# Barbary - and the last coalition against terrorism

Alan Judd

'MR. McDonell's daughter, pretty and young, for my harem,' wrote Ali Khoja, the new Dey (ruler or regent) of Algiers in 1817. 'The Spanish consul's daughter, who is ugly, to serve the favourite. I shall have the British consul's head cut off and kill the lot if they dare to complain.'

ALI Khoja had succeeded his predecessor in the usual way (by slow strangulation) the previous year and was to last only another year himself, although he died, unlike most deys, of natural causes: the plague. During his brief tenure he exemplified the international image of the Barbary pirate ruler - cruel, flamboyant, cunning, rapacious, mustachioed, turbaned, scimitar'd and lecherous. When the foreign consuls in Algiers paid their first official call they were forced to pass a line of corpses before finding him 'magnificently dressed with a book in his hand as if our entrance disturbed him in his studies.'

IT was not only Ali Khoja's days that were numbered, though. The tradition of piracy and the way of life he exemplified, a system of international terror in and around the Mediterranean, was about to be ended after nearly three centuries of profitable rapine. The eventual suppression of corsair piracy is sometimes cited as an encouraging example of international coalition action against a common enemy, also - now - as an example of conflict between Christians and Islamic terrorists. Certainly, the campaigns against the Barbary pirates do provide examples of coalition action, though they are equally eloquent of its limits; and although there are parallels with modern times, they are not necessarily the ones we might think.

THE story begins around 1530 when one of two brilliantly successful Albanian-Turkish adventurers, the Barbarossa (Redbeard) brothers, was appointed Regent of Algiers. Algiers thus became, along with Tunis and Tripoli, part of an outlying province of the Ottoman Empire comprising a narrow ribbon of land stretching nearly fifteen hundred miles from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Sirte. Known as the Barbary coast, it was garrisoned by Turkish troops (janissaries) and its rulers (initially the sons of Barbarossa, who used his name) owed allegiance to the Sultan. It later included Morocco. Piracy, particularly the seizure of hostages, was always a part of life but it did not become truly systematic until after Turkish invincibility was severely punctured by the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

THIS, the largest Mediterranean sea battle ever, was an early example of effective coalition action. Sultan Selim (known as 'the Sot') had a passion for Cyprus wine and in 1570 he invaded Cyprus. This action proved the last straw for the Pope, Pius V, who

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put together a Holy or Christian League comprising Venice, the Hapsburg dominions, Malta, Genoa and other Italian states. The 275-strong Turkish fleet was composed of galleys rowed by slaves; ramming was their favoured tactic, arrows their favoured weapon. The coalition fleet, commanded by Don Juan of Austria, numbered about 210 and, though mostly galleys (some rowed by volunteers), they fitted large guns pointing forward above the ram as well as protection against arrows. They also had six galleasses, a hybrid mid-way between a galley and a galleon which mounted guns as well as oars along their broadsides.

THIS was the last great battle in which both sides used oar-propelled vessels, almost unchanged since ancient times. They were fast, highly manoeuvrable and at their best in coastal waters, but the technical and tactical innovations introduced by the League proved devastating: the League lost about 15 galleys and the Turks around 200, with about 25,000 men killed, an unknown number wounded and 15,000 galley slaves freed. Yet this was with only transitional technology: had either side encountered a fleet of the relatively massive, heavily-gunned, ocean-going warships of the Atlantic nautical states - English, Dutch, French or Spanish - they would have been blown out of the water. Naval battles were never to be the same again.

NAVAL warfare was not the only lasting change. Lepanto ended what has been called the 'heroic phase' of the Muslim-Christian struggle. The holy war - in modern terms, the ideological struggle - disintegrated into battles between privateers and traders as the Sultan's command over the distant parts of his empire began to weaken. Barbary, Maltese, Spanish, Italian, English and Dutch privateers - licensed pirates - competed for the lucrative Venetian trade. At the same time, the pirates acquired new technology and tactics.

THE ending of the Spanish War in 1603 caused widespread unemployment among seamen. Significant numbers of English, Dutch and French seamen sailed variously-acquired craft to the Barbary ports and there embarked upon new careers as pirates. In return for a portion of their takings, they were granted immunity and protection and were encouraged to attack Spanish shipping, since Turkey was still at war with Spain. At the same time, the experienced warrior-sailors taught their hosts how to build and sail ocean-going ships.

ONE well-known example was John Ward, a former Kentish fisherman who, with 30 accomplices, boarded and seized a vessel in Portsmouth harbour and sailed it, with other prizes captured en route, to Tunis. He eventually acquired a nine or ten-strong raiding fleet of his own, as well as a grand house in Tunis with, according to a contemporary pamphlet, "marble and alabaster more fit for a prince than a pirate." He had a bodyguard of 12 Turks and apparently saw life as "a continued battle and defiance with Christians", preying upon English merchant craft as happily as upon Spanish.

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OTHERS, such as the Flemish Simon Danziker or the Englishman Peter Eston, were equally successful, but none flourished quite as colourfully as Henry Mainwearing, a Shropshire man. Mainwearing started out as a lawyer, then went soldiering in the Low Countries (a popular, even fashionable pursuit) before going to sea as a pirate-hunter. He became a licenced privateer, then a full-bloodied, Barbary-based pirate, though he never preyed upon English vessels. He was so successful – defeating a small Spanish fleet sent to capture him – that the King of Spain offered him a pardon and a squadron of his own. Wisely, he turned that down in favour of a pardon from James I, with an amnesty for those of his crews who wanted it. Once happily re-legitimised, he became an MP and Lieutenant of Dover Castle, was knighted and ended his career as a vice-admiral. From this eminence he advised against pardons for future pirates and recommended that those captured be turned over as slave-labour to the Royal Navy.

