by Alex Evans | Feb 8, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Gideon Rachman was with the dynamic duo as they touched down in Kabul. He reports that the security was so tight that it would have been impossible for the pair to form any impression of their own of what was actually happening:
The “security situation” here is so dicey that the arrival of the American secretary of state and Britain’s foreign secretary could not be advertised in advance. In fact my Foreign Office companions became highly agitated when I mentioned on an “open line” (ie a mobile phone call home) that I was sitting in a motorcade at Kabul airport, with Rice and Miliband in the car ahead, waiting to be swept along to the president’s palace.
The security is so tight that it must be virtually impossible for visiting western dignitaries to form any spontaneous impression of Afghanistan. Rice and Miliband arrived early this morning on an unadvertised flight from London. They were immediately put on a military plane to Kandahar – but did not leave the military base there. Then it was back to Kabul, and a short drive to see President Karzai on a road that had been cleared of all traffic. Then it was time to visit some more troops in a gym at Nato HQ. And that’s it. Condi is off tonight. Miliband is staying for a formal dinner. I’m sure they will have had “frank discussions” with President Karzai. But they must be completely reliant on their diplomats for any impression of how things are going.
And, he adds, he’s been hearing some worrying comparisons:
I’m slightly disturbed by occasional echoes of the Russians’ unhappy period here. When there was some discussion about whether our plane would be able to land on a snowy Kabul airport, an Afghan remarked – “The Russians always landed in the snow.” And when there was talk of sending girls to school in Afghanistan, I was told that the Russians had been keen on that too.
by Alex Evans | Feb 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
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.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 2, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
Americans have an innate ability to tell it like it is. And so I find myself listening intently to how NATO needs to meet 5 strategic challenges otherwise its doomed to failure. They are:
- To move from Article 5 operations to expeditionary warfare
- To shift up several gears to meet the level of ambition needed in the alliance
- To work on the comprehensive approach at national levels – at the tactical level things seem to be going ok
- To determine the identify of NATO – regional or global power
- To respect a new definition of security.
No one disagrees. Everyone nods their head. In the background I begin to hear a familiar Jackson song…’ABC easy as 123′
by Alex Evans | Feb 1, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
In the margins of Wilton Park’s conference on European security in 2020, a timely reminder that for some of the delegates here – who, collectively, represent a clear majority of European states – the concept of ‘European security’ is much more real than for other delegates (like us Brits, who tend to see it as an interesting theoretical exercise in blue sky thinking).
Talking to two eastern European diplomats over lunch today, I asked them how they felt about the argument – made by a western European participant yesterday – that NATO had expanded too fast during the 1990s, and that perhaps some of Russia’s misgivings about the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement were understandable.
Rubbish, they answered immediately, and with surprising intensity. Both cited chapter and verse on when Russia had invaded their respective countries – and how many of their compatriots had been lost. Only when Russia was on the back foot, as it was during the 1990s, did their countries have a chance to make progress in foreign policy. From the point of view of many eastern European foreign ministries, recent Russian behaviour – on energy, on Lugovoi, on the British Council – is a totally predictable reversion to type.
by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | North America
Yesterday, in the context of writing about the government’s new Counter Terrorism Bill, I was discussing why MCarthyism had never made real inroads in the UK during the 1950s. Today, what should drop into my inbox but an NY Times review of a new book aiming to rehabilitate Senator Joseph R McCarthy. David Oshinsky – himself a previous biographer of McCarthy – writes:
A full-throated defense of the senator is now in the bookstores. Written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative journalist whose roots stretch back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, it carries a title, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” (Crown Forum, $29.95), that well explains its thesis. But “Blacklisted by History” is drawing significant attention on the political right, where the reviews have ranged from gushing (The Weekly Standard) to scathing (National Review). If nothing else, Evans has forced his movement friends to look again at McCarthy. For conservatives, the crazy uncle has finally left the attic.
So what can we expect to read about if we buy the book?:
Evans buys into the heart of the McCarthy conspiracy — the belief that leftist elements in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a foreign policy to advance the spread of world Communism.
How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? “Who lost China?” propelled McCarthy to the national stage. Along the way, he described General George C. Marshall, the nation’s most respected military commander, as a Communist dupe; urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; purposely confused the names of the convicted perjurer and likely Soviet spy Alger Hiss and the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (“Alger — I mean Adlai”); and called Harry Truman a “son of a bitch” who made his key decisions in the midnight darkness while drunk on bourbon.
McCarthy blamed the fall of China on “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Evans not only endorses this conspiracy but actually expands it to include “the Eastern, internationalist faction” of the Republican Party, “with ties to Wall Street, large corporations, big Eastern media outlets and Ivy League establishment.” To Evans, the conspiracy passed from president to president — from Roosevelt and Truman to Eisenhower and even Nixon, a former McCarthyite, who “would fall off the teeter-totter, landing with Henry Kissinger in Red China, thereafter pushing on into the mists of détente with Moscow.”
Okaay…
