Losing Control

Global Security in the Twenty-first Century

Paul Rogers

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780745343679
• eBook ISBN: 9780745343747
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Outstanding... combines a glimpse behind the security screens with a sharp analysis of the real global insecurities - growing inequality and unsustainability' - New Internationalist

Written in the late 1990s, Losing Control was years, if not decades, ahead of its time, predicting the 9/11 attacks, a seemingly endless war on terror and the relentless increase in revolts from the margins and bitter opposition to wealthy elites.

Now, more than two decades later and in an era of pandemics, climate breakdown and potential further military activity in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Paul Rogers has revised and expanded the original analysis, pointing to the 2030s and '40s as the decades that will see a showdown between a bitter, environmentally wrecked and deeply insecure world and a possible world order rooted in justice and peace.

1

A Violent Peace

In the early 1990s the issue of climate change was emerging as a major challenge but at that time most of the evidence appeared to show that it would be the countries in the temperate latitudes that would be most affected, with tropical and sub-tropical regions escaping the worst of the impact. That at least meant that wealth and resources might be well placed to meet the challenge. This did not mean that environmental challenges across the Global South could be ignored, especially when those challenges combined with many problems of poverty and marginalisation.

It was in that context that a conference took place a few years later in Dhaka on the links between environmental degradation and poverty, organised by a Bangladeshi NGO and financed by the World Bank. It brought together experts from many parts of the world and, as is usually the case with such meetings, it was held in an international hotel. This particular well-appointed hotel had been built in a secluded part of the city a few years before, but the explosive growth of Dhaka in the 1980s and early 1990s meant that it was now surrounded by a large shanty town crowded with people who had come in from the countryside in search of work.

The poverty was extreme, with little fresh water, open sewers, rats everywhere and many of the hastily built dwellings liable to repeated flooding during the monsoons. In the midst of this was the hotel, with its carefully tended tropical gardens, large swimming pool, sun-loungers, sauna and fitness centre. The whole complex was surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire, with just one entrance, protected by armed guards. Conference delegates came in from the airport in taxis or hotel bus, stayed there for the duration of the conference, earnestly discussing poverty and the environment, and then departed.

No disrespect is intended towards the World Bank, at least on this occasion. The Bangladeshi organisers did their best to bring the conference down to earth, with some hard-hitting papers from local researchers who worked among the shanty dwellers. Moreover, several of the participants from Bangladesh and overseas argued forcibly and effectively that the problems of poverty within the country stemmed far more from its debt burden and perennial trade difficulties than from internal corruption and mismanagement, serious though that was. After all, East Bengal in the eighteenth century had been one of the most successful economies in Asia, before the East India Company got to work on it. There was certainly no little irony in discussing poverty in such surroundings, but the circumstances of that hotel could be repeated throughout the world.

Over half a century or more, intercontinental business travel and tourism increased at a remarkable rate. Many people thought nothing of moving from Rio to Cape Town or from Delhi to Bangkok on business, or visiting the game parks of Zimbabwe, Tanzania and South Africa or the beaches of Goa, Thailand, Kenya and the Gambia. In their travels they lived in an almost perpetual cocoon, carefully protected from the real lives of the great majority of the people around them. Tourists would stay in high-rise hotels on spectacular sea fronts and travel by coach out to the mountains and game parks. They might have visited the expensive and fashionable downtown shops perhaps only a few blocks from the hotel, but they would not walk there after dark – indeed they would not be encouraged to walk anywhere after dark and would certainly not see the massive shanty towns that are a feature of so many cities across the world.

The world’s elite has increased in size and wealth over that half century and, COVID-19 notwithstanding, has been mobile as never before, travelling the world in a perpetual mirage, constantly protected and made comfortable, happily unaware of the real world. Not that such marginalisation is restricted to the countries of the Global South. Over that same period, marginalisation has grown alarmingly in many northern states, accelerated by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and more recently by COVID-19 where, in mid-2020 Britain, one in ten people needed support from voluntary food banks.¹

Closing the castle gates

As marginalisation increased, the concern of the better off for their personal security also increased, shown by the growth across the world of gated communities and private security forces. Take, for example, the case of Heritage Park.² South Africa, like many countries that have particularly deep divisions of wealth and poverty, has a serious crime problem, especially in the major cities and townships. Many actions of the government may be directed towards improving the basic conditions of the marginalised majority, but it is proving to be an enormous task. Meanwhile, the richer elites of the country, mainly but not all white, take personal security seriously. Many live in gated communities or apartments protected by security guards, deserting the cities for suburban security at the end of each working day.

