New Pandemics, Old Politics by Alex de Waal

Author:Alex de Waal [Waal, Alex de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

AIDS in the Margins of Error

Another catastrophe didn’t happen. AIDS was expected to stoke global insecurity and, in the African countries where it was becoming hyper-endemic, to tear down the pillars of society. This is Whiteside’s third wave: ‘impact’, which can’t be represented with the same kind of quantitative precision, but which rears up behind the curve of AIDS deaths. What was going to happen to society when the wave of illness and death crashed ashore? What was AIDS’s pandemy?

The scale of Africa’s AIDS pandemic became clear at the same time as the US national security establishment was in turmoil. It had won its biggest ever victory quite unexpectedly, and that posed a problem. Its Cold War enemy had disappeared and politicians were asking whether the entire military-industrial and security-intelligence apparatuses served any purpose other than a costly employment generation scheme. America’s triumph ranked among the worst failures in the annals of intelligence history: busy counting missiles, it hadn’t foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just one small group of analysts stood out: health statisticians. In the 1970s, Christopher Davis (Britain’s leading academic on Soviet public health) and Murray Feshbach (the US Census Bureau’s expert on Soviet demography) looked at the figures for infant mortality in the USSR and saw that they were rising. After some debate over whether the figures were in fact accurate (they were), the two published a short, dispassionate, and devastating summary.75 Nick Eberstadt, then a young academic embarking on a career in political science, reviewed the findings and argued that something was going wrong not just with the Soviet health care system, but with the economy as a whole.76 The fact that every indicator for the health of the ordinary people of the USSR was pointing downwards showed, he said, that the Soviet system wasn’t sustainable. Communism’s social contract was unravelling. At this point, Eberstadt’s prognosis went off course: he suggested that an adventurist Soviet leadership might provoke an international crisis to make up for its domestic economic failures and didn’t consider the possibility that Communist rule would crumble from within.77 All the same, the experts who dealt with health metrics emerged from the shambles of security forecasting in Washington, DC, in 1989–91 with their reputation enhanced.

Demographers’ standing got another boost when the post-Cold War era began to look like a slide into anarchy. Nineteen ninety-four was the nadir year: protracted war in former Yugoslavia, imbroglio for the UN in Cambodia, humiliating US withdrawal from Somalia, a rogue dictatorship defying American pressure in Haiti, and genocide in Rwanda. President Bill Clinton read Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’ article and instructed that it be faxed to every US embassy around the world. Vice President Al Gore instructed the CIA to convene a ‘State Failure Task Force’ drawing on leading academics to figure out which countries were most at risk of descent into chaos. It was an exercise in massive political science number crunching, throwing every possible variable or indicator into the analytical pot to see what came out.

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