centralised administration and a predilection for state planning. Its politics is influenced by super-civil servants: the graduates (only about 100 a year) of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, or ENA, based in Strasbourg. ENA has a quasi-monopoly over many top civil-service jobs, which, in France, serve as stepping-stones to politics. Seven of the last 11 prime ministers and two of the last four presidents have been énarques. Though Nicolas Sarkozy is not one of the breed and has only one énarque in his cabinet, he has eased the institution’s hold only at the top; ENA is still a fast track to political success. A tenth of the French politicians in the sample are énarques.
The second most common “profession” is that of businessman. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Mitt Romney in Massachusetts are only two who parlayed business experience and a supposed toughness of decision-making into political office. The credit crunch has made financiers more prominent: in Britain, a former boss of Standard Chartered bank is now minister of trade; a former adviser to UBS Warburg, an investment bank, is competitiveness minister. In America, Hank Paulson, a former treasury secretary, and Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, are both former chief executives of Goldman Sachs, a bank apparently blessed by Midas.
Though it might seem as if rich democracies are most susceptible to managerial charms, the suits are in fact more significant in emerging markets. Anek Laothamatas, the former leader of the Mahachon party in Thailand, argues that businessmen have played a decisive role in his country since the 1980s. Thaksin Shinawatra, the fugitive ex-prime minister and fomenter of the “red protests” that are now congesting the streets of
Bangkok, is only the most prominent example.

In local elections in Russia between 1997 and 2003, 38 businessmen (all men) ran for governorships, of whom ten won. Scott Gehlbach and Konstantin Sonin, of the Centre for Economic and Financial Research in Moscow, argue that three factors have influenced businessmen to go into politics in post-Soviet countries. Politics helps them harm competitors; in new democracies, robber barons are often the only ones rich enough to finance election campaigns; and business people do not trust politicians to keep campaign promises because there is no real party discipline, so they go into politics themselves.

One might add a fourth consideration: parliamentary immunity has enabled some corrupt businessmen to ward off legal investigation. This clearly matters because, when the Kremlin started to extend its control over parliament, overriding claims of immunity, politics went out of fashion among business people. Considerations of immunity may also help to explain the remarkably large number of legally challenged politicians in India: according to the Public Affairs Centre, a think-tank based in Bangalore, 23% of members of India’s parliament have been served with criminal charges.

Some mature democracies, especially Britain and America, are seeing a new phenomenon: the rise of politics itself as a profession. In the old days, politics was something you went into after doing a real job. In Britain, Tory MPs were stereotypically squires of independent means or retired businessmen; Labour ones, trade-union leaders or university lecturers. No longer. David Cameron, the Tory leader, went from university into the party’s research department and, apart from a few years studying the dark arts of public relations, has been in politics all his adult life. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, Britain’s current and former prime ministers, became members of Parliament at the tender ages of 32 and 30 respectively, their other careers (journalist and barrister) having been merely useful preludes.
The emergence of politics as a career choice has been made possible, argues Peter Oborne in his book “The Triumph of the Political Class”, by a penumbra of quasi-political institutions—think-tanks, consultancies, lobbying firms, politicians’ back offices. They have increased job opportunities for would-be politicians. Increasingly, therefore, the road to a political career leads through politics itself, starting as an intern, moving to become researcher in a parliamentary or congressional office, with a spell in a friendly think-tank or lobby group along the way.

Mr Oborne says this is producing an inbred class that lacks proper connections to the outside world. Perhaps. But the trend is unlikely to stop. The intrusive demands upon aspiring members of any American administration make it harder for outsiders to enter politics. (The Obama team asked applicants, “If you have ever sent an…e-mail, text message or instant message that could…be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.”) For good or ill, politics is becoming its own profession.

Source: The Economist

__________________
~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

If atmospherics were all that mattered, the American president would be well on the way to curing the world’s ills




BARACK OBAMA had difficulty pronouncing the name of his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, but people forgave him. In fact, they forgave him for almost everything: his aura seemed to glow ever brighter as he made his first foray into global, crisis-busting diplomacy.

A general willingness to give Mr Obama the benefit of the doubt was palpable even among the exuberant anti-capitalist demonstrators jamming the streets of London’s financial district—a minority of whom turned violent and clashed with police as they attacked a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. “He’s got good morals,” conceded a graffiti artist called Monkey, while helping his friend scale a traffic light and drape a banner: it depicted a grim reaper clutching fistfuls of banknotes.

