Dancing with the devil

Eliza Manningham-Buller may be an apt sounding name as a former head of spies but she knows a thing or two about security and terrorism http://liten.be//LcOBH.

She poses some interesting questions. I believe it is right to have careful and guarded dialogue with terrorist organisations as I am not convinced that spiralling violence and war with unseen enemies is a either a civilised or sensible way to solve our differences. She rightly cites Northern Ireland as a 'success' story in using this strategy. She also points to Nelson Mandela and the ANC who used violence to attack the oppressive Apartheid regime in South Africa - we regaled him as a hero afterwards. Rightly so.

But should we aid and abet Dictators just so that we keep them where we want? Especially if we know that they are evil and oppressive to ether own people? She refers to Gadaffi and says it was right to motivate him to disband his nuclear weapon program and that made us safer. But by supporting him the way we did we ensured he had at least another 8 years to oppress his people.

What sticks in the craw is not so much keeping people where we want them. It was the sycophantic way in which politicians like Blair, Brown and Straw sidled up to him and became his 'best mate' so that we could get a share of the action on oil. It appeared not be about the safety of the world but getting snouts in troughs. Which is much like the overthrow of Iraq - another dictatorship the West supported at times and then attacked, as we are doing to Gadaffi now.

The strategy is clearly one that works in many instances but, by God, does it really make me gag to see smiling faces shaking the hands of murderers as Blair did to Gadaffi, Rumsfeld did to Hussein and Thatcher did to Pinochet. They tell us they are people of conviction but I can't believe that. It takes a malleable mind to double deal with killers. 

I'm all for forgiving but you have to be convinced that people have really renounced their old ways. What Gadaffi proved to us all was that he had only one aim and that was to extend his stay in power and he would do anything to keep that. The only thing that had changed was that his ambitions to expand had abated. Dealing with the West suited him and he knew he could control us as he had assets we wanted.

People far more intelligent than me will, I dare say, argue that we need to dance with devil in order to defeat him but I have to say events of the past few months have left me in no doubts that politicians are not to be trusted.

So what's the answer? Was Brown and his chums right to deal with Gadaffi and send home his bomber for a victorious reception only to see the tide of fate go against their new buddy? Are we right to talk to the Taliban or Al Q'aeda?

I happen to think talking is right. But that doesn't mean to say you have to kiss their backside or love their kids. There is a limit.

I would be interested to know the opinions of others.

Afghanistan - A War For No Purpose?

It's difficult in a war situation to define success but Gordon Brown today has declared that the recent shocking 15 deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan in just 10 days as 'progress'.

One thing I would like to make clear - the incredible bravery and hard work of our Armed Forces in Afghanistan is beyond reproach. We have the most professional and best people in the world fighting on our behalf and I do not think there is not a person in Britain who is not proud and awed by the sacrifices they make daily.

It is the Politicians who should be getting the criticism. History has told us that even modern armies have struggled in this rugged land and the might of the Soviet Forces in the 80s could not control Afghanistan and today the combined Allied Forces cannot control large tracts of territory amidst ever bloodier fighting. In 8 long years, little has been achieved beyond the seizure of the capital, Kabul and Helmand province remains an unconquered and dangerous territory where British Forces are getting killed at an ever increasing pace.

The Argument Against

Ostensibly, the enemy in Afghanistan is the ultra-hard Muslim sect, the Taliban. They are the ones who throw acid into women's faces and implement a hard regime based around the most fanatical interpretation of the Koran. It was they who originally harboured Osama Bin Ladin and his Al Qaeda terrorist network and allowed them to train and operate from a safe haven. It is alleged that the Taliban fund themselves through the drugs market and at one point it was estimated that over half the world's poppy supply for illegal drugs came from Afghanistan. Indeed, one of the outcomes of this war, Tony Blair told us, was that we would be able to decrease the amount of drugs on the streets of Britain. That, like many other stupid promises about Afghanistan, was utter rubbish and the supply, by all estimates, has actually increased since the Allies moved in.

Anti War protesters would point to the fact that the Taliban is pretty much a sect and has occupied Afghanistan as a place to have its religious life. As a regime, it has no real foreign policy, according to author James Ferguson, and it is claimed that Al Qaeda has effectively left Afghanistan and taken up residence in Pakistan.

The Argument For

The clear argument is that Afghanistan is a potential conveyor belt for terrorist recruitment and training, While the Taliban themselves may not have a foreign policy, they allow the likes of Al Qaeda to operate training camps and schools which develop terrorist convictions and skills, so allowing them to send the finished articles to Western lands to bring terror and bloodshed. It is also claimed that many of the 7/7 bombers were trained in Afghanistan and controlled by people from there.

This makes the war we are fighting critical if we want to stop terrorism, we are told.

What Does Not Make Sense

The invasion of Afghanistan by US Forces following the terrible day on 9/11 was swift and decisive. The world, having digested the event and been directed to the lineage of terror that led to Bin Ladin and Afghanistan, supported the move - Britain was 'shoulder to shoulder' as Blair famously pronounced. In 8 years, we have come no closer to Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda still remains pretty much intact, causing atrocities on a sporadic but devastating basis and all intelligence points toward a world with a vastly increased state of emergency due to terrorist threats.

The real rattlers nest came on the invasion of Iraq. There were no Taliban there, no connections to Bin Ladin or 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, just a regime and dictator who were spent forces in world politics and threats, although Saddam Hussein was still a major threat to his won people. What Iraq did was to open up a front where any enemy with a gripe against the West could go along and train on the job, have a glorious career in the eyes of their peers and take out a few Allied Forces in the process. But more than anything, it served to 'up the ante' in the age-old struggle of Christians vs. Muslims.

If there can be any doubt about this, just look to the pious nature of the two leaders involved - Tony Blair and George W Bush. Blair now leads a 'Faith Tour' while Bush made no attempt to hide that God was on his side.

What both wars have shown was the lack of preparation and understanding of the enemy, the history, and the terrain. There seemed to be no real game plan, no real strategy and no clear 'end game' which would indicate when a war was actually won or lost and what the outcome would look like. 8 years on and Afghanistan is still a powder keg and very little real progress has been made.

In a bizarre twist, in the 80s it was the likes of the SAS who worked alongside the very people we fight today to helped them harry the Russians, just as Rumsfeld famously shook Saddam's hand to supply him with weapons in his war against Iran. Politics through the ages has changed with the wind and double talk and hypocrisy has been pretty much the norm. Things have changed little since over thousands of years when it comes to wars and agendas.

So we pretty much reap what we sow. Young kids and their officers are dying daily in Afghanistan and we struggle to understand why. In 8 years we have got no closer to capturing Bin Ladin or stopping Al Qaeda carry out dreadful deeds.

How will it all come to and end? When can our brave soldiers come home?

There is a theory that such wars are a necessary convenience. Much like the 'Wag The Dog' scenario, wars divert attention and show that we are doing something. We, the public, are far too stupid to understand why wars are required, if indeed they are. Information can be carefully controlled and whenever there is the slightest real criticism on intentions, tracks are covered by invoking 'necessary secrecy' like vetoing the publishing of the minutes of Cabinet prior to the decision to go to war with Iraq. Or the sham Public Inquiries we have had, and yet to have, on Iraq.

There is always the danger, however, that what the Government is doing is the right thing. Although history tells us that no foreign power since Genghis Khan has ruled Afghanistan to any effect, we still seem to think we can conquer an almost indomitable people and, in attempting to do so, we only harden the resolve of everyday Muslims to support things which are indeed against their nature and their religion.

We can all point to parts of the Koran and Bible that promote war and revenge but ultimately we have to trust ourselves. At some point we are going to have to live with one another on this earth. We had better get used to the idea.

Thorny Issues

Let's get something straight at the start - I thought at the time and still do that David Davies was an egotistical prat. His puerile display of self gratification when he resigned his seat and forced a farcical re-election campaign was a mighty waste of time and money and an abuse of an arguably daft political system. The only decent outcome is that he remains in the political wilderness.

However, if anything, it detracted us all from the thing he was supposedly trying to highlight - the erosion of civil liberty by the extension of the detention period of an unaccused individual to 42 days. I believe strongly in civil liberty and habeas corpus but when it comes to Terrorism it becomes a massive grey area and the security of the public is paramount. If it stood as a general point then I would have supported him.

