Global News Journal

NATO summit sparks emotions in Germany

Judging from their comments, this week’s NATO summit will be an emotional event for Germany’s leading politicians — some of whom grew up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

Angela Merkel, Germany’s first chancellor to have grown up in communist East Germany, praised the “historic dimension” of the summit, which marks the 60th anniversary of the military alliance and comes 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. ”Memories of Wall and barbed wire (make us realise) Germany has to thank NATO and its allies’ solidarity for a lot… Re-unified Germany celebrates 20 years of German and European happiness,” the 54-year-old told parliament. Merkel said the summit, held in the French city of Strasbourg and the German towns of Kehl and Baden-Baden across the river Rhine, would take place where “German and French once stood as bitter enemies… and are now united in friendship”. 

Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung, 60, who grew up in West Germany, revealed his memories of NATO and the Cold War this week, telling journalists about his feelings as a young German soldier when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. ”If something had happened then, Germans would have stood against Germans. We were in NATO and the people now living in Germany’s eastern states were in the NVA (the German Democractic Republic’s military). ”We were trained to stand against each other,” he said. “From there, we’ve come to create an army of unity in Germany. That’s a great achievement,” he said, referring to Germany’s growing role within NATO.

But although the NATO summit will be high on symbolism — its logo are elements of the bridge spanning the Rhine — the  leaders meeting from Thursday will also address issues which are likely to cause friction and heated debate.  NATO’s relationship to Russia is a disputed question. The alliance’s choice of a new head has already sparked vivid debate. And partners will discuss their strategy to solve the violent conflict in Afghanistan. U.S. President Barack Obama has already made clear he will seek fresh committments from partners for combat forces, trainers and equipment. And although the summit’s two hosts, Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have both praised the meeting as a symbol of Franco-German friendship, they have clashed on a serious of economic and foreign policy issues in past months.

The “historic” summit marking 60 years of transatlantic friendship could turn into a pragmatic gathering dominated by topical and conflictual debates.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Are the Pakistan Taliban charting an independent course?

For some weeks now there have been persistent reports about Taliban leader Mullah Omar, asking fighters in the Pakistani Taliban to stop carrying out attacks there and instead focus on Afghanistan where Western forces are being bolstered.

The reclusive one-eyed leader had in December sent emissaries to ask leaders of the Pakistani Taliban to settle their differences, scale down activities in Pakistan and help mount a spring offensive against the build-up of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a report in the New York Times said as recently as last week.

But the attacks haven't stopped. If anything they have become even more brazen, with the Sri Lankan cricket team attacked in Lahore earlier this month and then Monday's rampage through a police academy, again in Lahore. Between these two major attacks,  there has a been suicide bombing in a mosque in the northwest near the Afghan border, a car bombing outside Peshawar and a blast in Rawalpindi, turning March into one of the bloodiest months in recent times.

And on Tuesday, Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a rather rare move, claimed responsibiity for the storming of the police training centre in Lahore, destroying whatever was left of Mullah Omar's reported calls for cooling off in Pakistan.

Is Mehsud going off-message ? Or is he setting another course?

Mehsud told a Reuters reporter that the attack on the police academy was to avenge U.S. missile strikes by unmanned aircraft. These Predator drone raids have been focused on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) including South Waziristan, his base.  According to U.S. army officials these attacks have taken a toll, accounting for a significant  number of senior al Qaeda figures.

Keeping an eye on the Taliban

By Jonathon Burch   “Contact at Woqab. They’ve made contact,” says Devos calmly before running to the edge of the rooftop to have a better look into the distance with his binoculars.

“What do you mean they’ve made “contact”?” I ask, trying to see where his binoculars are pointed. “Small arms fire at Woqab,” he says pointing beyond a line of trees in the distance. Suddenly I feel exposed, standing in the open, three storeys off the ground.   The place is Musa Qala in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province and Devos is a 26-year-old soldier from Nepal serving in the British Army’s 2nd Battalion Royal Gurkha Rifles. His job is to man the lookout on top of the British base inside the district centre, about a 30-minute helicopter flight across the desert from Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand.