ALONG with changes in tactics and technicalities, the new European Barbary pirates expanded the operational area. There were 17th century raids on Newcastle and King's Lynn, with a village in Cornwall captured and held for a time. They were also more aggressive than the traditional corsairs, who sensibly avoided fighting unless they had to, preferring to frighten their prey into submission by shouting, clapping, banging, waving their scimitars, promising mercy for those who did not resist and dire fates for those who did. The renegades, particularly the English, were more inclined to go in shooting than shouting. This was mirrored in their behaviour ashore where, according to a French observer in Tunis, their free-spending debauchery "made them cherished by the janissaries above all other nations. They carry their swords at their sides, run drunk through the town, and sleep with the wives of the Moors." They brought such money to the Barbary coast that "every kind of licence is permitted them by the authorities." It was rather like English football hooligans being welcomed for their spending power.

THE pirates' main trade was people. There are varying accounts of how captives were treated, probably reflecting a varied reality. They might be accorded no more than the normal harshness meted out to oarsmen (of whom Turks were rated the best, above Negroes and Iroquois Indians), or they might be stripped naked when their captors swarmed aboard and the captain beaten on the soles of his feet to force him to reveal any treasures and to name the wealthiest passengers, who might therefore be worth the highest ransom. Anyone thought to have swallowed jewelry or concealed it in their orifices might be cut open for inspection, or simply thrown overboard.

IN port, the naked or near-naked prisoners would be kept in chains and quarantined until auction in the slave-market. Their best hope was ransom, often arranged through the resident European consuls, with, sometimes, block deals for less important captives. It was a highly organised business, with ramifications throughout Europe; Malta's Knights of St. John funded piracy and were prominent beneficiaries. For poorer captives, the future was years of arduous toil with physical breakdown the likely end, short of

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miraculous rescue. Conversion to Islam could provide alleviation, but did not necessarily buy freedom.

EXPERIENCES of captivity varied widely. For some regular sea-goers, capture and ransom were almost routine, while for many others slavery did not last beyond a decade. Indeed, domestic slaves could find themselves better off in a wealthy Muslim household than at home, while some Christians who converted achieved social and political influence. In the main ports were huge, rambling *bagnios* - slave barracks - surrounded by stalls and taverns run by the slaves themselves. A cosmopolitan cafe society developed where deals were done and captives experienced a degree of social freedom and mobility unknown at home, with no questions asked about their pasts. One Spaniard who was ransomed in the 1640s found it so congenial that he returned frequently and voluntarily thereafter.

LIFE could be agreeable for the corsairs, too. One Aegean island where they wintered was populated by eight priests and five hundred women who, as a visitor wrote, "live purely on the work of nature; so that all merchants and corsairs can choose a female companion according to his particular fancy."

IT wasn't fun for all, though. Some *bagnios* were squalid and brutal places of confinement and unknown numbers of slaves were tortured and murdered. Impaling was an old favourite; a stake was driven between the legs and then hoisted upright, so that the victim could be pulled further down on it, then left there.

WOMEN, on the whole, were not physically molested since the Koran is strict upon such matters and it was never in the Dey's interest to give an impression of lax law enforcement. Of those who were not ransomable, the youngest and best-looking could hope to be taken as wives by wealthy Muslims or Christians (unless the Dey intervened). Others might be put into harems, where their greatest hardships were probably claustrophobic boredom and over-eating, concubines being fed bread soaked in syrup in order to encourage the desired rotundity. Those not chosen for either were straightforward slaves, often domestic.

THUS, for nearly three centuries, a substantial part of Mediterranean society lived well on the fruits for murder, robbery and extortion. They were a significant tax upon trade and sought no other way of life. Why were they permitted to thrive when, as the American consul in Tunis pointed out, "this elevated brute, the Dey, has seven kings of Europe, two republics and a continent tributary to him, when his whole naval force is not equal to two line of battleships"?

IN fact, there were many attempts to crush the pirates: between 1541 and 1829, there were eighteen coalition expeditions, as well as many other unilateral actions. But there were practical difficulties: the rocky coast, strong currents and weather conditions made it hard

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for ships of the period to conduct shore operations; they could not safely navigate at all in the area between November and March; the land defences, especially those of Algiers, were formidable and sophisticated, having been built up over centuries; and the defenders were enterprisingly ruthless – during one French raid they fired off forty-eight French residents, including the consul, from their cannon.

OVERWHELMINGLY, though, the reason was the lack of sustained political will. The nautical powers were too often fighting amongst themselves to engage in costly excursions against a region and a way of life from which they all, at various times, profited. The corsairs did not threaten their vital interests. They were a nuisance, certainly – sometimes serious enough to force England, for instance, to institute a convoy system – but with naval resources always under pressure there was a greater need for protection against other nations than against piratical depredation.

WHAT'S more, each nautical power had at different times something to gain from piracy, and so paid the deys tribute money to secure exemption. The English, for example, were from the time of Henry VIII's break with Rome grateful for Moorish-Spanish enmity and for nearly two centuries thereafter were more sympathetic to Islamic forces than Catholic. During the wars with France and her allies of 1793-1815 the Royal Navy needed Barbary port facilities, while Wellington's Peninsula army was fed with grain and beef bought in Barbary. Despite occasional humiliations, it was easier and cheaper to reach accommodation with the pirates than mount costly campaigns against them and lose an ally. Spain herself, France, Sweden and Holland all made similar arrangements at different times.

