Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Same old military thinking What were they up to at the army's recent Vision 2020 seminar? If they solely imbibed the one-dimensional rationality of Greg Mills and Gwyn Prins (Changed landscape means new battles for the SANDF, March 14) then South Africans are in for a repetition of our militaristic past.

The 1996 Defence Review process was damaged. It didn't weaken SA's approach to security, as Mills and Prins suggest. Quite the opposite: it made a strong case for the arms deal a decision that will hobble the country's economic development for decades. It is simply not true, as Mills and Gwyn would have us believe, that traditional state-centred thinking about security has reasserted itself worldwide. Actually, the most innovative, interesting and imaginative ideas in security are in the direction of human security, which seeks to extend definitions of security while bringing it closer to the lives of individuals. The entire argument turns on a rerun of the idea of liberal internationalism: invade other places Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan to bring about democracy and secure the interests of capital. This has failed in Afghanistan and will fail in Iran if the Bush administration chooses this option. The Mills-Prins piece is replete with the logic and language of the very interests especially Britain and the US that have made the world unsafe for democracy. Consider just two of these: liberal visa policy and foreign Islamic terrorists. The opposite of the first the policy which Mills and Prins would favour together with the unthinking application of the second, has twice kept my friend Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg out of the US.

But it is in the drift towards conclusion where the real terror lies. Again, two examples make the point. Consider the proposition that an army of 35-year-old privates needs replacing. Thinking like this always goes before that instinctive nationalist turn towards conscription a condition where the burden is always borne by the poor irrespective of the seductive logic of social development and nation-building Then there is the call for increasing ties between the private sector and the military. Here, alas, stalk the bleak lessons of Iraq where Haliburton, whose links to political power are the stuff of legend, drives what many now openly call Military Keynesian unbridled military expenditure which drives inflation and erodes long-term economic confidence. Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics, Rhodes University Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia