Our future depends on countries harnessing their strengths and working together to achieve common goals, writes TONY KINSELLA
HUMANS HAVE always been attracted by high vantage points with their better views and enhanced security. The use of fire to make tools was believed to have been discovered in Europe about 25,000 years ago, but research published in the current edition of the journal Science suggests tool-making fire had been mastered along the southern coasts of Africa almost 50,000 years earlier. Some 70,000 years ago, our ancestors were seeking out attractive higher-ground locations.
This month sees their descendants debating and deciding in two of the planet’s highest capitals – but reminds us that enhanced views are often not enough. Kabul, the Afghan capital, sits 1,800m above sea level in a Hindu Kush mountain valley. Afghanistan is preparing for its presidential elections later this month. The incumbent president Hamid Karzai is viewed as the likely winner. A re-election that will change little in the myriad conflicts that wrack that unfortunate country.
The incoming UK chief of the general staff, Sir David Richards, recently suggested that British troops may be needed in Afghanistan for another 40 years to achieve “victory”. Sir David was, hopefully, seeking to open a debate as to just what his troops are fighting and dying for. Their deaths, and those of many Afghans, are tragic human markers to the end of an old system of governance.
Afghanistan’s wars are not a clash of civilisations, nor a dispute between modernisers, traditionalists and their external allies. Elements of those tensions mix with ethnic rivalries, the opium trade and local disputes to produce violence and conflict. A dispute over illegal wood cutting in the Korengal Valley led to fierce fighting there, while competing claims to smuggling routes underpin much of the conflict in Uzbeen.
The actual state of Afghanistan is, in part, a creation of the defunct British empire. The border with Pakistan is the Durand Line, negotiated in November 1893 between Sir Mortimer Durand, the “foreign minister” of the British Indian administration and Afghanistan’s Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. It is a line that divides many Pashtun families, a line they ignore and frequently challenge.
The days when European empires, and later the US, could hope to dictate solutions, impose governments and define borders are thankfully behind us. Victory in any classical political, never mind military, sense is impossible in Afghanistan. Coming to terms with that reality is a precondition for determining what the best possible goals might be, goals that have to be acceptable to the broadest possible range of Afghanis if the view from Kabul is to improve.
Ecuador’s capital Quito lies 2,850m up in the Andes. Last Monday, the leaders of 16 countries gathered for a meeting of Unasur, the new Union of South American Nations. The Unasur Constitutive Treaty was signed in Brasilia in May 2008, creating a South American organisation modelled on the European Union. Unasur’s secretariat is in Quito, its parliament is setting up in Bolivia, while its bank will be located in Venezuela.
Unasur incorporated two existing customs unions, the Andean Community of Nations and Mercosur, to create a continental customs entity. It aims to have is single market partially in place by 2014, is pursuing policies on the free movement of peoples, infrastructure and energy projects and considering common security initiatives.
One similarity between the two bodies is the pivotal roles played by their largest members. Argentina and Brazil form the core of Unasur as France and Germany lie at the heart of the EU. It took Europeans centuries of bloody conflict and millions of corpses to realise that their common interests were better served through co-operation. South Americans absorbed the European lesson without having to repeat the carnage. If the concept of “victory” with its inherent connotations of crushing opponents, forms much of the matrix of our human past, our future depends on joint progress in pursuit of our common interests. A practical illustration of this is the revised agreement between Brazil and neighbouring Paraguay in July of this year about the Itaipu hydroelectric plant on the Parana river. With 14 gigawatts of capacity, Itaipu is the world’s second largest generator of hydroelectricity after China’s Three Gorges installation.
The 1973 treaty between Brazil and Paraguay was long resented by Paraguayans. Both partners were entitled to 50 per cent of the electricity generated, but were also obliged to sell unused parts of their quota to the other at a price, fixed for 50 years. As the former Paraguayan dictatorship failed to construct a modern grid, Paraguay consumed less than 10 per cent of its quota. The rest had to be sold at a fixed low price to Brazil.
At a meeting in Asuncion on July 20th, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reached an agreement with his Paraguayan counterpart, Fernando Lugo, saying that “Brazil is not interested in growing and developing if its partners don’t grow and don’t develop”. Paraguay will now be able to sell its surplus power at market rates, boosting its Itaipu income from around $120 million to $306 million (€252 million).
Holding the high ground may offer perspectives, but harnessing them requires pragmatic generosity. If you don’t believe me, take a look from one of the upper floors of developer Liam Carroll’s unfinished office buildings in Dublin.