Afghanistan

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Mars & Venus Revisited

Bob Gates' criticism of european defence shortcomings yesterday was couched in unusually harsh terms. Then again, NATO faces an uncertain future and there's a growing sense in the United States, I think, that europe is failing to lift its weight when it comes to defence matters. As Gates pointed out just 5 of NATO's 28 members spend more than 2% of GDP on defence. Consequently: The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st. And: Right now, the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.

Daniel Korski

ISAF = I Saw Americans Fight?

The imminent Dutch withdrawal from NATO’s Afghan mission will ignite the question of allied troop contributions. But what are the real numbers and how do they compare to past missions? In a new article for the Spanish think tank FRIDE, I have done the sums, as part of a broader analysis of transatlantic “AfPak” policy since President Obama came to power. The contribution of EU member states to NATO’s ISAF has grown from 16,900 soldiers in 2007 to 22,774 in 2008, 25,572 in 2009 and 32,337 in 2010. Soldiers from EU countries have until this year made up 45–53 per cent of the total force and for three consecutive years.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Going Dutch | 23 February 2010

"Going Dutch" will take on a whole new meaning now that the collapse of the Dutch government looks set to result in the country's departure from Afghanistan. Withdrawal had been on the cards for at least a year - especially as the coalition Labour party had campaigned to return Dutch troops at the last election. But now the process has gone into overdrive.   Militarily, the competent Dutch forces will be sorely missed. They have done a really quite impressive job in Uruzgan province. But the Dutch pullback will be an even bigger problem politically. NATO likes to refer to the dictum it formulated during the Balkan operations - "in together, out together".

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The new AfPak strategy in action – decapitation, reintegration and reconciliation (DRR)

It’s not quite the “we got him” moment, as when US soldiers unearthed the fugitive Iraqi dictator. But the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top militant commander who is said to be second in command to elusive Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mohhamad Omar, may be even more significant. By the time Saddam Hussein had been caught, the US was fighting a different enemy, though the Pentagon leadership had not realised yet. Baradar, who was in charge of the insurgency’s day-to-day operations on behalf of the so-called Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s leadership council, is very much today’s enemy - and his seizure should not be underestimated.

Monday

Daniel Korski

It’s what comes after Operation Moshtarak that matters

Fighting is now well under way in southern Afghanistan, as NATO forces are executing Operation Moshtarak. The plan is aimed at shoring up security around Kandahar city and recapturing the remaining Taliban strongholds in Chah-e-Anjir, Western Babaji, Trek Narwa and Marjah in Helmand province, though the latter is getting all the publicity. The operation has been billed as "NATO's biggest" and a "test" of the new counter-insurgency policy, designed to first eradicate militants and, then, follow up re-establish government control and civil services. These claims may have been exaggerated for effect.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Con Coughlin & His Critics

David has already highlighted some of the more dubious arguments Con Coughlin deploys in response to his critics but a couple of other points may still be made. Con writes: If I understand correctly Alex Deane’s high-minded rant about the rights of innocent people receiving a fair trial (which, just to put the record straight, I fully support), he is prepared to accept at face value former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed’s claim that he was brutally tortured during his interrogation with the full complicity of British security officials. David Davies, the former shadow Home Secretary, made a similar argument on the Today programme this morning, preferring to believe the word of Mr Mohamed rather than our own intelligence establishment.

Daniel Korski

The End of Charlie Wilson’s War

Rarely are obituaries so full of parties, history-changing events and personal contradictions as those of ex-Congressman and rebel-armer Charlie Wilson, who died last night aged 76. War will mix with cocaine. Burqa-clad women will mingle with strippers. "Good Time" Charlie's life was genuinely remarkable. Described as "one the most distinctive" congressmen, he spent most of his time partying until he found the cause of a lifetime: ejecting the Soviets from Afghanistan. As detailed in the book and film "Charlie Wilson's War", the Texan politician used his contacts and seat on a powerful Congress committee to arm the Afghan rebels. And he did it in style - all buttoned-down, white-collared shirts, college ties and striped suits that would make Gordon Gekko envious.