One development in South Africa is perhaps taking this to its logical conclusion and was, in some ways, ahead of its time. When Heritage Park was planned 30 years ago in the exclusive Cape settlement of Somerset West, it was seen as an almost completely self-contained community of the wealthy, surrounded and protected by a formidable electrified fence. When completed the 500-acre site would contain about 2,000 attractive high-cost homes surrounding a 50-acre central park with lakes, forest and bird sanctuary. Waterways, jogging tracks, a horse trail, children’s playground, recreation ground, sports field and sports hall would all be within the perimeter fence, as would a church and even a village green. The community would also have shops, schools, restaurants, a hotel, a theatre, a small business park and light industries.

Entry into Heritage Park would be by permit through one of four security entrances, and it would have its own police force of 40 people primarily to provide protection from outside. Crime was therefore not expected to be a serious problem within the fence, which would be screened by trees and shrubs to make it difficult to see from the inside, though residents could expect fine views of the distant mountains. Heritage Park would be open to all, white, black or coloured, provided they could afford to live there, although the acknowledged reality was that most were expected to be white. Given the availability of education, employment and recreation facilities, it was expected that most residents would spend the great majority of their time within the fence, rarely having to go outside.

Within a decade, Heritage Park was very much up and running with the first 650 houses completed, along with two churches and two schools and 35,000-volt security fences, and was fulfilling an aim of the original developer, George Hazelden, when he wrote, “We have taken a leaf or two out of the medieval past and placed it in our future. To be precise, we have stolen the concept of whole town fortification to create a crime-free state.”³ While the intention of the developers was to open the development to all who could afford to live there, at the end of that first decade just five of the first 1,500 residents were black. It is true that the developers also developed an outreach programme into local townships to provide work, and they built a small township for 200 black and coloured families within the estate but outside the fence and envisaged the day when the fence might be removed. That last hope, though, has not materialised and the fence, gates and control rooms remain. Indeed, many residents are also signed up to armed response security companies.

Heritage Park is an advanced example of a way of living that has become progressively more common throughout the world, including in the UK. In one sense it is nothing new, in that the richest and most powerful people throughout history have commonly found it necessary to pay particular attention to their own security and that of their possessions. What is more common is the manner in which the security of the richer sectors of society has become such a major phenomenon throughout the world, but especially in those many places where the wealth–poverty divide is particularly marked.

An even more extreme example was found in São Paulo in Brazil, at the same time as Heritage Park was being planned, where it was reported that the richest citizens had started to take to the sky for their own safety:

Carjackings, kidnappings of executives and roadside robberies have become a part of the risks of daily life for anyone perceived to have money. So the demand for private helicopters in São Paulo has turned the city into one of the most vibrant markets for helicopter dealers.⁴

What a difference a day makes

As the castle gates have closed, almost literally, around the protected residents of Heritage Park, so the richer states of the world try to close their gates to the seekers of a better life, a process which, for politicians, is greatly aided in many countries by the tabloid press. Occasionally, the effects are bizarre, as seen in two examples from the more distant and recent past. In the early morning of 6 February 2000, for example, nearly two years before 9/11 and when the Taliban still controlled Afghanistan, an internal flight of the Afghanistan airline Ariana was hijacked and the crew was forced to fly it to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. From there it went on to Aktyubinsk in Kazakhstan before flying to Moscow. A few passengers were released before the plane headed west, landing at Stansted Airport in Britain at 2 a.m. the following day with 164 people on board, 21 hours after it had left Kabul.

The next day, 8 February, the British tabloid press gave the hijack the full treatment, concentrating on the ordeal of the passengers, already imprisoned in the plane for 48 hours, and the presence at Stansted of crack paramilitary units from the SAS, ready to storm the plane and free the hostages. The assumption was that the terrorists who had hijacked the plane were seeking some concession from the Taliban leaders in Kabul in exchange for the lives of the frightened passengers.

A day later, the tabloid view had changed dramatically as it became clear that the hijackers were seeking asylum in Britain. Now ‘Stansted’ became ‘Scamsted’ as they were portrayed as scroungers seeking to sponge on Britain’s welfare state. Worse was to follow when the tired passengers were finally released and housed for a couple of days in an airport hotel, with many of them hoping to be allowed to stay. Now they, too, were scroungers, being accommodated at tax-payers’ expense in a luxury hotel while seeking an easy entry into ‘soft touch’ Britain. Almost immediately, the ever-vigilant Home Secretary announced that he would personally vet every application.