Helmand lies in the heartland of the growing Taliban insurgency, which the United States has vowed to stamp out as part of a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Barack Obama brings that plan with him to Europe this week to win support from NATO allies. Washington says the fight cannot be won by military means alone, but bringing insurgents in from the cold will be no easy task.   But Musa Qala DC (District Centre), as the base is called, might as well be thousands of miles away from Bastion, consisting of little more than a few tents, a helicopter landing pad and tall, sand-filled blast barriers that line the perimeter.   In the middle of the base, however, stands a decrepit two-storey concrete building — nicknamed “Taliban Hotel” after its former inhabitants who used to control the town — that now serves as the centre for British military operations in the area. It is on top of this building that Devos and I are standing.   Minutes earlier Devos let me use his binoculars to see a group of Afghan women he had spotted, gathered outside a compound, one kilometre or so from where the sound of gunshots now echoed. “I think something is up,” he said, “I think something is going to happen. Why do you think they’re gathered like that?”   “They’re probably just coming from a wedding,” said Omar, our Afghan photographer, reassuringly. But Devos wasn’t so sure. And he was right. The women, it turned out, had fled towards the town centre, knowing there would be an attack.   Dotted around Musa Qala DC, are more than a dozen smaller patrol bases, manned by British and Afghan soldiers, keeping a lookout for insurgents and trying to extend their, and ultimately the Afghan government’s, sphere of control.   Woqab marks the most northern of these patrol bases in the Musa Qala district and, therefore, the “frontline” between British troops and the Taliban. It comes under frequent attack, normally around the same time every afternoon.   Musa Qala itself is a small dusty town sitting on the edge of a shallow river that cuts through the dry desert, providing a strip of lush green on either side. It is a traditional opium-trading town and poppy fields in full bloom grow undisturbed only hundreds of metres from the British base.

 After the Taliban were driven from power in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks, the extremely light presence of international troops in Musa Qala and Helmand, and the near-absence of the Afghan state, allowed the insurgents to regroup and turn the town into one of their major centres of power.   British troops entered Musa Qala in mid-2006, only to pull out again in October the same year, after daily Taliban attacks that at times reached their perimeter defences. They left the collection of shabby concrete shops and houses under the control of tribal elders in a truce criticised by their U.S. allies.   But the Taliban seized the town again in February 2007 and proceeded to set up a shadow administration and their own courts. Ten months later, thousands of British and U.S. troops launched an offensive to capture Musa Qala from several hundred Taliban fighters, paving the way for the Afghan army to move in and seize the town.   Since then, British and Afghan forces have been trying to extend their area of control to the north and south of Musa Qala DC. The strategy has so far been a success, the British army are keen to point out, saying roadside bombs and small arms attacks within the town centre have decreased over the last few months as the insurgents have been pushed further out.   But success is always relative. While attacks in and around the town centre have indeed dropped — although there was a suicide bombing in the main bazaar in December last year which killed the deputy district police chief — the area the British and Afghan forces “control” measures no more than 10 km from north to south. An important and strategic area, no doubt, but a dot on the map in terms of scale.   “Do you see those trees over there? Beyond that is Taliban. And those over there? Taliban!” says Afghan army captain Sabir, standing on the rooftop of the base and pointing off into the not-too-far distance.   Meanwhile the QRF, or Quick Reaction Force made up of three British armoured Warrior vehicles, screams out of base towards Woqab. News of a casualty has come over the radio. After firing a few mortar rounds to push the insurgents back, the QRF returns to base.  On board is an Afghan policeman with a gunshot wound to his chest. He is stabilised in Musa Qala DC, and then airlifted by Chinook to Bastion for surgery.   He will probably live, but the pot shots at the patrol bases and the roadside bombs will continue.   The Gurkha Regiment lost their first casualty in Afghanistan last November. The soldier was shot by insurgents during an operation to extend British control to the south of Musa Qala.   “Did you know him?” I ask. “He was my cousin,” says Devos, “I was there.”

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

How will Obama tackle militants in Pakistan?

Read President Barack Obama's speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he said a year ago and it's hard to see how much further forward we are in understanding exactly how he intends to uproot Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

Last year, Obama said that "If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan's border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot." Last week, he said that, "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.  And we will insist that action be taken -- one way or another -- when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets."

