ARTICLE: Water find 'may end Darfur war', BBC, 18 July 2007
The Darfur story is an old one, as I noted in either PNM or BFA: the cowboy and the farmer can't be friends. It gets dressed up as a "clash' here because it's Arab Muslim cowboys and largely black African farmers. Desertification in the north pushes Arabs southward, and so now the hope is that more water resources in the south will calm the violence.
It is definitely a start and good news for refugees, but let's remember, the cowboy and farmer weren't friends in the American West for reasons beyond water (relatively plentiful then). It's mostly about controlling the land. More water makes the land more sustainable in terms of population, but it also makes it more valuable, and therefore more worth fighting over.
The reason why I crankily eschew the promise of single solutions, especially resource-based ones, as answers to conflict ("Get them water!" "Get us off oil!") is that they strike me as treating symptoms. If they're bad enough, then yeah, every bit helps. No sense in killing the cancer if the infection's gonna get you first. But relieving the resource pinch doesn't solve the underlying problems that yield the deprivation or misuse and perpetuate them. There are plenty of water-stressed places in the world without genocide. So it's a bit neat to say, "Give them water and the genocide will cease," even if that may well be true (and thus worthy) in the short term.
Simply put, there is no silver bullet, but always a complex interweaving generating enough connectivity that allows for individual creativity and entrepreneurship to emerge.
The denial of basic needs certainly hampers that emergence, but their provision, especially when unsustainably provided by outsiders via aid, is more status quo-enhancing than paradigm breaking.
Why do I argue like this?
I want to escape the logic that says, "For pennies a day, we can keep this disenfranchised, marginalized, unempowered person barely alive, assuaging your sense of personal guilt and moral obligation. You too can 'save' Africa/Country X!"
I don't want to save Africa. I want it integrated into the global economy with the same brutal, indifferent efficiency that pulled Europe together first, then North America, and now Asia. I want the entire package to come to Africa, in all its glory and pain and liberation and dislocation and pollution and innovation.
I don't want to make Sudan simply survivable. I want to make it accessible and therefore exploitable.
And whether we like it or not, China's doing more than we are to make that happen. It ain't pretty, it ain't often just, but it connects.
I want to connect American grand strategy to that sort of unstoppable force--that greed for a better life.
You might call it the "pursuit of happiness."
But the story does show why it makes so much sense for CJTF-HOA to focus on well digging in East Africa. Having traversed the area, it's clearly the long pole in the tent. Serious hydrological work, I might imagine, is a rare thing in those parts. Why? You need outside technology abetted with outside money fueled by outside greed to connect that region to the outside. We're now toying with that in our military penetration of the region (toying in the sense of pursuing in a limited fashion). China and Asia in particular offer more base ambitions, suggesting longer legs (remember, one Blackhawk down last time and we pullled).
I want to put those two together.
Thanks to Matthew Garcia for sending this.
Sunday, July 22, 2007 at 2:31AM 
