But the real stand-out blog here is from Sherard Cowper-Coles, our man in Kabul. Apart from the fact that he’s written far more content than any of the other bloggers (and posted four YouTube videos in a week), it’s also much more interesting. This is less for what he says about policy (not much, for obvious reasons, though he is forthcoming about differences with the US over aerial spraying), and more for what you learn about operational realities. It’s intriguing, for instance, to learn that the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency has “a big presence” in Afghanistan, and still more so to discover that HM Ambassador whiles away his Friday nights getting thrashed by DFID Kabul’s head of comms on a Nintendo Wii.
Still, if there’s one piece of content in particular that’s worth a look, see Cowper-Coles’ interview with Brig. John Lorimer, the outgoing Commander of Task Force Helmand. Asked by Cowper-Coles to offer “a few thoughts” about Helmand, Lorimer emphasises “good progress”. How? Well, relationships with the Governor and some of his line ministers are “much improved”. And levels of cooperation between the military team, the FCO and DFID are “a real step forward” [from what? – ed.] But, er, what about the military side?
The aim has always been to say goodbye to the enemy and that’s what we’ve done and we have beaten them many many times during the last six months.
Which just about says it all where fourth generation warfare is concerned… Still, top marks to Cowper-Coles for public diplomacy. (Has he been reading David Kilcullen?) There’s something refreshingly un-Foreign Office about an ambassador who talks you through a visual tour of the Kabul skyline while a member of his Royal Military Police close protection team obligingly acts as cameraman.
David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, given at Chatham House earlier today, is worth watching (transcript on the FCO website here). He’s proposing to simmer the UK’s ten current international priorities down to perhaps three, mooting radicalisation, climate change and the EU as his “starters for ten”.
Especially welcome was the emphasis on Foreign Office reform, policy coherence and the need for a new theory of influence for 21st century diplomacy (which, regular readers will know, David Steven and I both have a tendency to bang on about). In his conclusion, he noted that:
The Foreign Office is a unique global asset. But diplomacy has to be allied to other assets across government, in particular, aid, trade, investment and military intervention. How can we improve coordination across the FCO and other departments on particular countries and challenges?
[…and there’s the question of] how can we engage beyond Whitehall, with faith groups, NGOs, business and universities. The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters.
But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun farmer, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.
But the real stroke of genius here was to ask Avaaz to co-host: an awesomely smart piece of positioning. Rather than waiting for Avaaz to dump a global petition on him during some crisis still to come, Miliband has actively set out to court their global network of supporters – and succeeded. Having been invited to co-host and canvass questions for Miliband from their global roster of members and supporters, Avaaz are now positively purring about David – titling their coverage of his speech, “David Miliband – a new diplomacy?”
Last week’s UK-sponsored debate on climate change in the Security Council this week was always going to be contentious, as the Guardian and the Times of India reported (see also a letter to the FT yesterday from UK special representative on climate change John Ashton). As China put it: “The developing countries believe that Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change — nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.”
The G77 group of developing countries, together with China, have long been acutely sensitive to any perceived encroachment of the Security Council into non-security areas. ‘Soft’ issues like climate change, they argue, belong in the UN’s Economic and Social Council, or indeed in the full General Assembly; but emphatically not in the Security Council, which is seen as an exclusive great powers’ club.
From the perspective of the Foreign Office in London, by contrast, the Security Council debate was an example of ‘disruptive political action’ that could highlight the extent to which climate change is becoming a security issue. As Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett put it, “an unstable climate will exacerbate some of the core drivers of conflict — such as migratory pressures and competition for resources”.
Both China and the UK have a point. For last week’s squabble illustrates a crucial point: that just because climate change doesn’t belong in the Security Council, isn’t to say that it sits any more comfortably anywhere else.
Amidst the predictable froth about ‘strategic plans’, ‘program evaluations’, ‘senior reviews’ and ‘departmental performance plans’ in the US State Dept‘s 2006 Performance and Accountability Report, there are a few small gems.
One of the more eyebrow-raising is the table starting on page 71 that sets out State’s own evaluation of how it’s doing on a range of key objectives. Across a lengthy range of indicators, there are just three where State judges itself to be ‘above target’ or ‘significantly above target’. One of them – ready for this? – is “stable political and economic conditions that prevent terrorism from flourishing in fragile and failing states”.
