The Scourge of Terrorism

We live with the scourge of terrorism, and, it seems, we must live with it for some time yet. Whether or not this could now be otherwise, had a different approach been taken by the West (lead by the US and the UK, in particular) in the years following 9/11 we will never really be able to tell. But, for the present, we must live with it.

            Unfortunately, we have now got to the stage where attacks by lone “terrorists” seem to be on the rise. It seems, too, that a number of cases are those in which a psychologically disturbed, or socially isolated. It almost seems to be the case that such attacks are becoming a “fad”, and an incident in one location encourages others elsewhere. Lone terrorist attacks are particularly difficult to detect and to guard against.

            It is possible that the online activity of groups like ISIS is fuelling some of this. But I suspect that some individuals who have carried out attacks simply plan these on their own initiative and then claim allegiance to ISIS. ISIS, too, will want to claim that such attacks are carried out on their direction in order to continue to boost their profile, and further the sense of their threat to world. Nowhere is beyond their reach.

            The authorities, in responding to these atrocities, are becoming more cautious (it seems to me) of immediately identifying such attacks with the influence of, or connection to, ISIS. This, I think, is wise: and I think that the general populous must be ready to examine the causes of such attacks in similarly cautious and careful way. It is easy to see things in shades of black and white, rather than gray. To do so – and especially to attack or blame Islam and Muslims as a whole – is not only to misrepresent the situation, but to play into the hands of ISIS, and to support their ideological warfare.

            For to blame Islam as a whole, is to permit ISIS to paint the situation as a war between Islam and the rest. It is also to help fuel the sense of grievance amongst disgruntled young Muslims. It is to help to raise the stakes of fear and mistrust.

            Not all recent terrorist activity, of course, has its roots in Islamist terrorism, of course. Some of the attacks (by ex-miliary men in the US, for instance) have been fuelled by other issues, such as police brutality against and shootings of African Americans. That is another matter for another time. Then there is the terrible attack against disabled residents of a home in Japan.

            The causes of terrorism may be multiple. The effects are the same: misery, heartbreak, broken bodies, fear. But, I do believe that ultimately the seeds of its destruction lie within the mentality and practice of terrorism itself. It has a relatively short shelf-life: people cannot abide destruction and death for long. Time and effort to address the root causes: and especially attention to the conditions that breed resentment and despair that drives many young to take up extremism are important ingredients to combating terrorism. And a refusal to be terrorised.

         I don't mean to downplay the fear and the distress experienced by those who have lived through terrorist attacks, or live in places (such as Paris) where such attacks happen, and seem all too real a threat. It is natural to be afraid and anxious. I mean to say that we cannot, and should not, allow terrorists to frighten us into abandoning our values, or our essential sense of what is right and wrong, or our humanity towards those different from us. I think those who live through terrorist attacks understand that. But sometimes, it seems, we can allow the fear to drive our responses and our thinking. When that happens, the terrorists win.

MMP - Two Ticks! Too Easy?

The results of the referendum on our voting system are now in, and we have decided to retain MMP. Now we turn our attention to how this system might be adapted to better serve the interests of the electorate and the principle of proportionality.

As an ordinary voter who is in favour of MMP, I want nevertheless to write about an aspect of the political discourse around MMP to which I object. I also want to make a suggestion about a feature that I think we might change.

Political commentators often talk about “wasted votes”. These votes are, of course, those cast for minor parties that fail to cross the 5% threshold, and fail to win an electorate seat. They are discounted when determining the allocation of parliamentary seats.

In a democracy the only votes that are truly “wasted” are those that are never cast in the first place. Of votes cast, “wasted votes” are those that are classed as “informal votes”. Most voters vote with the intention of achieving some effect, though the system renders some of these intentions ineffectual.

Let me illustrate from my own voting habits. In the 2008 election, my party vote went to the Progressive Party. I voted this way because I wanted to see Jim Anderton’s colleague, Matt Robson, whom I regarded as an effective politician, returned to Parliament. I knew that Anderton was almost certain to retain his electorate seat (which, of course, he did). This meant that the Progressives did not need to receive 5% of the party vote to get another candidate in (something around 1.5%, I think, would have done it). As it happened, not enough of my fellow voters also cast their votes for the Progressives. My “strategic vote” was ineffective, and hence “wasted”.

In my opinion, to call these votes “wasted” is not only insulting, but it is inherently anti-democratic if it operates to dissuade voters from following their inclinations. Moreover, these votes are, in effect, not so much “wasted” as disregarded. And in a sense, they are also “diverted” or “transferred” to other successful parties.

This is because when MMP was devised, Parliament decided that it is the proportion of party votes a party receives that decides the number of seats allocated to that party. But when a proportion of the party votes are removed from the equation, the allocation of seats is adjusted to allow for that. Hence, party votes do not translate into seats on a “strictly” proportional basis.
Rather a mathematical formula called the Sainte-Laguë allocation formula is used. I don’t fully understand this: could we have one of our political commentators, or political science experts explain it in plain English, please? But the effect of it appears to advantage the parties that are left in the pool, as it were: particularly the parties that poll the higher percentages of party votes.

To illustrate: in this election, National got just on 48% of the party vote, which on strictly proportional terms would give it 58 seats in a 120 seat Parliament. Instead, if it retains Waitakere (at the moment this seems likely), it gets 60 seats, which is 50% of the seats. In 2008, with 45.5% of the votes, National received 58 seats (55 seats would have more closely represented their “percentage share”).

MMP as it currently operates also allows for parties that gain one electorate seat to have their share of the party vote counted: so that, for instance, in 2008 the Act Party by winning Epsom and getting 3.65% of the party vote, was allocated five seats. NZ First, of course, polled 4.07% of the party vote, but did not win an electorate seat, so that their share of the party votes was discounted.

In my opinion, the Electoral Commission’s website is misleading when it states that “a party vote cast for a party that does not cross the threshold has no impact on the number of seats other parties receive”; or that these party votes “are not in any way reallocated to other parties”. The effect of the formula is that they are. To “sell” MMP as a system whereby the percentage of seats a party receives is “roughly equivalent” to the percentage of its party vote, is “false advertising” to say the least.

I believe that the number of seats a party receives under MMP should more straightforwardly reflect the percentage of party votes it gets. This will be achieved, I think, by lowering the 5% threshold so that allocation of seats more closely reflects the party vote percentages. On current polling figures, this should also do away with the need for “overhang” seats.

At any rate, the system should also be adjusted so that the number of seats in Parliament is capped at 120. Any party that gains only an electorate seat should be allocated only that seat, unless it is also able to cross the (lowered) threshold. This would move the MMP system closer to a Supplementary Member style Parliament, but would retain sufficient “list seats” to retain the proportionality of MMP.

Finally, as MMP comes under review, could we please have some good education about the system, and a decent debate, in the pages of the Herald? What are the merits and demerits of the opinions expressed above? Some, like me, will favour lowering the 5% threshold, others will want to see it raised. What are the pros and cons of lowering it? What are the pros and cons of raising it? And by how much should it go up or down? There are other elements of the system that need review. What are they, and what changes will deliver the best outcomes?

Sleuthing out the terrorists

Recently, there have been a couple of good news stories as far as dealing with terrorism is concerned. They’ve passed almost unnoticed: but they should be cheered. Three British Muslims were convicted of plotting to commit acts of terror. And in the United States, some Afghani men were taken into custody, suspected of planning terrorist attacks. The good news is that, in both cases (assuming of course, in the case of the Afghani suspects, the evidence against them is solid) the convictions and arrests were the result of several months of investigation. Furthermore, these convictions and arrests have been effected before the men were able to carry out any of the planned crimes.

One assumes, and hopes, that these results are due to good, honest, and painstaking detective and surveillance work, with no torture involved. Here the hard graft of careful criminal investigation has made us all that much safer from the ill intentions of terrorists. This should be cheered because this is the way to victory over terrorism: focused attention to the activities of terrorists. We should know more of this, so that we can insist that this is where resources of money and manpower are deployed. There are probably all too few such resources being put in this direction, given the requirements of the wider and ill-conceived “war on terror”. In terms of stopping specific acts of terror, steady and sustained sleuthing will probably return greater rewards.