Nico, a French resident of London who sported a cardboard box over his head (to denounce climate-change denial), said in muffled tones that he was “not sure about Obama—but he can’t be worse than George Bush.” Anyway, he opined, “the problem is the madness of the economic system—growth wrecks the environment.”

Even the Russians, so determined to wrong-foot America for the past few years, were gracious after the two presidents met and agreed to seek deeper cuts in their strategic arsenals than those foreseen by an existing treaty, which could slash each side’s stockpile to 1,700 warheads by 2012. Negotiators were told to set new goals by July, when Mr Obama will visit Moscow.

Recent strains in American-Russian relations had not been good for either country, said Mr Medvedev, as he and Mr Obama vowed to begin a “constructive dialogue” on everything from curbing terrorism to economics. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, claimed that the two presidents had broken a “closed circle” in which each side felt the need to respond forcefully to a perceived provocation by the other. These upbeat noises from a hitherto grumpy Russian official marked a change of tone.

These days, America’s ties with China probably matter more to the world than the remnants of superpower diplomacy. And on that front, too, the chemistry was good. With China’s President Hu Jintao, Mr Obama agreed that his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, would start a Sino-American “strategic and economic dialogue” beginning in Washington, DC, this summer. The Americans said Mr Hu assured them of his commitment to boosting demand as well as improving economic management.


London hails the chief

Visiting Downing Street earlier in the day, Mr Obama was at once emollient, self-critical and articulate, in a way that put an initially bashful Gordon Brown at his ease. “I came here to put forward ideas but I also came here to listen and not to lecture,” the president said, setting the tone—one that subtly combined humility with firmness about the responsibilities of others—for his meeting with the leaders of 19 developed and emerging economies.

The president admitted that the United States “has some accounting to do” over the failures in its regulatory system. He said the world had become used to viewing American consumers as the engine of global growth—with a clear hint that his country could no longer play this role, and that spenders in other countries should now be doing their bit. But he rejected the idea of American decline, saying that was an old theory, which had been repeatedly belied by the existence of “a vibrancy to our economic model, a durability to our political model, and a set of ideals that has sustained us through difficult times.”

The Economist went to press before the G20 summit ended. But if any of the participants arrived in London spoiling for a fight, it was the leaders of France and Germany, who were at pains from the beginning to stress their absolute accord with one another and their differences with everybody else. At a splashy joint appearance, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe had done a lot already to provide economic stimulus. What was needed was far tougher regulation, whose targets would include hedge funds, traders’ pay, rating agencies and tax havens. Both of them seemed keener on trying to prevent financial crises in future than on dealing with the one that is raging now.
But Mr Obama was anxious not to let the Franco-German duo spoil the party. Instead he stressed the “enormous consensus” that existed on the need to reinvigorate the sagging world economy. Among governments, anyway: Nico the box-wearer might beg to disagree.

Elsewhere on the sidelines, more conventional voices were stressing that there could be limits to Mr Obama’s ability to dissolve global problems at a stroke: the warming of the American-Russian atmosphere was not a breakthrough comparable with the one achieved by Mikhail Gorbachev in the last days of the cold war.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, a think-tank, said Messrs Obama and Medvedev had merely “plucked some low-hanging fruit” by signalling that rows over Georgia were no longer the key to their relationship. It was now conceivable, Mr Trenin said, that Russia and America could talk business over NATO expansion and possible Russian help to America over Iran. But Russia might not really want American-Iranian ties to improve too much—and the mood of anti-Americanism which was fanned under ex-President Vladimir Putin (now prime minister) would not disappear from the Russian scene. There are some tricks that even Obama magic cannot pull off.

__________________
~Time owns each and everything~
~Useless youth if not useful for Pakistan~

Mar 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The Atlantic alliance at 60 is busier, and going further afield, than ever—but some members want to refocus on threats nearer home




FOR the past six decades, the pledge by America, Canada and their European friends that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” has kept the West together. That vow—in Article 5 of NATO’s charter—helped to see off Soviet communism. And now the alliance is busier than ever: it keeps the peace in the Balkans and guards the sea lanes to Europe. Above all, it is fighting a tough war in Afghanistan.

