Bill Gates: My Plan to Fix The World's Biggest Problems

by Bill Gates

Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2013

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar

By custom, many Ethiopian parents won't name a child for weeks, in case the baby dies. Sebsebila Nassir, pictured above with a health worker, named her newborn daughter Amira—'princess' in Arabic—on her immunization card the day she was born.

We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.

Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."

In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.

This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.

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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

An innovation—whether it's a new vaccine or an improved seed—can't have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from it. We need innovations in measurement to find new, effective ways to deliver those tools and services to the clinics, family farms and classrooms that need them.

I've found many examples of how measurement is making a difference over the past year—from a school in Colorado to a health post in rural Ethiopia. Our foundation is supporting these efforts. But we and others need to do more. As budgets tighten for governments and foundations world-wide, we all need to take the lesson of the steam engine to heart and adapt it to solving the world's biggest problems.

One of the greatest successes in terms of using measurement to drive global change has been an agreement signed in 2000 by the United Nations. The Millennium Development Goals, supported by 189 nations, set 2015 as a deadline for making specific percentage improvements across a set of crucial areas—such as health, education and basic income. Many people assumed the pact would be filed away and forgotten like so many U.N. and government pronouncements. The decades before had brought many well-meaning declarations to combat problems from nutrition to human rights, but most lacked a road map for measuring progress. However, the Millennium goals were backed by a broad consensus, were clear and concrete, and brought focus to the highest priorities.

When Ethiopia signed on to the Millennium goals in 2000, the country put hard numbers to its ambition to bring primary health care to all of its citizens. The concrete goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds created a clear target by which to measure success or failure. Ethiopia's commitment attracted a surge of donor money toward improving the country's primary health-care services.

With help from the Indian state of Kerala, which had built a successful network of community health-care posts, Ethiopia launched its own program in 2004 and today has more than 15,000 health posts staffed by 34,000 workers. (This is one of the greatest benefits of measurement—the ability it gives government leaders to make comparisons across countries and then learn from the best.)

Last March, I visited the Germana Gale Health Post in the Dalocha region of Ethiopia, where I saw charts of immunizations, malaria cases and other data plastered to its walls. This information goes into a system—part paper-based and part computerized—that helps government officials see where things are working and to take action in places where they aren't. In recent years, data from the field have helped the government respond more quickly to outbreaks of malaria and measles. Perhaps even more important, the government previously didn't have any official record of a child's birth or death in rural Ethiopia. It now tracks those metrics closely.

The health workers provide most services at the posts, though they also visit the homes of pregnant women and sick people. They ensure that each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices. All these interventions are quite simple, yet they've dramatically improved the lives of people in this country.

Consider the story of one young mother in Dalocha. Sebsebila Nassir was born in 1990, when about 20% of all children in Ethiopia did not survive to see their fifth birthdays. Two of Sebsebila's six siblings died as infants. But when a health post opened its doors in Dalocha, life started to change. Last year when Sebsebila became pregnant, she received regular checkups. On Nov. 28, Sebsebila traveled to a health center where a midwife was at her bedside during her seven-hour labor. Shortly after her daughter was born, a health worker gave the baby vaccines against polio and tuberculosis.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life. When Sebsebila's first daughter was born three years ago, she followed tradition and waited a month to bestow a name. This time, with more confidence in her new baby's chances of survival, Sebsebila put "Amira"—"princess" in Arabic—in the blank at the top of her daughter's immunization card on the day she was born. Sebsebila isn't alone: Many parents in Ethiopia now have the confidence to do the same.

Ethiopia has lowered child mortality more than 60% since 1990, putting the country on track to achieve the Millennium goal of lowering child mortality two-thirds by 2015, compared with 1990. Though the world won't quite meet the goal, we've still made great progress: The number of children under 5 years old who die world-wide fell to 6.9 million in 2011, down from 12 million in 1990 (despite a growing global population).

Another story of success driven by better measurement is polio. Starting in 1988, global health organizations (along with many countries) established a goal of eradicating polio, which focused political will and opened purse strings to pay for large-scale immunization campaigns. By 2000, the virus had nearly been wiped out; there are now fewer than 1,000 cases world-wide.

But getting rid of the very last cases is the hardest part. In order to stop the spread of infections, health workers have to vaccinate nearly all children under the age of 5 multiple times a year in polio-affected countries. There are now just three countries that have not eliminated polio: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I visited northern Nigeria four years ago to try to understand why eradication is so difficult there. I saw that routine public health services were failing: Fewer than half the kids were getting vaccines regularly. One huge problem was that many small settlements in the region were missing from vaccinators' hand-drawn maps and lists documenting the locations of villages and numbers of children.

To fix this, the polio workers walked through all high-risk areas in the northern part of the country, which enabled them to add 3,000 previously overlooked communities to the immunization campaigns. The program is also using high-resolution satellite images to create even more detailed maps. As a result, managers can now allocate vaccinators efficiently.

What's more, the program is piloting the use of phones equipped with a GPS application for the vaccinators. Tracks are downloaded from the phone at the end of the day so managers can see the route the vaccinators followed and compare it to the route they were assigned. This helps ensure that areas that were missed can be revisited.

I believe these kinds of measurement systems will help us to finish the job of polio eradication within the next six years. And those systems can be used to help expand routine vaccination and other health activities, which means the legacy of polio eradication will live beyond the disease itself.

Another place where measurement is starting to lead to vast improvements is in education.

In October, Melinda and I sat among two dozen 12th-graders at Eagle Valley High School near Vail, Colo. Mary Ann Stavney, a language-arts teacher, was leading a lesson on how to write narrative nonfiction pieces. She engaged her students, walking among them and eliciting great participation. We could see why Mary Ann is a master teacher, a distinction given to the school's best teachers and an important component of a teacher-evaluation system in Eagle County.

Ms. Stavney's work as a master teacher is informed by a three-year project our foundation funded to better understand how to build an evaluation and feedback system for educators. Drawing input from 3,000 classroom teachers, the project highlighted several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance, including test data, student surveys and assessments by trained evaluators. Over the course of a school year, each of Eagle County's 470 teachers is evaluated three times and is observed in class at least nine times by master teachers, their principal and peers called mentor teachers.

The Eagle County evaluations are used to give a teacher not only a score but also specific feedback on areas to improve and ways to build on their strengths. In addition to one-on-one coaching, mentors and masters lead weekly group meetings in which teachers collaborate to spread their skills. Teachers are eligible for annual salary increases and bonuses based on the classroom observations and student achievement.

The program faces challenges from tightening budgets, but Eagle County so far has been able to keep its evaluation and support system intact—likely one reason why student test scores have improved in Eagle County over the past five years.

I think the most critical change we can make in U.S. K–12 education, with America lagging countries in Asia and Northern Europe when it comes to turning out top students, is to create teacher-feedback systems that are properly funded, high quality and trusted by teachers.

And there are plenty of other areas where our ability to measure can improve people's lives in powerful ways—areas where we are falling short, unnecessarily.

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work? How can measurement enable them to perform their jobs better?

In the U.S., we should be measuring the value being added by colleges. Currently, college rankings are focused on inputs—the scores and quality of students entering college—and on judgments and prejudices about a school's "reputation." Students would be better served by measures of which colleges were best preparing their graduates for the job market. They then could know where they would get the most for their tuition money.

In agriculture, creating a global productivity target would help countries focus on a key but neglected area: the efficiency and output of hundreds of millions of small farmers who live in poverty. It would go a long way toward reducing poverty if we had public scorecards showing how developing-country governments, donors and others are helping those farmers.