IT was a protection racket from which everyone, except the corsairs, suffered, and everyone – including the corsairs – benefited. In 1799 the American tribute paid to Tunis amounted to £50,000, twenty-eight guns, ten thousand cannon-balls and large quantities of timber, cordage and gunpowder. Yet still some American ships were captured.

WHAT finally changed the world for the corsairs were changes in dispositions between the great powers, a growing moral change and American example. The Napoleonic Wars must have seemed an endless golden age for the pirates, but they were actually the last throw. Once a lasting peace was established, neither Britain nor France had any interest in buying favours from cut-throats. The Americans had already shown the way. Having paid tribute for some twenty years with mixed results, in 1815 the US Navy called in their new heavy frigates on each Barbary port in turn, explaining that there would be no more tribute, demanding the immediate release of US citizens and ships and part restitution of previous payments. Taken by surprise, the Algerines were given three hours to decide and left in no doubt that action would follow refusal. After their defeat of the lacklustre British Navy in 1812, the American reputation was high and there was nothing the Algerines respected more than the

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immediate application of physical force. American shipping was left alone after 1815
without a shot fired.

THE moral change was the growth of the anti-slavery movement, creating a widespread
determination - in Britain more than anywhere else - that slavery was intolerable.
However, the admirable Wilberforce and his fellow Abolitionists remained shamefully
indifferent to the plight of white or Christian slaves in the Mediterranean, refusing
cooperation. It was left to Admiral Sir Sydney Smith to work up the required indignation
and political backing for action.

THE result was the 1816 Battle of Algiers, a savage, costly and crushing ship-to-shore
engagement brilliantly conducted by Admiral Lord Exmouth with sterling help from a
small Dutch force (a very effective coalition enacted without the authority of either
government). Exmouth started with serious disadvantages - little time, scratch crews, his
enemy forewarned and the knowledge that his 215 heavy cannon would face about a
thousand similar guns, mostly mounted in secure emplacements. He was, however,
thorough and ingenious in his preparations, securing good advance intelligence and
practising gunnery far more than was (or is) naval custom. He was also imaginative in his
deployment, making the first successful use of the Congeve rocket and mounting 12
pounder carronades in his cross-trees.

THE action was brutal and bloody pounding against a determined and well-led enemy,
beginning in the afternoon and continuing late into the night, lit by flames at sea and
ashore. The Algerines lost 5,000-8,000 dead, with unknown numbers wounded, the allies
141 killed, 742 wounded. The Dey sued for peace and agreed terms.

THE relatively small allied losses conceal the horror of war. Lieutenant Whinyates, Royal
Engineers, described the carnage on the middle gun deck of the *Impregnable* where he saw
"eight men lying between two guns, each in the convulsed attitude in which he had
expired. One man ... had his right leg by his side, having been cut in two by a cannon-ball.
Near him was another poor fellow....his back exposed: between his shoulders was buried
an 18-pound shot. Legs, arms, blood, brains and mangled bodies were strewn about in all
directions....men and boys who had been burnt....crawled about the deck in the most
excruciating agony, stark naked, a single feature of whose faces could not be discovered,
perfectly blind, uttering the most heart-rending shrieks and cries, calling out to everyone
they met to put them out of their misery...but this distressing and shocking scene fell short
of what we saw in the cockpit, where three surgeons attended the wounded, whose groans
and shrieks pierced the soul to the quick...Several were lying on the dressing-table,
undergoing amputation...I saw the whole process from the beginning, of one poor fellow's
arm, a youth of about 18, who used to wait in the Captain's cabin. He did not move a
muscle of his face until the saw touched the marrow, when he gave a shriek which I shall
never forget."

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THE Algerines had taken a battering such as they never had before, and the defences of Algiers were laid waste. Yet, as we saw at the beginning, they soon made good and were back at their old ways. The British action was not conceived as part of a strategy - the master-strategist of the day, Wellington, was not even consulted - and was really of a piece with the punitive raids of the previous three centuries, albeit on a grander scale. In 1830 the French took more permanent action, occupying Algiers with a 40,000-strong army, and staying there for over a century. Even then, pirates from Morocco remained active on a lesser scale for the next thirty years until suppressed by the British and French.

ARE there any lessons in all this for today? Has the suppression of international piracy anything to teach us about the suppression of international terrorism? Probably not much. The world has changed unrecognisably since then and, anyway, drawing historical parallels is often as dangerous as it is tempting.

BUT there may be one or two enduring truths of human affairs to which we can point. Firstly, effective, long-term action can come only from national governments, acting either singly but determinedly (like the French in Algiers) or in concert. In order to do this they need to be convinced that a vital national interest or cause is at stake. Nuisances persist so long as they are no more than that; once they become menaces, the investment of sufficient resources and energy to defeat them becomes worthwhile. This presupposes that you have the resources - which means that generally only rich governments count.

SECOND, coalitions work - witness those that defeated Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler - provided they are driven by overriding mutual interest, like neighbours threatened by fire. Even then, they work best when dominated by one or two leading players - Britain and Prussia at Waterloo, Britain and France in the First World War, Britain, America and (belatedly) Russia in World War II.

THIRD, long-term solutions require long-term commitment, like America's to Europe after 1945. Punitive expeditions such as the Battle of Algiers or the Gulf War deal with the situation but not its cause; that may continue to manifest itself in other ways viz. the resurgence of piracy after 1816, or the growing evidence of Iraqi involvement in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and in other anti-US outrages since (possibly including 11 September).

