Archive for the ‘Topics’ Category

Why The Swap Will Harm Israel

By Alon Pinkas

Billions and Billions

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Sometime on October 31st, the world’s population will hit seven billion. The baby who does the trick will most likely appear in India, where the number of births per minute—fifty-one—is higher than in any other nation. But he or she could also be born in China—the world’s most populous country—or in a fast-growing nation like Nigeria or Guatemala or, really, anywhere. The idea that a particular child will on a particular day bring the global population to a particular number is, of course, a fiction; nobody can say, within tens of millions, how many people there are on earth at any given time. The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31st as its best estimate. That this date is Halloween is presumably just a coincidence.

Depending on how you look at things, it has taken humanity a long time to reach this landmark, or practically no time at all. Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.”

In a distinctly un-Malthusian fashion, population then took off. It hit two billion in the nineteen-twenties, and was three billion by 1960. In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation, it stood at around three and a half billion; since then, it has been growing at the rate of a billion people every twelve or thirteen years. According to the United Nations, it reached six billion on October 12, 1999. (A baby boy born in Sarajevo, Adnan Mević, was, for symbolic purposes, designated the world’s six-billionth person and greeted at the hospital by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.) For large and slow-to-reproduce mammals like humans, such a growth curve is, to put it mildly, unusual. Edward O. Wilson has called “the pattern of human population growth” in the twentieth century “more bacterial than primate.”

Predicting where the numbers will go from here is, at least in the short term, pretty straightforward. Fourteen years from now, there will be eight billion people on the planet. At around the same time, India will overtake China as the most populous nation on earth. Most of the growth will occur in the world’s poorer countries. Proportionally, Europe’s population will decline, while Africa’s will increase.

The further ahead you look, the trickier things become. This is partly a matter of birth rates; because the base is now so large, even relatively trivial changes produce enormous effects. In most European nations, and also in countries like Japan and China, birth rates have already fallen below replacement levels. Until quite recently, the U.N. was projecting that rates in other parts of the globe would follow a similar downward slope, so that sometime toward 2050 global population would level out at around nine billion. A few months ago, though, the U.N. announced that it was revising its long-term forecast. The agency now estimates that the number of people on earth in 2100 will be ten billion and still climbing. One reason for the upward revision is that birth rates in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, have remained unexpectedly high. Another is an uptick in births in wealthier countries, like the United States and Britain. (Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that birth rates in the U.S. dipped during the recession that started in 2007; it is doubtful, though, that this will have much impact on long-term population estimates.) If families have, on average, just half a child more than the U.N. currently projects, by 2100 there will be sixteen billion people on the planet. Read more…

As published in The New Yorker (October 24th Print Edition).

Swapping one famous Israeli prisoner for 1,027 Palestinians

Palestinians at a rally in Jerusalem on Friday called for the release of family members held by Israel. The full list of the more than 1,000 Palestinians to be freed will be made public on Sunday. (Source: www.nytimes.com)

Of the 1,000 Palestinian men and 27 women Israel has agreed to release from prison in return for its abducted soldier, Gilad Shalit, 550 are designated “a gesture to Egypt”, which brokered the complicated deal. Selected by Israel from among the 6,000-odd Palestinians it holds in its jails for terrorist (as opposed to mundanely criminal) offences, they are to be freed in two months’ time.

The other 450, plus the women, were selected by Hamas, the Islamist organisation that rules the Gaza Strip and that has been responsible for Sergeant Shalit’s incarceration for the past five years. They will be freed very soon and some hours before Sergeant Shalit—assuming everything goes smoothly and the Israeli Supreme Court rejects a series of appeals against their release by relatives of some of those they killed. Questions are being asked why Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, decided to relent after years of refusing so lopsided an exchange.

Mr Netanyahu cited regional turmoil as the reason for agreeing to the swap right now. “I don’t know if the future would have allowed us to get a better deal—or any deal at all for that matter,” he said. Intelligence officials briefing the cabinet suggested that violent unrest in Syria was a primary cause for a shift by Hamas. It may choose to move its leadership to Egypt, which may have made a prisoner deal a precondition.

Mr Netanyahu made no mention of the ongoing effort by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to win statehood at the UN, a move he vigorously opposes. Plainly, though, the prisoner deal will enhance Hamas’s standing with the Palestinian public, presumably at the expense of Mr Abbas.

Moshe Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister, warned that many of the freed men will take up arms again, despite the Israeli security services’ best efforts to keep tabs on them. He recalled the same happening in 1985, when 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were swapped for three Israeli soldiers.

Most of the cabinet still voted for the deal. For Mr Netanyahu’s more cynical critics this was a sign that the prime minister and his coalition were closing ranks behind a populist move designed to capture public sympathy. The government has been unnerved of late by a broad-based social-justice movement, which organised large demonstrations during the summer.