And if I could wave a wand, I'd love to have a way to measure how exposure to risks like disease, infection, malnutrition and problem pregnancies impact children's potential—their ability to learn and contribute to society. Measuring that could help us quantify the broader impact of those risks and help us tackle them.

The lives of the poorest have improved more rapidly in the past 15 years than ever before. And I am optimistic that we will do even better in the next 15 years. The process I have described—setting clear goals, choosing an approach, measuring results, and then using those measurements to continually refine our approach—helps us to deliver tools and services to everybody who will benefit, be they students in the U.S. or mothers in Africa. Following the path of the steam engine long ago, thanks to measurement, progress isn't "doomed to be rare and erratic." We can, in fact, make it commonplace.

No US peace dividend after Afghanistan

By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes

Financial Times, 23 January 2013

Nearly 12 years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began, a war-weary America is getting ready to leave. But there will be little in the way of a peace dividend for the US economy once the fighting stops.

The direct costs of the war are already $700bn. The original mission was to root out al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But in 2003, the US shifted nearly all of its attention and resources to Iraq. The Taliban regrouped and strengthened in Afghanistan, making the conflict far more expensive. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda shifted operations into Pakistan, Yemen and Mali, where France this month sent troops.

US forces have struggled in Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain, where getting supplies and munitions has been a complex logistical exercise. Then came the ill-fated “surge” strategy, which put 30,000 more US troops on the ground with little if any military gain. There were 3,000 attacks on US and allied forces in 2012 – a figure little changed from 2009, when President Barack Obama’s administration decided on the change in strategy.

The surge itself was expensive. But the way we conducted the war unnecessarily increased its costs. For instance, the closure of the land route through Pakistan for eight months in reprisal for a US drone attack in November 2011 that inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers added billions to the transport bill. Another $90bn has been devoted to “reconstruction” aid in Afghanistan – the largest amount spent by the US since the Marshall plan, with little to show for it. Endemic corruption among local contractors and officials has drained money from the budget.

Much of this red ink will dry up once Nato troops withdraw. But the true cost of the war is only just beginning. Indeed, the costs after withdrawal may exceed those during the war. Choices made in the past decade mean high costs for years to come – and will constrain other national security spending.

In 2008, when we wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War , our book on the costs of the Iraq war, we predicted that costs of disability and healthcare benefits for recent war veterans would grow enormously. With nearly one in two returning troops suffering some form of disability – ranging from depression to multiple amputation – the reality far exceeds our estimates. The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans receiving government medical care has grown to more than 800,000, and most have applied for permanent disability benefits. Yielding to political pressure, the White House and Congress have boosted veteran’s benefits, invested in additional staff and technology, expanded mental health treatments and made it easier to qualify for disability pay. But the number of claims keeps climbing. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs struggles to cope with its backlog.

The VA’s budget is likely to hit $140bn this year from $50bn in 2001. In previous wars, the bill for benefits came due decades later – the peak year for paying second world war benefits was 1969. Now, with much higher survival rates, more generous benefits, and new, expensive treatments, the eventual costs of caring for veterans of the Afghanistan war will exceed $1tn. To put these numbers into perspective, the debate surrounding the fiscal cliff has centred on expenditure cuts over 10 years of $1tn-$2tn.

There are other costly legacies. To recruit volunteers to fight in highly unpopular wars, the military adopted higher pay scales and enhanced healthcare benefits both for those serving and their families and for those who retired. Even though the Pentagon – watching its personnel costs soar – is asking Congress to roll back some of these benefits, they are politically untouchable. The result is that total personnel costs will soon reach one-third of the total defence budget. Spending on Tricare, the healthcare programme for the US military and their families, is likely to reach $56bn this year. Tricare is growing even faster than Medicare or Medicaid, and will soon consume 10 per cent of the defence budget.

Meanwhile, there is a huge price tag for replacing ordinary equipment that has been consumed during the wars – not least because of our policy of outsourcing maintenance to sometimes dodgy local contractors. There is also the US pledge to help prop up the Afghan police and army for the next decade – expected to run to $5bn-$8bn a year. The legacy of expensive commitments will force the Pentagon to make difficult choices – for example, reducing the size of the army and investing in more unmanned robotic weapons.

The US has already borrowed $2tn to finance the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – a major component of the $9tn debt accrued since 2001, along with those arising from the financial crisis and the tax cuts implemented by President George W. Bush. Today, as the country considers how to improve its balance sheet, it could have been hoped that the ending of the wars would provide a large peace dividend, such as the one resulting from the end of the cold war that helped us to invest more in butter and less in guns. Instead, the legacy of poor decision-making from the expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will live on in a continued drain on our economy – long after the last troop returns to American soil.

The writers are respectively a recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School

Pep Guardiola: football’s most wanted

Financial Times, 18 January 2013

The world’s greatest clubs fought to hire the former Barcelona coach. So what’s his secret?

©AFP/Getty Images

In the spring of 2008 Barcelona Football Club was a big-name global brand that was losing its lustre. The ideas were running out, the competitive edge had faded, morale was low. New leadership was called for.

The board had a range of options, among them a serial winner whose record offered the closest thing to a guarantee of success in a game where, more often than in most other sports, outcomes turn on fortune’s tricks. To the dismay of the majority of Barcelona’s shareholders or, rather, their 180,000 paid-up members, they chose Pep Guardiola, a novice with one year’s experience as a lower-division coach and none in the game’s upper reaches. Guardiola had been a great player and captain of Barcelona, but in terms of the new responsibility on his shoulders and the uncharted waters he was being asked to navigate, it was like Sony selecting the manager of a medium-sized regional office to take over as company CEO.

A year and a half later, Barcelona had won all six trophies they had competed for, including the European and world club championships. In the four years that Guardiola remained at the club, they won 14 out of 19 possible leagues and cups, a feat unequalled in the history of the game. Unequalled also is the fourth consecutive Ballon d’Or, the world’s best player award, granted this month to Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, who Guardiola made even better. Barcelona achieved something else too, something more difficult to win than any official prize: the admiration of the football world. Guardiola’s team revolutionised the 150-year-old sport. Coaches from clubs large and small made pilgrimages to Barcelona’s training camp, notebooks in hand, hoping some of the Guardiola gold dust might rub off on them.

©HelloVon

In May last year Guardiola quit Barcelona and took a sabbatical in New York: exiled, but far from forgotten. Imagine Steve Jobs were alive, announced his departure from Apple and signalled he was open to offers from the competition. Dwell on that and you’ll have a sense of why the biggest clubs and some of the biggest footballing nations have been banging on Guardiola’s door ever since he moved across the Atlantic.

Inquiries came from England, Italy, Germany, Russia, France and China. Silvio Berlusconi, who apart from being a former prime minister of Italy also owns AC Milan, confessed recently that he was among the supplicants. The most eager was Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire who owns Chelsea FC and saw Guardiola as the man to fulfil his dream of building a team that not only wins the biggest trophies but – a goal that has eluded him so far – dazzles the world. Finally it was announced this week that the winner is … Germany’s biggest club, Bayern Munich.

. . .

Guardiola, whose father was a bricklayer, was born in 1971 in the small Catalan town of Santpedor, 73km north of Barcelona. When he was 13 he left home to take up residence at La Masía, the elite boarding school where Barcelona – or Barça, as their fans call them – nurture the finest young talent their global network of scouts can find. His mother shed tears, but the young Pep, already Barça-mad, brightened up upon discovering that from the window of his dormitory he would wake up every morning to see the mighty grey monolith of the Camp Nou, the club’s football stadium, Europe’s biggest. Guardiola excelled in the youth leagues of Catalonia and, aged 19, he made his debut in the Barcelona first team. A natural leader, he rose to become team captain, along the way winning the European Cup, the biggest prize in world club football, in 1992.