More good news was to be found in The Guardian Weekly (18/09/09). Here, in a couple of articles, it was reported that Al-Qaida is losing ground and finding it difficult to find new recruits, much less effectively mount attacks. Some of the reasons for this are an increasing disenchantment with the indiscriminate loss of life, and the tactics of terror, amongst the wider population in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Algeria and Indonesia. Fellow Muslims, it seems, are sick of the violence and wanton mayhem. And in Saudi Arabia, a report stated, “60%-70% of information about Al-Qaida suspects now come from relatives, friends and neighbours, not from security agencies or surveillance” (GW, 18/09/09, 2).

The problems for recruitment stem from the fact that Al-Qaida has been unable to carry out any large-scale attacks in the West since the London bombings in 2005. This is coupled with the fact that some young men, from the West, who go for training, are disillusioned by the lack of excitement and action, as well as the requirement to spend hours in study of the Quran. Some of the success in limiting Al-Qaida’s operations, it is true, is due to military action, and in particular the search and destroy missions of military drones against key operatives. A number of leading terrorists have been killed or captured in recent months. Furthermore, the ability of terrorists to communicate with each other has been disrupted, or successfully monitored.

Ironically, it may be the West’s military operations in such theatres as Afghanistan that have stirred Al-Qaida to redouble its efforts, along with a resurgent Taliban movement, that has led to its demise. As stated above, the ordinary citizens are becoming sick of their activities: and, according to The Guardian Weekly, the usefulness of Al-Qaida to the Taliban is waning and ties are fraying. The question is, of course, whether the West’s military action in Afghanistan is, in fact, ensuring that a dangerous group is being replaced by another danger in the renewed strength of the Taliban.

Permissible Torture?

Recently an Australian academic, Mirko Bagaric, mounted a defence of torture as “justifiable in some cases” [NZ Herald, 8/9/09]. One of his arguments was that, as killing is accepted as permissible “to kill in self-defence or defence of another, it must surely be acceptable to ‘inflict lesser forms of harm, including torture, to achieve the same result’. What he called “life-saving torture” was permissible to save innocent lives.
He began the piece by welcoming the investigation into the torture tactics used by the CIA to take place in the USA, and to which former Vice-President Dick Cheney has been objecting, as something that ‘may assist in demarcating the permissible limits of torture’. But if torture is to be used to save innocent lives, how can one define permissible limits against the utilitarian motive of saving lives? At what point can the limit be drawn, for it the “permissible limit” does not achieve the desired effect, does one abandon the use of torture or move beyond the permissible limit?
Bagaric’s article was answered by an Auckland academic, John Ip, who put up a counter-argument in an attempt to demonstrate that the proposal had “no logical stopping point” [NZ Herald 17/9/09, A13]. If by reason of nerve damage and intense training, the terrorist from whom the information was required was impervious to physical pain, but the authorities had his beloved three-year old son, whom they could torture in front of the terrorist, should they indeed do so? On Bagaric’s ‘utilitarian logic the answer is “yes”, assuming that the benefits (lives saved) outweigh the cost (pain inflicted on child plus mental pain inflicted on terrorist)’.
What both worthy academics missed in their utilitarian-based, legally-acute arguments, was an equally important and fundamental question, and that was the question of the effect of torture on the torturer. And the effect of a culture of torture on the society that accepts torture, even a carefully modulated and well-defined limited use of torture (if such a thing is possible). For the use of torture surely degrades the humanity of the torturer every bit as much as that of the tortured. If there are personalities who derive satisfaction from inflicting pain on others, ought a society to be encouraging such proclivities, be they ever so finely regulated? And can ordinary, “decent” human beings be expected to learn to engage in permissible and limited torture?
No doubt it is possible for a society to rationalise the use of torture in certain circumstances. Recent events, the attitudes of some members of the previous US Administration, and perhaps some functionaries and officials even now, not to mention Bagaric’s article (and for that matter Ip’s inadequate riposte) worryingly suggest it is all too possible: and in an era of moral panic, very likely. But the society that takes that road is surely regressing: its civilization, its civility, its compassion is surely being degraded. Societies’ and institutions in the past that have resorted to torture have not been free, and open, and democratic: they have been fearful, and repressive, and totalitarian in nature. A society that resorts to torture does not generally do so to save lives: it does it to maintain the status quo and, generally, to preserve the place of an elite that does not care for “innocent lives” if it means losing power.