FOURTH, nothing works like the successful exercise of physical power. To be the known possessor of overwhelming force, and the political will to use it, may be an imperfect guarantor of safety. But it's still the best there is.

*Alan Judd is a biographer, novelist and newspaper columnist. His latest novel, a Cold War spy novel 'Legacy' is published by Harper Collins.*

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Of Brutality, Authority and Cultural Clashes

THE intimidatory 'line of corpses' adopted by Ali Khoja, and described by Alan Judd, was a technique not unknown to the young men of the North West Frontier Province. Charles Allen tells the story of John Nicholson:

'EVERY one of the young men had emerged from the Second Sikh War with a heightened reputation. But John Nicholson's was very much a local one, among the Punjabis rather than the British, and he was able to exploit it, when he returned to Rawalpindi as its District Commissioner, in imposing his own style of local government. Three stories are told of him at this period. The first concerns his treatment of a local robber chieftain who had such a strong network of supporters in the area that none of the local maliks would help in his capture. Nicholson began by putting a price on his head, and then doubling it. When this failed to produce any result he turned to direct action, riding alone into the freebooter's village. By a great stroke of luck, the first person Nicholson encountered when he entered the village was his quarry. When the man refused to surrender, Nicholson ran him through with his sword, then cut off his head. This was placed upon his desk (or in a corner of his office - accounts differ) and he then invited every headman in the district to call on him. As each malik entered, he was asked whether he recognised the owner of the head, and advised to ponder his fate.'

IN the essay that follows, Samual Brittan quotes Huntington's advice that the west should above all stop interfering in other cultures. This would have resonated with Henry Lawrence's young men in the North West Frontier in the nineteenth century, as described by Charles Allen:

'But if there was one single matter which continued to divide the Young Men at this time, it was the question of Afghanistan and what line to take with its ruler, Dost Mohammad Khan, the Amir of Kabul. The Dost had been left severely alone since his last incursion into the Vale of Peshawar and beyond, at the time of the Second Sikh War, but as soon as Herbert Edwardes took up Mackeson's post in Peshawar he began to challenge this policy. His argument was that the peace and security of the Punjab rested on two elements: a clearly established border with Afghanistan that could be defended, and good relations with Afghanistan.

SUCH a policy was anathema to the many officers still serving in the Punjab for whom the Afghan War was much more than a distant memory. Like most of Edwardes's colleagues, John Nicholson was extremely disturbed to hear from his friend in May 1854 that he had begun to treat indirectly, through the Pakhtun chiefs, with "the enemy" - and wrote to tell him so: "I hope you will never forget that their name is faithlessness, even among themselves. What, then, can strangers expect? I have always hopes of a people, however barbarous in their hospitality, who appreciate and practise good faith among themselves - the Waziris, for instance - but in Afghanistan son betrays father, and brother brother, without remorse. I would not take the trouble to tell you all this, which you no doubt know already; but I cannot help remembering how even the most experienced and astute of our political officers, in Afghanistan, were deceived by that winning and imposing frankness of manner which it has pleased Providence to give the Afghans, as it did to the first serpent, for its own purposes."

JOHN Lawrence was equally hostile, declaring there was no point in having any sort of peace treaty with the Afghans. "I have two reasons against it," he wrote. "(1) that you will

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never be able to get the Afghans to make a treaty; and (2) if they make it, they will not keep it. "Other experienced voices also spoke out against his proposals. But Edwardes pushed ahead, going over Lawrence's head to the Governor-General and winning Lord Dalhousie's cautious support. The outcome, after months of patient negotiation, was a treaty signed at the mouth of Khyber in March 1855, between John Lawrence on behalf of the EIC, and a son of Dost Mohammad Khan representing his father. It bound the Afghans to be "friends of our friends and enemies of our enemies", and closed a door on the past by signalling an end to the EIC's ambitions to expand any further westward than its existing frontier."

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# My Enemy's Enemy is not always My Friend

Samuel Brittan

THE terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 has brought renewed attention to a thesis by the political analyst Samuel P. Huntingdon, which first appeared in an article in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993 entitled The Clash of Civilisations and was then expanded into book form under the same title (Simon and Schuster 1997).

HUNTINGTON'S message was that Western leaders were deluding themselves if they thought that they had won the battle of ideas with the collapse of the Soviet Union and that the world was now safe for liberal democracy, free market capitalism and the rule of law. It was a direct answer to Francis Fukuyuma who had appeared to assert just that in his thesis, The End of History, which originally appeared in 1989.

INSTEAD Huntington predicted that we would be back in a world resembling that which existed before 1800, or even before 1600, when the West was only one of several contending civilisations. It would have been preferable to use the word culture, which surely evokes much better the differences, say, between the Orthodox and the Western Christian traditions, than civilisations which suggest utterly different technologies, and populations which have little contact with each other.

THE weakest part of Huntington's book is the attempt to enumerate the civilisations now in existence, as Arnold Toynbee tried to do for earlier periods in his Study of History. This leads to endless semantic arguments about whether Latin America belongs to western culture or is a separate world of its own; or whether to regard Japan as a separate civilisation or part of an East Asian orbit. In fact a better title would have been 'The Decline of the West' had not Oswald Spengler pre-empted it in a book published early in the twentieth century.

