Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

NEW YORK – World leaders will come together at the United Nations in September in order to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Three of the eight MDGs involve bringing primary health services to the entire world’s population. A small amount of global funding, if well directed, could save millions of lives each year. The key step is to expand the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria into a Global Health Fund.

The Global Fund was created in 2002 to help the world battle those three killer diseases, and its accomplishments have been spectacular, making it arguably the most successful innovation in foreign assistance of the past decade. As a result of Global Fund programs, an estimated 2.5 million people are on antiretroviral AIDS therapy. No fewer than eight million people have been cured of TB. And more than 100 million long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets have been distributed in the fight against malaria. In total, studies suggest that Global Fund programs have saved five million lives.

The Global Fund’s remarkable successes result from its operational procedures. Disease-specific committees, called the Country Coordination Mechanism (CCM), are constituted in each developing country. Each CCM is chaired by the national government, but incorporates input from non-government organizations to formulate national-scale, disease-specific plans for submission to the Global Fund.

Once the Global Fund receives these plans, they are sent to a Technical Review Panel (TRP) to check that the plans are scientifically sound and feasible. If the TRP approves, the plan is sent to the Board of the Global Fund, which then votes to approve financing. Once the program gets underway, the Global Fund follows the implementation of the program, undertaking audits, monitoring, and evaluation. Since 2002, the Global Fund has approved around $19 billion in total funding.

There are two huge challenges now facing the Global Fund, and especially the donor countries that support it. The first is lack of financing. The Global Fund has been so successful that countries are submitting increasingly ambitious programs for consideration.

Unfortunately, the Global Fund is already in a state of fiscal crisis. It needs around $6 billion per year in the next three years to cover expansion of programs for the three diseases, but it has only around $3 billion per year from donor countries. Unless this is corrected, millions of people will die unnecessarily.

The second challenge is to broaden the Global Fund’s mandate. So far, the Global Fund has addressed MDG 6, which is focused on the control of specific killer diseases. Yet control of these three diseases inevitably involves improvement of basic health services – community health workers, local clinics, referral hospitals, emergency transport, drug logistics – that play a fundamental role in achieving MDG 4 (reduction of child mortality) and MDG 5 (reduction of maternal mortality). All three health MDGs are interconnected; all are feasible with an appropriate scaling up of primary health services.

The obvious step to address MDGs 4 and 5 is to explicitly expand the Global Fund’s financing mandate. Many programs, such as those in the Millennium Villages project, already show that a scaling up of primary health systems at the village level can play a decisive role in reducing child and maternal mortality. Expanding the Global Fund’s mandate to include financing for training and deployment of community health workers, construction and operation of local health facilities, and other components of primary health systems could ensure the development of these local systems.

Many countries – including France, Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States – have recently recognized the need to move beyond the financing of control of AIDS, TB, and malaria to financing improvements in primary health systems more generally. But they seem to view the issue of health-system financing as an either-or choice: scale up control of AIDS, TB, and malaria, or scale up financing of primary health systems. The truth, of course, is that both are needed, and both are affordable.

The annual cost of specific disease control in the next three years is perhaps $6 billion, and another $6 billion per year for health-system expansion. The total, $12 billion per year for an expanded Global Fund, might seem unrealistically large compared to the $3 billion per year spent now. But total annual funding of $12 billion is really very modest, representing around 0.033% (three cents per $100) of the donor countries’ GNP. This is a tiny sum, which could be easily mobilized if donor countries were serious.

US President Barack Obama has been outspoken in support of scaling up primary health services, yet the specific budget proposals from his administration are not yet satisfactory. The worst of it is that the Obama administration’s budget for the 2011 provides just $1 billion per year to the Global Fund. This small sum is unworthy of US leadership.

If the US would expand its annual support to the Global Fund to around $4 billion per year, it would likely induce the rest of the world’s donors to put in $8 billion per year, keeping the US share at around one-third of total funding. To raise these extra amounts, the Obama administration could levy an excess-profit tax on Wall Street to make up the budget gap. Wall Street bankers, whose poor performance did so much damage to the world economy in recent years, and who still are reaping excessive bonuses, would also begin to make amends by seeing their new tax payments contribute to saving the lives of millions in the coming years.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/sachs164.mp3

Thomas de Maizière is Germany’s Interior Minister.

BERLIN – Islamist terrorism has in recent years become central to security policy in Germany and many other Western countries. The terrorists’ intention is to sow mistrust and stoke fears; their aim is to weaken the democratic rule of law and to shatter citizens’ confidence in public institutions. Governments are determined to prevent this, but the reality is that frequent terror alerts tend to increase rather than reduce insecurity among our people.

The debates across Europe on new security laws to fight terrorism have sometimes created the false image that states threaten rather than protect their citizens’ freedom. In fact, the often-assumed conflict between freedom and public security does not exist.

Freedom and public security are not irreconcilable opposites. They complement and even depend on each other. Public security is a pre-requisite for freedom, and protecting freedom is at the core of a democratic state’s responsibility for public security.

A state’s monopoly on the use of force is justified if citizens can rely on it to ensure their security. The prevention of threats, along with law enforcement that involves prosecuting offenders, are crucial responsibilities, but they do not require, as a matter of principle, ever-newer security laws.

Of course, security authorities need suitable tools to fight terrorism. As terrorists take advantage of new technologies, the legal and technical means used by security authorities must adapt accordingly. But terrorism cannot be fought by the security authorities alone.

Prevention is better than repression. We should do everything in our power to avoid radicalization, to interrupt radicalization processes early, and to guide radicalized individuals back into our society and to acceptance of our values.

Yet, in facing a worsening problem of home-grown terrorism, Western countries are often unaware of this radicalization process. To intervene effectively, we need to find answers to three questions: Where and how do people radicalize? Why are they attracted to radical ideas? What can we do to counteract it?

In Germany, radicalization takes place largely through radical mosque communities or private prayer rooms, as well as through the Internet. State surveillance is used as a counter-measure, but it is just as important to work closely with the Muslim population.

Parents, friends, and imams can spot signs of radicalization earlier than security officials can, and they act responsibly by contacting the relevant state agencies in such cases. Security authorities are responsible for monitoring the more visible signs of radicalization, and other state agencies can help potential terrorism recruits to leave extremist environments and become reintegrated into society. Nothing, though, can replace support and help within these young peoples’ immediate environment.

The second question – why are some people attracted to radical ideas? – has been explored by researchers and security practitioners, who generally agree that people are more inclined to accept radical ideologies if they feel alienated. This is especially true of young people who have experienced real or even imagined discrimination. Lacking attractive social or professional prospects, such young people often seek a new and more welcoming home within a radical group.

Society’s task is to give them a feeling of belonging. That means a new sense of commitment by civil society as a whole. Our societies need to engender greater respect and acknowledgement of others, and to acquire more knowledge about different cultures and religions. We need to create tightly knit networks of personal relations between the members of different social and religious groups.

It is equally important that citizens should consider it their duty to commit themselves to the principles of liberal democracy. It is everyone’s task to counter extremism actively and speak out about radical statements, in public and in private.

Muslims have a particular responsibility here. Within their communities, or in social frameworks, they have an opportunity that others do not. Non-Muslims rarely have much contact with Muslims who are in the process of becoming radicalized, and in any case their arguments would not be well received.

The United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in particular, have notched up a number of positive civic-engagement projects involving Muslims. In Germany, we intend to facilitate and support similar contacts with Muslim groups.

But Europe and the Western world must also cooperate more closely with key Muslim countries. We need Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Maghreb countries as partners in the fight against Islamist terrorism, and that means improved operational cooperation between security authorities.

These countries have a clear interest in maintaining their stability. They should be anxious to allow terrorist groups as little room for development as possible. At the same time, it is in our interest to obtain from them as much important information about terrorist structures and activities as we can.

Improved cooperation should not stop there. We need to establish an extended dialogue with Muslim countries, particularly those from which immigrants come, and convince them to accept that their own Islamic authorities have a special responsibility in fighting radicalization. We need each other, and in many areas we can make a difference only if we act together.
Thomas de Maizière is Germany’s Interior Minister.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Jamie Metzl is Executive Vice President of the Asia Society and Project Director of the Asia Society Task Force on Afghanistan-Pakistan.

NEW YORK – The United States and its Afghan and NATO allies have demonstrated unmistakable progress in Afghanistan this year. The ongoing Marja campaign, the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and two Taliban “shadow governors” in Pakistan, and the recent drone strike hitting top leaders of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network are all clear steps in the right direction.

But no matter what other progress is made, America and its allies cannot succeed in Afghanistan unless the Afghan government succeeds – and that government is moving in the wrong direction. Until this changes, all other efforts will ultimately be in vain and current levels of international engagement with Afghanistan will become unjustifiable.

