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My friend Eddie (of Hidden Unities) sent me "The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades," a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, by Nathan Nunn (pdf download). In the paper Nunn finds a correlation between a region's loss of slaves in the Atlantic Ocean, Sahara Desert, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades and present levels of misery.

Certainly one explanation is that Africa's misery is the result of the slave trade. Indeed, that conclusion is the title of Nunn's paper. Another is that regions that are so capital-starved and economically-screwy that they export a substantial fraction of their work force probably will remain capital-starved and economically-screwy.

Whatever the course -- slavery, anti-state guerrillaism, or just low general intelligence, the moral of the story is the hard part of shrinking the Gap is ahead of us. Building up a Military-Industrial-Complex and waiting seems to have been enough to globalize eastern Europe and eastern Asia,

However, when it comes to the hard part of globalization -- hookin up the Muslim world and especailly Africa -- are record is not so good. The world lost the highest-functioning indigienous Systems Administration forces it had in those areas -- French Algeria and South Africa -- while the Empires of Japan, France, and Britain - which did so much good for so many -- were disolved in the wake of World War II.

This is why building a Sysadmin Industrial Complex, as we are currently doing in the United States, is so vital. It's not fair that merely leaving the deepest parts of the Gap alone will actually help end misery. We need to do more. A Sysadmin Industrial Complex of the military, Congress, and private contractors -- resting on and supported by the people -- is the only institutional way to move shrinking the gap beyond politics and to results.

Jackson, P. (2007). Are Africa's Wars Part of a Fourth Generation of Warfare?, Contemporary Security Policy, 28:2, 267 - 285. DOI: 10.1080/13523260701489826 Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13523260701489826

Steve Pampinella, a friend of this blog, sent me a link to a very solid article, which wonders of the African Wars should be considered as part of the fourth generation of modern war (4GW). First some excerpts from the conclusion, and then my thoughts:

All of these wars exhibit characteristics that would seem to fit 4GW theory, including chaotic modes of warfare, looting, atrocities against civilians, and cultural approaches to power. However, there is significant evidence that African wars follow pre-colonial patterns of warfare, not new patterns, and that conflict in Africa has taken on a number of additional, modern characteristics including the use of modern weaponry and media and communications...

In terms of policy, what an application of 4GW to Africa shows is that any approach to conflict resolution must be far broader than a military approach, and must take into account cultural and socio-political approaches...

The 4GW theoretical model of the evolution of warfare may not be applicable to Africa in the same way that it may or may not be applicable to Europe, but it does highlight the idea that African wars are exhibiting similar processes to those currently seen in different asymmetric wars.

The short answer is No, the African wars are not 4GW. The African wars tend not to be state-centered, but that is because they are before-the-state, not after-the-state.



Africa's wars are pre-modern wars, or "0GW." Simply put, the continent of Africa is too backwards when it comes to organization to indigineously host the sort of wars that the rest of the world takes for granted. Part of the reason for Africa's inability to organizer higher generational (and less bloddy) wars is clearly cultural: a destroyed cultural infrastructure in one generation hardly helps the next! Another is bioneurological: the low intelligence of African populations due to malnutrition, disease, etc. But whatever the cause, referring to the pre-modern African wars as "4GW" demonstrates a poor understanding of both Africa and 4GW.

Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, written by Stephen DeAnglis and edited by Bradd Hayes, links to a recent article in The Economist thatlooks forward to New Sudan. Both The Economist and the ERMB articles are worth reading, but I want to use this opportunity to extend my comparison of Palestine to Iraq.

Within a decade of 9/11, the world may see the division of the Palestinian territories into Fatah and Hamas states, the division of Iraq into Shia, Kurdish, and Sunni Arab regions, and the division of Sudan into "New Sudan" in the south, Darfur in the west, and a rump Khartoum government in the north.

This is exactly what is needed. 9/11 was a sympton of a malfunctioning Sunni Arab civilization combined with the Sunni Arab's world to divert feedback from itself onto others. Our responses to 9/11 have served to redirect that feedback back to the source, destabilizing a Sunni Arab system already out of kilter instead of accepting a "stability" which generates violence for us.

That's a good thing.

Update: Tom adds his thoughts.

Hughes, J. (2007). South Africa's rising wave of crime. Christian Science Monitor. August 24, 2007. Available online: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0824/p09s01-coop.html.