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Guardiola, circled, with Johan Cruyff’s 1992 European Cup winning team

Guardiola quit Barcelona in 2001 and moved to Italy, where he played for the Serie A team Brescia for two years before spinning out the autumn of his playing career in Qatar and Mexico. In 2007 he was hired to coach the Barcelona B team, where he performed with such success and aplomb that in 2008 the club board took the gamble of appointing him to run the first team. The gamble paid off beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, including his own, but last year he decided he had had enough. A severely self-critical perfectionist, he needed a break from the demands he imposed on himself and the weight of expectation placed on him by the club faithful, for whom Barça is not merely a football team, but the flagship of Catalan pride. He chose New York for his sabbatical because the city intrigued him but also because the US, a pagan nation in terms of the relative intensity of its football faith, is one of the few places on earth where he is not well known. (Such is his fame that had he moved to London or Buenos Aires or to a village in Madagascar he would not have had a moment’s peace.)

He thrives on New York’s culture, but his chief joy, curtailed during his four years at Barça, is the leisure to spend time with his three school-aged children and Cristina, his elegant wife. (Cristina is the inspiration behind his keen sense of style – typically, Hamlet-black, pencil-sharp suits.) Intense and driven, his continuing zeal for his work derives from a perception that he has a duty not only to satisfy fans’ lust for victory but to raise football to an art form. That is what he achieved at Barcelona and the belief that he can replicate it elsewhere is what has made him into the most sought-after commodity in the world’s biggest sport.

©PacificCoastNews.com

Pep Guardiola and his family moved to the relative anonymity of New York in 2012

. . .

What is Guardiola’s secret? How did a man who began his big leagues coaching career aged 37 achieve so much, so soon? A large part of the answer is that he spent 24 years, from the day he arrived at the club, preparing himself for the job. Johan Cruyff, the Dutchman who as coach of Barcelona laid the foundations for the temple Guardiola built, plucked him from the club’s youth ranks into the first team. In his hungry eyes and tautly alert bearing Cruyff saw an avid learner. The Dutch master, a magnificent player in his day, never had a more attentive pupil. Cruyff’s core message remains Guardiola’s today. Lessons one, two and three of football: keep possession of the ball. It sounds absurdly simple, but watch any game of the English Premier League, the world’s richest, and you’ll see how difficult it is to put into practice, how wasteful and random the deployment of the round object on which the game turns. To keep the ball, to defend by denying it to your opponents and to create more opportunities than them to score, you need skill, self-possession and intelligence. Cruyff saw enough of the first quality in Guardiola, and an abundance of the second and third.

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Johan Cruyff, left, influenced Guardiola’s later managerial style

He played at number four, just in front of the defence, the link man with the attack. Eusebio Sacristán, a former Barcelona player who was on the pitch on the day of Guardiola’s first-team debut, remembers that he was far from being a complete player. “He had no pace, he couldn’t run with the ball, he wasn’t strong in the tackle yet he became the axis around which Cruyff’s team revolved,” said Sacristán, who is today coach of the Barcelona B team. “His brain worked so fast he could make those around him play at the speed of light.”

Cruyff imported the Dutch philosophy of “total football” – everybody is comfortable on the ball, everybody attacks – to Barcelona, and Guardiola became its chief artificer on the pitch. Guardiola processed every game in his mind, every training session, every lesson Cruyff imparted. It was a habit of mind that extended to his life beyond football. Unusually for a player, he read books. He took an interest – ever greater the older he got – in film, music and politics. One of his closest friends is David Trueba, a Spanish novelist and film director whom he met at a poetry reading in 1995, when he was 24. Trueba wrote this about him in El País two years ago: “He is curious about a lot of things beyond football. But you get the sense sometimes that he codifies them in his own special way. That he ‘footballises’ them … ” In other words, that everywhere he finds a lesson applicable to football. Such are the obsessive thought processes of a top football coach, a destiny which Sacristán, who played alongside him for six years, says he never doubted he would fulfil.

Evaristo Murtra, then a club director, and owner of a large textile business, was the man who pushed for Guardiola to be named coach of the Barcelona B team. “It was a horrible assignment,” said Murtra, today a Guardiola intimate. “The team had just gone down to the third division and the task he was set was to promote them immediately back to the second.” David Trueba told me Guardiola’s associates in football warned him not to accept, telling him the third division was “poison: the players violent, that this was no place to launch his first football laboratory”. But he took the job on, transformed a demoralised team and, as required, won them promotion.

©Corbis

David Trueba, novelist and friend: ‘Guardiola is curious about a lot of things beyond football. But you get the sense sometimes he codifies them in his own special way’

Meanwhile, the first team was not doing so well. Under Frank Rijkaard, a Dutch disciple of Cruyff and a stellar former player, they had scaled the heights, winning the league twice, in 2005 and 2006, and the European Cup in 2006. But it was now the spring of 2008 and the team had faded, winning nothing in two seasons. Rijkaard, it was felt, had lost control of the dressing room.

A murmur arose among club members for José Mourinho to be appointed in his place. Authoritarian, charismatic, with a spectacular record of success in his native Portugal, in England and Italy, he seemed just the man to cut big egos down to size and restore drive to a rudderless team. Two board members were dispatched to Portugal to sound him out. “Mourinho gave them a detailed PowerPoint presentation of what he would do to turn Barcelona around,” Murtra recalled. “It would never have crossed his mind that he faced serious competition from the upstart Pep.” The upstart got the job. Murtra told me he was convinced that Mourinho’s subsequent “frustrations”, after he became coach of Barcelona’s bitter ancestral enemy, Real Madrid, two years later, had their genesis in this “painful blow to his pride”.

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Evaristo Murtra, a former Barça director: ‘It would never have crossed [Mourinho’s] mind that he faced serious competition from the upstart Pep’

Polls showed that public opinion in Barcelona was overwhelmingly sceptical of Guardiola, yet he had the temerity to announce at a preseason gala before a packed Camp Nou stadium, which has a capacity of 98,000, that the good times were about to roll. “Fasten your seat belts,” he cried out, microphone in hand, from the centre of the pitch, “you’re going to have fun!” But fun it wasn’t, at first. Barcelona lost their first league match to a tiny club called Numancia and then drew against scarcely much bigger Racing de Santander. The “I told-you-so’s” rang around practically every home and bar in the Catalan capital. Guardiola did not waver. In public (“as in private”, Murtra said), he declared that he would remain faithful to his “idea”. The playing style would not change and the results would come.

The Guardiola idea is, and will remain, that possession is nine-tenths of the law. That you cherish the ball as if you were a jealous lover. That if you lose it the team fights to get it back like a pack of indignant dogs. By monopolising the ball you will minimise the treacherous random factor inherent in football and you will also enjoy yourself. Just as in the school playground, all the fun is in having the ball at your feet. The misery lies in not having it. Let the other team feel that.

And that was exactly what happened. The rivals chased shadows until, like mesmerised bulls before a matador, their legs gave way and they were put lethally, gracefully to the sword. Guardiola’s poor start proved to be a chimera. From his third game on, he led a victory parade.