'Known Knowns and Known Unknowns'

Rumsfeld's famous phrase is worth repeating. We live in a world which has changed dramatically since the day the world stopped on 9/11. I vividly recall the events unfolding before me in sheer aghast horror and relived them in the excellent film Flight 93. I recall equally being on a train into London when 7/7 occurred and worrying how my wife was in her office in Spitalfields unobtainable - then seeing the carnage that had been wrought not by foreign terrorists but from citizens of our own. The world had changed beyond all recognition.

So when the US response came in Afghanistan, I had no quibble. But when we jointly invaded Iraq and John Charles De Menezes was gunned down in cold blood on a train in London, I believed we had changed the world for the worse, not the terrorists. Blair always said that it was the terrorists who did it, they started it, but I do not for one minute believe that terrorism was on George W Bush's mind when he ordered the invasion of Iraq and I don't think that terrorists train or compel police to be incompetent.

Since these events we have constantly been held in a state of low level terror, drip-fed information designed to keep us on our toes and to agree with policy. We have let Guatanamo go by as a necessary method to treat indeterminate people on non-sovereign territory while Abu Ghraib was put down to over zealous individuals rather than a Supreme Command that basically said do what you want to these people - they are worthless. A lack of understanding of a complex situation has caused terrible loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq and it came from the dreadful lack of planning and knowledge displayed by leaders like Bush, Blair, Brown and Rumsfeld.

When interviewed about a year ago, a US Marine in Iraq was asked by a reporter, 'Why are you here?' He replied with total honesty, 'Because of 9/11.' Yet Iraq and Saddam Hussein by Bush's own words had nothing to do with 9/11.

This has been the problem with the escalation of world tension. Even our own incompetent Intelligence Agencies who fell to Alistair Campbell's leadership and produced the piece of shocking fairy tale that was the basis of our decision to invade Iraq, have said that by invading Iraq we would cause more terrorism - because we have now given anyone with a gripe against the West a focal point to do so, a raison d'etre and a good career.

Why Should We Think Again?

I bring this very tough subject up on two counts. Firstly, and most importantly, amid all the lambasting about Government incompetence over its handling of the Financial Fiasco, the 145th British Soldier died yesterday in Afghanistan since 2001. He was from the First Batallion of Rifles and he died in Helmand Province. He followed Marine Darren Smith who died of his wounds on Saturday while being transferred to Camp Bastion.

While I query why our soldiers are being used this way, I think they are the best and bravest people on this earth. They are dying on our behalf and there is no greater sacrifice. Remember that today for the sake of the families of those two men and the 143 others who have died in Afghanistan alone.

It will put the rest of our troubles into perspective.

The second reason I bring this subject up is that Dame Stella Rimington, former Head of MI5, has spoken out against the West's policies. "The US has gone too far with Guantanamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that," she said. "Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect - there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification."

She has previously been critical of the government's policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards. "It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state," she said.

Her comments come ahead of the publication by the International Commission of Jurists which is chaired by Former Irish President Mary Robinson who said, "Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats."

The report contends that the US and UK undermine the framework of International Law. Personally I think they repeatedly break International Law in the name of Freedom and Democracy - the two virtues we wish to bring to the worlds they invade. Our example of what Freedom and Democracy is about is pretty questionable.

Never Say Never

I should imagine there were a fair number of financial experts who would have said the present turmoil could never happen or at least be as likely as a lottery win, are now crying into their flat champagne. Similarly, I bumped into a pilot yesterday who said the likelihood of a plane being struck by birds at take-off and then safely landing in the Hudson River had so many 'impossibilities' attached to it that it should never happen.

But they did.

So when a few boffins tell us that the risk of a black hole opening to gobble up the Swiss Alps when the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is switched on is no more than 1 in a billion, how sure are they that they have calculated the right numbers?

The Possibility of The Impossible

If you want a cerebral read, go to New Scientist and read Mark Buchanan's Essay on this subject which is scary. I will attempt to put it in terms that I can understand and hopefully a monkey can then interpret it too. Firstly, we are a clever species, you know. Better than apes and dolphins, we have a large capacity for deductive reasoning, although you would not always think so because we also have the capacity to deceive ourselves over the significance of our conclusions.

The financial chaos we are in is a prime example and at loggerheads with the views of Taleb et al, I don't think it was a Black Swan phenomenon that popped up randomly to wreck the system, it was poor deductive reasoning of the combined financial army of gurus who thought their schemes were bullet-proof when a cursory conversation with an average chap in the pub would have said there were several flaws in their thinking. That and their judgement was clouded by greed.

