ISAF Locations
Context
NATO feels the strain
Tempers are fraying in NATO. Following Canadian PM Stephen Harper’s threat to withdraw its troops from Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan if other NATO countries don’t send additional troops to help, Germany has now rejected calls for it to send more help to the south. Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy sums up views in DC:
…if NATO members cannot support the military effort in Afghanistan, you have to wonder what it is that these countries stand for.
Here at Wilton Park’s conference on European security in 2020, tempers are fraying too. There’s dark muttering in some of the discussions in the margins that whatever Germany may say about only having signed up for peacekeeping duties in the north, the reality is that Germany sent troops to Afghanistan in order to curry support for its bid for a permanent Security Council seat in 2005, but isn’t there for its overstretched allies when the going gets tough. Chatham House’s Paul Cornish takes a similar view in the Telegraph today:
“Nato is in operations now and the whole of Nato has made this commitment to Afghanistan, so why should it be mainly American and British and Canadian boys who are fighting and dying? This all goes back to the key question about the health and vitality of the trans-Atlantic security relationship. Here we are, in extremis, and other Nato member states just don’t stump up the troops.”
Interestingly enough, though, the Weekly Standard – of all publications – thinks that US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has some blame to shoulder for the fractious nature of discussions, as Michael Goldfarb sets out:
Both the content and timing of Gates’s blunt letter to his German counterpart Franz-Josef Jung, which was leaked yesterday by the center-left paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, have left even staunchly pro-American politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU parties supporting Chancellor Merkel astounded and annoyed…
Current opinion polls indicate that about two-thirds of all Germans want an immediate Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan, but despite this growing public pressure, Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU allies are strongly committed to the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission and considering doing more (like in the case of [the Quick Response Force in northern Afghanistan). Given this highly charged domestic political context, aggressive demands from abroad that Germany deploy additional combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan tend to play into the hands of those who want a complete German military pullout.
A license to be awkward
Some of the presentations today have been excellent but have highlighted the desperate need for alternative approaches to some of the problems governments are facing in weak and failing states. But the stomach for taking risks inside of governments has disappeared. We need to bring back the imagination and resourcefulness of the 1970s and early 80s.
It may have become fashionable in policy circles to talk of red teaming, the “structured, iterative process executed by trained, educated and practiced team members that provides commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners’ and adversaries’ perspectives.” But we don’t do it.
As Lord Butler noted in his review of intelligence on WMD, ‘well developed imagination at all stages of the intelligence process is required to overcome preconceptions. There is a case for encouraging it by providing for structured challenge, with established methods and procedures, often described as a ‘Devil’s advocate’ or a ‘red teaming’ approach. This may also assist in countering another danger: when problems are many and diverse, on any one of them the number of experts can be dangerously small, and individual, possibly idiosyncratic, views may pass unchallenged..
At times of uncertainty and criticism the response is usually to bunker down, keep information tightly controlled and react react react…. But everything we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere has shown we need to do the opposite. We need individuals who have a license to be awkward, and in doing so help all of us tackle the complex problems of today and tomorrow.
Winning on wicked issues
I’ve got an article in this month’s World Today, Chatham House’s monthly magazine. It’s about the UK’s approach to national security. Here’s a taster:
British Governments have rarely taken a strategic approach to national security, preferring instead to focus separately on issues of defence, foreign affairs,development and intelligence. Invariably, this has led to narrow strategies, which have centred on individual Whitehall departments, or created new agencies and units to meet emerging security challenges.
In the wake of September 11 2001 for instance, the Security Service MI5 moved away from managing a portfolio of risks, which included organised crime, to focus almost entirely on the threat from international terrorism. Nearly all the service’s work on organised crime was passed to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, an amalgamation of a number of different organisations including the National Crime Squad and National Criminal Intelligence Service, which was established by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill of 2005.
Current operations, policy decisions and legislation also prevent the government from taking a strategic approach. At present most of the Ministry of Defence’s time and resources are devoted to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the new Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, based in the Home Office, focuses on counter terrorism, rather than wider security issues, as originally envisaged by the former Home Secretary John Reid.
Most important of all, an institutional bias is alive and well in Westminster, Whitehall and beyond. Instead of discussing the global risks to Britain, recent debate on national security has focused on the roles of government institutions rather than the problems that need to be solved. Some commentators have lamented the decline of the Foreign Office, while others have questioned the increase in spending on development aid at a time when savings have to be found in the defence budget. It is a depressing cycle of claim and counter claim which smacks of short-termism and a lack of leadership across government.
Karzai’s divide and rule strategy
Last week saw Dan Korski’s excellent new paper on Afghanistan – and, following the announcement of Paddy Ashdown’s nomination to be the UN’s Envoy to the country, signs that Afghan leaders were concerned about the appointment. Today’s news suggests such speculation was if anything too cautious: the Afghan Government are digging in their heels and have made it clear they do not want Paddy Ashdown. Period.
The West, for its part, is hoping that Lord Ashdown will help bolster the entire international effort in Afghanistan – nothing like the weight of the (western) world on one’s shoulders. Will there be a compromise? Let’s hope not: the Afghan Government’s new preferred candidate is General Sir John McColl, a British General who has already served in Afghanistan.
So why not Ashdown? According to the Afghan ambassador to the UN, their reason for wanting General McColl is based on an assessment of “…who is going to be more helpful and who is going to be more able to work with the Afghan government and with different elements of the international community in Afghanistan.”
Ouch.
Update: Ashdown has pulled out of the role, having told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that the job needed Afghan government backing which did not exist. As the BBC’s coverage notes, Hamid Karzai has recently criticised the performance of British troops fighting the Taleban in Helmand province; note that while Karzai is criticising UK policy he is also praising US involvement.
Update 2: The FT reports that the UN is unlikely to welcome a serving soldier (General McColl) as head of its mission in the country. Many officials already worry that the neutrality of the UN, whose agencies oversee a huge amount of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan, has been un-dermined by its political activities and close involvement with Isaf.