US President Barack Obama has defined America’s goals in Afghanistan as denying Al Qaeda a safe haven, reversing the Taliban’s momentum, and helping the country’s security forces and government “take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.” To this end, Obama launched an 18-month military “surge” with the backing of other NATO member countries, to be followed by the beginning of withdrawal.

To achieve these goals in such a short time, NATO and its Afghan partners must overcome three enormous obstacles. First, they must fight far more successfully against the Taliban to create space for rebuilding and possible negotiation. Second, they must convince Pakistan to begin actively opposing the Afghan Taliban and denying them the safe haven and support they currently receive in Pakistan. Third, they must support the emergence of a legitimate Afghan government that is not, unlike the current government, seen as corrupt and ineffectual by its citizens.

Because the NATO strategy’s success requires significant progress on each of these fronts, even the current preliminary signs of military progress and in Pakistan’s relations with the Afghan Taliban will be for naught if Afghanistan’s government cannot establish its legitimacy domestically. Recent efforts by President Hamid Karzai’s administration to limit its public accountability demonstrate that the Afghan government in its current form lacks either the capacity or the willingness to do so.

For at least a year prior to the August 2009 elections, NATO officials recognized that ordinary Afghans’ disgust with their government’s massive corruption was among the Taliban’s most effective recruitment tools. At that time, these officials argued that the elections would give Afghanistan’s leaders a clear mandate for reform. The deeply discredited elections put an end to those hopes.

The original flaw of the 2009 elections was structural. There was no voter list, and so it was nearly impossible to prevent ballot-stuffing. The body empowered to conduct the vote, the Independent Election Commission, was run by commissioners all appointed by and partial to one candidate, Hamid Karzai.

One institution, the Electoral Complaints Commission – a hybrid Afghan-international oversight body with a majority vote controlled by United Nations-appointed commissioners – retained its credibility throughout the process. Only the presence of the ECC, particularly its international commissioners, and the hope that it would ensure at least some fairness into the process prevented the electoral controversy from erupting into open conflict. As flawed as the elections were and as contentious as the outcome ultimately was, the situation would have been far worse without the ECC.

After the election, many hoped that Karzai would recognize the need to build a more accountable government to help secure both Afghanistan’s future and the future of international military and financial support. In a high-profile speech in London this past January, Karzai pledged to make progress in fighting corruption and promoting government accountability. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening.

Since his London speech, Karzai has actively opposed efforts to attack official corruption, sought to appoint warlords to his cabinet, failed to promote civil society, and weakened processes aimed at increasing the representation of women in parliament. To make matters worse, Karzai issued a decree on February 13 permitting him to appoint all of the ECC’s members, a measure clearly designed to strengthen the patronage system and weaken opposition movements’ prospects in future elections and a strong demonstration that his administration is not serious about establishing greater government accountability.

NATO and the international community must do everything possible to foster accountable government at all levels in Afghanistan. Although Afghanistan’s government does not need to be fully centralized, Afghanistan cannot succeed if the central government fails. For this reason, unless the Karzai government changes course there is no justification for NATO member countries to risk the lives of their soldiers and commit other valuable resources to the struggle in Afghanistan if the Afghan government’s corruption and legitimacy deficit make current progress unsustainable and achievement of NATO’s goals impossible.

Karzai is free to lead his country as he pleases, but America and its allies cannot and should not maintain their current levels of commitment unless his government can establish itself as a viable partner. The 18-month clock is ticking.
Jamie F. Metzl, who served on US President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, is Executive Vice President of the Asia Society and served as an election monitor in the August 2009 Afghan elections.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Prize. His latest book is One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.

CAMBRIDGE – In the world of economics and finance, revolutions occur rarely and are often detected only in hindsight. But what happened on February 19 can safely be called the end of an era in global finance.

On that day, the International Monetary Fund published a policy note that reversed its long-held position on capital controls. Taxes and other restrictions on capital inflows, the IMF’s economists wrote, can be helpful, and they constitute a “legitimate part” of policymakers’ toolkit.

Rediscovering the common sense that had strangely eluded the Fund for two decades, the report noted: “logic suggests that appropriately designed controls on capital inflows could usefully complement” other policies. As late as November of last year, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn had thrown cold water on Brazil’s efforts to stem inflows of speculative “hot money,” and said that he would not recommend such controls “as a standard prescription.”

So February’s policy note is a stunning reversal – as close as an institution can come to recanting without saying, “Sorry, we messed up.” But it parallels a general shift in economists’ opinion. It is telling, for example, that Simon Johnson, the IMF’s chief economist during 2007-2008, has turned into one of the most ardent supporters of strict controls on domestic and international finance.

The IMF’s policy note makes clear that controls on cross-border financial flows can be not only desirable, but also effective. This is important, because the traditional argument of last resort against capital controls has been that they could not be made to stick. Financial markets would always outsmart the policymakers.

Even if true, evading the controls requires incurring additional costs to move funds in and out of a country – which is precisely what the controls aim to achieve. Otherwise, why would investors and speculators cry bloody murder whenever capital controls are mentioned as a possibility? If they really couldn’t care less, then they shouldn’t care at all.

One justification for capital controls is to prevent inflows of hot money from boosting the value of the home currency excessively, thereby undermining competitiveness. Another is to reduce vulnerability to sudden changes in financial-market sentiment, which can wreak havoc with domestic growth and employment. To its credit, the IMF not only acknowledges this, but it also provides evidence that developing countries with capital controls were hit less badly by the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

The IMF’s change of heart is important, but it needs to be followed by further action. We currently don’t know much about designing capital-control regimes. The taboo that has attached to capital controls has discouraged practical, policy-oriented work that would help governments to manage capital flows directly. There is some empirical research on the consequences of capital controls in countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Malaysia, but very little systematic research on the appropriate menu of options. The IMF can help to fill the gap.

Emerging markets have resorted to a variety of instruments to limit private-sector borrowing abroad: taxes, unremunerated reserve requirements, quantitative restrictions, and verbal persuasion. In view of the sophisticated nature of financial markets, the devil is often in the details – and what works in one setting is unlikely to work well in others.

For example, Taiwan’s use of administrative measures that rely heavily on close monitoring of flows may be inappropriate in settings where bureaucratic capacity is more limited. Similarly, Chilean-style unremunerated reserve requirements may be easier to evade in countries with extensive trading in sophisticated derivatives.

With the stigma on capital controls gone, the IMF should now get to work on developing guidelines on what kind of controls work best and under what circumstances. The IMF provides countries with technical assistance in a wide range of areas: monetary policy, bank regulation, and fiscal consolidation. It is time to add managing the capital account to this list.

With this battle won, the next worthy goal is a global financial transaction tax. Set at a very low level – 0.05% is a commonly mentioned rate – such a tax would raise hundreds of billions of dollars for global public goods while discouraging short-term speculative activities in financial markets.

Support for a global financial-transaction tax is growing. A group of NGOs have rechristened it the “Robin Hood tax,” and have launched a global campaign to promote it, complete with a deliciously biting video clip featuring British actor Bill Nighy ( www.robinhoodtax.org ). Significantly, the European Union has thrown its weight behind the tax and urged the IMF to pursue it. The only major holdout is the United States, where Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has made his distaste for the proposal clear.

What made finance so lethal in the past was the combination of economists’ ideas with the political power of banks. The bad news is that big banks retain significant political power. The good news is that the intellectual climate has shifted decisively against them. Shorn of support from economists, the financial industry will have a much harder time preventing the fetish of free finance from being tossed into the dustbin of history.
Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Prize. His latest book is One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/rodrik41.mp3

Daoud Kuttab is Director of the Community Media Network in Amman, Jordan and a former Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

RAMALLAH – Palestinians and Israelis have different and possibly contradictory expectations from the indirect negotiations that the United States has pushed both sides into beginning.

Israel was among the first parties to welcome the Arab League’s reluctant decision to back Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s call for Arabs to give their blessing to the talks. It is clear that for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, the start of indirect talks without freezing settlement activities in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a sort of victory. Just to remind the world of this, as the indirect talks were preparing to get off the ground, Israel’s government approved a decision to break ground on 112 housing units in a settlement south of Bethlehem, and 1600 new settlement units in East Jerusalem.

For Palestinians, the return to talks, albeit indirect, is focused on one strategic issue: borders. The idea, a new one, aims at getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to the borders of the Palestinian state that both sides and the rest of the world have said is the way out of the decades-old conflict.

Palestinians want the areas occupied by Israel following the June 1967 War to be the territory of the Palestinian state. This fits with United Nations Security Council resolutions, among them Number 242, which stated the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

But a return to the 1967 borders would mean that large settlement blocks – as well as smaller settlements and East Jerusalem – would be part of the Palestinians state. Few expect that to happen. Previous talks have included an allowance for land exchanges, which would permit Israel to keep many large settlement blocks by giving land inside Israel to the Palestinians. The most likely swap would probably involve territory to create a West Bank-Gaza land corridor.