Fast forward two decades and the UK was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while a trickle of asylum seekers tried to cross the Channel from northern France, most often in flimsy dinghies with many losing their lives. Many came from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, all too often forced to flee weak and failing states such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya that had been torn apart following disastrous Western interventions led by the United States, with the UK in prominent support.

The numbers were in the low thousands over several years at most, a tiny fraction of the several million refugees taken in by Lebanon, Turkey or indeed Germany. They were quite enough, though, for the solidly right-wing and populist government of Boris Johnson to securitise them into a threat, with some of his supporting parliamentarians dubbing them a “migrant invasion”.

Keeping the violent peace – the Secret Squirrels

Heritage Park and its many equivalents across the world represent the need of elites to protect their lifestyles and the Afghan airline hijack and the cross-channel asylum-seekers are just two examples of hardening attitudes as wealthy states close down on immigration, but this is also a process that operates at the global level. Elite states and alliances also have to protect their interests in a security paradigm that has changed dramatically since the ending of the Cold War. For 45 years, the West had one primary security concern, the confrontation with the Soviet bloc. It was straightforward, easy to understand and very simple – ‘them versus us’. After 1990 the world became a much more uncertain place, with diverse threats to Western well-being, so that the function of the Western military progressively became one of ‘keeping the violent peace’, being able to project military force anywhere in the world where Western interests were affected.

A near classic example of this is indicative of the change and goes right back to that period after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. It was a specific response to the sudden and unexpected threat to Western oil supplies that started with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of that year and ended when the Iraqi forces were defeated and forced out of Kuwait a few months later in Operation Desert Storm. In the process, there was one particular event that featured in the war but did not even get into the public domain for several years. It concerns an operation by a little-known US Air Force unit deploying new missiles known colloquially as the ‘Secret Squirrels’ after a cartoon character. In its own way, the story of this unit is as much a metaphor for the future as is Heritage Park and is worth examining at some length.

Operation Desert Storm commenced on the evening of 16 January 1991, with sustained air attacks on targets in many parts of Iraq. In Western Europe, the early indications of the attack became apparent very late in the evening as CNN and other TV networks interrupted programmes to bring the first news of the air raids. According to available public sources, the air raids on Iraq were all launched from bases in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other western Gulf states, and from aircraft carriers and missile ships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

This was not quite true. More than 15 hours before the raids on Baghdad commenced, a flight of seven B-52G long-range bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on what was to become the longest air raid in history. Over the course of a day and a half, the planes flew out over the eastern United States, over the North Atlantic, Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and Egypt, and into air space over western Saudi Arabia. At no time did they cross into Iraqi air space. Instead, they launched a total of 35 air-launched cruise missiles at eight targets in Iraq, including power plants at Mosul in the north and a telephone exchange at Basra in the south. Having completed their task, the planes turned round and flew back to the United States. The entire operation involved a 35-hour 20,000-km flight supported by substantial air-to-air refuelling involving tanker aircraft operating out of air bases in Spain and the Azores.⁵

There were three remarkable features to this air raid. The first was the length (the first truly global demonstration of air power in time of war), the second was the weapons used to carry it out. Unlike the Tomahawk cruise missile used by the US Navy throughout the Gulf War, the US Air Force’s variant, the air-launched cruise missile, had originally been deployed only in a nuclear-armed form yet here it was being used to deliver a high-explosive warhead. Third, the raid was entirely experimental as the same targets could have been attacked with cruise missiles launched from ships close to Iraq.

There was no immediate military requirement to stage the hugely expensive operation from bases in the United States except, of course, to demonstrate the capacity of the US Air Force to project military power on a global scale. While this stemmed partly from a rivalry with the US Navy and its carrier-based air power, it also arose out of the experience of the air force in the previous decade. It is a story worth recounting, not least because of what it tells us about the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. A Violent Peace
• 2. Learning from the Cold War
• 3. Taming the Jungle
• 4. A Different Security Paradigm
• 5. Losing Control
• 6. A War-Promoting Hydra
• 7. The Thirty-Year War
• 8. ISIS and After
• 9. Lost Decade
• 10. Future Possible
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index