The Christian Science monitor is optimistic, to say the least:

It is now 13 years since South Africa turned its back on the oppressive era of apartheid and, in a remarkably peaceful transition, embraced democracy. Much has been accomplished as blacks and whites sculpt a new, multiracial nation. But the warning in the Sowetan's boardroom is a reminder that democracy must be nurtured to flourish.

Besides "democracy," the fall of the Nationalist government brought hope on one front: the Nationalists ran their economies along welfareist-socialist lines, and a shock therapy program by the new rulers (of the African National Congress) might jump-start the economy.

Instead, solid economic growth is accompanied with an increasingly violent society and ethnic cleansing against the most educated demographics within the country. And of coures,



As can be seen in the chart above, South Africa's human development index under the Nationalist government was essentially that of a Latin American or Caribbean state. Since the African National Congress has taken over, South Africa's human development has fallen below Latin America's, below East Asia's, below the Arab states', nearing South Asia's, and is steadily regressing to the mean for sub-Saharan Africa.

Generally, two factors are behind Gappishness -- having your country be one of the worst in the world. One is economic system. The other is the average intelligence of the population that runs the state. The easiest states to bring up are those with bad economic systems but high general intelligence, such as those of East Asia. The hardest countries to bring up are those that suffer from both bad institutions and low general intelligence.

The worst parts of the Gap will not shrink themselves. Pretending they will confines a billion people to misery, terror, and death. Shrinking the Gap requires a long term, institutional commitment by the Core.

The Core's last attempt has failed everhwere or is failing everywhere in Africa. The European states were too weak and too self-destructive to complete their mission. Hopefully, the next wave of Systems Administration will be luckier.

Enterra has at least three great bloggers on their payroll: Barnett, Deichman, and of course CEO Stephen DeAngelis, writing at Enterprise Resilience Management Blog. ERMB's latest post, on China in Africa, contains this paragraph:

African countries will not experience sustainable economic growth by relying on the export of natural resources. One of the reasons that Tom Barnett and I came up with the idea for Development-in-a-Box™ was to break this cycle of reliance and help countries develop the diverse economic base and create the jobs they need to prosper. Until China understands which of their programs are helpful and which are harmful, their ventures in Africa will continue to bear the rogue label.

The reason that things are labeled in political discourse is, of course, political. China is a pro-business capitalist state, and it is no surprise that she draws attacks from anti-business and anti-capitalist groups. It's chic at best and harmless at worst to have a quirky ideology that ruins your productivity and kills millions of your citizens. But become productive and compete? That makes you rogue.



That said, if we wish to criticize Beijing for not doing enough, we surely can. Perhaps the greatest technologies in the history of man are the police and ecological homogenization. The benefits of police are clear: a drastic reduction in violence and associated reputation-/pride-/face-/honor- related killings. Ecological homogenization, the reduction in diversity in a climate region, reduces the pathogenic load on a population, increasing average intelligence as the body has to spend less effort resisting diseases during development

If we really wanted China to help in Africa, we would encourage Chinese police to patrol African cities and Chinese industry to engage in continental climate change.

Of course, that would be labeled "rogue," too.

Humanity, like all species, evolves through changes in the frequency of genetic variants over time. Where there is less diversity -- less possible genetic variants to have their frequency varied -- there is less evolution. The aboriginies of Austarlia, for example, are dark skinned in spite of living at a mid-lattitute for thousands of years. This does not mean that there is some health advantage to being dark skinned at a mid latitute -- quite the opposite! Rather, there simple was not enough diversity in the the population of aborginies to enable evolution over that time frame.

Populations with greater diversity are able to evolve faster for their conditions. Thus, it is slightly horrifying than the region with the worst living conditions (where selection pressures are least like those of the developed world)

and the region with the highest birthrates:



is also the region with the most genetic diversity: Africa.

Extrapolating from other species, behavioral change from natural selection might occur in human beings in as little as 200 years. We are approximately fifty years into the Declonization of Africa, and the genocidal nightmare that unleasehd.

Forgetting about the actual human cost of this gappish hell, there is still time to be patient. There is time to let a plan work to shrink the gap.

But it must begin soon.

The following three statements are true:

• People prefer to have a job done by locals incompetently than by outsiders competently


• Economic growth and foreign-direct investment depend on competent basic services, such as security


• Intelligence, along with economic system, are the pest predictors for the social competence of a country

These three facts mean we only need to look at a table of comparative national intelligence. The results are unsurprising to those who know about the Afro-Islamic Gap: intelligence scores in Africa are two standard deviations below those in the west.