Jerusalem will be much more difficult to demarcate. Palestinians and Israelis have publicly said that they do not want a wall separating West and East Jerusalem. Among the various ideas in circulation, most incorporate former US President Bill Clinton’s call for Jerusalem’s Jewish communities to be part of Israel and the Arab communities to be part of Palestine.

But this plan has been put to the test lately by right-wing Israelis’ forcible takeover of Palestinian properties in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarah neighborhood. Hundreds of Israeli peace supporters, along with some international activists, have joined evicted Palestinians to protest the actions of these radical settlers, which have been supported by municipal and government officials.

Unfortunately, therefore, the indirect negotiations now being launched are unlikely to produce any tangible result on the borders of the Palestinian state. Indeed, to expect such results by the proposed four-month deadline is highly implausible.

Nevertheless, for both sides, the process can be as important as the results. For Israelis, these talks will relieve US and other international pressure, while at the same time providing some legitimacy to Netanyahu’s position of talking peace without giving up on settlements and Jerusalem. Many will say that this appearance of supporting peace without surrendering land has been Israel’s successful position for decades.

For Palestinians however, this process is different from negotiations in the past. Stubbornly refusing to talk face to face while settlement activities are not completely frozen has focused attention on what many believe is the crux of Israel’s colonial occupation regime.

For many Palestinians and Israelis, as well as for the international community, the shape and details of what would be a settlement acceptable to majorities on both sides is well known. By focusing on the need to reach agreements on borders within a short time period, Palestinians are saying that they do not see any need to negotiate gradual steps, preferring to agree on the final settlement first and then work back on issues of implementation.

Perhaps the most interesting new aspect in the upcoming indirect talks is what has been happening on the ground in the occupied territories. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has been active in executing a strategic plan that is expected to lead to a de facto Palestinian state within a year and a half. Non-violent protest has also been on the rise, whereas violent acts and suicide bombings have been drastically decreased.

The American negotiators who are planning to play an active role in the indirect talks, and will for the first time sit at the negotiating table if face-to-face talks do take place, have apparently promised the Palestinians that the US will point its finger at the party that dares to derail the negotiations.

Such a US declaration (if it declares Israel at fault) would give Palestinians the opportunity to declare the talks a failure and thus move toward a unilateral declaration of statehood in the hope that the world community will recognize such a state. Europe has already said that it would recognize such a unilateral declaration. In that case, the Americans would have a hard time refusing to recognize a Palestinian state that fits what the international community has said is the only acceptable solution to this intractable conflict.
Daoud Kuttab is Director of the Community Media Network in Amman, Jordan and a former Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Anoop Singh is Director of the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department.

WASHINGTON , DC – China has weathered the Great Recession well. The world now waits to see if last year’s impressive domestic demand growth can be sustained, and if China can, in the words of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, “give full play to the leading role of…consumer demand in driving economic growth.”

The Chinese consumer has been held back for too long, and now must be put front and center in China’s growth model. China’s government is already moving ahead on multiple fronts to attain this goal as was clear from announcements at this week’s National People’s Congress.

Of the many factors that have decreased the share of consumption in China’s economy, declining household disposable income has been central. That, in turn, has reflected the fall in labor income as a share of the economy, owing in part to structural changes that have moved workers out of agriculture (where the labor share of income is high) and into manufacturing (where capital commands a larger share of income).

Concurrent with diminishing labor income, government-imposed ceilings on bank deposits – the primary savings vehicle for most households – have held down household capital income. This fall in income has been magnified by rising household savings rates, driven by insufficient insurance for health care and old age, the high cost of education, growing income inequality, and demographic trends.

So what to do? Recently, I attended an IMF-organized workshop in Beijing that brought together Chinese officials, academics, international analysts, and IMF staff to discuss how best to catalyze household consumption in China. Participants emphasized that changes would be needed in multiple areas, including improving the system of taxation and social insurance, further developing housing and the service economy, and eliminating a range of relative price distortions.

One key idea was to lighten the tax burden on labor . Taking into account the personal-income tax and various social contributions, taxation of labor income in China is too high . To be sure, taxes are needed to finance social spending, but revenue sources other than taxes on labor income could do the job. China could usefully explore shifting part of the burden from labor toward property, capital gains, and inheritance taxes. Larger dividends paid to the budget from the highly profitable state-enterprise sector could also provide an alternative source of funds.

Another route to improve consumption could be to offer households greater support . The global crisis has prompted China’s government to push ahead with its social-reform program. Important improvements have been made over the past year to expand the pension system’s coverage, move toward universal health care, and provide public funding for basic education. But more can be done to speed up the existing reform package, find ways to develop full coverage for catastrophic health events, and develop government-backed financing of tertiary education.

Fixing the housing market could also help spur consumption . Distortions in the real-estate market are a powerful motivation for saving, particularly among young people who struggle to meet the high down-payment needed to buy a first home. Part of the high cost of housing arises from an underdeveloped financial system, which makes housing one of the few alternatives to bank deposits as a store of value.

Property or capital-gains taxes could help curb demand for housing as an investment vehicle. In addition, a comprehensive nationwide housing policy is urgently needed to ensure that housing remains affordable, particularly for those on limited incomes.

Related to this is the need for improvements in the overall financial system . By developing markets for private pensions, commercial health insurance, and annuities, China could complement expanded government provision of social insurance and weaken the incentives that underlie high precautionary saving.

Similarly, broadening the range of available savings instruments could raise household disposable income and increase consumption. A more developed financial system would provide alternatives to real estate as a store of value, thereby making home ownership more accessible. These issues will be examined carefully during the course of this year as the Chinese government and the IMF collaborate on a Financial Sector Assessment Program for China.

Fostering a dynamic service economy will invariably boost consumption as well . In the coming years, a more fully-fledged service economy will be an essential ingredient to increase employment and lessen China’s reliance on manufacturing.

But spurring faster growth in services is a complex undertaking. Entry barriers, particularly in service industries dominated by state-owned oligopolies, need to be lowered. Distortions in key prices that favor capital-intensive manufacturing need to be removed by raising the cost of land, energy, water, and capital. Changing the tax structure will also help. At present, industry is the primary source of tax revenue for the government, particularly at the local level, giving the state too little incentive to foster a service economy.

Finally, a stronger renminbi ought to be an integral part of the package of reforms to boost consumption. A stronger currency would increase household income. It would also create a powerful incentive for companies to expand into the service economy, providing more jobs and more choices for Chinese consumers.

If consumption can be successfully and sustainably boosted, I believe that China’s development will enter a new era, one in which economic growth continues at a rapid pace, generates higher employment, increases social welfare, places less demand on natural resources, and, ultimately, is of a much higher quality thereby underpinning more balanced global growth.
Anoop Singh is Director of the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Vartan Oskanian, Armenia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1998 until April 2008, is the founder of the Yerevan-based Civilitas Foundation.

YEREVAN – Will Turkey’s current turmoil between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and the country’s powerful army complicate and delay the country’s boldest initiatives in years – the moves to address decades-old tensions with both Armenians and Kurds?

Restructuring the role of Turkey’s army is vital, but if Turkey cannot follow through with the Armenian and Kurdish openings, the country’s own domestic situation, its relations with the two peoples, as well as tensions in the Caucasus, will undoubtedly worsen. Of the several flashpoints in the region, including that between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the tension between Armenians and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh is among the most challenging.

As to Georgia and Russia, the disproportionate size, weight, and power on one side are enough to deter any return to violence. Moreover, there are no entangling alliances complicating the matter. Georgia is not a NATO member, and the United States, it is clear, will not go to war with Russia over Georgia.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani struggle is more precarious. It is no longer a two-way tug-of-war between two small post-Soviet republics, but part of an Armenia-Turkey-Azerbaijan triangle. This triangle is the direct consequence of the process of normalization between Armenia and Turkey, which began when both countries’ presidents met at a football game.

That process now hinges on protocols for establishing diplomatic relations that have been signed by both governments but unratified by either parliament. Completing the process depends directly and indirectly on how Armenians and Azerbaijan work to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

This snarled three-way dispute, if not carefully untangled, holds many dangers. Turkey, which for nearly two decades has proclaimed its support for Azerbaijan, publicly conditioned rapprochement with Armenia on Armenian concessions to Azerbaijan.

Turkey, a NATO member, is thus a party to this conflict now, and any military flare-up between Armenians and Azerbaijanis might draw it in – possibly triggering Russia’s involvement, either through its bilateral commitments to Armenia, or through the Collective Security Treaty Organization, of which Armenia and Russia are members.

Given energy-security concerns, any Azerbaijani conflict would also seriously affect Europe. Iran, too would be affected, since it is a frontline state with interests in the region.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis have not clashed militarily for more than a decade and a half. But this is only because there has been the perception of a military balance and a hope that ongoing negotiations would succeed.

Today, both factors have changed. The perception of military parity has altered. With Azerbaijan having spent extravagantly on armaments in recent years it may now have convinced itself that it now holds the upper hand. At the same time, there is less hope in negotiations, which appear to be stalled, largely because they have been linked to the Armenia-Turkey process, which also seems to be in limbo.

The diplomatic protocols awaiting ratification by the two countries’ parliaments have fallen victim to miscalculations on both sides. The Armenians came to believe that Turkey would find a way to reconcile Azerbaijan’s interests with the Turkish opening to Armenia, and would open the border with Armenia regardless of progress on resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The problem is that Turkey initially closed the border precisely because of Nagorno-Karabakh, rather than any bilateral issue.

Turkey believed that by signing protocols with Armenia and clearly indicating its readiness to open the border, the Armenians could somehow be cajoled or pressured into resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh problem more quickly or cede territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh. But this has always been unlikely in the absence of a comprehensive settlement that addresses Armenians’ greatest fear – security – and fulfils their basic political requirement, namely a definition of Nagorno-Karabakh’s status.

Both sides seem to be somewhat surprised by the other’s expectations. Indeed, there is a growing fear that a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute is more distant now, because Turkey’s public backing has raised Azerbaijan’s expectations, while some Armenians fear collusion between neighbors out to railroad them into an unsustainable agreement.

This is Turkey’s moment of truth. The Armenia-Turkey diplomatic process has stalled, and the Turkish government’s effort at reconciliation with the country’s large Kurdish minority has soured. Just as a loss of confidence among Kurds and Turks in eastern Turkey will rock the shaky stability that they have recently enjoyed, a loss of hope for a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute may end the tentative military calm between Armenians and Azerbaijanis .

But the situation is not irretrievable. Endless public sparring between Turkish and Armenian officials through the media is not helping. It is time for both countries’ leaders to speak privately and directly with each other, with an understanding of the instability that could result from any failure to complete the diplomatic opening that the two sides initiated.

So, even as Turkey tries to deal with the consequences of its history at home, and redefine the army’s role in society, it must reset its tortured relationship with Armenia. The recent resolution passed by the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Congress, which called upon President Obama to ensure that US foreign policy reflects an “appropriate understanding and sensitivity” concerning the Armenian Genocide, should serve as a wake-up call to both Turkish and Armenian governments that Armenians are not about to question the historical veracity of the genocide. After all, if France and Germany can face their tortured history, Turkey should be able to do so as well.

The two sides must step back, look at the situation dispassionately, acknowledge the deficiencies in the protocols, address the other side’s minimum requirements, and bear in mind that a single document will not heal all wounds or wipe out all fears.

The international community must support this effort. The problem should not be dismissed as a mere settling of old scores. What is at stake is the future of a region critical to Eurasia’s peace.
Vartan Oskanian was Armenia’s foreign minister from 1998 until 2008.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Ian Buruma is Professor of democracy and human rights at Bard College. His latest book Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, has just been published by Princeton University Press.

AMSTERDAM – The Dutch army has been operating as part of NATO in a remote and unruly part of Afghanistan since 2006. Fighting against the Taliban has been heavy at times. Twenty-one Dutch lives have been lost, out of about 1,800 men and women.

The Dutch were supposed to have been relieved by troops from a NATO partner in 2008. No one volunteered. So their mission was extended for another two years. But now the Social Democrats in the Dutch coalition government have declared that enough is enough. The Dutch troops will have to come home. Since the Christian Democrats do not agree, the government has fallen.

This is highly inconvenient for US President Barack Obama, who needs all the help he can get in Afghanistan, even from small allies, if only for political reasons. To many Americans, especially of the neo-conservative persuasion, Dutch behavior might confirm all their suspicions about perfidious Europeans, addicted to material comforts, while remaining childishly dependent on US military protection. When the going gets tough, they argue, the Europeans bow out.

It is true that two horrendous world wars have taken the glamour out of war for most Europeans (Britain is a slightly different story). The Germans, in particular, have no stomach for military aggression, hence their reluctance in Afghanistan to take on anything but simple police tasks. Mindful of Ypres, Warsaw, or Stalingrad, not to mention Auschwitz and Treblinka, many regard this as a good thing. Still, there are times when pacifism, even in Germany, is an inadequate response to a serious menace.

Pacifism, however, does not really explain what happened in the Netherlands. The reason the Dutch are wary of carrying on in Afghanistan is not the trauma of World War II, but of a small town in Bosnia called Srebrenica. In the mid-1990’s, the Dutch volunteered to protect Srebrenica from General Ratko Mladic’s Serbian forces. Under United Nations rules, the Dutch, bearing only sidearms, could fight only in self-defense.

Air support, although promised, never came. Dutch hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The world then watched as the hapless Dutch allowed Mladic’s heavily armed Serbs to massacre about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

Then, too, pacifism had nothing to do with what happened. Quite the contrary: the main reason the Dutch allowed themselves to be maneuvered into an impossible situation, without military support from the UN or from NATO allies, was their over-eagerness to play an important role, to be taken seriously by the larger powers, to play with the big boys. As a result, they were left holding the bag. Now that the Dutch have done their duty in Afghanistan, the Social Democrats want to make sure that this does not happen again.

Hope of punching above their weight, of influencing the US, was also an important reason why Britain joined in the invasion of Iraq, even though public opinion was set against it. Tony Blair enjoyed the limelight, even if the light was reflected from the US.

But this was not just national hubris; it exposed a basic condition of postwar Western Europe. In return for US protection, European allies always tended to fall in line with US security policies. This is what kept NATO going since 1949. It made sense while NATO did what it was designed to do: keep the Soviets out (and, sotto voce , the Germans down).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO suddenly found itself without a clear goal (and the Germans no longer needed to be kept down). It is never easy to mobilize people in democracies for military enterprises. It took a direct Japanese attack on the US Navy to bring America into World War II. And when the former Yugoslavia was sliding into serious violence in the 1990’s, neither the US nor the Europeans wanted to intervene. By the time NATO forces finally took military action against the Serbs, 200,000 Bosnian Muslims had already been murdered.

A military alliance without a clear common enemy, or a clear goal, becomes almost impossible to maintain. NATO is still dominated by the US, and European allies still fall in line, if only just to keep the alliance going – and in the hope of exerting some influence on the only remaining superpower. This means that Europeans participate in US-initiated military adventures, even though national or European interests in doing so are far from clear.

It is hard to see how this can continue for much longer. Democratic countries cannot be asked to risk the blood of their soldiers without the solid backing of their citizens. The only solution to this problem is for Europeans to reduce their dependence on the US and take greater responsibility for their own defense.

This can no longer be accomplished on a purely national level. No European country is powerful enough. Yet, in the absence of a European government, there can be no common defense policy, let alone a common army. It is like the euro-zone’s problems: only political unity could solve them, but that is a step that most Europeans are still unwilling to take.

So we are stuck with an unsatisfactory status quo , in which NATO casts about for a role, Americans are less and less able to afford to be the world’s policemen, and Europeans struggle to find a way to define their common interests. The alliance forged in the Cold War will become increasingly fragile. For, whatever Europe’s interests are, they are unlikely to be best represented by a seemingly endless war with the Taliban.
Ian Buruma is Professor of democracy and human rights at Bard College. His latest book Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, has just been published by Princeton University Press.

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Ibrahim Kalin is chief policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.

ANKARA – The exposure of the plan hatched by senior military officials – called “Operation Sledgehammer” – to destabilize Turkey’s government, and the subsequent arrest of high-ranking officers, demonstrates the growing strength of Turkey’s democracy. Moreover, prosecutors’ efforts to uncover the truth are not a campaign to discredit the Turkish army, as some allege; nor has the exposure of “Sledgehammer” led to an emerging showdown between “secularists” and “Islamists.”

Turkish society and politics are too complicated to be reduced to such simplistic formulae. Nevertheless, this is a very serious moment for Turkey, because it may mark the country’s transit from decades of military tutelage of its civilian politicians – and thus complete its transition to full-fledged democracy.

“Sledgehammer” is, sad to say, yet another alleged coup plot in a series of attempts to topple the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which was first elected in 2002. According to the Turkish constitution, it is illegal for any agency, even the military, to try to overthrow a democratically elected government. Had such a coup attempt taken place, much less succeeded, it also would have put an end to Turkey’s aspirations to become a full member of the European Union.

Indeed, the EU’s progress reports on Turkey have consistently raised the issue of the military’s disproportionate power in Turkish politics, and the fact that some officers do not seem to accept that they are subject to civilian control. The three military coups Turkey endured in 1960, 1971, and 1980 brought neither prosperity nor stability to the country. The “soft coup” of 1997, whereby a democratically elected government was forced by the military to resign, left deep scars in Turkish society. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Turks respect the army only when it stays within its barracks.

According to the evidence gathered by Turkish prosecutors, four coup attempts, named “Sar?k?z,” “Ay?????,” “Yakamoz,” and “Eldiven,” have been made since the AKP came to power. On April 27, 2007, the Turkish Armed Forces issued a statement opposing the presidential candidacy of Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister at the time, warning that if Gul was elected, Turkey would descend into chaos. But this effort at intimidation failed, and Gul won.

