Tom Streithorst
Rio's Dona Marta favela has benefitted from a greater police presence
House prices in the Dona Marta favela overlooking Botafogo beach in Rio de Janiero have quadrupled in the past year. Part of the reason is Brazil’s booming economy, probably more is President Lula’s policy of Bolsa Familia (providing a cash safety net of cash to the poorest Brazilians) but mostly it is because Dona Marta was the first in a pilot programme to take back the favelas from the drug dealers.
For years, drug lords have ruled Rio’s hillside favelas. Large swaths of the city were free from government control. The police might stage a raid from time to time, but after a bit of bang bang, they would retreat back to their secure police stations, leaving the favelas to the gangs. It seemed the natural order of things, inevitable unchangeable. Perhaps the police could control the asphalt below, but the gangs would always rule the hillsides.
That seems to be changing. A year ago, the State Police of Rio de Janiero had a new idea. Instead of showy and ineffective raids, now they grab some land in the middle of a favela, use it to establish a police station and staff it with rookie police officers just out of the academy—officers new to the force and thus not implicated in its culture of corruption. Today, the police regularly patrol these favelas, both day and night. Consequently, crime has gone down and house prices have gone up.
If this strategy sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much what General Petraeus did in Iraq in 2007. For the first few years after the invasion, the US army would stage raids, use its massive firepower to kill or capture “bad guys”, and then go home to sleep on their large and secure bases. Petraeus’s insight was that control of an area required “boots on the ground”, that a raid followed by withdrawal did nothing but confirm the insurgents’ day-to-day domination of the neighbourhood.
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Tom Streithorst
Iraqis will re-elect Nouri Maliki not because they like him, but because they crave strong government.
I’m a cameraman, so facts have never been my strong suit. Vibe and mood are. And despite Sunday’s brutal bombing, the mood in Baghdad is worlds away from the dark days of 2006-2007, when ordinary Iraqis feared driving home, feared the militia checkpoints where so many had been taken out of their cars, tortured and killed.
Baghdad is much more tranquil now. If you are stopped on the streets, it is by the police—and the police is no longer just another Shia death squad. The Americans like to think that “the surge” is responsible for the decrease in violence. I disagree. Baghdad in 2006 was as close to Hobbes’s state of nature as any place I ever hope to visit. Civil war understates the hell that Iraq had become. Civil war suggests two sides, maybe three. Back then, every neighborhood, nearly every block had its own militia. Iraq, for 35 years ruled by the Ba’athist Leviathan, had descended very quickly into Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
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Anthony King
Helicopters aren't enough
As July draws to a close, the deaths of nine British soldiers killed in Helmand this month have brought the question of the Afghanistan campaign into the centre of public debate. The deaths have precipitated extensive coverage in the media. Politicians and, perhaps, the public finally seem to be recognising the level of commitment Helmand demands. That realisation is to be welcomed. However, almost exclusively, the discussions about the campaign have focused on equipment, more specifically, on transport.
Continuing a long-standing theme from Iraq, the focus has been on the inadequate protection of land vehicles, especially the Snatch Land Rover, and the related lack of helicopters. The lack of aviation has always been a concern in Helmand, and the increased improvised explosive devices (IED) threat has added force to the argument that British troops need to reduce their vulnerability on the ground. And, at the same time, commanders have called for more troops.
It is undoubtedly true that more British troops are required. It also seems unarguable that the lack of helicopters, especially for re-supplying troops in the various Forward Operating Bases (see this map), is a serious problem. However, rectifying these shortages will not remedy a campaign that some already see as failing.
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