by Charlie Edwards | Jun 27, 2008 | UK
(Updated 26 July 2008)
By my estimation the UK’s national security strategy is 100 days old. So what initiatives from the UK NSS have gained traction? What ideas have been quietly dropped? And what proposals are still hanging around in the ether?
In his statement to the House of Commons Gordon Brown listed the following:
1. The publication of first a ever cross-departmental strategy for supporting service personnel, their families and veterans. To be published in mid/ late July (my guess Thursday 17th July)
2. Increase the the number of security service personnel by 4000. Ongoing but growth constrained by training capacity
3. A 10 per cent increase in resources for the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre To be confirmed – relatively easy to do.
4. Set aside funds to modernise GCHQ’s interception capability. To be confirmed
5. Publication of a national register of risks. Published soon
6. The creation of a National Security Forum. NSF will be a NDPB. See here for details
7. Introduction of a resolution in both Houses that enshrines an enhanced scrutiny and public role for the Intelligence and Security Committee. No obvious sighting – to be confirmed
8 & 9. A new bargain to non-nuclear powers and an international conference on the related issues later this year. No news – unless conference was this one (which I don’ think it was)
10. The creation of a standby international civilian capability for fragile and failing states (Brown commits 1000-strong UK civilians including police, emergency service professionals, judges and trainers). No news
11. Between now and 2011 £600 million for conflict prevention, resolution and stabilisation work around the world, including in Israel and Palestine, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan, Kenya and the Balkans. Not new money but I think a repeat announcement from last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review.
12. Britain to pay for 850 Burundian troops as part of the African Union peacekeeping force. Confirmed
13. Creation of an integrated civilian-military headquarters headed by a civilian in Helmand. To be confirmed
14. 30 per cent Increase in Foreign Office staff to Middle East and South Asia. Ongoing
15. Creation of a UK wide civil protection force. (Initiative seems to have been dropped)
If I have missed any initiatives out/ or you know things have changed please post a comment.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 25, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
This afternoon I’m giving a presentation to the Sandhurst Defence Forum. The subject of my talk: Strategic Myopia develops some of the themes from the report I wrote last year and focuses on a number of issues resulting from the publication of the UK’s first national security strategy.
There hasn’t been much news on the UK NSS for sometime (no one seems to have noticed, for example, the civil defence force initiative has been quietly dropped). That said, today’s papers are ablaze with news of Sir Jock Stirrup’s warning that sustaining operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq is becoming almost impossible. From his interview with the press gallery:
“We are not structured or resourced to do two of these things on this scale on an enduring basis but we have been doing it on an enduring basis for years,” Sir Jock said. “Until we get to the stage when one of them comes down to small scale, we will be stretched beyond the capabilities we have.”
3 things spring to mind:
- Where is the Defence Secretary Des Browne? Aside from the MoD’s official spokesmen, General Sir Richard Dannatt and the CDS seem to be the only ones who speak on behalf of the department. Is there any political leadership in the MoD?
- Have the MoD really developed any sustainable planning assumptions going forwards (see after the jump)?
- Is this all actually a ruse to get a better deal out of the forthcoming white paper on support for the military?
Stunts like Liam Fox’s announcement last week for military families to get preferential access to public services is nice PR but hideously impractical. But it plays well with the media (though I doubt it plays well with the military).
The point is that announcement like Sir Jocks increases the need for a new defence review. Given this is very unlikely before the general election in 2010, the MoD has got to come up with a sound strategy for the next couple of years. Keeping Minister’s quiet and letting General’s do the talking should not be part of it.
Bonus post: If like me, you have been wondering why the defence planning assumptions seem to increasingly irrelevant and out of step with current operations I’ve posted some information on the current DPAs after the jump (more…)
by David Steven | Jun 23, 2008 | Global system, Middle East and North Africa, North America
Alhurra – the Arab language TV station and America’s most costly public diplomacy boondongle – has been regularly slagged off, but this superb report from Pro Publica patches all the criticism together into a damning indictment.
Here was the promise – in George Bush’s 2004 State of the Union:
As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East. We will challenge the enemies of reform, confront the allies of terror, and expect a higher standard from our friend. To cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda, the Voice of America and other broadcast services are expanding their programming in Arabic and Persian — and soon, a new television service will begin providing reliable news and information across the region.
And here’s the reality:
- Half a billion dollars spent for an audience share of around 2% (about the same as Hezbollah’s TV station – which is run on a shoestring).