HUNTINGTON is at his least convincing when dealing with Japan and the tiger economies of south east Asia, which, in line with President Clinton in his early years, he treats as a serious economic and political threat. This does not read so well after Japan's decade of economic stagnation or after the Asian crisis of 1997-98 when the West had to come to the rescue of many of the tigers - still less during the present recession when the East Asian economies are more vulnerable than most others to the ill-winds emerging from the USA.

THE strongest part of Huntington's thesis is that, even though the US has emerged for the time being as the only world superpower, the West - defined as North America, Europe and closely related areas such as Australasia - has passed its zenith. The tables

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at the beginning of his book show convincingly that the West has constituted for some
time a declining proportion of the world, whether viewed in terms of population
under its political control, or GDP, or proportion of European language speakers. It can
only be a matter of time before the West's military supremacy is also threatened, and
the author is fatalistic about nuclear weapons proliferation to the main power centres.

THE real thesis of The Clash of Civilisations is the West against the rest. Huntington was spot-on in his assertion that the main challenge to the West would come from a Moslem revival. As he remarks, it is not just a matter of Moslem fundamentalism but one world outlook against another.

OF course the majority of Moslems, especially those settled in the US and Europe, did not support Bin Laden's raids. But a good many of the more passive majority did experience satisfaction with the embarrassment of the USA and have expressed strong hostility to the Afghan campaign.

HUNTINGTON is on less firm ground when he identifies the West with a culture of
democracy, toleration, reason and personal freedom, and Islam with more or less its
opposite. People can find whatever they are looking for in canonical religious texts like the
Bible or the Koran (or for that matter the writings of Karl Marx) which contain many
passages ranging from the most bloodthirsty to the most humane.

THERE have been periods when the Moslem world has been not only more
scientifically advanced, but much more tolerant of dissent than the Christian West and
indeed provided a home for Jews who had been driven out of Spain by the Christian
reconquest. At the time of the Crusades it was the Western European Christians who
were aggressive and bloodthirsty – not merely against Islam but against the Byzantine
Christians, whose capital, Constantinople, was pillaged more than once by Western
thugs on their way to liberate Jerusalem. The values which Huntington celebrates as
western are really those of the Enlightenment which began in Europe in the 18th
century and whose triumph has never been complete.

THE new terrorism is indeed a challenge to the Enlightenment; or indeed to any kind
of tolerable living. The Afghan war is likely to be a beginning rather than an end. The
world will not be safe while rulers such as Saddam Hussein are free to develop nuclear
and biological weapons of mass destruction; and President Bush would be well
advised to ignore the advice of German intellectuals – or Arabists in the Foreign Office
or the Quai d'Orsay – who shrink from the necessary confrontation.

IRAQ apart, there is now a network of militant Moslem organisations which will
not disappear with the publication by the US authorities of the names of a few of

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the most prominent. It is indeed interesting that someone like David Roche, a London market strategist writing in the Wall Street Journal (November 28) to dispute with Huntington, has a remarkably similar analysis to his of the planners of the September 11 atrocities. They were maladjusted, privileged middle class youths who got sucked into a fanatical ideology - a more lethal version of the middle class Maoist students of 20 or 30 years ago. Their identity kit looks like that of those who belonged to Bader Meinhof or the Red Brigade: spoilt middle class kids, suicidal and brainwashed.

MR Roche would like to follow up the anti-Taleban success with a free market drive to lower trade barriers and immigration requirements, so that talented people would be free to move to where economic opportunities are waiting for them. This would, he believes, move us a step closer to a truly multi-cultural world. Maybe. But despite the face-saving agreement at Doha to start another round of world trade negotiations, it is unlikely that dominant interest groups will allow their governments to tear down barriers where they hurt the emerging world most - mainly in agriculture and in the movement of people.

HUNTINGTON'S advice that the West should above all stop interfering in other cultures and look to its own defences seems more realistic. This means above all else, in my view, that we need to abandon the pernicious doctrine that my enemy's enemy is my friend. This has involved western leaders in a dizzying successive embrace of rival dictatorships ranging from China to Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and in the process selling arms to regimes which are eventually used against the West as well as against their own people.

BUT he is too inclined - perhaps in reaction to the Clinton Administration - to see western intervention as a campaign for human rights, which, alas, it is not, except at the margins. The huge investment of the US and the UK in the royal despotism of Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with the misplaced belief that the West will always need Saudi Arabian oil.

IF there is one policy which makes political and economic sense it is for the West to reduce its dependence on Gulf oil in general and Saudi Arabian oil in particular. This would be the first step towards the disengagement advocated by Huntington, although not perhaps in the way he envisages.

THE Middle East and the struggle against terrorism are also the key to economic development in the first decade of the new century. While in the past economics and international politics moved in separate spheres and practitioners simply made cross references to show off, today the connection is very real.

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THE possible international environments affecting the world economy can conveniently be grouped into three. The most optimistic is a sustained period of quiet, following the termination of the Afghan War. In that case there could be a normal cyclical recovery boosted by a revival of business and consumer confidence, even though not as early or as pronounced as official forecasters hope.

AT the other extreme, some of the initial pronouncements of the US military about a long and expensive war against terrorism, lasting years if not decades, could be vindicated. In that case the extra £100m which the British Government, as the principal US ally, has allocated for 2002 for the war against terrorism would turn out to be a mere flea bite. Major wars are normally inflationary rather than deflationary and we will be back with the problem of taxing or borrowing enough to pay for the military effort which was discussed by Lord Keynes in 1940 in his classic book 'How to Pay for the War'.