Even assuming that nutritional and educational levels in sub-Saharan Africa could be brought up to Western standards immediately, there still would be a long lag until sub-Saharan intelligence reaches western levels and a difference may survive even then. It is reasonable to expect that social services, such as security, would be provided incompetently by the resulting local governments.

The obvious solution is to use military-industrial-complex-enabled uniformed service to help provide security, but the drawbacks of these are obvious. Adrian Martin of Politics and Soccer outlined just a few, in including "dependency, blowback, corruption, weaponization, and non-scalability."

To summarize: the low national intelligence of sub-Saharan African nations implies that outside provides of social services will be needed, but history teaches us that outside providers of social services causes problems.

The way forward: Connecting sub-Saharan Africa to the global economy, providing a minimum level of civilization in order to end Africa's export of disease and misery to the rest of the world, is not an easy task. Leaving the job to the locals is genocidally wrong-headed. The most likely future is a form of Asian resource imperialism supported by American force. The question then becomes how heavy the world's footprint should be. Too light, and the 2nd half of the twentieth century just repeats,l over and over and over. Too heavy, and sub-Saharan Africa returns to colonialism.

In other words, "too light" and nothing changes, "too heavy" is better than now, and "just right" might actually shrink the gap!

There's an ongoing debate about low intelligence, environmental instability, and the livint standards of a country. It's worth reading about, but I will set that aside to re-join the discussion on global guerrillas, with my friends Schloky, Soob, and others.

I've criticized global guerrilla theory before. It is unfalsifiable, lacks metrics, and lacks any explanation of why someone would become a global guerrilla. About the only thing going for the theory is that there are "failed states" and "hollow states" in the world. Global guerrillas would want to create hollow states, so the argument goes, therefore, these hollow states may have been caused by global guerrillas.

Of course, this is like arguing in favor of aliens by saying there are lights in the sky. And it can be combated in the same way. The "alien hypothesis" for UFOs is not taken seriously because far more boring explanations (misidentified planets, military craft, etc.) work equally well. Likewise, the "global guerrilla" explanation for failed states falls because something far more obvious prevents societies from being stable.

Take, for example, Africa... a continent riddled with failed states since decolonization.

According to the latest failed states index, the hollowest countries in Africa are Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Ivoery Coast, Congo, Guinea, Central African Republic, Uganda, and Nigeria. An evidence of a global guerrilla swam? Hardly: the mean intelligent quotients of these countries are 72, unreported, 66, unreported, unreported, 65,59, unreported, 73, and 67.

Why don't African states get better? Because the population, on the whole, has the intelligence of 12-year-olds.

Intelligence, besides making one "smarter," is correlated with the ability to delay gratification and the ability to solve problems -- precisely those skills needed for civilized life

To be persuasive, global guerrilla theory needs to explain failed states in a way better than other explanations. Lack of intelligence, combined with economic structure, alone is enough to explain most failed states. So why bother with "global guerrillas"?

Update: Tom adds his thoughts.

Hari, Johann. 2007. White Man for the Job. The New Republic. April 23, 2007. Available online: https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20070423&s=hari042307.

Eddie of Hidden Unities emailed me a "hit piece" against Andrew Roberts that recently appeared in The New Republic. In particular, felt the follow passage justly put Roberts in a bad light:

In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa and calls for "the re-establishment of civilized European rule throughout the African continent." Founded by a former member of the neo-fascist National Front, the club flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting. The dinner was a celebration of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, which was pressing it to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for this racist rule, Roberts, according to the club's website, "finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which he said he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements."

I'm generally unaware of the Springbok Club, and can't comment on its mix of affection for the Commonwealth and liberationalist republicanism. Instead, I will address what appears to be the substantive theme of the paragraph: that "civilized European rule throughout the African continent."

Of course it was.

The European Powers conducted the most massive, and most intense, Systems Administration Work in the history of the world in Africa. The European regimes stretched from the horrendous (Congo Free State) to possibly the best the continent had ever known (the British Empire). This period of interventionism stretched roughly from the 1878 Congress of Berlin to after the Second World War (though native left-of-center governments took power in Rhodesia and before the end).

The retreat of the Empires saw genocides, ethnic cleansing, massacre, and terrorism of all stripes. The middle part of Africa saw near immediate devastation, while decline and stagnation would soon encircle the continent from the Pacific to the Indian, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Southern Ocean.