Juan Carlos Unzué, the team’s goalkeeping coach for three of the four years Guardiola coached Barcelona, watched the spectacle up close. “In terms of tactics, in terms of motivation, in terms of every single facet required in a coach,” Unzué said, “Guardiola is outstanding, in a class of his own.” Unzué has himself been a full team coach and has played or worked under many, including Guardiola’s predecessor, Rijkaard. Other coaches, said Unzué, tend to work hard on defensive tactics but not attacking ones, arguing that by so doing they might confuse their talented players, thwarting their creativity. Guardiola rehearsed all manner of intricately geometrical attacking patterns in training, his players pinging the ball about with billiard-ball precision at high speed. “Pep had the rare satisfaction,” Unzué said, “of seeing the players apply those same moves against the toughest rivals on the field of play, as if they had been copied and pasted.”

Cruyff saw that 20 years earlier too – but not as often as Guardiola would. Cruyff’s “Dream Team” won the European Cup in 1992, but then they flagged. The Dutchman’s manner was – and is – aristocratic, and his team reflected it. They were brilliant but too often supercilious, and therefore erratic. Guardiola has always acknowledged his debt to Cruyff, but it was he who delivered the finished product, who distilled the gold from the alchemic process his master began. The difference lay in the thoroughness of Guardiola’s preparation and in his greater attention to the proletarian task of defending, which he had studied in his playing days among the Italians, the masters of the art. Taking “total football” to another level, Guardiola’s team were as brilliant as Cruyff’s at their best, but they were harder workers. His players were artists but terriers too.

They would not have been had he not stressed from the beginning the central importance of team spirit. According to Unzué, Guardiola’s notion of esprit de corps extended to ancillary staff, the physios, the doctors, those in charge of the balls, boots and players’ kit. And, not least, Unzué himself. One Saturday morning in November 2008, barely five months after Guardiola’s arrival as coach, Unzué’s father abruptly died. That evening the team played a league match, won and immediately afterwards Guardiola ordered a charter flight to take the entire sporting staff, star players not excluded, to Pamplona for the funeral the next morning. “He’d have made the same gesture for anybody,” said Unzué, who will be forever grateful to Guardiola but is cold-eyed enough to see that behind his generosity lay a deeper purpose. “He sent out a message that day to all of us that we’d be together as a team in bad times and good. On the field that translates into a spirit of fierce solidarity. Eleven players attack and 11 players defend.”

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The goal tally of Lionel Messi, right, soared under Guardiola

They were no ordinary 11, either – not players easy to win over. Between them they had won the European Cup and the European nations’ cup, among a host of trophies. (Eight of the team’s players would feature in the World Cup final win against Holland in 2010.) Lots of very rich young men there, with very big global reputations. Guardiola subordinated them to his will because they came to see that acting on his instructions was the recipe for victory. And, as Unzué said, there was another thing: “Practically all the players confessed it to me that Pep had made them better.” Not excluding Lionel Messi, who is on record as acknowledging he would not be the player he has become without Guardiola’s help.

Messi played on the right wing during that first season in which the team won everything and he won his first Ballon d’Or. But Guardiola never ceased to believe there was room for improvement. Half way through the next season Messi suffered a rare loss of form. For three games in a row he went missing in action. The third, in February 2010, was a first-leg European Cup – or Champions League – game away to Stuttgart. The game ended in a disappointing 1-1 draw, with Messi more ineffectual than ever. “The standard reaction of a coach would have been to blame the player and give him a wake-up call by dropping him for the next match,” recalled Murtra. “Instead, Pep thought: ‘It’s my fault. It’s me who’s failing to get the best out of him.’ Pep thought hard about where he was going wrong. Then it came to him. He saw he was wasting Messi’s talent playing him out wide, he spoke to him and said, ‘From now on you’re going to play up front, in the middle’.” Guardiola also said, as Messi would later recall, “Now you’re going to score three or four goals a game.”

Unzué witnessed Guardiola’s thought processes from the inside. “Messi had always been regarded, unquestioningly, as a winger, but Pep suddenly saw that he had to be positioned where he would receive more of the ball and have the greatest possible impact.” He was right. Three weeks later, in the return game against Stuttgart, Barcelona won 4-0 and Messi scored two goals, setting up another. He didn’t score three or four goals every game, but he came close. His scoring rate soared, as it continues to do today. In his first season with Guardiola, Messi scored 38 times; in his fourth, he scored 73. Barcelona won the Spanish league for the second season running, lighting up the world, to the disgust of Real Madrid, who responded by signing José Mourinho.

©AFP/Getty Images

Barcelona’s players throw their departing coach in the air at the Camp Nou in May 2012

Six months later, now in Guardiola’s third season, Barcelona humiliated Mourinho’s Madrid 5-0 in an exhibition of “choral” football, as they call it in Spain, never before seen. From that day on, for all future encounters with Barcelona, Mourinho battened down the hatches, paid his rivals the compliment of doing as small teams do against big ones and “parked the bus”, played a backs-to-the-wall defensive game and deployed every trick he knew on and off the field to put his rivals off their stride, not least by seeking to sully their reputation – claiming over and over, for example, that they won because of the referees’ help – by playing the game of rhetorical mud-slinging at which he excels. It didn’t work in his first season at Madrid, for Barcelona won the Spanish league for the third year in a row, plus the European Cup again, but it did work the season after that, Guardiola’s last. Real Madrid were finally crowned champions of Spain. Towards the end of the season Barcelona began to lose their edge. The team remained, to the end, a mirror of their coach. Guardiola had dedicated every waking moment for four years to devising new tactics, new ways to motivate his players, new responses to new challenges. His batteries were drained. “He always said success wears you down and in his case he was right,” said Evaristo Murtra. “He needed a rest.” For his own good and, as he saw it, that of the team, which he felt he could no longer improve, he quit.

But it was not in a spirit of mourning or defeat, no matter Real Madrid’s triumph, that the Barcelona faithful crowded into the Camp Nou one balmy evening in May to bid him farewell. The message that night was a joyous “Gracias, Pep!”, “Thank you, Pep!” All present knew, as all did watching the scenes on television around the world, that the higher achievement of conquering the admiration of the world had been met. As Sir Bobby Charlton, the most legendary figure in English football, had said a few months earlier, it didn’t matter if Real were ahead on points: “Barcelona have it all. They have the values. They have an idea: an idea that having possession of the ball gives you an advantage. They are unique and the world should learn from them.”

Few luminaries of the world game would disagree. Guardiola’s Barcelona might have lost a battle, but they had won the war. Even today, with Guardiola’s former number two, Tito Vilanova, in charge they continue to shine, breaking new records, rushing to another Spanish league title, leading Real by 18 points at the season’s half way mark. Guardiola, breaking a long public silence this month, drew attention as he habitually has done to the tradition on which his team was built: “I took over a legacy,” he said, “and the greatest pride I can feel comes from seeing that everything continues the same as when I was there, or better.”

. . .

Apart from recharging his batteries and spending more time with his family and fending off foreign suitors, what has he been doing in New York? Absorbing and processing information in preparation for the next challenge, as he has always done, according to David Trueba. Most obviously, by watching hours and hours of live European football at home. Less obviously, as Trueba says, by devouring all New York has to offer. “I went over to see him and we went to shows and museums – we even had dinner with a famous economist,” Trueba said. “For the American elections he stayed up until the final result was in, peppering me with information all night on the phone, following Obama.”