IMMEDIATELY after September 11, I thought this was most likely; and it could still happen. But I would now put my money on a third possibility. This is that there are enough further terrorist alarms to prevent a lasting revival of confidence; but the military effort will not amount to that of a full scale world war and will not put excessive pressure on resources. In that case, low growth, stagnation or recession could characterise much of the first decade of the 21st century.

THE first possibility -- mobilisation for all out war -- would be the worst for human welfare; but the second -- intermittent terrorist shocks and marginal mobilisation -- would be the worst for business activity.

EVEN then we should be careful about predicting an era of deflation. Deflation means a sustained general fall in the price level: the mirror image of inflation. Of course in a world of low inflation there are bound to be sectors, such as commodities or even industrial product prices, which fall occasionally. Not all prices can march in step. Deflation should not be diagnosed unless and until comprehensive price indices such as the GDP deflator have been falling for an extended period. Generalised deflation has been extremely rare since World War II. Even now the only major industrial economy reporting falling prices is Japan. It is quite possible to have depressed economic activity without a plunging price level; and it is better to reserve the word deflation for its original meaning.

IN fact one cannot even rule out the return of the 1970s phenomenon of stagflation - that is depressed growth and employment, combined with high inflation. Such periods have usually been triggered off by large increases in world oil prices, aggravated by mistaken monetary and fiscal policies which accommodated pay increases granted in a vain effort to compensate for these energy developments.

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IN fact the most politically sensible course for the West to adopt would be to impose a large increase in taxes on fossil fuels, but be careful not to accommodate catch-up wage increases by over-lax monetary policies. Apart from the much canvassed environmental benefits, on which there is still scientific argument, there could be a clear geopolitical benefit in reducing the dependence of the US, Europe and Japan on oil imports from the unstable Persian Gulf area.

IT would of course also help if there were a large expansion in Russian oil production, especially in the untapped resources of Siberia rather than in the southern portions of Russia and the former Soviet republics which verge on Central Asia. There is nothing that would make these developments more profitable to the Western investor than a much higher price of oil to the final buyer. At the time of writing energy prices are depressed and energy saving policies are mainly confined to the wish list of the Great and the Good. But another oil shock is always possible, for instance if the pro-Western feudal regime is overthrown in Saudi Arabia and/or the anti-terrorist effort arising from a conflict with Iraq or Iran. OPEC could even get its act together.

IT is actually easier to discuss these medium term issues than to make a conventional economic assessment for the next year or two. Events in the year 2001 have demonstrated once again the uselessness of official economic forecasts as a guide to the future. The year started off with predictions of nothing more than a gradual and modest world slowdown after the growth spurt in the millennium year 2000. As the year progressed, the predicted slowdown turned into a predicted crawl, but full recession was never foreseen. Even at the end of 2001 with a major setback in all the worlds large economies, the OECD still does not forecast for 2002 more than a slowdown to 1 per cent growth, followed by a return in subsequent years to a more normal 3 per cent.

LOOKING at more detailed movements, the OECD does concede a modest fall in output in the second half of 2001; but like most other forecasters it predicts a recovery beginning in 2002. The best one can say about this kind of exercise is that it is a way of summarising existing data. In other words, it tells one what is happening now rather than what is going to happen.

THE poor record in forecasting turning points is not due to the deficiencies of individual forecasters. It reflects the inherent difficulties of crystal gazing. But it also reflects a dislike on the part of the official world for predicting gloom and doom, in case this should prove self-fulfilling – or at least incur the displeasure of governments that pay for the exercise. The OECD for instance – which is among the best of the official bodies – explains with some elaboration that the risks are nearly all on the downside of its central projection. Which makes one wonder if it should really be called a central projection at all.

25

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IT has to be added that the stock market is not much better than the official forecasters. The gibe of the Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson that the stock market has predicted five out of the last three recessions still holds good; and it is not much better at recoveries.

THE widespread predictions of a gradual recovery in 2002 and the return to normal growth by 2003 look dubious. As Prof Robert Shiller, who diagnosed the Wall Street bubble at an early stage has remarked, the present recession differs in two ways from its predecessors. First, it has marked the end of irrational exuberance in high tech stocks. Even now that the ICT bubble has burst, normal equities still look expensive in relation to realistic earnings expectations. But on top of this shock has come the extra blow to confidence following September 11.

WITHOUT putting my own head on the chopping block with a rival set of dubious predictions, I still think there are some clearly visible features of the economic landscape. The most obvious is that the Western world has come to the end of a silver age. (The golden economic age was in the period before the first oil shock of 1973.)

THE 1990s could indeed be called a silver age. During this decade real growth in the Group of Seven main economies, whose leaders meet at summits, never fell year on year. Even the USA, where Bill Clinton was elected president on the stupid slogan 'Its the economy, stupid', saw only a half per cent drop in GDP in 1991. After that the growth rate never fell below 2.7 per cent and in each of the last four years of the decade exceeded 4 per cent. The UK began with a genuine recession in 1990-92, associated with the ill-fated attempt to join the European Monetary System. But after that it grew steadily under both Conservative and Labour governments. Yet this real expansion in economic activity was accompanied by low inflation, which never exceeded 3 per cent in the G7 as a whole.

THE silver age has almost certainly come to an end; and political business leaders will have their work cut out to prevent the next phase from being an age of lead.