If not for the terrible toll, in blood and money, of fighting the Axis in World War II, Dar Fur would have never happened. Rwanada would have never happened. Because the Europeans would still be there.

Instead, a combination (in increasing order of importance) of national liberation movements, leftist-isolationist domestic intellectuals, and bankrupt Empires led to the abandonment of a good slice of humanity. While other states pulled off the grid in the twentieth century (the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic, for example) experienced record-breaking democides, they had enough internal social capital to either slowly decline (Moscow) or eventually rebound (Beijing). Africa does not and did not.

I titled this post "The Genocide in Darfur is the Fault of Those Who Oppose Colonialism" not because the genocides and democides truly are the moral fault of anticolonialists, any more than a spate of immolations would be the "fault" of those who just don't feel like funding a fire department anymore. The title of the post is true in the functional sense.

European colonialism was a once-in-a-millenia opportunity for Africa. Sadly, neither Europe -- nor Africa -- were up for it.

The day is won. Israel has succeeded in its generational struggle with Arab National-Secularism.

Yet now the medium-term interests of the United States and the Jewish State diverge. The United States, the world's leader, desires a "rule-set reset" across the Middle East, replacing the divded and confused Arab regimes with something sustainable. Yet such division and confusion is precisely in Israel's interests, because weak and disoriented enemies cannot threaten her. In particularly, the map of Israel's near-abroad that America must strive for will naturally spook our allies in Jerusalem.

American actions not in Israel's preferred direction occurred soon after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and can be seen by comparing the recommendations of the seminal 1996 paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.

with what actually happened

• Attempted implementation of an indigenous, secular, Shia government


• Actual implementation of an indigenous, religious, Shia government

Israel desired a restored Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq to calm the Middle East, as soon as possible. The United States desired a Shia Iraq to explode the Middle East, as soon as possible.

Such a disagreement extends beyond the failing state of Iraq to Israel's immediate neighborhood. With the internal remnants of Arab National-Secularism, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah patronage machine, in shambles, Israel's best medium-term future was a globalized Lebanon and weak (and easily blackmailed) Egyptian and Syrian regimes. Yet America's goal is continuing the 3/20 Revolution wish must include replacing the Arab National-Secularist governments of Egypt and Syria with the Muslim Brothers. The Global War on Terrorism requires replacing dysfunctional worldly rule with Islamic Law.

Sharia's modernizing track record in the Middle East is positive, National-Secularism's is negative. Don't believe it? Compare the religiosity of Egyptians and Iranians. Compare the strength of Egypt and Iranians.

In a recent post, Tom Barnett wrote:

And yes, forcing us all to live together in connectedness (known today by the moniker of globalization) will force a tremendous amount of change on both those who welcome it (by all indications, the bulk of the populations throughout the Gap) and those who revile it (a small minority who will fight these changes to the very end, and yes, for them, the conflict will be "genocidal" in that they will not survive it).

In that conflict process, which I believe is both inevitable and good, it will be harder before it gets easier, but putting off the hard part only ensures greater conflict and death totals down the line, because if integration isn't achieved, colonial mercantlist-style economic transaction patterns will predominate, as will local authoritarianism and failed states, and the death totals associated with those pathways will (as they do today) dwarf the death totals of integrating conflicts (and if you don't believe that, then you are woefully ignorant of what's happening every day in Africa right now).

The challenge before us is not one of deciding "yes" or "no" to this historical process. That train left the station a generation ago when the East decided to join the global economy.

The only question that remains is how we rise to this challenge. How we get smarter about how we wage both war and peace.

To pretend that the choice lies between war and peace is self-delusional, just like pretending we must choose between globalization-the-integration-process and globalization-the-disintegrating/reformatting-process. Life is simply not that binary.

Israel, being only a state, is too weak to influence systems and instead must play for time, merely surviving into her surroundings are magically improved. But America is a system-level power, and America has the power to change the nature of Israel's surroundings.

It is by bringing 3/20 to Cairo and Damascus that we can truly prevent another 9/11. Redirect the violent feedback of the National-Secularists to the National-Secularists. Bring the rage of crooked Arab economies to crooked Arab states. Shrink the Gap by destroying-in-detail the National-Secularism that helped expand it.

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A New Middle East, a tdaxp series
A New Middle East 1: Our Vanquished Enemies
A New Middle East 2: Iran
A New Middle East 3: Israel
A New Middle East 4: Islam is the Answer