He has no doubt been “footballising” Obama too, drawing lessons in leadership that he will apply when he gets back to coaching next season. Putting an end to months of speculation in the world’s sports pages, it was announced this week that he has signed a three-year contract with the most successful German football club, Bayern Munich. In the end, he spurned the vast salaries reported to be on offer at England’s most cash-rich clubs, Chelsea and Manchester City, and opted for a club that offers a project and an idea of football that closely matches his own. Bayern Munich, run in the main by former players with long histories of attachment to the club, has a clearly defined identity on and off the field. In recent years the football they and the German national team have played has converged with the philosophy of attractive, possession-based attacking football that Guardiola refined and perfected at Barcelona. Bayern will be expecting him to evolve the model, take it to a higher plain.

A question lingers, however. Quite possibly among German fans too. Will Guardiola be able to repeat his success at his new club? The doubters’ argument rests on the notion that he was lucky at Barcelona to have stumbled upon a spectacularly talented set of players. “With that lot, who couldn’t succeed?” goes a familiar jibe in football circles. Yes, but the core of the team he inherited had done nothing for two years and there are other clubs with excellent individuals, notably Manchester City and Real Madrid, who have not come close to Barcelona’s achievement in terms of beauty of spectacle or sheer efficacy. In the four years during which Guardiola won 14 trophies, Real Madrid won two.

The truth is Guardiola did pull off an astonishing feat at Barcelona. He achieved what every coach at every level knows to be the true measure of success: he extracted the very best from what he had and, almost beyond imagination, he made his players even better. Lucky Bayern. He’ll do it again.

John Carlin writes for El País. He is working on a feature film documentary about FC Barcelona

What the Buddha Thought

Written by Karim, 19 May 2012

Source: http://mezimbite.com/2012/what-the-buddha-thought/

Richard Gombrich was born in London in 1937.

His father, Ernst Gombrich, moved to England from Vienna in late 1935. He was a historian whose book, The Story of Art,  has been translated into more than 30 languages and made the family fortune. He died in 2001 as Sir Ernst Gombrich, OM, CH, after having lived for over 50 years in the same modest house in Hampstead. Richard’s mother was a pianist born in Prague. The Gombrich family contained distinguished musicians, and the dominant passion of Richard’s parents was classical music.

His father once said that he felt that a day on which he had not listened to music was wasted.

Richard was sent to St. Paul’s School, London, which his parents chose because it had been founded by Dean Colet in 1509 “for children of all nations to be taught indifferently.”

Richard was brought up to care about ethics and what is now called “high culture”. His father admired Goethe and Voltaire, and had no religion.

After two years of compulsory military service, spent mostly in Germany, Richard progressed from St. Paul’s to Magdalen College, Oxford. Half way through his four-year course he changed from Classics (Latin and Greek) to Oriental Languages – Sanskrit and Pali. Graduating in 1961, he had a Harkness Fellowship for 2 years at Harvard, where he took an AM in Sanskrit literature under Professor Daniel Ingalls*.

However, his interest in Buddhism was even greater than that in Sanskrit, and he wrote his Oxford doctoral thesis on the practice of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. For this he studied some anthropology and did a year’s fieldwork in a Sinhalese village. When he returned to Oxford, now as a Lecturer, in 1965, he was befriended by a sociologist of religion, Bryan Wilson, and has since remained interested in this subject.

His earlier training, on the other hand, has given him an interest also in philology, and above all an awareness of its demands for painstaking accuracy and a respect for sources.

At Oxford, Richard worked as a University Lecturer until 1976, and then was chosen as the Boden Professor of Sanskrit. With this went a Fellowship in Balliol College.

Richard held office in the Pali Text Society for about 15 years, ending as its President. He is also President of the UK Association of Buddhist Studies, and an honorary life member of theInternational Association of Buddhist Studies.

He also founded the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and is the editor of its Journal.

Richard’s publications include:

Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the rural highlands of Ceylon. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1971

Cone, Margaret, and Richard Gombrich. The Perfect Generosity of Prince Vessantara. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977

Bechert, Heinz and Richard Gombrich eds. The world of Buddhism: Buddhist monks and nuns in society and culture. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. Paperback ed. 1991.

Theravāda Buddhism: A social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo, London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988.

Buddhism transformed: Religious change in Sri Lanka (authored with Gananath Obeyesekere), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Paperback ed. 1990.

Buddhist Precept and Practice. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1991.

How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings, London: The Athlone Press, 1996.

What the Buddha Thought: London & Oakville: Equinox, 2009. (pictured at left)

Professor Richard Gombrich, Oxford University

Editor’s Note

*Like Richard Gombrich, The Editor of Mezimbite Magazine also studied Sanskrit literature under Prof. Daniel Ingalls at Harvard University.

Editor’s interview questions below are in orange and Prof. Gombrich’s responses are in black.

The Mezimbite Forest Centre is a sustainable forest community and a model for African development.

Forests are a frequent backdrop for the factual and mythological history of Sanskrit and its literature.

Do forests play a part in Buddhism?

In India from the earliest times the village and the forest were embedded in people’s minds as a pair of complementary, contrasting concepts. The village stood for civilization, for the works of man, for structure, for norms. The forest was nature untrammeled, the mysterious and unpredictable wilderness, both attractive and frightening, where anything goes. Perhaps as far back as records go, there were individuals who left the life of society by literally walking out of the village and living as wanderers or hermits.

One of them was the man who became known by his achievement, the Buddha: the Enlightened One, or more literally the Awakened One, who had woken from the murky lack of self-awareness in which ordinary people live. According to the legend, which has at least an allegorical truth, the Buddha was brought up in a village (even if his father was called a “king”) to inherit wealth and power; but on confronting the realities of ageing, disease and death he fled into the forest and spent six years there, almost starving to death, looking for the truth.

What he found he called the Middle Way. It was a Way because it led to salvation. It was the Middle Way because it led between the life of the householder, bound to the senses, and its extreme opposite, the life of the solitary ascetic who mortified the flesh.

This discovery led the Buddha to create what I think one can claim to be the world’s longest lasting institution, the Sangha (the “Community”) of monks and nuns who are to dedicate themselves to treading the middle path.

The Sangha gave them an environment in which they could individually find salvation, and also pass that opportunity on to later generations by preserving the Buddha’s message. Periods of individual meditation in the forest were permitted, even encouraged, but the Sangha were never to lose all contact either with the laity (on whom they depended for food) or with each other, on whom they depended for advice and moral support. So the Buddhist Sangha represents a life style and world view which perfectly combine village and forest.

There is another important way in which the Sangha instantiates a middle way which is not a timid compromise but a bold creative advance.

The Buddha lived in the fifth century BC. At that time several civilizations had already created codes of law by which to live, but so far as I know all of them were ascribed to authors who were either divine or great sages of the past. Their laws were therefore considered beyond criticism and unchangeable. When the Buddha created his community he soon saw the need to lay down rules both for individuals and for regulating community life, and these were recorded in a long book which traditionally stands at the beginning of the Buddhist canon.

This record cannot be taken literally as historically accurate throughout, and later generations must have made changes, both intentionally and inadvertently. But we can clearly see that the Buddha proceeded by case law. When he encountered a new situation, he sometimes changed one of his previous rules, or even rescinded it, advancing by trial and error.

The very fact that this record exists at the heart of the Buddhist canon shows that the Buddha did not regard himself as omniscient and did not require his followers to do so either.

I gather that you have been studying the mind of the Buddha for much of the past 40 years, and have presented in your book a kind of summary of your conclusions. You emphasise that this was a pragmatic thinker. Moreover, when looking at some of your research, I feel like I could just as well be reading about Leonardo da Vinci, or Thomas Alva Edison or… dare I say it… Marcus Tullius Cicero, in terms of the breath and scope of his intellect.

