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THE dictator General Pervez Musharraf leads a country on the brink. As the
war in Afghanistan intensifies, he is torn between appeasing the US and
pacifying Pakistani rioters baying for his resignation. The danger his country
faces is obvious, but researchers in the US have devised a system they claim
could predict much earlier any countries approaching civil war.

Their 鈥渃onflict barometer鈥� gives a week-by-week measure of the scale of
unrest. Although the barometer鈥檚 forecasting prowess remains to be proved, its
developers say it could have presaged the slide of Algeria and Sri Lanka into
civil war. They also believe it could help the US and Britain decide how long to
fight Operation Enduring Freedom.

Raw material for the barometer arrives daily in the form of several thousand
Reuters news stories. A sentence-analysing program called a parser classifies
events into roughly 200 categories. This task had to be automated, says the
program鈥檚 developer, Doug Bond of Harvard University, since humans cannot keep
pace with reports.

From the category counts, Bond and his colleague Craig Jenkins, a political
sociologist at Ohio State University, calculate the proportions of events
involving civil protests, repressive government actions and outbreaks of
violence.

They feed these three factors into an equation to give a nation鈥檚 鈥渃onflict
carrying capacity鈥� or CCC. A score of 100 signifies stability, zero equals
chaos. Before 11 September, the US typically scored around 98, Britain in the
90s, and countries such as Sri Lanka, 60 or below.

In a recent paper in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Jenkins and
Bond traced a decade of CCC scores for seven countries. They found that the
scale provided warnings six to nine months ahead of civil war in Algeria and Sri
Lanka, and Peru鈥檚 march back to relative stability. 鈥淎 close observer might have
done as well, but I think it helps to have the indicator out in front of you,鈥�
says Jenkins. Independently, John Freeman at the University of Minnesota has
shown that the CCC is also a strong predictor of currency collapse. The Swiss
Peace Foundation, for example, uses CCC scores to help identify countries whose
currencies are at risk.

Jenkins and Bond have found that nations fail when violence, civil strife and
government repression mount and stay high for many months鈥攌eeping the CCC
below 85 or so. 鈥淚t looks like the gestation period of a crisis is six to nine
months,鈥� says Jenkins. That makes him think that both the intensity and duration
of fighting in Afghanistan must be weighed in assessing the risk of
destabilising neighbouring states.

Gary King, professor of government at Harvard, points out that even though
only two or three nations implode each year, the consequences for the rest of
the world are momentous. 鈥淭he only sponsors of international terrorism are
failed states.鈥� He values the CCC鈥檚 ability to monitor countries in real time.
鈥淭his is a tremendous help,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t provides knowledge we couldn鈥檛 get
辞迟丑别谤飞颈蝉别.鈥�

While Jenkins emphasises that the CCC鈥檚 forecasting ability needs to be
evaluated and honed through further studies, he thinks it could already help
governments spot crumbling regimes. He is particularly worried about Pakistan
and Tajikistan, which, according to the index, are teetering on the edge of
instability.