General Yasar Buyukanit, the top commander of the Turkish Armed Forces back then, recently admitted that he himself wrote the April 27 memorandum. On March 14, 2008, the Chief Public Prosecutor opened an investigation aimed at shutting down the AKP on the grounds that it was intent on violating the constitutional ban on promoting religion. But the case was motivated almost exclusively by political and ideological considerations, with evidence gathered from newspaper clips and anti-government op-eds.

“Sledgehammer” is but the most recent coup plot to be uncovered, going back to 2003. According to the Turkish daily newspaper Taraf , to which the plot was leaked, a 5,000-page plan was drafted to create chaos in Turkey by burning mosques, downing Greek military aircraft, and carrying out mass arrests of those who opposed the military. The intent was to prepare the ground for a military takeover.

Some critics dismiss this planning as just “war games,” not to be taken seriously. The same thing was said by top military officials about another plot, called “The Action Plan against Religious Fundamentalism,” drafted by Col. Dursun Cicek. On June 26, 2009, Chief of General Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug called the Action Plan “just a piece of paper.” Eight months later, a military committee investigating the case concluded that the plan was, indeed, drafted to damage and discredit the AKP and government.

If none of the above constitutes a breach of democratic principles, one wonders what would. No democratic country would allow such interventions by its military, whatever the circumstances.

Yet critics still insist on getting the root cause of these efforts wrong. They try to depict this as a showdown between the “Islamist AKP” and the country’s democracy-loving secularists. Daniel Pipes, an American polemicist, has gone so far as almost to endorse the military coups of 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, arguing that “on four occasions between 1960 and 1997, the military intervened to repair a political process gone awry.” One wonders if Pipes would accept the US military taking over the American government if it should ever unilaterally conclude that American politics had gone awry.

The fact that these plots have been uncovered is a clear sign of the maturation of Turkish democracy. The legal investigations now underway do not mark a showdown between Islamists and secularists, nor are they a campaign to discredit Turkey’s generals. They are part of a process of normalization, of the establishment of absolute civilian control of the military, and confirmation of the principle that no one is above the law.
Ibrahim Kalin is chief policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997. He is the author of the recently published bestseller, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

NEW YORK – A wave of fiscal austerity is rushing over Europe and America. The magnitude of budget deficits – like the magnitude of the downturn – has taken many by surprise. But despite protests by the yesterday’s proponents of deregulation, who would like the government to remain passive, most economists believe that government spending has made a difference, helping to avert another Great Depression.

Most economists also agree that it is a mistake to look at only one side of a balance sheet (whether for the public or private sector). One has to look not only at what a country or firm owes, but also at its assets. This should help answer those financial sector hawks who are raising alarms about government spending. After all, even deficit hawks acknowledge that we should be focusing not on today’s deficit, but on the long-term national debt. Spending, especially on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure, can actually lead to lower long-term deficits. Banks’ short-sightedness helped create the crisis; we cannot let government short-sightedness – prodded by the financial sector – prolong it.

Faster growth and returns on public investment yield higher tax revenues, and a 5 to 6% return is more than enough to offset temporary increases in the national debt. A social cost-benefit analysis (taking into account impacts other than on the budget) makes such expenditures, even when debt-financed, even more attractive.

Finally, most economists agree that, apart from these considerations, the appropriate size of a deficit depends in part on the state of the economy. A weaker economy calls for a larger deficit, and the appropriate size of the deficit in the face of a recession depends on the precise circumstances.

It is here that economists disagree. Forecasting is always difficult, but especially so in troubled times. What has happened is (fortunately) not an everyday occurrence; it would be foolish to look at past recoveries to predict this one.

In America, for instance, bad debt and foreclosures are at levels not seen for three-quarters of a century; the decline in credit in 2009 was the largest since 1942. Comparisons to the Great Depression are also deceptive, because the economy today is so different in so many ways. And nearly all so-called experts have proven highly fallible – witness the United States Federal Reserve’s dismal forecasting record before the crisis.

Yet, even with large deficits, economic growth in the US and Europe is anemic, and forecasts of private-sector growth suggest that in the absence of continued government support, there is risk of continued stagnation – of growth too weak to return unemployment to normal levels anytime soon.

The risks are asymmetric: if these forecasts are wrong, and there is a more robust recovery, then, of course, expenditures can be cut back and/or taxes increased. But if these forecasts are right, then a premature “exit” from deficit spending risks pushing the economy back into recession. This is one of the lessons we should have learned from America’s experience in the Great Depression; it is also one of the lessons to emerge from Japan’s experience in the late 1990’s.

These points are particularly germane for the hardest-hit economies. The United Kingdom, for example, has had a harder time than other countries for an obvious reason: it had a real-estate bubble (though of less consequence than in Spain), and finance, which was at the epicenter of the crisis, played a more important role in its economy than it does in other countries.

The UK’s weaker performance is not the result of worse policies; indeed, compared to the US, its bank bailouts and labor-market policies were, in many ways, far better. It avoided the massive waste of human resources associated with high unemployment in America, where almost one out of five people who would like a full-time job cannot find one.

As the global economy returns to growth, governments should, of course, have plans on the drawing board to raise taxes and cut expenditures. The right balance will inevitably be a subject of dispute. Principles like “it is better to tax bad things than good things” might suggest imposing environmental taxes.

The financial sector has imposed huge externalities on the rest of society. America’s financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it. Besides, well-designed taxes on the financial sector might help alleviate problems caused by excessive leverage and banks that are too big to fail. Taxes on speculative activity might encourage banks to focus greater attention on performing their key societal role of providing credit.

Over the longer term, most economists agree that governments, especially in advanced industrial countries with aging populations, should be concerned about the sustainability of their policies. But we must be wary of deficit fetishism. Deficits to finance wars or give-aways to the financial sector (as happened on a massive scale in the US) lead to liabilities without corresponding assets, imposing a burden on future generations. But high-return public investments that more than pay for themselves can actually improve the well-being of future generations, and it would be doubly foolish to burden them with debts from unproductive spending and then cut back on productive investments.

These are questions for a later day – at least in many countries, prospects of a robust recovery are, at best, a year or two away. For now, the economics is clear: reducing government spending is a risk not worth taking.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. His most recent book Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy is available in French (Le Triomphe De La Cupidité, Liens Qui Liberent) and will be available shortly in Japanese, Spanish, German, and Italian.

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Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.

The euro’s current problems are, instead, a reflection of unresolved Europe-wide and global problems. The common currency is the canary in the mine of the global exchange-rate system.

The euro precisely measures international tensions in that it is a bold experiment: a currency that is not linked to a state, but rather follows from international rules and treaties. It is a creature of the intellect rather than a product of power. It is a post-modern or post-sovereign currency. But in the aftermath of a crisis, countries put national interests above their willingness to go along with international rules.

The creation of money is often thought to be the domain of the state: this was the prevalent doctrine of the nineteenth century, reaching its apogee in the German economist Georg Friedrich Knapp’s The State Theory of Money . In the New Testament, Christ famously answers a question about obedience to civil authorities by examining a coin and telling the Pharisees, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Unlike most banknotes and coins, there is no picture of the state or its symbols – no Caesar – on the money managed by the European Central Bank.

There has always been a close relationship between European monetary integration and global problems. Europeans thought that their close geographic proximity and shared cultural inheritance might enable them to produce answers where global debates had become stalled. When things did not work out globally, a regional solution might be possible.

The impetus to the first act of European monetary integration, the 1970 Werner Report, stemmed from awareness that there were major difficulties in the fixed exchange-rate system established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference. Nobody outside the US could force it to restrain either its monetary policy, which was becoming increasingly expansive under President Richard Nixon, or its fiscal policy, marked by mushrooming deficits due to the costs of the Vietnam war.

Policymakers in France loved to quote a remark by the French poet Paul Valéry, who in the middle of the chaos of the Great Depression had written that “Europe visibly aspires to be governed by an American committee.” To Europeans, the International Monetary Fund, which supervised exchange-rate arrangements in the post-Bretton Woods world, looked like a perfectly American committee, and France did not like that.

The Werner Report’s ideas were too feeble to deal with the currency turmoil of the early 1970’s, and it was almost a decade before Europe produced a new response. The European Monetary System began as a high-level reaction to global currency chaos, and in particular to the depreciation of the dollar in 1977 and 1978, which seemed to threaten its continued role as the major international reserve currency.

The process that began with the report of the Delors Committee in 1989 and led to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the establishment of the euro in 1999, and the introduction of the physical currency in 2002 was rooted in an attempt to devise mechanisms that would generate a more stable global exchange-rate regime.

The critical policy innovators of the late 1980’s, in particular the highly activist French Finance Minister Edouard Balladur, took an international answer and started to advocate its realization on the European level. At the G-7 meeting of finance ministers in Louvre in February 1987, Balladur suggested a system of currency target zones; when its realization proved problematic, he pushed on with a more definitive and tighter European version of the scheme.