*Sir Samuel Brittan's collected articles and essays can be found at www.samuelbrittan.co.uk*

26

Rebecca Jordan

From: Michael Maclay [michael.maclay@hakluyt.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 2:07 PM
To: cneumann@csis.org
Subject: Hakluyt Xmas Cracker

xmaskiss.doc (240 KB)

Dear Christy,

Here is the version of Dr Kissinger's piece we have collated from the Ruttenberg lecture and the Washington Post article. We are sure this will be stimulating Christmas reading for the cross-section of CEO's and Chairmen who receive the cracker: they are unlikely to have seen the lecture or the article. The only paragraph that might be overtaken by events before publication in a fortnight is the tenth, on Afghanistan, and we shall watch events closely. If Dr Kissinger does wish/have time to make any changes, we would be grateful for them as early in the week as possible. My mobile (+44 7798 793 027) is the most reliable way of reaching me, as I'll be in Switzerland and France in the course of the week.

For Dr Kissinger's information, the other essays this year will from Sir Sam Brittan of the FT, on the economic implications of the Huntington thesis on clashes of civilisations, and Alan Judd on the last great coalition against terrorism - against the Barbary pirates. There will also be extracts from Charles Allen's book on Afghanistan: 'Soldier, Sahibs'.

Best wishes

Michael

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager.

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For America, the events of 11 September were a wake-
up call against the background of a period of indolence
and self-satisfaction. The illusion was that history was
over. Foreign policy had become a version of economics
or sociology; we believed there were no major political
issues left.

Much of the debate, that has characterised our
discussions since the Vietnam War - between power and
morality, between national interests and idealism - is
being subsumed and, at the moment, overshadowed by a
situation in which it is clear that these are not the
ultimate alternatives of foreign policy. Our alliances, our
relations with Russia, China and South Asia can be
looked at in a different context.

When I speak of the conduct of the war against
terrorism, I look at it as a common enterprise – not as an
American projection of an American national view.
Indeed, in its deeper sense, it is a common enterprise not
just for the United States but for all peoples concerned
with world order. It is a war that has no front lines. It is a
war that had no issues on September 10th. Until then the
American public would have been astonished to hear that
there were fundamental differences between the United
States and Islam, or that there was such a thing as a
concept of a war of civilisations. For them, that was
confined to academic treatises.

The American public still does not understand why,
exactly, we were attacked nor what, precisely, it is that
we are supposed to do. This is what has generated this
extraordinary sense of defiant unity which I have never

(LC)

seen in America, not even after Pearl Harbour, to quite
this emotional extent. That is why there has been no
pressure on the American Government that it might be
doing too much. If there is any psychological pressure, it
will come from the opposite direction.

It seems to me that the fundamental challenge of
terrorism is that it exists in many cells all over the world,
but it cannot survive without some base and without
some direction. If one reads of the structure of the
various plots that one knows about, they all go back to a
variety of base areas that provide organisation,
recruitment, fund-raising and a sort of coherence. It is for
this reason that the elimination of these base areas, or at
any rate the suppression of them by the host
governments, has to be the strategic objective of the
common policy.

I do not believe that the elimination of bin Laden will
end the problem; nor do I believe that success in
Afghanistan will, by itself, end the issue. What America
is attempting to do, together with those members of the
Coalition who in fact are doing something, is to
demonstrate that safe havens cannot be tolerated if
terrorism is to be ended. This is the key to anti-terrorism
strategy.

These safe havens come about in various ways, but
mostly they come about when a government closes its
eyes because it agrees with at least some of the
objectives of the terrorists – as in Afghanistan, to some
extent in Iran and Syria and, until recently, in Pakistan.
Even ostensibly friendly countries, such as Saudi

Arabia, sometimes make a tacit bargain with terrorists, so long as terrorist actions are not directed against the host government. A serious anti-terrorism campaign must break this nexus.

If America takes the lead it is, of course, in part because of the effect of the offence in attacking New York and Washington. But it is also, importantly, because for the entire post-war period, the security of free peoples anywhere has depended upon America's willingness to defend them, whether that was always recognised or not. If America fails in its reaction to an attack on its own territory, the whole structure of the security of the post-war world will disintegrate - even for those people who are critical, or sometimes for domestic reasons pretend to be critical. That is the fundamental issue.

In Afghanistan we clearly cannot have as an objective the occupation of Afghanistan. Our goal needs to be to destroy the network of bin Laden and, by removing the Taleban from the government of Afghanistan, to make clear the penalties for tolerating and even encouraging this sort of activity.

I do not believe, once these two objectives are reached, that American and allied military forces have the primary rôle to play in the so-called "nation-building" of Afghanistan. The pacification of all of Afghanistan has eluded many previous countries that have attempted it. The likely - perhaps optimum - outcome is a central Kabul government of limited reach, with tribal autonomy prevailing in the various regions. This essential enterprise should be put under the aegis of the UN, with

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generous economic support from the US and other advanced industrial countries. A "Contact Group" could be created composed of Afghanistan's neighbours (minus Iraq), India, the US and those Nato allies that participated in the military operations. This would provide a mechanism to reintroduce Iran to the international system, provided it genuinely abandons its support of terrorism.

But the next challenge in the war against terrorism is not the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Rather, it is how to deal with state-supported terrorism in the military campaign's aftermath. If we slacken in this effort – if we think that what I have defined as "victory in Afghanistan" is the only purpose, and is an adequate reaction to what happened on 11 September – we will find that terrorism will come back. It will engulf, first, the moderate states in the region, but blackmail many other countries – as we see now in the nature of the Coalition in many parts of the world. We will then face the question of what the Coalition is supposed to do; whether the Coalition is a convoy that sails at the rate of the slowest ship, or whether there is another way of interpreting it.