Well, the Buddha’s range of interest was rather narrower than that of da Vinci or Edison; but by that I do not intend to belittle him. He himself emphasised that his purpose in teaching was simply pragmatic: to help others achieve what he had achieved, to find the tranquil and lucid happiness which meant that this would be his last life, because he had escaped forever from the cycle of rebirth. Pure theory he regarded as a waste of time.

Even so, he was surely an intellectual giant.

How so?

Earlier Indian thought had often been evocative and insightful, but it operated mainly through myth and metaphor, and never clearly differentiated the literal from the figurative. While the Buddha too made much use of metaphor, he was the first thinker to use abstraction as we do.

I think that the most important use he made of this discovery was to analyse what we normally think of as objects, as things, and declare them to be processes. He did not even have a proper word for “process”, but just as Heraclitus in Greece, who was probably his senior contemporary, saw fire as the basic constituent of the world, the Buddha too saw the phenomenal universe as dynamic through and through.

Nowadays people usually see this discovery of the Buddha’s as just like modern physics, which has dissolved the world perceptible to our senses into processes. That is a fair analogy. Yet I think we must beware of claiming that the Buddha anticipated modern physics, because he was not interested in physics at all: he was interested in our experience.

The most important use that the Buddha made of his discovery was to apply it to us, living and sentient beings. Buddhism became famous for its denial of the soul. But throughout history this denial has very often been misunderstood. The Buddha denied that there was such a thing as the soul, whether or not you choose to regard it as material. This meant there was nothing unchanging at the centre of each individual being. Sometimes “no soul” is translated as “no self”; the Buddha denied that we have a self which does not change over time. Like everyone around him, he believed in rebirth, and indeed told stories about himself in former lives.

What crucially links me to myself in a former life, or to myself in a future life, is the same as what links me to the person I was yesterday or will be tomorrow. The link is summarised in the term karma, which refers to moral character. If I do good, I not only benefit the outside world, but also become a better person; and of course the other way if I do wrong. Karma is the best illustration of the Buddha’s idea of process, because it is neither random nor wholly determined, but in constant change, under the influence of causal factors which are probably too many and too complex to be perceived.

Personally I do not believe in karma, and this is why – as I often have to explain – I do not call myself a Buddhist. It is a corollary of the Buddha’s karma doctrine that the world is a just place, in which good deeds always ultimately meet their reward and bad deeds their punishment, however long it may take. I would love this to be true, but unfortunately my observations do not allow me to believe it.

However, this does not diminish the magnificence of the Buddha’s moral achievement. For both his capacity for abstraction, which enables generalization, and his view that living beings are essentially constituted by their moral character, which they can always modify, led him to conclude that all living beings are on an equal footing, for each of them is morally responsible for his or her own actions. At this point it is more useful to talk about all mankind rather than “all living beings”.

For the Buddha, all human beings are morally on a par and ultimately capable of reaching salvation, nirvana.

This is the most important characteristic that they have, and it is shared alike by men and women, young and old, brahmins and outcastes. Moreover, since what essentially differentiates good action from bad is the intention behind it, ritual of itself has no moral value and most social convention is nothing more than that. Thus the Buddha was both a great egalitarian and a great moral teacher, who required everyone to face the fact that they alone were responsible for their destiny.

He, if anyone, deserves to be credited with founding a civilization.

You depict the Buddha as an activist. However, the stereotype of the Buddha, the PR campaign if you will, seems to promote the idea that if you simply sit in lotus position and wait around for a bit, enlightenment might come and knock on your mental door. Variations of this theory can be found in countless popular magazines and books and CDs and podcasts and videos. I see none of that in your research. What I see is a person who – rather like Henry David Thoreau – practices and cultivates self-reliance and individuality.

Passivity, sitting in lotus position without an active and energetic intent to take charge of one’s own destiny is not a Buddhist concept, but may well be a concept in popular psychology or popular culture. It is true, however, that I have not yet said anything about the role of meditation in Buddhism, and meditation may not appear to outsiders as a particularly strenuous activity! My discussion of the Buddha’s thought in this book has almost nothing new to say about meditation as such.

I am however very concerned to point out that the Buddha regarded morality as a prerequisite for meditation. I am doubtful whether he would have approved of the modern trend to try to fit an hour of meditation, or even less, into the daily schedule of a lay life. In traditional Buddhist societies too, the laity are exhorted to practice their Buddhism mainly by venerating the Buddha as an example and following his teachings on ethics; meditation tends to be considered a prerogative of the Sangha, and perhaps also practiced by retired people who have the leisure for it.

Nowadays in the West – and also in Buddhist countries under Western influence – meditation has become popular as a form of psychotherapy. I am sure that it often works, and I have no objection to good psychotherapy, but this is not really what the Buddha envisaged.

You have strong views on higher education.

Yes, several. I run an annual summer school at Oxford, an intensive introduction to Pali.

There are no prerequisites except willingness to work hard for 12 days. Students attend from all parts of the world. It is booked months in advance, but unfortunately my personal method of teaching means that I have to limit the attendance to 14 students. I start out on the first day by telling the students that this is about cooperation, not competition. We are 15 individuals whose aim is to learn Pali and hope to learn it also by teaching each other.

If it is not too bold to say so, I hope we can emulate the Buddha’s concept of the Sangha as a community who wish to progress by helping each other.

If you happen to grasp a concept more swiftly than your neighbour, it is your duty to share that understanding. The gratifying thing is that this does actually seem to work. At the end of the course we take a lunch together and I really enjoy the atmosphere, because everyone says that they have managed to make a good start in Pali, but it is also evident that they have become friends. Many go on to keep in touch, and even to work on Pali together.

You don’t like exams do you?

I dislike exams intensely! I regard them as the enemy of education. To a small extent tests are of course necessary: you have to find out whether someone graduating in civil engineering knows how to build a bridge that will not fall down. But my father said a wise thing to me: If results are what matter, then why can exams at university be taken only once?

If for example, you are taking a driving test in this country, you can take it any number of times until you pass; then you can drive a vehicle, because you now have the requisite knowledge and skill. If the result is what matters, then why can you not take a university exam many times as well?

Well, my father would have likely responded to your father with the notion that this life we live is rather like a school, whereby the end result is a richer sense of inner knowledge and understanding than we had at the start of our journey. If that is the desired result, then he too would concur with your father that exams seem superfluous.

Essentially, there is no correlation whatsoever between the milestones of enlightened thought and the milestone of sitting for an exam. So, for the Humanities at least, it seems you would rather not have your students suffer through exams if you had a choice?

The only justification for studying the Humanities is curiosity.

While I was still in post, I used to say so to my students. I said that I would not teach them for the exams; but on the other hand, if they studied with real interest, they would probably be at no disadvantage in the exams. The exam situation is getting ever worse. Now in Britain an examiner is required to justify every mark they give.

If they give 66% to an essay on the Buddha, they must explain why they think it is not good enough to get 67% but deserves more than 65%. This is not merely ludicrous. Since there can be no rational reason to determine the mark of 66%, the poor examiner is actually forced to be dishonest, to lie. What a betrayal of educational values!

Quantification has become a pernicious fetish. If the Humanities can teach us anything, surely it must be that human qualities cannot be expressed by a percentage.

The most basic requirement of a university education should be to teach intellectual honesty. That is brother to the personal responsibility the Buddha taught.

