The World Today

From emergency food aid to maize exporter in just eighteen months, is Malawi marking out a new African miracle? Government seed and fertiliser subsidies have certainly been highly controversial and the jury is still out on whether the success is sustainable.

The Kurdish people are an awkward presence in the complicated and tense geopolitics of the Middle East. Whether in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, or Syria, they are in the midst of highly unstable situations. There is turmoil in Iraq; the possibility of a military attack on Iran; uncertainty over Turkey’s political direction; and the continuing problem of the treatment of Kurds in Syria.

Russia says this is the month it will pull out of a 1990 treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe. The decision comes after heated disputes over the future of Kosovo and Washington’s plan for missile defences in Europe. The west is missing a trick: new arms agreements are needed, not new missiles.

No world leader faced a starker choice when United States President George Bush declared they were either ‘with us or against us’ in the wake of the 2001 attacks on America, than General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Now, with his declaration of emergency rule, his score card is being remarked.

With the American firm Blackwater in the dock, suspicions abound over the whole area of private security in modern conflict. In particular, there is concern about unsatisfactory contracting out of coalition operations in Iraq. But the September dramas on the Baghdad streets involving private security companies produced unreasonable reaction as well as sensible concern.