The United States has already stepped up attacks by drone missiles on suspected militant targets in Pakistan's tribal areas since Obama took office, despite official protests by Pakistan, which says they are counterproductive since they cause civilian casualties and encourage people to support the insurgents.

The Pakistani protests began to look rather hollow after media reports that the drones were taking off from a base inside Pakistan. But that may have missed the point. The question of where the drones are based is perhaps less important than the distrust between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries on sharing intelligence about militant targets.

General Ashfaq Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, tells a rather revealing story about this. He is quoted in Brian Cloughley's book "War, Coups and Terror" as describing the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience (he doesn't say what happened to the monkey). "This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding," writes Cloughley.

"The monkey incident, and other attacks by the U.S. within Pakistan," adds Cloughley, "have convinced the population of North West Frontier Province and a disturbing number of other citizens, including many in uniform, that there is nothing to be gained by supporting the United States, which they consider to be overbearing and imperceptive in its engagement with the country."

from UK News:

Ghost of past failure haunts G20

Stopping off in New York during a marathon, 18,000-mile diplomatic offensive before next week’s G20 summit in London next week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled a conference held in eerily similar circumstances in London 76 years ago.

Sixty-six nations gathered for the June 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference which was aimed at lifting the world’s economy out of the Depression.

But amid American opposition to European plans to return to a system of fixed exchange rates, the conference collapsed and the world put up trade barriers, jobless ranks swelled and the rise of Fascism took the world into war.

“There was no further progress other than a resort to protectionism for the rest of that decade,” Brown told a business audience during a five-day pre-summit tour that has taken him to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, New York, Brazil and Chile.

Brown must be hoping desperately that history will not repeat itself when he hosts a meeting of leading industrial and developing economies in London on April 2 to try to chart a way out of the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s.

Again there have been signs of transatlantic division in advance of the summit, with many Europeans resisting U.S. pressure for more fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, while the Europeans put the emphasis on tightening regulation of the financial sector.

Mirek Topolanek, prime minister of the Czech Republic which holds the current European Union presidency, was quoted this week as saying U.S. President Barack Obama’s huge economic stimulus plan was “the road to hell”.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Obama takes Afghan war to Pakistan

U.S. President Barack Obama set out his strategy to fight the war in Afghanistan on Friday, committing 4,000 military trainers and many more civillian personnel to the country, increasing military and financial aid to stabilise Pakistan and signalling that the door for reconciliation was open in Afghanistan for those who had taken to arms because of coercion or for a price.

He said the situation was increasingly perilous, with 2008 the bloodiest year for American forces in Afghanistan. But the United States  was determined to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan", he said, warning that attacks on the United States were being plotted even now.

But it is the emphasis on Pakistan that seems to be the most significant shift in the U.S. strategy since it went into Afghanistan more than seven years ago, with an avowedly aggressive carrot and stick approach. Time columnist Joe Klein said the most important aspect of the security review was a refocusing on the situation in Pakistan. "The terrorist safe havens in the tribal areas is the heart of the problem."

Obama left little doubt that Pakistan was going to be front and centre of the war in Afghanistan, declaring this is where the top al Qaeda leadership was based.  And that their presence there posed a threat to not just America, but countries around the world from Europe to Africa and above all to Pakistan itself.

Here are some excerpts from his speech relating to Pakistan.

"In the nearly eight years since 9/11, al-Qaida and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier. This almost certainly includes al-Qaida's leadership: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They have used this mountainous terrain as a safe haven to hide, to train terrorists, to communicate with followers, to plot attacks and to send fighters to support the insurgency in Afghanistan. For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world."

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Garrisons and force protection crowd out other objectives in Afghanistan

- Joshua Foust is a defense consultant who has just spent the last 10 weeks embedded with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He also blogs at Registan.net. Any opinions expressed are his own. -

It is a cliché that, in counterinsurgency, one must be among "the people". In Iraq, the U.S. Army did this to great effect under the leadership of General David Petraeus, moving large numbers of soldiers off the enormous bases and into smaller, community-oriented security outposts. As a result, in densely populated urban areas like Baghdad, an active presence of troops played a significant role in calming the worst of the violence. The Western Coalition forces in Afghanistan, however, face an altogether different problem. Kabul is not Baghdad - far less of Afghanistan's population lives there than in Iraq, and the insurgency is concentrated outside the country's largest urban areas. In many urban areas-Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, Mazar-i Sharif in the north-a westerner is far safer in the city itself than out in the countryside.