The prime minister stresses that Hamas has to do without such high-profile prisoners as Ahmed Saadat, convicted for the murder of an Israeli minister in 2001, and Marwan Barghouti, convicted of several murders but widely seen as a possible future Palestinian leader acceptable to all sides in the long-running conflict. Read more…

As published in www.economist.com on October 15, 2011 (The Economist Print Edition).

Is there anyone who still doubts that Iran is a terrorist state?

By Matthew Levitt

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement on Oct. 11 that a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen and a commander in Iran’s Quds Force, the special-operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had been charged in New York for their alleged roles in a plot to murder the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, represents a brazen escalation in Iran’s struggle for regional dominance. But Iran’s willingness to use brutal means to achieve its foreign-policy goals is nothing new: Since the creation of the Islamic Republic, U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly identified terrorism as one of the regime’s signature calling cards.

The timing of this plot suggests Iran feels itself under increasing pressure, both from the international community (led by the United States) and from the regional alliance of Sunni states in the region (led by Saudi Arabia). Intriguingly, the plot seems to have been launched shortly after the Saudi-led military intervention in Bahrain against Shiite protesters, to which Iran objected loudly but was unable to affect.

The plot developed quickly over just a few months, starting this spring and culminating with the arrest of Manssor Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American man, in September. According to a Justice Department news release, Arbabsiar told a Drug Enforcement Administration confidential source (CS-1) posing as an associate of an international drug cartel that “his associates in Iran had discussed a number of violent missions for CS-1 and his associates to perform, including the murder of the Ambassador.” Later, after Arbabsiar was arrested and confessed to his role in the plots, he reportedly called Gholam Shakuri, the member of the Quds Force who was also indicted, at the direction of law enforcement. Shakuri again confirmed that the plot should go forward and as soon as possible. “Just do it quickly. It’s late,” he said.

The fact that Iran plotted attacks in the United States is surprising, and not only because Iranian agents have traditionally carried out such attacks in Europe, South America, or the Middle East. One might assume Iran would behave more cautiously at a time when it has come under increasing international pressure over its rumored pursuit of nuclear weapons, its suppression of human rights at home, and its support of terrorism abroad. Indeed, the U.S. government designated the Quds Force as a terrorist group in 2007 for providing material support to the Taliban, Iraqi Shiite militants, and other terrorist organizations. Most counterterrorism experts expected that future acts of Iranian terrorism would occur in places like Europe where Iranian agents have long targeted dissidents, and not in the United States, where carrying out an attack would risk a U.S. military reprisal.

Iran’s use of terrorism as a tool of foreign policy, however, goes back as far as the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Writing in 1986, the CIA assessed in a now declassified report titled “Iranian Support for International Terrorism” that while Iran’s support for terrorism was meant to further its national interest, it also stemmed from the clerical regime’s perception “that it has a religious duty to export its Islamic revolution and to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.” Read more…

Matthew Levitt is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

As published in www.foreignpolicy.com on October 12, 2011.

The Europeans are pushing the global banking system to the edge

You know something bad is going to happen in a horror film when someone decides to take a late-night stroll in a forest. The equivalent in finance is a bank boss insisting that his institution is completely solid.

European bankers have been saying things are fine for weeks now, even as their exposure to indebted euro-zone countries strangles their access to funding. The amount of money parked at the European Central Bank (ECB) has risen to 15-month highs as banks hold back from lending to each other. Fears of contagion from Europe have now infected America (see article). Banks there led the S&P500 into official bear-market territory this week, as the index briefly dipped more than 20% below a high set in April. The chief executive of one embattled institution, Morgan Stanley, sent a memo to employees reassuring them that the bank’s balance-sheet was dramatically stronger than it was in 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Europe is not the only problem facing Western banks, of course. A long list of woes also includes anaemic economic growth, piles of new regulation and waves of litigation related to America’s housing bust. An ill-conceived congressional bill to punish China for manipulating its currency is yet another sign that America has little to be proud of in terms of economic policy. But the central reason to worry is the euro zone: a series of defaults there would unleash devastation, sparking big losses on European banks’ government-bond holdings, and in turn threatening anyone exposed to those banks.

Earlier this year, the prospect of another Lehman moment seemed remote. Thanks to the abject failure of Europe’s leaders since then, the similarities with 2008 are disturbingly real. Governments are once again having to step in to support their banks. France and Belgium this week said that they would guarantee the debts of Dexia, a lender that was bailed out three years ago but which is weighed down by lots of peripheral euro-zone debt. In another throwback, plans are afoot to create a “bad bank” for Dexia’s worst assets. The cost of buying insurance against bank defaults has surged: credit-default-swap spreads for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs hit their highest levels since October 2008 this week. Rumours are rife: that banks cannot pledge collateral at central banks, that hedge funds are pulling their money from prime brokers. Read more…

As published in www.economist.com on October  8, 2011.