The US President and the Secretary of State have spoken of a Coalition in which every member does what it is most comfortable with – what might be called an "à la carte" Coalition policy. What matters, however, is what those members of the Coalition who are prepared to act will do in response. At some point, those countries which are now technically part of the Coalition will be obliged to choose between whether they wish to remain in the Coalition, or to engage in actions that support terrorism.

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It is often said that this is not simply a question of
terrorism, but that there are other issues which have
caused terrorism and which must be eliminated in order
to achieve what we have set out to do.

Economic development is often seen as the solution for all problems. There is no doubt that many governments in the Islamic region are backward and have not fulfilled the aspirations of their populations. Compare the economic development of these countries since the 1950s with, say, Korea. There is no doubt that a country like Korea, that has undertaken major reforms, has made much more rapid progress – and this is not primarily due to the actions of foreigners.

Another challenge we face in this respect is to know
what it is we want. An attempt to bring about, in a very
brief period of time, the evolution that took centuries in
the West is more likely to produce chaos than
democracy. What the intermediate steps should be, and
how one can have reforms such as those which brought
Islamic Turkey to a democratic system, are matters on
which Western thinking has been largely confined to
domestic debates, between those who are allegedly
concerned primarily with expediency, and those who
claim for themselves the mantle of abstract idealism.
Such people forget that, sometimes, crusades can
produce more suffering than incremental steps.

Before 11 September it was fashionable in some circles
in America to speak of the end of history; it was
certainly fashionable on the Continent to think that there

was no longer the sort of danger that justified an Atlantic relationship. Indeed, it was commonplace to seek European identity in distinction from the United States. NATO ran the risk of becoming an institution that was used for "liturgical" purposes and occasional meetings, but with less operational content.

I think that on both sides of the Atlantic there is now a much greater understanding of the continued importance of restoring the vitality of the Atlantic relationship. Many of the issues that on 10 September absorbed us, like missile defence or the Kyoto protocol, will now be able to be dealt with in a quite different context. Missile defence will find a solution, so far as the overall global relationship is concerned, in the negotiations between President Bush and President Putin. Meanwhile, the global significance of environmental and medical issues will have to be addressed when we deal, as we must, with the new question of biological warfare.

In relation to Russia, we face a situation that none of us has had to consider in the period since World War II. In fact, they are attempting to enter the international system on the basis of borders that have not existed in Russia since Peter the Great. Up until now it has been tempting to believe that perhaps Europe should act as a mediator between an excessively slow America and a Russia that needed psychological help. That is no longer the case. Indeed, a considerable opportunity now exists for America to engage in a bilateral negotiation.

There are some who argue that the way to deal with Russia is to respond to occasional Russian hints that they

might join NATO, but I believe this to be a great
mistake. NATO is not an organisation for bringing
Russia into the international system. The attempt to do
so would only lead to confusion in NATO, to a
bureaucratisation of the process, and to a weakening
even of the prospect of the ultimate reconciliation
between Russia and the West. However, Russia should
be able to participate in the political and fundamental
choices about the future of the issues raised by terrorism,
and the construction of the international system for
which the opportunity exists.

To the many people who think that I read the debates of
the Congress of Vienna by candlelight, let me say that
there is indeed an analogy. At the end of the Napoleonic
Wars there was a quadripartite alliance directed against
the resurgence of French expansionism, but there was
also a Concert of Powers in which France participated as
an equal and full member. The quadripartite alliance was
never invoked and the Concert of Europe operated very
well - at least until Britain withdrew from it, upsetting
the necessary balance. It seems to me that some kind of
new relationship should be established, first within the
Atlantic region - and on the political side, open to Russia
- in which, in time, NATO would play the rôle of the
quadripartite alliance of the previous period. This is a
great opportunity for the West and a great opportunity
for Russia.

The debates, at least in America, on many of the issues
like missile defence and those generated by the Kyoto
protocol, are coming to an end. So are those about China.
The theories of some of those who attempt to slight

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China – to put China into the position vacated by the
Soviet Union, and to organise the international system as
a kind of coalition against China – are also substantially
superseded by the co-operation that is now taking place
on the issue of terrorism.

The conditions of international support for a firm policy
exist. The attack on the US has produced an
extraordinary congruence of interests among the major
powers. Our Asian allies, Japan and Korea, share our
conviction that there is a continuing need for an Atlantic
security structure. India, profoundly threatened by
domestic Islamic fundamentalism, has much to lose by
abandoning a common course. Russia perceives a
common interest due to its contiguous Islamic southern
regions. China shares a similar concern with respect to
its western regions and has an added incentive to bring
an end to global terrorism well before the 2008 Olympics
in Beijing. Paradoxically, terrorism has evoked a sense
of world community that has eluded theoretical pleas for
world order.

My point is this: we have been challenged by terrorism,
and this has given us an opportunity to rediscover
fundamentals. It is an occasion to think, not simply of
how to overcome the immediate challenge, but of how to
deal with the deeper issue of what a world order for the
21st century should look like.

When I was a young professor, in an indescribably long
ago past, I once called on President Truman who had just
left office. I asked him what he had done of which he
was most proud and he said: "I am most proud of the fact

that we totally defeated our enemies and that then we
brought them back to the community of nations as
equals." In a way, we now have the same opportunity as
the leaders who created the post-war world between
1945 and 1950; but we have got to get the sequence
straight; we have got to defeat the enemies, and only
then shall we be able to create a community of nations.

ends