Obama Announces an Afghan Surge of 30,000 Troops, Copenhagen’s Climate Summit Falls Short of a Binding Treaty and a Would-Be Christmas Bomber is Overpowered Aboard a Detroit-Bound Flight

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2010 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2010

Quarterly Briefing

• President Obama announces at West Point on December 1 that 30,000 additional US troops will deploy to Afghanistan in 2010; the surge is designed to reverse Taliban momentum in the south and east, with a commitment to begin withdrawal by July 2011; the announcement is the culmination of a three-month strategic review that revealed deep divisions within the administration.
• The Copenhagen Climate Conference, COP15, ends on December 19 with the Copenhagen Accord — a non-binding political agreement rather than the legally enforceable treaty that environmental advocates and many developing nations had demanded; the accord, brokered by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, commits signatories to limiting warming to 2°C but includes no mandatory emission reduction targets.
• On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian student trained by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, attempts to detonate a plastic explosive device concealed in his underwear aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approaches Detroit; fellow passengers subdue him; the incident exposes critical failures in US aviation security intelligence and triggers an immediate review of airline screening procedures.
• Iran’s Green Movement protests continue into the autumn following the disputed June presidential election; the regime’s security forces respond with arrests, beatings and killings; Ashura commemorations in late December become flashpoints, with security forces attacking mourners; the protest movement has not collapsed but has been significantly suppressed.
• Honduras holds presidential elections on November 29 despite the political crisis following the June coup against President Zelaya; Porfirio Lobo Sosa wins; most Latin American and Caribbean governments refuse to recognise the result as legitimate while the United States and a smaller group of countries indicate support for the democratic exercise.
• The global economic crisis continues to shape government budgets across the Caribbean; Jamaica enters talks with the International Monetary Fund for a standby arrangement; remittances from the diaspora — still the primary source of foreign exchange for many households — have fallen significantly from pre-crisis levels.

Prologue: The New Decade’s Opening

The quarter ending January 2 brought the first decade of the twenty-first century to a close on terms that would have been difficult to predict when it began. A United States that entered 2001 at the height of an internet-driven economic boom ended 2009 still crawling out of a financial crisis generated by its own financial sector. Two wars whose combined costs exceeded $1 trillion remained unresolved. The international system’s response to the greatest collective action problem in history — climate change — produced a conference whose principal outcome was an agreement to keep talking. And on the very last day of the decade, a 23-year-old from Nigeria demonstrated that al-Qaeda’s ambitions remained undimmed ten years after the organisation’s emergence as a global threat. For the Caribbean, the decade had brought Hurricane Ivan, the aftermath of the financial crisis, Venezuela’s Petrocaribe initiative, and the continuing geopolitical proximity to the world’s problems that Jamaica’s location and diaspora entail.

Afghanistan: The Surge Decision

Obama’s three-month strategic review of Afghanistan was the most scrutinised internal deliberation of his presidency. General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, had requested 40,000 additional troops in August; the request was leaked to the press, creating public pressure on a White House that had not yet decided. The vice-president, Biden, argued for a much smaller counterterrorism-focused force; the military argued for a full counterinsurgency strategy. Obama’s West Point speech on December 1 split the difference at 30,000 troops, with the significant concession to Biden’s position that a withdrawal timeline — July 2011 — would be publicly announced.

The timeline announcement was immediately controversial. Military commanders expressed private concerns that publicising a withdrawal date would allow the Taliban to wait out the surge. Pakistani officials, whose cooperation was essential to any Afghan strategy, were reassured that the US was committed but unsettled by the implicit message that American patience was finite. For the Caribbean, the Afghan surge represented another commitment of American military and financial resources that would shape Washington’s capacity to engage with hemispheric issues; the costs of the two wars were already exerting pressure on US foreign assistance budgets across the globe.

Copenhagen, Climate and Caribbean Vulnerability

The Copenhagen Accord’s failure to produce a legally binding treaty was a particular disappointment for Caribbean small island states, which had arrived at COP15 with existential stakes. For Barbados, the Bahamas, Antigua, St Kitts and other low-lying island nations, the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming is not an abstraction but a question of whether the islands will be habitable within this century. The Alliance of Small Island States had pushed hard for a 1.5°C target and for a binding legal framework; they received neither. The accord’s $100 billion per year fast-start financing commitment for developing countries offered some consolation but no certainty of delivery.

Jamaica’s contribution to global emissions is negligible; its exposure to the consequences of other countries’ emissions is significant. Sea level rise, more intense hurricane seasons, coral bleaching and reduced rainfall — all projected consequences of continued global warming — threaten the island’s agricultural productivity, coastal infrastructure and tourism industry. The Copenhagen outcome left Caribbean negotiators carrying a sense of frustration shared across the developing world: the countries least responsible for the crisis bearing the greatest consequences of its mismanagement.

Honduras and the Caribbean’s Democratic Test

CARICOM’s response to Honduras’s November elections illustrated the region’s dilemma when democratic form and democratic substance diverge. The elections were procedurally conducted with reasonable fairness; voter turnout was reasonable; international observers from some bodies deemed the process acceptable. But the elections had been called by a government that had come to power through a military coup; the constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya, was in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa where he had taken refuge after returning to Honduras in September; the supreme court had barred his return to office. Most CARICOM members followed the Latin American regional consensus in refusing to recognise the results; the United States, while having initially condemned the coup, now indicated it could work with the Lobo government. The episode would continue to complicate hemispheric relations into the new year.

Looking Ahead

Afghanistan’s surge will begin deploying in early 2010; the strategy’s first real test will come in Helmand and Kandahar, where the Taliban are strongest. Iran’s protest movement may resurface around the February anniversary of the 1979 revolution; the regime will face a continued challenge to its internal legitimacy. Yemen has emerged as a new front in the global jihadist struggle, with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula demonstrating the capability and intent to strike Western targets from its base there — the Christmas Day bomber’s Yemen connection will intensify US and allied attention on the country. And for the Caribbean, 2010 begins with economic stress, a climate agenda deferred and a Haitian state that was already fragile even before the terrible test that the new year may bring.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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