What resulted was a partly flawed answer to the problem. That was because France and Germany, the principal protagonists in the drama of monetary integration, had different visions of how the problem should be solved. The Germans pressed for clearly defined fiscal rules, but other countries wanted more wiggle room. The French argued for European economic governance alongside the monetary union, but that looked to others as imposing too much French planisme . A watered-down version of the German solution was eventually adopted.

Today, as in the 1960’s or 1970’s, we face a fundamentally global problem of inconsistent monetary policies. Back then, Europeans complained that low interest rates in America were driving global inflation; now low US interest rates are blamed for driving irresponsible asset-price booms.

Indeed, low US interest rates, though an appropriate domestic response to the financial crisis, have pushed a global carry trade in which people borrow in dollars to fund investments in the apparently less crisis-hit large emerging-market economies. These large transactions are funneled through the international banking system.

The answers to a global problem of this kind cannot be found on a European level. It will demand global coordination of monetary policies, and some form of global economic governance. Europe tried this combination, and found that even in a regional setting it could not be fully realized. Instead, an imperfect answer produced heightened vulnerability. The result is that Europe has made itself into the primary victim of the financial crisis.
Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
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Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign minister (1998-2002), finance minister (1995, 2002-2004), and minister of defense (2001-2002) is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.

The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met in New Delhi recently, after a gap of more than 15 months, the terrorist attacks of November 11, 2008 having frozen bilateral relations between the two countries in suspicion and mutual recrimination. The New Delhi meeting marked a temporary thaw, yet even as Pakistan’s foreign secretary returned home to Islamabad, suspected Taliban bombers had attacked an Indian medical mission in the heart of Kabul, Afghanistan, killing 11 people.

Moreover, in the Pakistani province of Waziristan, three Sikhs, a minority in Pakistan, were abducted. When the ransom could not be raised, one was beheaded.

India and the world watch such events in horror, unable to decide how to respond. As people wonder if the United States-NATO surge in Afghanistan which began last month will succeed, all of South Asia is asking even more troubling questions: Who runs Pakistan? Who is really in charge of its nuclear arsenal?

To understand where Pakistan’s massive problems began, we need to look back to the country’s founding. At a press meeting on November 14, 1946, nine months before British India was partitioned into two countries, India and Pakistan, Jinnah was asked about the future of the communal situation in what would become Pakistan. He foresaw “a really stable and secure government in Pakistan,” whose Muslim majority would treat minorities in their midst “in a most generous way.” Seeking to dispel skepticism, he declared that “Pakistan and Hindustan by virtue of contiguity and mutual interests will be friends in this subcontinent.”

That was Jinnah’s dream, but the reality is that Pakistan has lived in high drama ever since its birth, often troubled by dark and imaginary historical shadows. It has been a victim of its own grandiose dreams about its role in the world and place among Islamic nations, and often of intense emotionalism and an absence of calm, dispassionate logic. Almost inevitably, or so it seems, the idea of Pakistan has been usurped, which is why Pakistan’s friends have so often become its masters, and why Pakistan continues to remain fragile, insecure, and tense.

But there are other, non-psychological factors for Pakistan’s troubles. Founded on the notion of separateness, Pakistan has continuously had to affirm its Islamic identity, as well as its opposition to India. So it adopted the identity of an Islamic Republic – a seemingly direct and logical evolution from “Muslims as a distinct nation” before partition to Pakistan as an “Islamic State” afterward. In reality, this transition has impeded Pakistan’s evolution into a modern, functioning state underpinned by a coherent national identity.

Indeed, by becoming an Islamic state, Pakistan ultimately – and perhaps inevitably –became something of a “jihadi” state. Unsurprisingly, when set on this path, it also became the chosen refuge of Osama bin Laden and of the Taliban leadership that fled Afghanistan after the US-led invasion.

Can Pakistan alter its identity? Peace in the region, and within Pakistan, depends on the answer to this question, which only Pakistani civil society – not the US, NATO, or any “surge” – can provide. But Pakistani society is now an orphan, dependant almost totally on both the Pakistani Army and the all-pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) , which has grown into a state within a state, answerable only to itself .

Of course, there are ideas of Pakistan other than that of an “Islamic state.” Indeed, Pakistan aspired at one point to becoming something of a modern extension of India’s long-ruling Mughal dynasty. But this aspiration grossly misread both the present and the inherited historical reality, for Pakistan also wanted to be a legatee of British India – a confused desire that made Pakistan more vulnerable to becoming a “rented state” than when it was part of either the Mughal or British Empire.

Likewise, dreams of cultural links with Central Asia by themselves do not make Pakistan a boundary between it and the teeming masses of India. Indeed, the only role Pakistan plays in this respect is as an outpost for Central Asian terrorists.

There is cruel irony in the observation that in the country which Jinnah created in the name of Islam, that noble faith itself now constitutes the principal challenge to the very survival of the state. It is no less ironic that Pakistan, once seen as the protector of Western interests in South Asia, has become the central challenge to those interests – what one high Western dignitary has undiplomatically called an “international migraine.”
Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign minister (1998-2002), finance minister (1995, 2002-2004), and minister of defense (2001-2002) is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Simon Chesterman is Professor of Law and Director of the NYU School of Law Singapore Program at the National University of Singapore.

Kishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His most recent book is The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

The key to understanding Asian approaches is their pragmatism. Asians constantly adapt and change.

In the past, Asians put a premium on protecting their sovereignty and were wary of any multilateral approaches that could dilute it. Now, in response to global challenges – for example, pandemics, financial crises, and climate change – the vast majority of Asian countries understand that collective action does not erode but instead protects sovereignty. For example, despite losing faith in the International Monetary Fund after the region’s financial crisis in 1997, they agreed to contribute billions to the IMF after the recent global financial meltdown.

There has also been another significant shift in Asian attitudes. Instead of legitimacy , or simply getting more seats at the table to provide input, the discussion in Asia is increasingly about outputs: how to create institutions that are more effective . At the same time, reflecting their pragmatism, the Asians remain ready to accept continuing American leadership and domination of global institutions. Nor do they challenge the United States-led security umbrella for the Asia-Pacific region.

At a recent workshop that we co-chaired in Singapore, the inevitable question was raised: Can Asians lead in meeting global challenges? The responses from the Chinese and Indian participants were striking. They argued that by taking care of more than two billion people – and taking care of them well – both China and India were already making a major contribution to global stability and order.

That is a reasonable response. Indeed, if the vast majority of the four billion Asians continue to improve their livelihoods, the world would become a better place.

Still, there are both positive and negative aspects of the Asian approach to the challenges of global governance. The positive aspects include respect for diversity and an emphasis on consensus-building over conflict, practical solutions over lofty principles, and gradualism over abrupt change. On the other hand, the desire to avoid confrontation can prevent meaningful agreements from being reached in a reasonable timeframe, and the appearance of consensus may merely mask the true politics at work.

Drawing on the positive aspects of the Asian way suggests the possibility of more inclusive decision-making in the institutions of global governance. The danger in such an approach is that decisions may not be taken, or that those that are put rhetoric ahead of substance, thereby failing to resolve fundamental political challenges.

So what might this mean in practice? Here are a few areas in which Asia – or, more properly, Asians – can contribute to solving some key global challenges:

Peace and Security: Asia includes many new naval powers, such as China and India, which could help bolster the security of sea-lanes by creating partnerships with traditional naval powers such as the US. Various Asian countries joined efforts to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia. China is developing a deployable police capacity that may provide an important new tool in peace operations in fragile states.

Climate Change: Asia needs to build up innovative markets that enable technology transfer. China, Japan, and Korea have become leading producers of green technology. Asian governments are in a position to take the lead in developing alternative energy sources.

Financial Regulation: Asian countries need to take more leadership in regulating financial markets. China, questioning the wisdom of putting the fate of the world economy in the US dollar, has proposed the creation of a global currency. Progress has been made on the Chiang Mai Initiative – a multilateral currency swap arrangement among the ten ASEAN members, China, Japan, and South Korea – and the possibility of an Asian Monetary Fund remains on (or at least not far off) the table.

Health: Asia’s experience in dealing with SARS, bird flu, H1N1, and other diseases should be studied carefully – for both positive and negative lessons – with a view to developing a new global consensus on handling pandemics.

Social Enterprises: Asia has emerged as a leader in social entrepreneurship. The successes of social businesses such as Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh have contributed to renewed thinking about how social objectives can be fused with revenue-generating practices.