The Confessions of Kofi Annan

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Michael Ignatieff

Interventions: A Life in War and Peace
by Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh
Penguin, 383 pp., $36.00                                                  

Evan Schneider/UN Photo

Kofi Annan in Darfur, listening to two women who had suffered at the hands of the Janjaweed militia, May 2005

How do we explain Kofi Annan’s enduring moral prestige? The puzzle is that it has survived failures, both his own and those of the institution he served for fifty years.¹ Personal charisma is only part of the story. In addition to his charm, of which there is plenty, there is the authority that comes from experience. Few people have spent so much time around negotiating tables with thugs, warlords, and dictators. He has made himself the world’s emissary to the dark side.

To these often dire negotiations, he brought a soothing temperament that became second nature early in his Ghanaian childhood. His father, Henry Reginald Annan, lived across two worlds, as a senior executive with a British multinational corporation and a hereditary chieftain in a country poised on the eve of national independence. In the Ghanaian struggle, the Annan family occupied the cautious middle, supporting independence but keeping their distance from the revolutionary nationalism of Kwame Nkrumah.

From these experiences, Annan became adept at circumspection and skillful in dealing with all sides, while keeping his own cards concealed. It was a temperament perfect for the UN. When he found his career in Ghana blocked by a succession of military regimes, he enlisted in the UN and has spent all his life in its upper reaches in New York and Geneva. Like Barack Obama, he learned early to live across racial divides and to position himself as the rational and relaxed confidant of all, while belonging finally to no one but himself.

Being at once agreeable and remote isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t explain how he managed to keep his reputation intact while rising up through nether regions of the UN bureaucracy—human resources and budgeting—where nepotism and mismanagement were notorious. This ascent demanded a polite but ruthless care of his own reputation, together with an ability to distance himself from trouble. Along the way he deeply internalized the moral rhetoric of the institution and never let its dreary reality drain away his idealism. Once elevated, through American support, to the UN’s highest office in 1996, he displayed unsuspected flair and managed to articulate in every nuanced but committed utterance the still unspent hopes that survived inside the institution itself. When he accepted the Nobel Prize awarded jointly to him and the UN in 2001, he seemed to many the most complete incarnation of its ideals of any secretary-general who ever lived.

Realists dismiss the UN as “a political entity without any independent will,” to use Perry Anderson’s phrase, but they miss the power that flows from moral prestige.² To paraphrase Stalin’s remark about the pope, Annan understood that the UN had no divisions, but it was the bearer of hopes, and in this lay such power as the secretary-general enjoyed. He was the most successful holder of the office since Dag Hammarskjöld in leveraging the world’s hopes into personal moral influence.If prestige is to last, it must be burnished with accomplishment, and much happened on his watch—the UN Global Compact, the Millennium Development Goals, the Global AIDSFund, the International Criminal Court, the “responsibility to protect” doctrine—for which we praise him because he gave them benevolent encouragement and maximum publicity. Like no secretary-general before him, Annan understood modern media and used the power of his own celebrity to raise the visibility of his institution. He also understood that globalization was empowering new actors besides sovereign states, and he was shrewd enough to realize that the UN had to stop being an intergovernmental organization alone but must establish partnerships with corporations, NGOs, and that ever-multiplying creation, global civil society. He understood that while his authority came from the member states who pay the bills and cast the votes, his moral prestige came from “we the peoples,” the millions of ordinary people whose faith in the UN had managed to survive serial disillusion.

But there remains a mystery about his prestige. Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Václav Havel acquired theirs by standing up to tyrants. Kofi Annan acquired his by talking to them. Prestige acquired in this manner is bound to be ambiguous and to leave a complex legacy.

In February 1998, he flew to Baghdad and persuaded Saddam Hussein to let the UN weapon inspectors back in. He was greeted as a hero when he returned and the world fell under his spell. Modest and unassuming as he was, he became prone to believing his own magic. There is more than a little hubris in a passing remark he makes in his memoir to the effect that his actions as secretary-general were coming to have more influence than the Security Council. In fact it was the imminent threat of American air strikes, as much as Annan’s good offices, that concentrated Saddam’s mind, and in any event, war was only delayed, not forestalled.

When no credible threat of force hangs in the air, as in the case of his recent mission to Syria in August of this year, Annan’s shuttle diplomacy may only have provided the US, as well as Russia and China, with an alibi for doing nothing. When he abandoned his Syria mission, he observed that no mediator succeeds if he wants peace more than the protagonists.³ But he must have known this when he started. In his eagerness to serve there is the pathos of a global politician in retirement fearing that his moral prestige will waste away—only to discover, too late, that you can also lose it when you use it.

Annan’s enduring authority is also perplexing because his past won’t leave him in peace. To use Samantha Power’s cruel words, “his name would appear in the history books beside the two defining genocidal crimes of the second half of the twentieth century,” Rwanda and Srebrenica.⁴ His memoir is called Interventions, as if to recognize that his public career will always be judged by his part in the UN’s most ill-fated operations.

In confronting these incidents, he and his cowriter and former aide, Nader Mousavizadeh, have decided that when a reputation is under scrutiny, candor is the best defense. The result is a resolute, detailed, and unflinching review of his most difficult hours. They quote in full the now notorious fax that the UN force commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, sent in January 1994 to UN headquarters seeking Annan’s authorization for military action to arrest prospectivegenocidaires. Annan turned Dallaire down, and neither he nor the secretary-general at the time, Boutros Boutros Ghali, ever communicated Dallaire’s request for action to the Security Council.

Dallaire, Power, Philip Gourevitch, and other close observers of the Rwanda catastrophe believe that preventive military action by the UN at that point might have averted the horrendous events that unfolded months later in April, May, and June, leaving 800,000 people dead. Annan’s answer to these charges—it has not varied in a decade—recalls that the Americans had just been driven from Somalia after the disastrous Blackhawk Down episode and Dallaire’s proposed intervention risked a similar debacle:

In Dallaire’s cabled request to raid, we saw the ingredients of a disaster akin to the failed raid on Aidid in Mogadishu three months earlier—but with a force that was a thousand times weaker in military capabilities and entirely isolated from any possibility of reinforcement.

In an astonishing admission, Annan adds that Dallaire’s force was “a peace-keeping force, sent in a deliberately weak and vulnerable form to engender the trust of both sides.” Deliberately weak and vulnerable… When moral prestige deludes itself into thinking it need not arm itself, it can make itself an accomplice of evil.

The same dismaying faith in the deterrent force of good intentions fatally shaped UN policy over the safe havens in Bosnia. Annan was in charge of UN peacekeeping in this period and watched helplessly as governments in the Security Council crafted mandates and deployed troops that could not possibly protect the safe havens if they came under determined attack. To his credit, Annan stood his ground. He told the Security Council that the safe havens could not be protected with anything less than an additional 32,000 troops. It ignored the advice, leaving civilians for a second time to be protected by “presence” rather than forces authorized and willing to fight. Eight thousand civilians in Srebrenica paid with their lives for this fatal illusion about the force of the UN’s moral prestige.

Annan has rebuilt his own moral prestige since Bosnia by being candid when others have been less so, including presidents and prime ministers. In his memoir, he admits mistakes, showing how the UN peacekeeping bureaucracy was unable to assume the huge burdens imposed on it by light-minded governments at the end of the cold war. He takes responsibility now, remarking at one point:

To a man, woman, or child for whom the presence of a blue helmet is all that lies between safety and certain death, talk of limited mandates, inadequate means, and under-resourced missions—however accurate—is, at best, beside the point, at worst, a betrayal.

