In Bangladesh, A Mutiny Driven By Twin Crises

By Cernig

 I wonder how many Westerners noticed the armed mutiny among the 42,000 members of the Bangladesh Border Guards this last week? The government had to use the regular army, and the threat of tanks, to put it down.

At least 11 people were killed in the insurrection after the guards opened fire on their senior officers and seized their headquarters to protest poor pay and conditions.

The guards had agreed overnight to surrender after the government promised them an amnesty and agreed to look into their demands.

But as the process stalled and the revolt looked to be spreading to other areas Thursday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina stepped in to warn the rebels she would "do whatever is needed to end the violence."

Hours later, tanks and armored vehicles with heavy machine guns rolled into the capital, taking up positions in residential neighborhoods around the border guards' compound. An Associated Press reporter saw several tanks stationed in a playground.

Apparently intimidated by the move, the guards hoisted a white flag on Thursday afternoon and resumed laying down arms.

As that report notes, the mutiny was over lack of pay. Bangladesh has been hit hard by the economic crisis and has also been badly impacted by global climate change. Every single person made homeless by encroaching waters also loses their livelihood - further intensifying Bangladesh's economic woes.

"The climate change predictions for Bangladesh are particularly grim and people are already feeling it," says World Vision chief economist Dr Brett Parris.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts rising sea levels will devour 17% of Bangladesh by 2050, displacing at least 20 million people. Already an average of 11 Bangladeshis are losing their homes to rising waters every hour, according to an estimate by the Dhaka-based Coastal Watch.

But some experts believe the toll will be considerably higher. In a report released by Greenpeace in March, Dr Chella Rajan, professor of humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, warned that South Asia must brace for a huge wave of migration resulting from sea-level rise, floods, cyclones and drought associated with shrinking water supplies and monsoon variability. He estimated that 75 million Bangladeshis and 50 million Indians could be displaced by the end of this century if the worst sea-level rise scenarios are realised.

Had the mutiny taken hold then it would have been a long step towards yet another basket-case sub-continent nation exporting extremism and creating border tensions with its nuke-armed neighbours. Bangladesh already has its own well-funded Islamist extremist groups who have carried out attacks in neighbouring India and in the recent past the Bangladesh Border Guards have exchanged fire with their Indian counterparts in "misunderstandings" which have escalated to include crew-served machine guns and mortars.

This is exactly the kind of stuff the think-tankers and experts have been warning about - and what I've been saying since 2006 was Bush's greatest national security failure. By denying climate change and the developing economic crisis for so long, his administration left the US waaayyy behind the curve on the conflicts which will develop.

Which is not to say that the Obama administration has it all right, either. Instead, driven by the shadow-Pentagon at the Centre for New American Security (CNAS) - which is the nexus of the coterie of neoliberal interventionists in charge of Obama's foreign policy just as the AIE is the mothership for the neoconservatives who pushed Bush foreign policy - the current gung-ho meme is to transform the US military into an all-singing, all-dancing counterinsurgency and nation building force to deal with these new crises on the international stage.

The CNAS hawks forget that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and that nations such as Bangladesh which haven't tipped over into requiring military intervention yet could greatly benefit from a non-uniformed US corps of "wingtips on the ground" nation-builders where they wouldn't let a military force over the border willingly. They're intent on institutionalizing wide-spectrum counter-insurgency in the military, heedless that this means there will be no money or people left for non-military options. That, yo my view, is a massive mistake. When all you have is a military option, even a "kinder, gentler" COIN one, you'll reach for the only hammer you have for every nail. That way lies imperialism and colonialism at kinder, gentler gunpoint - the "white man's burden" for a new American century.