30 November 2021

Covid-19: Digital Peasants and the Ignorant Rich

By Gwynne Dyer

The new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus was discovered last week by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, the only countries in southern Africa that have the skills and resources to detect a new variant.

So what did  the rich countries of the world do? Like the drunk looking for his lost car keys under a street-light – “Where did you drop them?” “Over there.” “Then why are you looking for them here?” “The light’s better here.” – they banned travel from southern African countries.

On 23 November, scientists in Botswana uploaded 99 Sars-CoV-2 genome sequences to the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, which has operated as a clearing house for more than a million such sequences from dozens of countries since March 2020. They noted that three of the genomes seemed different from the usual Delta variant.

On the same day a separate team in South Africa uploaded the genomes of seven Covid samples with the same suspicious mutations in the spike protein that the virus uses to infect human cells. Within hours scientists everywhere could study those genomes on the web, and in 72 hours the World Health Organisation declared that we have a fifth ‘variant of concern’ on our hands.

Whereupon the rich countries of the global north instantly slammed their gates shut against travelers from South Africa and nine other countries in the same region. It’s not even clear that this is where the variant first emerged, but never mind all that.

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira, the Durban-based scientist leading the effort to understand the new variant, pointed out that South Africa has been “very transparent with scientific information… The world should provide support to South Africa and Africa and not discriminate or isolate it.” Fat chance.

By Sunday South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa was warning that the travel ban “is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant. The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to and recover from the pandemic.”

Where to start? Perhaps with the fact that there is no country called ‘Africa’. For example, there is actually no shortage of vaccines in South Africa, a semi-developed country where the main problem is vaccine reluctance. Internet access is high and mistrust of authority is even higher, so only 27% of South Africans are fully vaccinated.

This is what you might call the ‘digital peasant’ problem, and it is shared by some fully developed countries like Russia (only 43% of the population double-vaccinated) and Germany (68%), as well as by Trump supporters in the United States (ca. 50%).

Cynics might say that this is a self-solving problem. As Germany’s outgoing health minister Jens Spahn put it, “probably by the end of this winter, pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, recovered or dead.” But this is not just a local problem.

The risk of new variants emerging still exists even in rich countries where the Covid virus continues to circulate widely. In most African countries, and in the poorest Asian countries as well, the risk is very high and will remain so, because they just can’t get enough vaccines. A year after the first vaccines became available, only 6% of Africans are fully vaccinated.

Twelve billion vaccine doses will have been produced in the world by the end of this month (December), which is more than enough for every human being over 18 years old. But the rationing is mainly done by price, so school-children are being vaccinated and adults are getting a third jab in the wealthy countries, while several billion adults have not yet had their first jab in the global south.

In effect, the rich are maintaining a long-term reservoir of potentially devastating new variants in the poorer countries in order to make themselves a little bit more secure in the short term. Everybody knows that being rich tends to make people greedy and careless about the welfare of others; it’s less well known that it also makes them stupid.

And in the meantime, they are also punishing the economies of the poor by imposing knee-jerk travel bans on an entire region of Africa on suspicion of harbouring the Omicron virus – even though we all know that it has already been confirmed in Europe and Asia, and is doubtless present (although not yet detected) in the Americas too.

The right move, even at this late date, is to focus all the world’s energies on getting vaccines into the poorest countries: ‘nobody is safe until everybody is safe’. Omicron looks like it may be a big problem, and there could be even bigger ones behind it.

20 November 2021

Killer Drones 

By Gwynne Dyer

Commercially available quadcopter drones carrying small amounts of explosives are “the most concerning tactical development since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq,” US Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., senior US commander for the Middle East, said last February. But now drones are political weapons as well, and it will get worse.

Two weeks ago three quadcopters flew into the heavily fortified ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad to attack the home of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who won last month’s national election and is working to form a new coalition government (usually a months-long haggle in Iraq).

Two of the drones were shot down, but the third dropped explosives that blew in Kadhimi’s front door, injured at least five guards, and wounded the prime minister’s wrist. If he had died, he would have been the first senior politician killed by a drone, but that honour will have to go to someone else. We probably won’t have to wait too long.

Small quadcopter drones were first used by ‘Islamic State’ during the siege of Mosul in 2017, and the main venue is still Iraq. A drone loaded with a 2-kilo munition was found on a rooftop in central Baghdad in March, another was found nearby after it crashed in July, and US forces shot down a quadcopter carrying explosives over the US embassy later that month.

Long-range, million-dollar drones have been killing people remotely for  a more than a decade, but those are big aircraft making big explosions and they usually avoid densely populated urban areas. They won the war for Azerbaijan against Armenia last year, which was their first decisive use in a ‘conventional’ war. But now we are seeing something quite different.

“I’m not just talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with by normal air defense means,” explained General Mackenzie. “I’m talking about ones you can go out and buy at Costco right now for $1,000.”

If you have some people who are good at making improvised explosive devices ( a fairly widespread skill these days), then buy yourself a clutch of drones big enough to carry two or three kilos each and you can go into business right away.

Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to make ‘IEDs’ for yourself by trial and error – and do bear mind that errors are generally lethal. But the golden age of political assassinations, dormant for a century, is probably on its way back in. 

You can shoot down quadcopters, of course, but they are small, fast-moving targets. They can be launched in large numbers, and they can avoid detection until the last moment by staying low amid the urban clutter. If they are actively guided you can jam the signal, but if they are following a pre-programmed flight path using GPS there’s no signal to jam.

They’re also untraceable. Even if you find the bits after the thing exploded, there will be no markings on the pieces that let you trace it back to the person who bought it.

What caused the recent unpleasantness in Iraq was that Khadhimi’s party won the right to form the new government in the October election, while the pro-Iranian militias lost two-thirds of their seats in parliament. It was a surprisingly fair election, but the militias automatically claimed foul. (They even borrowed Trump’s slogan: “Stop the Steal”.)

On 5 November stone-throwing militia supporters marched on the Green Zone to protest. The police opened fire, dozens of people were injured, and at least one demonstrator, maybe two, died. The drone attack on Kadhimi’s house, ‘safe’ inside the Green Zone, came just two days later.

It doesn’t take much by the way of offense to motivate people into doing something that’s so cheap and safe (for the attacker). Even if the attack fails, the authorities probably won’t be able to find the perpetrator. Just wait a month or so, and try again from a different direction with different speeds and altitudes.

It’s inevitable that this technique will spread rapidly far beyond Iraq, and that politicians and other prominent public figures will be vulnerable to it in every country, even the well-run ones. They will need more security than before, perhaps much more, and even that will not guarantee their safety.

And there may be one more step in this dance. It’s not normally a good idea for a killer drone to be in direct radio contact with the person who launches it, but if that person has access to face-recognition software it might be possible to make remote attacks outdoors on individual people with relatively little ‘collateral damage’. Is nothing safe?

Of course not. It never was, really. Kings needed food-tasters to avoid being poisoned; presidents and prime ministers just need different kinds of protection.