Alex Massie

Charlie Wilson’s War is Over

Charlie Wilson in Afghanistan. I guess the movie they made of Charlie Wilson's War is now more famous than George Crile's book. That's a shame because the movie, while entertaining, ain't half as revelatory as the book which is more than just a political thriller explaining how - with only some exagerration - a lone Congressman funded and armed the mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. It's a terrific piece of work and an excellent, if extreme in the particulars, introduction to the way the United States Congress actually works. Or worked back then, anyway, in the age of Tip O'Neil when Congress was more powerful, or perhaps simply insisted upon its prerogatives more keenly than it does now. Well there aren't too many Congresspeeps like Charlie Wilson these days.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Will British judges be “responsible” for the next terrorist attack?

Con Coughlin has an awful piece up at the Telegraph arguing that, in the light of today's decision in the case of Binyam Mohamed, "if another al-Qaeda bomb goes off in London, the judges will be as much to blame as Osama bin Laden." Seriously. That's what he wrote. It's as preposterous as it is repellent. Happily, over at Conservative Home, Alex Deane does an excellent job dismantling this and the rest of Coughlin's diatribe here. The crux of Coughlin's argument - in as much as there is one beyond the notion that the judiciary is inviting al-Qaeda to attack the United Kingdom - lies in the idea that the disclosure of the treatment meted out to Mohamed would damage this country's intelligence-relationship with the Americans.

Friday

John Bew

Talking to the Taliban | 29 January 2010

After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered. Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for holding secret talks with Taliban in December 2007, President Karzai has become an advocate for such negotiations over the last two years. In the Spring of 2009, Saudi Arabia hosted tentative negotiations between Karzai’s representatives and former Taliban, with links to the current movement. But the idea now has a head of steam behind it.

Fraser Nelson

Blair wants to tell Iranian tales

Iran. That’s the news story which poor Mr Blair is trying to spin to the panel – but they don’t pick up on his hints. It would have all been all right in Basra – he’d like to say - if it hadn't been for those pesky Iranians. As Prime Minister, if he blamed Iran in public then that would have had implications. He’d have had to follow up on it. But now he wants to tell us, or he would if those chaps on the panel would kindly probe him on it. When he was talking to Baroness Prashar he tried to start: “If what you’d ended up having was an indigenous violence or insurgency, or criminality and looting and so on…” She wasn’t interested “We’ll come to that later…” and handed over to Chilcot.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Is the West rich enough to buy the Taliban?

The Lancaster House conference commences this morning and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has penned a stupefyingly worthy article in the Times, playing the same old tunes about the intention to 'improve governance, fight corruption and bring Taleban fighters back into society if they are ready to lay down their arms.' The Afghanistan mission has clarity of purpose in that attempts to build a democracy have been abandoned in favour of establishing lasting Afghan security. The nascent strategy relies too heavily on the Afghan National Army; as Daniel Korski notes, the non-ideological Taliban, those inscrutable soldiers of fortune, will facilitate or undermine stability.

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate

Whitehall has turned into the lobby of the UN General Assembly, as dignitaries gather to give NATO’s Afghan campaign renewed impetus. Will it all amount to much? It depends. In this piece for the magazine E!Sharp I set out my stall: '[if the conference] is to achieve anything more than fill out the evening news, the gathering must have only one aim: to help Hamid Karzai begin reaching out to insurgents and fence-sitters, drawing them into a negotiation that can drain the insurgency of all but the religiously-committed warriors.' Part of this will involve giving money, jobs and security guarantees to foot-soldiers, as I recommended in a report back in 2008. But now this will probably not be enough.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The Eikenberry cables: today’s Ellsberg papers

Sometimes government leaks tell the public what they did not know. But sometimes leaks just confirm what everyone knew. The view held by the US ambassador in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” and “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,” will come as no surprise to anyone. But the timing of the leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s cables in The New York Times will nonetheless be quite explosive. Does it matter? Not really. Hamid Kazrai has in most people’s minds joined Anastasio Somoza García, Ngo Dinh Diem, even for a while Saddam Hussein as the West’s, well, what was that phrase used by FDR? He is what there is. Period.