In short, there is no coherent or systematic Asian approach to meeting global challenges. In response to each challenge, Asians respond pragmatically. But, given that some of the biggest challenges are the result of failed policies, pragmatism may offer a constructive way forward.
Kishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Simon Chesterman is Professor of Law and Director of the NYU School of Law Singapore Program at the National University of Singapore. They co-chaired the Singapore Hearing Working Group for the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

To be sure, the Tea Party’s brand of aggrieved populism – and its composition of mostly white, angry, middle-class voters – has deep roots in the United States, flaring up during times of change. But observers who have drawn comparisons to the Know-Nothings, the racist, paranoid, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant party that surged in the 1850’s, are reading the movement far too superficially.

Indeed, those who deride and dismiss this movement do so at their peril. While some Tea Partiers may be racist or focused on eccentric themes – such as the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate – far more of them, those who were part of the original grass-roots effort, are focused on issues that have merit. If you actually listen to them, instead of just reading accounts transmitted through the distorting mirror of the mainstream media, you hear grievances that are profound, as well as some proposals that are actually ahead of their time.

For example, Tea Party activists, using a group called End the Fed, were among the first to focus critical attention on the unelected and unaccountable US Federal Reserve Board. Now legislation is being put forward to establish greater transparency at the Fed – surely a laudable outcome.

While those attracted to the Tea Party movement are a diverse group, some common themes emerge. They see a struggle for the soul of the Tea Party between true libertarians, who are worried about individual liberties, and traditional conservatives.

Many who spoke to me directly in my Facebook community believe that Congress is utterly broken and regard faith in either of America’s major parties as naïve. They view the Democrats and the Republicans alike as obstacles to change, drowning out the voices of the people as they kowtow to special interests. They are concerned about concentrated Federal control, spiraling debt, and the loss of individual rights.

Are they really wrong? After all, the movement took shape following the US government’s massive – and bipartisan – bailout of Wall Street banks. And, at a time when the Chinese government, America’s main creditor, has begun sending clear signals about its preferences for US domestic policy – even as it ignores American criticism of its human rights record – are the Tea Partiers merely being paranoid?

As little as I like Sarah Palin, the fact is that entrenched lobbying and other special interests mean that a “changing of the guard” in Washington is too often only a change in branding. As Barack Obama submits to the pressures of a US Department of Defense in which private contractors comprise 65% of the staffing budget, proposes preventive detention of Guantánamo detainees, and perpetuates the status quo in myriad other ways, her question – “So how’s that whole hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya?” – is not the wrong question.

Indeed, for nearly a decade, concentration of executive power has threatened America’s system of checks and balances and given the Federal government the authority to spy on citizens, withhold information, and aggressively arrest and even Taser protesters – or to hire private contractors to do so. In these circumstances, the Tea Party activists’ focus on supporting states’ autonomy – and even on property rights and the right to bear arms – can seem like a prescient effort to constrain overweening corporate and military power in national government.

That is why the elites in general are so quick to ridicule this movement. A movement that is genuinely populist in origin poses a threat to their own position in the power structure. For once, a grassroots movement has arisen that is composed of people – some with Ivy League degrees, but many without – who are taking seriously the Internet-age promise that you don’t have to yield leadership to an established class of politicians and pundits.

This is also why the Republicans are seeking to capture the Tea Party movement’s energy for partisan purposes, overrunning it with well-paid operatives, particularly from former Representative Dick Armey’s fundraising and advocacy organization. Moreover, Tea Party gatherings have increasingly become a platform for Republican candidates seeking the support of a highly mobilized electoral base.

I hope that the Republican establishment does not succeed in co-opting the Tea Party – and that the Democratic establishment does not, either. And I hope that the movement captures the imagination of progressives, who are equally disgusted with the corruption of the status quo, and who can agree on many thematic goals, even if their policy proposals might be different.

At its worst, any populist movement can descend to demagoguery. But the Tea Party movement at its best (or in its origin) is constitutionalist. That is an awakening – and long overdue – sentiment in America, and one that spans the political divide.

The Tea Party movement’s adherents are angry – and, in many respects, justifiably so – but most of them are not crazy. That diagnosis better suits those who prefer to ignore them.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/wolf21.mp3

Ronald D. Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, is executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Russia today openly lays claim to a sphere of interest in its borderlands – in direct contradiction to commitments made under the Helsinki process. It has embraced policies and a military doctrine that labels NATO a threat and justifies the right to intervene in these countries. While packaged in smooth diplo-speak, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s new proposal for European security has the less-than-hidden goal of stopping and rolling back Western influence.

Rather than moving into the twenty-first century, Russia seems determined to revert to nineteenth-century strategic thinking. With the Obama administration focused on Afghanistan and Iran, the Kremlin hopes that a West in need of its cooperation will acquiesce in its demands.

And it is not only words. Eighteen months ago, a war took place in Europe between Russia and Georgia. It was a little war, but one that raised big questions. It was not fought over the future status of Georgia’s Russian-backed breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (though that source of conflict was a real one). Instead, the war’s root cause was Georgia’s desire to align itself with the West and Russia’s determination to stop it.

Many diplomats would prefer to forget the Russo-Georgian war or sweep it under the rug. But none of the underlying tensions are resolved. There is no stable solution in sight for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia has not abandoned the goal of breaking Georgia’s desire to go West. Instability and separatism are growing in the northern Caucasus, making the broader region more volatile.

In late January, the Obama administration issued its first unequivocal reaffirmation of the strategy of democratic enlargement that has guided Western thinking since the collapse of the Iron Curtain two decades ago. Speaking in Paris, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reminded us that NATO and EU enlargement created an unprecedented degree of stability and security in the eastern half of the continent, that Russia too had benefited from this stability, and that it was critical that Europe’s doors remain open to further enlargement.

Clinton went on to reject as unnecessary Medvedev’s call to re-make current European security arrangements. NATO has also finally started engaging in defense planning and other forms of strategic reassurance for its allies in Central and Eastern Europe, which are unsettled by Russia’s new assertiveness.

But what about those countries in between – countries like Ukraine and Georgia and the southern Caucasus? Ukraine has just elected as its president Viktor Yanukovich, who is unlikely to pursue a NATO integration agenda, and if follows through on his commitment to join a customs union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, membership in the EU would be precluded. But that does not mean that tensions with Russia will automatically disappear.

Yanukovich’s victory notwithstanding, Ukraine is a country that is becoming more European and gradually moving out of Russia’s orbit in its own chaotic way. Regardless of whether Georgians like or dislike Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvilli, they want to go West, too. So Russia’s attempts to bring these countries to heel are likely to continue and remain a bone of contention and conflict.

And what is Western policy? In reality, the West today no longer has a grand strategy toward the East. The moral and strategic vision of the 1990’s has exhausted itself and come to a grinding halt after the shock of the Russo-Georgian war and the recent Ukrainian election. As welcome as Clinton’s recent clear words were on the need to defend the right of countries to decide their own fate, you don’t have to go very far in Europe to hear whispers that some kind of new “Finlandization” might be a reasonable compromise for countries like Ukraine and Georgia.

It is time for the West to openly debate what its strategy is – and what it is not. Two decades ago, the West rejected “spheres of influence,” because Europe’s bloody history taught us that compelling nations to align themselves with others against their will was wrong and a recipe for future conflict.

If we still believe that today, we need an updated moral and strategic vision for such countries, and to back it up with a real strategy. We need to be clear that Moscow has a right to security, but that it does not have the right to interfere in the affairs of its neighbors, to topple their governments, or to deny them their own foreign-policy aspirations.

Barack Obama is right to try to reset relations with the Kremlin and engage a revisionist Russia. But we need to do so knowing what our strategy is on this key issue. As the United States and Russia close in on a new arms-control treaty, it is time to face the question of how we deal with Europe’s contested neighborhood.
Ronald D. Asmus is Executive Director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the US in Brussels and author of The Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia and the Future of the West.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Emily Parker, a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, is currently writing a book about democracy and the Internet.

Even if Google does ultimately leave China, the game is not over. Western companies can promote Internet freedom from the outside, by providing useful technology as well as the keys to access it. Call this “Twitter diplomacy.”

Twitter is largely blocked by China’s “great firewall” (GFW), which prevents Chinese people from accessing certain sites. Yet Twitter has an almost religious following among tech-savvy Chinese, whose determination to use the service outstrips authorities’ efforts to block access to it.

These “netizens” surmount the firewall by way of proxy servers or virtual private networks (VPNs) that allow them to browse the Web as if they were outside of China. Earlier this month, Chinese twitterati helped get the GFW onto the list of Twitter’s top ten “trending topics” (or most tweeted terms) – an impressive feat given that Twitter is supposed to be inaccessible in China.

Twitter, which lets people send bite-size messages to large groups, allows Chinese to quickly disseminate urgent news or even uncomfortable facts. “Twitter can create a faster information flow than any official agency,” says Michael Anti, a journalist in Beijing who has long been at the forefront of the Chinese Internet movement. “That means people would get information faster than the government. That’s a real crisis for Communists.”

Twitter also helps protect individual citizens. Blogger Peter Guo claims that Twitter got him out of jail. He says that he was arrested after spreading word about a crime that allegedly involved local officials. He tweeted an SOS via his mobile phone after he was arrested last July, and his case quickly attracted both domestic and international attention, which helped secure his release a little over two weeks later.

