Review: Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine

How come Africans are so poor when Africa is so rich in natural resources? Simply because the revenues generated by exploitation of those resources are split between the giant multinationals who operate the mines and oil wells - and the personal bank accounts of government ministers or other racketeers who collect the rent in profit shares, licence fees and bribes. Nobody else gets a look in. It's as simple as that.

Tom Burgis is an investigative journalist and a lot of this book reads like the cut and paste of past investigations, with generous helpings of disclaimers to protect him from English libel laws. So he dutifully records that everyone living who he names denies having done what it is commonly believed they have done. Everyone else is corrupt but not me, they all say. All Cretans are liars.

There are many fascinating - and harrowing tales - scattered through this book, along with many statistics to make you weep. Not much has changed since King Leopold of the Belgians ran his racket in the Congo - size of Europe -  that he personally owned.

If Burgis is right - and the idea of "resource curse" is not novel and is widely held to be at the root of sub-Saharan Africa's tragedy - then the implications are actually worse than he tells us. I will elaborate.

A country, a state is a geographically defined entity which has its borders accepted by the United Nations. The government of that country is any body which the United Nations (and at least as helpfully, the United States) recognises as entitled to make laws, control the borders and decapitate people or put them in the electric chair. The United Nations is fairly broad minded about what qualifies you as a legitimate government. Most any bunch of gangsters will do and the longer they hold on, the more legitimate they become. All the advanced, civilised Western nations exchange Ambassadors with Equatorial Guinea which currently is Number One in the world for an inverse relationship between GDP per capita ($30 000) and individual well-being. New gangsters in the Presidential palace may, initially, have a hard time - but Burgis points out that nowadays China will often enough come to their rescue with immediate up-front cash advances against future deals.

In general, the local labour forces required to exploit mines or oil wells are small. In general, the governments of resource-rich states can both run the country and pocket personal billions just from the money passed to them by the oil companies or the uranium miners. They don't need tax revenues from local people.

And the implication is this: they don't need the local people at all. Maybe they need 10% of the population as a helot class to do manual labour and service jobs. The rest of the population could simply die and there would be no ill-effect. Indeed, it would solve the problem of insurgencies and protest movements. Let Ebola or, more selectively, genocide carry them off. A country free of people would make life much easier for the regimes and the multinationals. And the United Nations would not mind: there is no minimum population you need to get in - Nauru is a full member with a population of under 10 000

This is an information-rich book. If you read it alongside Frank Ledwidge's Losing Small Wars you get an even gloomier picture for prospects in Africa's resource-rich countries.

Review: Frank Ledwidge, Investment in Blood

I reviewed Frank Ledwidge's previous book Losing Small Wars, about the British defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can find the Review in the June 2012 listing. When I saw this new book I didn't need any recommendation to buy it. Ledwidge is a heavyweight. He brings a background in military intelligence (the UKs military intelligence) to a critical analysis of the UKs disastrous failures in Basra and Helmand.

This time he looks at the costs of Britain's latest Afghan War, modelling himself on Stiglitz and Bilmes' Three Trillion Dollar War (2008), an economist's costing of the US invasion of Iraq. But he goes beyond that in continuing his critique of the political, strategic, and tactical failings of our political and military "policy" in Afghanistan.

Though he does not dwell on it (page 20), the Big New Mistake in the second phase of the Afghan War was the one made by Tony Blair in 2005 when he decided that in a fresh allocation of invading forces' responsibilities, the UK would take on  Helmand province, centre of Afghan opium production then and bigger centre of opium production now: 40% of all Afghan opium output in 2006 and 49% in 2012 (page 180). There were two very good reasons for not taking on Helmand: (1) it's a very big place and we didn't actually have enough troops to occupy it ; (2) the Helmandis have a specific hatred of the British, dating back to the previous Afghan Wars we have launched against them.

But even bigger than this mistake was the overall mistake of giving both political and military backing to Karzai and his gang of war lords and kleptocrats. Official UK aid to Afghanistan does not trickle down much farther than their pockets. We know this. Transparency International ranks 183 countries on its scale of governmental corruption; Afghanistan is down there in position 180, far worse than say Azerbaijan (at 143) where Mr Blair likes to hang out these days. Only North Korea and Somalia (which has recently acquired a  government to corrupt) are behind Afghanistan; Myanamar is equal 180th. (pages 146 - 48)

This known fact about what we are backing in Afghanistan is one reason why the British political class and its compliant civil servants (not many whistleblowers here) are determined to withhold as much information as possible on the costs of our prolonged Afghan adventure. Ledwidge repeatedly has to resort to best guesses, estimates and extrapolations from bits of known evidence. This is true for costs of military hardware and troop deployment; insurance and medical treatment costs associated with deaths, injuries, trauma both now and recurrent in the future; costs to the Afghan economy of our presence; costs of Afghan deaths, injuries and trauma.

It's an honest and unsparing book. There are two things missing.

First, recognition of the fact (stressed by Sherard Cowper-Coles in Cables from Kabul) that Afghanistan has neighbours: not just Pakistan but Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, China and India. This is not a very encouraging list. But these countries have all paid a price for American-led adventurism in Afghanistan. And Pakistan has paid a heavy price for its former Imperial power's occupation of Helmand. Ledwidge does briefly discuss the consequences for British homeland security of the damage we have done in Helmand (pages 208 - 211). This line of thinking is one that urgently needs to be pursued.

Second, a link needs to be made to the analysis offered in David Keen's book Useful Enemies which argues that many wars drag on for years because there are stakeholders who have an interest in their continuation. Ledwidge does mention, more than once (pages 20 - 21 and elsewhere),  the "use them or lose them" remark attributed to General Sir Richard Dannatt when Chief of the General Staff (2007) suggesting that if troops did not deploy from Iraq to Afghanistan then they would be declared redundant in some round of defence cuts.

But it is more than that. There are stakeholders everywhere: Karzai and his chums trousering aid money; the Taliban taking bribes not to attack enemy convoys; drug lords providing income in an economy which cannot be normal while fighting continues; British politicians basically channeling tax money to the arms manufacturers on whom we rely to keep the unemployment figures down; the military trying to defend its turf; Prince Harry needing photo ops ... the list goes on. And now we have Britain's answer to Donald Rumsfeld, our Foreign Secretary William Hague, casting around - almost desperately -  for some new war to lose when the troops become free from Afghanistan. It's not the winning that matters; it's the taking part.