Daniel Korski

Kabul needs a big UN beast

The London Afghanistan conference is meant to appoint a civilian NATO coordinator to help align the counter-insurgency effort. The well-respected British ambassador in Kabul, Mark Sedwell, is a front-runner (as, incidentally, was Geoff Hoon until he plotted against Gordon Brown). If the press just publish the news, many questions will go unanswered. That's not right. For the new post means that a two-year effort to make the UN the main aid coordinator has failed, and the appointee is likely to produce little unless individual NATO allies award him some spending power - a very unlikely scenario. There is nothing easier than to add a job to solve a problem, and sometimes it is the right thing to do.

Friday

Daniel Korski

Cutting drugs

On Wednesday, Baroness Kinnock told the Lords that a number of Foreign Office departments had been hit been hit by an estimated £110 million budget shortfall, and that an anti-drug program in Kabul has been cut.  Coming after British dismay at President Karzai's desire to put Afghanistan's former (and widely-discredited) Interior Minister, Zarar Ahmad Moqbel, in charge of the country's anti-drug effort, the cuts are bound to cause concern. Afghanistan is the world's leading supplier of opiates, trafficked as opium, morphine and heroin. Over 90 percent of the heroin on the UK's streets originates from Afghanistan. Though cuts to counterterrorism programs are probably ill-advised, there is less reason to worry about the impact on any anti-drug efforts.

David Blackburn

Has Brown got anything to hide?

Proof positive that Brown listens, sometimes at any rate. The Prime Minister will give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry before the election. Chilcot has been resolute in his wish to keep politics out of the probe, which suggests that No.10 may have put in a call following the mounting clamour for Brown to appear. Brown is something of master in expressing defiance with a single line: “I have nothing to hide,” he averred on Wednesday. Might this sudden decision prove to be, as Sir Humphrey might have said, courageous? As Daniel Korski noted two weeks back: 'Brown’s role in the Iraq War, not that of Blair, that is the most obscure part of Britain’s modern history. As chancellor, Brown was the second most powerful man in government. He held the purse strings.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Poor communication is damaging the Afghan mission

He may be a chateau-bottled shyster, but there is no better communicator of policy than Alastair Campbell. He has penned an article in the FT arguing that the lesson that should have been learned from the Iraq war was how to communicate strategic ideas and objectives. The lack of clarity that came to define Iraq now afflicts Afghanistan: ‘It was hard to discern that approach in the run-up to the Afghan surge being announced, or after it. The surge should have been followed by co-ordinated communications across the alliance. That job is not being done with the vigour and consistency that it should, and the systems of co-ordination have weakened since Iraq.

David Blackburn

Ultimately, Brown is responsible for these anti-terror cuts

Seriousness comes naturally to Gordon Brown and yesterday he gave a speech detailing how Britain is defending itself by striking at the heart of the ‘crucible of terror’. What Brown has in seriousness of delivery, he lacks in realism. Britain has not fought for such a sustained period since the high-water mark of empire; but the ambitions of two prime ministers, and to be fair the severity of the threat that Britain faces, have outstripped resources; Britain is now completely over-extended. Hours after Brown’s speech, Baroness Kinnock divulged that anti-terror measures run by the Foreign Office have been cut – anti-narcotics campaigns in Afghanistan and de-radicalisation programmes in Pakistan.

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

David Miliband’s big idea: an Af-Pak-India Council

An idea that has received little media attention in Britain, but is giving Foreign Office diplomats sleepless nights, is David Miliband’s push for a "regional stabilisation council" involving Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, to be unveiled at the international conference scheduled for January 28. The idea is seen as an innovate way to bring the three countries together, while at the same time allowing the Foreign Secretary, who will formally host the conference, to show leadership and initiative. The pretender to the post-election Labour throne needs something to get rid of his “Banana Boy” epithet. So far, however, the idea is not meeting with local support.