So just imagine if Twitter were available to the larger Chinese population. The problem is that many Chinese still lack the simple tools that would enable them to get past the GFW.

When I asked Guo how the outside world could make Twitter more accessible in China, he replied that we could help by “providing affordable VPN service.” Foreign companies, he added, could make available more secure browsers that would help “Chinese people to circumvent the GFW.”

Government can also play a role in empowering Chinese netizens. Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has suggested that the United States, for example, could start with some basic funding for the kind of “science and technology innovation that gave us the Internet to begin with.” This could include potential “game changers” in China such as ad hoc mesh networking, which allows users to communicate with one another by hopping from one device to the next without an Internet service provider in the middle.

But, given the political sensitivities of foreign pressure on China, it is unclear how far Western governments will be able to go. That is where companies like Twitter come in.

Even if Twitter’s co-founders did not necessarily develop it to be a tool of democratization, that is precisely what it has become. In April 2009, young people in Moldova used Twitter to organize protests against their government. Two months later, Twitter famously helped Iranians assemble and share information during their election protests.

Now, we are beginning to see a similar phenomenon in China. In November, citizen protests against the construction of an incinerator in Guangzhou became a widely Tweeted event. Referring to the role that Twitter played in protests in Iran and Moldova, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told me, “These are all events and movements that people chose to make happen, and Twitter was a tool that happened to be there to make it more easy.”

Twitter may now be taking more aggressive steps to promote Internet freedom abroad. Co-founder and CEO Evan Williams recently suggested that software developers were working on technology to evade government barriers, though he did not give specific details.

Google’s adamant stance on Chinese censorship may have been well intentioned. The problem is that the standoff has now taken on the tone of a state-to-state confrontation. China, apparently still reeling from a “century of humiliation” at the hands of outsiders, will not be pushed around by America. This view is not limited to the Chinese government. Right now, many netizens are applauding Google’s move. But if they begin to perceive Google as a pawn of the US government, this sentiment could turn on a dime.

Ultimately the Chinese Internet cat-and-mouse game will be won with innovation, not political pressure. The world should continue to flood the Chinese market, and those of other countries that restrict freedom of expression, with cutting-edge technology. Of course, censors will often be just one step behind, filtering information and shutting down sites. But Chinese netizens are remarkably adept at using the limited tools available to them. In doing so, they are transforming their country in a slow but irreversible way.
Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, is writing a book about democracy and the Internet.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Donna Dickenson, Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of London, was the 2006 winner of the International Spinoza Lens Award for contributions to public debate on ethics. Her latest book is Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood.

The questions on which the case turns are whether genetic patents help or hamper research, and whether patients should have to pay a license fee to a biotechnology corporation to be tested for predisposition to disease.

One of the plaintiffs is Lisbeth Ceriani, a 43-year-old woman with breast cancer whose doctors recommended that she be tested for two genetic mutations involved in some hereditary forms of the disease. Myriad Genetics, the sole test provider in the US – it holds a patent on the genes themselves , not just on the diagnostic test – did not accept her insurance, and Ceriani could not afford to pay for the test. So she remained ignorant, as did her physicians – with possible ramifications for her clinical care. Five other plaintiffs – along with major medical bodies – tell similar stories.

Those who oppose genetic patents claim that they also deny US constitutional rights, making this the first time a genetic patent has been challenged on human rights grounds. As so often happens in biotechnology, what looks at first like an abstruse technical issue raises many questions that cut to the core of our humanity.

One human gene out of approximately every five is now the subject of a patent, the majority of which are held by private firms. This case concerns two such genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Women with the “wrong” version of these genes have a heightened risk of developing breast cancer (up to 85%, against the normal 12%, although the genes account for only a minority of breast cancers). These women also run a greater risk of ovarian cancer.

Myriad Genetics also has tried to pursue patent rights in Europe, but there its claims have been largely rejected. Although the gene’s function in causing breast and ovarian cancer was uncovered by Cancer Research UK in 1995, Myriad, along with nearly 30 other defendants, argues that the patent is a necessary reward for its research costs. In fact, without patent protections, the firm and its allies claim, medical research would shudder to a halt.

But, whatever the merits of the claim that genetic patents benefit research and treatment, that is a practical, rather than a legal, argument. In order to gain legal “standing” to sue Myriad Genetics, critics of genetic patents – including the American Medical Association, the American Society of Human Genetics, and the American Civil Liberties Union – had to find an issue that could be adjudicated on a constitutional basis. Their innovative strategy is to draw on the First Amendment, which protects freedoms such as speech and religion, to argue that patents restrict patients’ freedom of access to information that might enable us to take action to protect our health.

That is a clever argument, but is it really the source of people’s profound disquiet about genetic patenting? In talking about similar issues raised in my recent book Body Shopping , I have heard many shocked reactions to the growing commodification of human tissue, but none more generally shared than this one: how can you take out a patent on life?

Is a genetic variant a “product of nature” or a “discovery”? While the plaintiffs assert that “genes are identified, not invented,” the defendants claim that the basis of patent law is precisely the opposite. Their argument is that what is patented is not the gene as it occurs in our bodies, but rather a sort of “cloned” version produced in the laboratory. Rather than a “patent on life,” the companies say, they are patenting something more like a chemical.

If that is true, how can Ceriani rightfully be kept in the dark about what form the gene takes in her body? This is not just a problem for people who think – wrongly, in legal terms – that they own their bodies, as most people do. With a few limited and recent exceptions, there is no such thing as property in tissue once it has left your body. We know that from such cases as that of John Moore, who tried unsuccessfully to claim property rights in a valuable cell line developed from his immune cells.

But what about a gene that has not left my body? Don’t I somehow still “own” it? Don’t I have rights of control over my own body? How can a commercial firm not only deny me the right to know my own genetic profile unless I pay their fee for the diagnostic test, which might be fair enough, but also to prevent any other firm from offering me a similar test unless those firms pay it a license fee?

Proprietary rights for commercial firms over the most basic element of an individual’s genetic identity should not be enforceable. We do not have to believe in genetic determinism to find that argument compelling.
Donna Dickenson, Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of London, was the 2006 winner of the International Spinoza Lens Award for contributions to public debate on ethics. Her latest book is Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

The global public is disconcerted by these attacks. If experts cannot agree that there is a climate crisis, why should governments spend billions of dollars to address it?

The fact is that the critics – who are few in number but aggressive in their attacks – are deploying tactics that they have honed for more than 25 years. During their long campaign, they have greatly exaggerated scientific disagreements in order to stop action on climate change, with special interests like Exxon Mobil footing the bill.

Many books have recently documented the games played by the climate-change deniers. Merchants of Doubt , a new book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway set for release in mid-2010, will be an authoritative account of their misbehavior. The authors show that the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.

Today’s campaigners against action on climate change are in many cases backed by the same lobbies, individuals, and organizations that sided with the tobacco industry to discredit the science linking smoking and lung cancer. Later, they fought the scientific evidence that sulfur oxides from coal-fired power plants were causing “acid rain.” Then, when it was discovered that certain chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were causing the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, the same groups launched a nasty campaign to discredit that science, too.

Later still, the group defended the tobacco giants against charges that second-hand smoke causes cancer and other diseases. And then, starting mainly in the 1980’s, this same group took on the battle against climate change.

What is amazing is that, although these attacks on science have been wrong for 30 years, they still sow doubts about established facts. The truth is that there is big money backing the climate-change deniers, whether it is companies that don’t want to pay the extra costs of regulation, or free-market ideologues opposed to any government controls.

The latest round of attacks involves two episodes. The first was the hacking of a climate-change research center in England. The e-mails that were stolen suggested a lack of forthrightness in the presentation of some climate data. Whatever the details of this specific case, the studies in question represent a tiny fraction of the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the reality and urgency of man-made climate change.

The second issue was a blatant error concerning glaciers that appeared in a major IPCC report. Here it should be understood that the IPCC issues thousands of pages of text. There are, no doubt, errors in those pages. But errors in the midst of a vast and complex report by the IPCC point to the inevitability of human shortcomings, not to any fundamental flaws in climate science.

When the e-mails and the IPCC error were brought to light, editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal launched a vicious campaign describing climate science as a hoax and a conspiracy. They claimed that scientists were fabricating evidence in order to obtain government research grants – a ludicrous accusation, I thought at the time, given that the scientists under attack have devoted their lives to finding the truth, and have certainly not become rich relative to their peers in finance and business.

But then I recalled that this line of attack – charging a scientific conspiracy to drum up “business” for science – was almost identical to that used by The Wall Street Journal and others in the past, when they fought controls on tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, second-hand smoke, and other dangerous pollutants. In other words, their arguments were systematic and contrived, not at all original to the circumstances.

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years – time after time – but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fueling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link: http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/sachs163.mp3