The one thing he never did at the time was go public with his doubts. He admitted in a recent interview with Charlie Rose that he should have shouted from the rooftops to protest the Security Council’s unwillingness to protect the safe havens in Bosnia with robust deployments, but he adds, characteristically, that the UN Secretariat’s idea of public relations was “archaic.”⁵ And so he kept silent. As an international civil servant, it was not his job to publicly upbraid national governments. This is to blame the mandarin culture of the Secretariat, but also to admit that he was a prisoner of that culture.

The essential paradox of Annan’s career is that through a period in which the UN’s prestige declined in the 1990s, crippled by moral promises it failed to keep, his prestige emerged unscathed. His political stock with the Americans also rose. When the US finally decided to do something about the slaughter in Bosnia in August 1995, Annan was helpful in overcoming UN resistance to the bombing of Serb targets. Within weeks American air power, coupled with assistance to the Croats, turned the tide against the Serbs and brought them to the negotiations at Dayton.

Having made himself useful in Bosnia, Annan became an obvious candidate when Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton were looking for someone to replace Boutros Ghali. It is a mark of his shrewdness that he understood, as Boutros Ghali had not, that the UN could not succeed unless America reinvested in it. Once elected in 1996, he used his celebrity to sooth Congress, appease the anti-UN Republican hawks, and unfreeze US contributions to the organization.

Interventions reveals how difficult it proved to keep his American friends happy. Madeleine Albright pushed his candidacy through and then bullied him unmercifully, at one point waking him up at 4:30 in the morning to dictate the language of a press release on Iraq. She “never quite understood,” he says with icy understatement, that he was also responsible to other members of the UN.

David Burnett/Contact Press Images

Kofi Annan meeting in Pakistan with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Ahmad Mutawakil (white turban) and, to his left, Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, March 2001

He was too canny a politician, however, not to have understood that it was good politics for both the Clinton and Bush administrations to beat up the UN publicly. Yet both administrations turned to him when they needed his moral benediction. Even an administration bent on a unilateral invasion of Iraq felt obliged to send Colin Powell to make its case for war to the UN. The most vivid pages ofInterventions describe the foreign ministers’ lunch after Powell’s presentation when he faced the disbelieving Dominique de Villepin of France and Igor Ivanov of Russia. After assuring them and Annan that he personally hated war—“I’ve lost friends in war; I’ve fought in two wars; I’ve commanded wars”—Powell then asserted that he didn’t “accept the premise that wars always lead to bad results.” At this point, Joschka Fischer of Germany chimed in, “And we are the best example of that.”

The scene captures politics at the top as Annan lived it, but it also encapsulates what the UN is actually for. It is the forum that forces the powerful to earn legitimacy by persuading the weak that their cause is just. Powell was still seeking that legitimacy six weeks after the invasion itself when he came to Annan’s office with a team of briefers to prove that the US invaders had found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. A troubled secretary of state was still looking for absolution. “Kofi, they’ve made an honest man of me,” he exclaimed. Annan and his team remained stonily unconvinced by the evidence.

Prestige accrues to those who get the big issues right. Annan got Iraq right. Saddam Hussein had stopped all programs to make WMDs since 1991. If the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN inspector Hans Blix had been listened to, and Blix had been given more time to confirm them, Iraq’s lack of WMDs would have been exposed. But as Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz later admitted, they couldn’t allow the “Jews and the Persians” to find out and so they stonewalled the inspectors, provoking the invasion and their regime’s downfall.

Colin Powell’s reputation never recovered from Iraq and it proved a turning point for Annan’s as well. For five years, he fought to keep the UN at the center of the diplomatic dance with Saddam, while seeking to guarantee that if force was used, it would be approved through the Security Council. But he had already created a precedent for unilateral action, having given his blessing to the NATO operation in Kosovo, launched without Security Council approval. Now, with the Security Council flatly refusing to endorse an invasion of Iraq, he concluded that the American invasion was “illegal.” The Bush administration never forgave him for that judgment. It ignored the UN, plunged into the invasion, and Annan was left to draw slim consolation from the knowledge that he and his organization had refused to legitimize a debacle:

The United Nations had stood up for itself, and its founding principles. It would matter little to the world—and to the people of Iraq—in the months and years to come, but far worse would have been [to be] a rubber stamp for a war fought on false premises.

In August 2003, Annan’s personal envoy in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and twenty-two of his colleagues were blown up in a terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. It was a parable of trust misplaced. Annan and the UN put their faith in American protection and Annan paid for this faith by losing one of his oldest friends and closest collaborators.

In the year that followed the invasion, scandal erupted over Oil for Food, the UN program established to ensure that Saddam wouldn’t use the international sanctions regime to starve his own people. With the active collusion of UN officials, the Saddam regime siphoned $8.4 billion of illegal kickbacks from the scheme, and some UN officials and foreign contractors made illicit fortunes on a program supposed to help the poorest Iraqis. When Annan appointed Paul Volcker to uncover the truth about Oil for Food. Volcker discovered that Cotecna, one of the more than two thousand companies involved in these kickbacks, had hired Kojo Annan, Kofi’s son, and paid him until 2004, even though he stopped working there in 1998.

Having been the darling of the American media and Washington establishment, Annan now watched, in a gathering haze of depression, as they turned on him and press conferences rang with calls for his resignation. In December 2004, with his prestige in tatters, Annan agreed to a soul-searching review of his predicament at Richard Holbrooke’s apartment in New York. There, Les Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations told him that after a visit to check with his sources in Washington, the Bush administration’s view of Annan was: “They won’t push you, but if you stumble, they’re not going to catch you either.”

Annan survived by calling in every political favor he had accumulated in a long career. His friend Bill Clinton went to the White House and told George Bush, “You do not want Kofi Annan’s blood on your hands,” to which Bush replied, “My right-wingers want to destroy the United Nations, but I don’t.”

In his final two years as secretary-general, Annan fought to salvage his reputation. He took responsibility for the abject management failures and outright thievery that had characterized Oil for Food and sought to regain the political initiative by launching a frenetic attempt to reform the institution. He wanted to enlarge the Security Council, create a peace-building commission, and replace the discredited Human Rights Commission with a Human Rights Council. The effort was worthy but the moment for reform had passed. By then, the US had sent the obstreperous ambassador John Bolton to the UN as a sign of its displeasure and as a sop to Bush’s right wing. Annan discovered that his own prestige was too depleted to achieve significant reform. A secretary-generalship that had begun with hope in 1996 ended in frustration in 2006.

When you recall how Annan’s secretary-generalship ended, you begin to understand his hunger to remain in the public eye, to mediate a political settlement in Kenya following disputed elections in 2008, and finally to find peace in Syria. These quests for peace are something more than an experienced mediator’s desire to stay busy. In some deep way, given what he has seen, lived through, and taken responsibility for, they can be taken as a conscientious man’s quest for redemption.

Annan’s story is a cautionary tale about the fragility of moral prestige in a world still stubbornly ruled by state interest. He can be seen as an entrepreneur of moral standards, promoting new ideas of collective behavior, sovereign responsibility, and international criminal accountability for a world that briefly believed that globalization might bring us together. He put his own prestige on the line to bring peace to war zones from Bosnia to East Timor. He will talk to tyrants if there is a chance for peace. To achieve these goals, he was prepared—this was the essence of his job—to live with the narrow nationalism of the state interests he served and the cowardice of the UN bureaucracy that made him who he was. No one ever came closer to being the voice of “we the peoples” and no one paid a higher price for it. The world still needs such a voice, but the next person who tries to fill that role will want to reflect long and hard on the lessons of this candid, courageous, and unsparing memoir.