And it is a popular club. Membership has grown from a cold-war total of 16 to 26 today; more hope to join. France, which left NATO’s military structure in 1966 (though not the alliance itself), has decided to rejoin. And yet as NATO celebrates its 60th birthday in early April, with events straddling France and Germany to prove its success in transcending old feuds, the alliance is wrestling with an identity crisis that has lingered since the cold war ended.

NATO is losing its role as the main forum for strategic dialogue between America and Europe. The economic crisis is being dealt with in the G20; the threat of a nuclear Iran is being handled by a small club of six powers; the security of energy supplies from Russia is better addressed by the European Union; and intelligence co-operation against terrorism is done bilaterally. “Military operations have become our raison d’être,” says one senior NATO insider, “I intervene, therefore I am.”

In the 1990s NATO’s mantra was “out of area or out of business”. But few allies imagined, as they pushed the Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999, that within a few years they would be fighting along the Hindu Kush. Indeed, NATO got into its biggest war almost by accident. When America was attacked in September 2001, NATO formally invoked Article 5 for the first time. But the Bush administration did not want to be encumbered by a formal alliance. Instead it cherry-picked the allied assets it needed to help topple the Taliban.

Only later, as America turned its attention to Iraq, did NATO take over the stabilisation force in Afghanistan; it started in Kabul in 2003, then spread across the country. NATO’s entry into the south of the country in 2006 coincided with an upsurge in fighting; maybe the Taliban saw NATO as an easier foe than America alone. The insurgency has grown every year since.
America’s president, Barack Obama, says NATO is not winning and, having ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, will discuss with his allies a new strategy to turn the war around. Many say NATO’s credibility, and its very future, are at risk.

Afghanistan has exposed two big rifts among the allies. First, one between countries willing to take on the Taliban (mainly America, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Poland) and most of the others. Then, even among the more martial states, there is one camp that sees global jihad as the main threat to NATO, while another frets more about the old adversary, Russia.
Last year’s war between Russia and Georgia (which has been promised eventual NATO membership) stoked a debate over how far “out of area” NATO should go; and over how much it should focus on Russia rather than “asymmetric” threats like terrorism. Some pundits noted that Georgia’s best forces had been trained by America to deal with insurgents, at home and in Iraq, not to fight conventional war.

Home or away?

Nobody suggests it is time to quit Afghanistan. And the Obama administration’s talk of a “reset” in ties with Russia has eased the tension, for now. But the ex-communist NATO countries, in particular, want more effort on guarding their soil. Many whisper that they joined NATO for protection against Russia, not to fight Afghans. Even an old ally like Norway, worried about Russia’s polar ambitions as the ice melts, thinks it is time to rebalance priorities. “NATO appears to our publics to be an organisation that takes our sons to send them to Afghanistan,” says Norway’s deputy defence minister, Espen Barth-Eide. Focusing on home missions, he says, would make NATO relevant to Europeans, and ultimately boost support for away missions.

Such “neo-traditionalists” want NATO’s planners at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) to make credible plans for the defence of NATO’s borders, and surrounding seas and airspace. They say NATO should conduct more visible exercises to rehearse the response to threats at home, and improve the ability of bases and ports to receive NATO reinforcements.

The problem for NATO is whether such hints of the old, cold-war posture might not trigger confrontation with Russia. In the view of Mr Barth-Eide, however, such plans and exercises may help prevent NATO from over-reacting to a crisis.

For years after the cold war ended, NATO’s threat assessment, contained in a document known as MC 161, saw no Russian threat; that is why there are few contingency plans to defend new allies. For instance, SHAPE drew up plans to defend Poland (inadequate ones, say senior Poles), but none exists to protect small Baltic states that feel particularly vulnerable. This is changing slowly; NATO’s outgoing commander, General John Craddock, started some informal “prudent planning” for territorial defence that could, in coming months, become official contingency plans, if friends of Russia, like Germany and Italy, can be made to agree. Russia, General Craddock has said, seeks to weaken Euro-Atlantic institutions and “has shown readiness to use economic leverage and military force to achieve its aims”.

The balance between NATO’s home and away missions will be addressed in a “Declaration of Alliance Security”, which should be approved at the anniversary summit. This should then form the basis for a more detailed new “strategic concept” to be drafted for approval next year.

But some in NATO think the backlash against expeditionary war is overdone. They say nothing in intelligence reports suggests that Russia’s military posture is now more threatening; a confrontational stand by NATO would just abet the Kremlin’s hawks. In any case, they say, the same expeditionary forces would be needed in any crisis, whether in Afghanistan or, say, to defend Estonia. “Some countries feel insecure for reasons going back centuries,” says a NATO insider. “You can’t exorcise history through contingency planning.”

Britain has proposed a practical idea to reassure nervous allies. It suggests a NATO “solidarity force”, made up of small contingents from several allies, that would act as a rapid-reaction unit to help countries in need. It would have many nationalities, to deliver a political message, but not too many teeth, so as not to provoke Russia.

It would be, in effect, a smaller version (perhaps 1,500-strong) of NATO’s now-defunct Allied Command Europe Mobile Force-Land, a brigade-sized force (about 5,000 soldiers) whose role was to act as a tripwire in the cold war. The aim, commanders now admit, was to have many “different flags on coffins” at the start of a war, so as to ensure that allies could not dodge their commitment to joint defence.


Belgrade: not everybody loves us

The new solidarity force, if approved, could form the first echelon of the troubled NATO Response Force (NRF), supposedly a powerful 25,000-strong mailed fist held at high readiness but far from ready. Britain hopes that, with the solidarity force available to deal with a crisis at home, allies might agree to use the rest of the NRF for other tasks—for instance, temporarily to reinforce NATO in Afghanistan. The risk is that the solidarity force could simply cripple the NRF by diverting scarce resources.

The NRF was created in 2002 as the vehicle for the “transformation” of NATO from a large, static force designed to fend off massed Soviet armies into an agile expeditionary outfit. Hans Binnendijk, of America’s National Defence University, says: “The NRF is a force that should be on steroids, and instead it’s on life support.”

The NRF has failed to fill its roster, and has been informally cut back. Expeditionary war needs airlift, sealift, jets, helicopters, drones and other “enablers” like field hospitals. Such items appear year after year on NATO’s wish list, but are always scarce. One reason: countries that have such assets are using them in Afghanistan.

Any hope that European countries might invest more in defence for Europe’s sake has vanished. An EU plan for a 60,000-strong force has shrivelled into a vow to maintain two small “battlegroups” (formations of about 1,500 troops) at high readiness. Even these can be hard to deploy; although the EU runs several small military and security operations, the United Nations’ call last year for the EU to send forces to Congo was quietly declined.
America spends about 4% of GDP on defence, but only four European countries (Britain, France, Greece and Bulgaria) meet NATO’s minimum of 2%. Partly as a result, America in 2007 deployed about 14% of its troops on operations, while European countries could barely muster 4%.
For all the worries about NATO, two leaders personify hope: Mr Obama, who is very popular in Europe, and President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose decision fully to rejoin NATO should end French dreams of making the EU a counterweight to America.

In truth, rivalry between NATO and the EU has been an absurdity. NATO provided the stability that helped Europe to integrate. For ex-communist states, NATO has been a stepping stone into the EU. Both clubs are based in Brussels, and share 21 members, yet they cannot co-operate formally (on the ground, things are better).

Ending the club rivalry

At first this reflected rivalry between America, which leads NATO, and France, which wanted a separate EU defence. But since France’s line changed, other tensions have resurfaced, like the feud between Turkey (a NATO ally) and Cyprus in the EU.

Until recently NATO has largely monopolised military power, while the EU has been an economic entity. But in Afghanistan NATO found that might alone cannot crush an insurgency; development and state-building are as important.

The EU, for its part, sees that soft forms of influence must be complemented by some hard power. So at a time when the recession is squeezing both defence and aid budgets, the two clubs need each other. A report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, says America’s military “surge” in Afghanistan will fail without an EU “civilian surge”—including police trainers and monitors for next August’s elections. Yet the EU has trouble finding such experts; it has so far recruited just 200 of its planned 400 police trainers.

A study by four American institutions banding together as the Washington NATO project lists five strategic priorities for America and Europe. They are tackling the economic crisis; building “resilience” in homeland security; dealing with global security threats by stabilising Iraq and Afghanistan and halting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; spreading democratic stability across Europe; and keeping “a habitable planet”. NATO will not be able to do much of this; if anything, the EU has a bigger role.
The authors argue that NATO is “indispensable yet insufficient” for dealing with global problems. They want America and the EU to sign a “new framework” next year. This would be “anchored by a clause of mutual assistance” in case of terrorist attack or other disaster—in other words, a bit like the NATO treaty.

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