The message here is that just because there are sophisticated arguments about sophisticated systems by sophisticated people, doesn't mean to say they are right. Just like the paranoids who think just because they are paranoid it doesn't mean people are not out to get them. Well it isn't like that but I like that idea.

So when some chap makes a seminal study of the risks of the LHC causing a blackhole small but deadly enough to kill us and tells us it's virtually impossible, we might ask just how impossible is impossible?

Do We Know What We Are Doing?

There are no real ways we can test the theory without switching the thing on, at which point it may be too late as some pixelated monster from a Nintendo game may start chomping its way around the earth's crust and gobble us up. Then we would look pretty silly and dead.

Well let me stun you with science. You see, boffins invoke quantum chromodynamics which is not something to do with the making of a multi-coloured pizza but it's about defining the gravitational conditions for creating black holes. If you combine this with our vast knowledge (?) of near-Earth high energy collisions due to cosmic rays, you can calculate the risk of a 'dangerous event', which could defined as merely Earth-extinction, as being a paltry 1 in a billion. This is very comforting.

Or is it?

Now a chap called Ord has done a study on this and he concludes that this small risk is fine if, and only if, the boffins who came up with it have made the correct assumptions in the first place. Even better, he even tells us there is a calculation to see how wrong they could be which goes something along the lines of X being the probability of an event occurring multiplied by the probability of it being wrong added to the multiple of Y, the chance that the event will happen if the argument is wrong and the probability of the argument being wrong.

With me so far? Well it doesn't matter much if the value of X is high like 50% or even 1%, but darn me, if X is very small like 10 to the power of minus 20 or so and the chance the argument is wrong is 1 in a billion, then we should be quite scared as the first number becomes meaningless.

Eh?

Put in terms we can understand - it means if the probability estimate given by the argument is dwarfed by the chance of it being wrong, then run and take cover because then the estimate they come up is likely to be highly suspect.

What they are trying to say, the more suspect your logic, the more likely something will happen even if you think the possibility is small. You see in comparison to 10 to the minus 20, 1 in a billion is a huge chance. What it does mean is that if you are going to make very small probability predictions, you had better be very, very, very sure of your facts.

When I studied for my sciences degree, everyone was obsessed by the percentage of margins of error for calculations but we rarely operated at + or - a few percent at most because we knew that our measuring kit was pretty accurate. Here we are playing with incredibly small numbers so the difference between 10 to the power of -20 compared to 10 to the power of -18 is 100 times different and that's the issue.

The LHC Argument

Now the boffins cite that the energy densities frequently created by cosmic rays colliding with particles in the earth's atmosphere could be compared to the probabilities in the LHC case - as, if these were truly dangerous, then we would have had a big enough collision already to kill us all. That sounds very reassuring. But is it?

Here is a scary bit about science. The boffin who looked at this risk also looked across the proportion of scientific papers which proved to be wrong and concluded that 1 in 10,000 were wrong. Sound small? Remember the conclusion of the probability of a nasty event at the LHC was 10 to the power of -9. Worse still, they concluded that in fact when you account for the fact that the journal they chose covered only top-ranking papers, the real errors rate was likely to be 1 in 1,000 for all papers published. Even if it were a million times smaller, it should be a cause for concern given that interesting calculation.

In other words, we have a nasty record of getting our predictions wrong.

And when you think of it, people like Newton, Einstein and Darwin who we revere so much, have subsequently been proven to be not exactly right about everything they said. And this invokes the Donald Rumsfeldism of 'known knowns' and 'known unknowns' - if you don't know everything that underpins your argument at the outset then you are building in a margin of error, and Newton did not know about quantum mechanics and Darwin knew nothing of DNA.

It's Impossible To Prove The Impossible

Here is the ironical thing - it's pretty much true that despite our longing for certainty we can never definitively prove anything as we can never be certain we have not got something wrong in the process - and even if we ask others to help, they can make mistakes too.

So after all that nasty maths at school, we can be certain of one thing and that is that mathematical certainty is not certain. But we can't even be certain of that.

The end message is, when they switch that LHC thing on, hide under the stairs and cover your ears. You can never be too sure.........