- Can’t document its expenditure to the satisfaction of its auditors.
- Run by a President who doesn’t speak Arabic, who is “is unable to understand anything broadcast on the radio and television networks he is paid to manage,” and who sits through editorial meetings without being provided with translation.
- Based in Springfield, Virginia, where it employs “an untrained, largely foreign staff with little knowledge of the country whose values and policies they were hired to promote.” (Yes, the Simpsons is set in Springfield. No, it’s not the same one. Yes, it might as well be.)
- Regularly slags off the US and supports the policies of its enemies. Describes Israel as waging a holocaust against the Palestinians.
- Promised to fire a reporter who “told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust” but didn’t.
- Believed by the US’s (former) top public diplomacy official in the Middle East to be stocked “with radical Shi’a Islamists who favored their political brethren and discriminated against and intimidated members of other parties … especially during the Iraqi electoral season.”
- Found by the State Department’s Inspector General to have had a hiring process that “may have been marred by favoritism toward Lebanese candidates or candidates of Lebanese ancestry.” Put a Lebanese hairdresser on a $100k salary to do the news anchors’ hair.
- Paid guests $150-1500 dollars for a single appearance – even if they were from Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
- Doesn’t even cover the United States as well or in as much depth as Al Jazeera.
Read the whole thing and weep.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 23, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa
You have to hand it to three US intelligence amigos: Donald Kerr , Tom Fingar and Mike McConnell. They don’t just subscribe to the concepts of need to share and the responsibility to provide intelligence. They are systematically trying to embed new processes across the intelligence architecture.
One of the key areas they are currently eyeing up is diversity – for pretty obvious reasons. The agencies need to better understand countries like Indonesia and China, find and develop new technologies and listen to and share from different experiences (think more outreach to think tanks and academic institute). In a speech to The 2nd Annual Intelligence Community/Heritage Community Summit Donald Kerr gives an example of diversity in action:
In this work there are countless stories about the importance of diversity. There’s one I recently learned from an FBI intelligence analyst who had worked on Saddam Hussein’s debriefing team in Iraq. While Saddam was being interviewed, a key component of the strategy was to keep him isolated from people outside of the FBI agencies who were questioning him, but he was fluent in several languages. Not deeply so, but sufficiently, and the interviewers needed to find guards who could speak a language that he wouldn’t understand.
It turned out to be really difficult. He knew bits of Spanish, but not the rapid fire Spanish of Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rican speakers would really flummox him, they certainly do me. And that’s what the FBI settled on for his guards. US military members who were native Puerto Ricans in terms of the Spanish that they spoke.
by David Steven | Jun 19, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
Remember Curveball? The intelligence ‘source’ who supplied ‘virtually all of the [US] Intelligence Community’s information on Iraq’s alleged mobile biological programs.’
As a refresh, here’s what the US Presidential Commission on intelligence screw-ups made of the episode:
One of the most painful errors… concerned Iraq’s biological weapons. Virtually all of the weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed “Curveball,” who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community’s biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source’s reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball’s flaws in the weeks before war.
Well Curveball – real name Rafid Ahmed Alwan – has just given his first media interview and it turns out that he’s even more of a sad sap than we realised. He’s remained in Germany, from where he is denying everything:
I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life. I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But he seems to have told some fairly obvious lies in his fifty or so meetings with German intelligence (meetings that were used in 100 or more US intelligence reports):
He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif’s son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.
When a Western intelligence team interviewed Latif outside Iraq in early 2002, a year before the war, he warned that Alwan had been fired for falsifying invoices at work. Latif also denied that anyone produced biological weapons at the plant where he worked with Alwan.
“They thought I was lying,” Latif, who now lives in Oman, said in an interview. “But I was telling the truth. It upset me very much
A serial fraud, who had been fired from numerous jobs, Alwan fled Iraq after a warrant was issued for his arrest for the theft of cameras from his employer. But German intelligence thought he was a good source because he “was understated…the opposite of a braggart, and that was impressive.”
Colleagues at Burger King (purveyor of the Whopper) where Alwan flipped burgers were less easily fooled:
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein’s regime.
They couldn’t decide if he was dangerous or crazy.
“During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad,” said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. “But he always lied. We never believed anything he said.”
Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be “a big deal” in Iraq. “How could America believe such a person?”
My thoughts exactly.