A rural insurgency is a devil's game. It is difficult for a foreign counterinsurgent force to concentrate itself to maximize effectiveness, in part because the insurgency itself is not concentrated. When there are no obvious population clusters, there are no obvious choices for bases. Bagram Air Base, the country's largest military base, is in the middle of nowhere, comparatively speaking - dozens of miles north of Kabul, and a 45-minute drive from Charikar, the nearest city in Parwan Province. FOB Salerno, a large base in Khost Province, is miles away from Khost City, the province's capital-and the road in between is riddled with IEDs.

The many smaller bases strung in between are surrounded by enormous Hesco barriers, concertina wire, and guard towers. No one is allowed on the base without being badged and interviewed by base security, and in many places delivery trucks are forced to wait in the open for 24 hours before completing their trips to the dining halls, clinics, or technology offices.

There are other ways in which Coalition Forces are separated from the people of Afghanistan beyond their heavily fortified bases. Most transit - on patrol, on delivery runs, or on humanitarian missions - is performed through Mine Resistance Ambush Protection, or MRAP vehicles. These enormous trucks, thickly plated with metal blast shields on the bottom with tiny blue-tinted ballistic glass, make it near-impossible to even see the surrounding countryside from another other than the front seat.

On the narrow mountain roads that sometimes collapse under the mutli-ton trucks, soldiers drive, too, in up-armored Humvees, which are similarly coated in thick plates of armor and heavy glass windows they aren't allowed to open.

When soldiers emerge from their imposing vehicles, they are covered from head to groin in various forms of shielding: thick ceramic plates on the torso, the ubiquitous Kevlar helmets, tinted ballistic eye glasses, neck and nape guards, heavy shrapnel-resistant flaps of fabric about the shoulders and groin, and fire-resistant uniforms. A common sentiment among Afghans who see these men and women wandering in their midst is that they look like aliens, or, if they know of them, robots.

from Africa News blog:

France and Africa. New relationship?

Before Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007, he made clear he wanted to break with France’s old way of doing business in Africa – a cosy blend of post-colonial corruption and patronage known as “Françafrique” that suited a fair few African dictators and the French establishment alike.

He has made the same point during his past visits to the continent.

“The old pattern of relations between France and Africa is no longer understood by new generations of Africans, or for that matter by public opinion in France. We need to change the pattern of relations between France and Africa if we want to look at the future together,” Sarkozy said in South Africa early last year.

This week he is back in Africa for a visit on which France’s business interests play a very prominent role.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sarkozy called on the country to work with former foes Rwanda and Uganda in a partnership based on exploiting the region’s natural riches.

Another stop was in neighbouring Congo Republic to see President Denis Sassou Nguesso, an old friend of France who seized power in the oil-producing state in 1979, lost it in a 1992 election and then returned five years later via a civil war. In the past, Congo Republic symbolised as much as anywhere the old style of diplomacy.

After the Congos, the schedule takes Sarkozy to Niger, a particularly important country for nuclear power dependent France because of the uranium mining interests of French state-controlled nuclear energy group Areva. It is building a huge new mine in Niger, where the government is fighting Tuareg rebels who demand more of the region’s wealth.

Chili’s owner Brinker dishes on global expansion

Brinker International which owns casual dining restaurants Chili’s Grill & Bar, Maggiano’s Little Italy and On the Border brands, says that outside the United States it’s on track to open about 300 outlets over the next five years which would bring it’s total overseas presence to about 500…many of those are already located in the Middle East and Mexico. Even though the company’s international president John Reale concedes there has been a slowdown in sales “they are still up in the high single digits” which is more than they can say in the U.S. where mid-tier chains across the board have seen comparable-store sales turn negative as consumers tighten their budgets. Reale says the biggest challenge for the remainder of 2009 is trying to understand consumer behavior, but he does see a bright spot. Prices for real estate around the world, which had prevented the company from opening in some locations, have come down “30 to 40-percent.” Click here to hear what Brinker International President John Reale had to say:Reale interview from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

Business as usual as governments crumble in E.Europe

The Czech opposition toppled Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s minority cabinet on Tuesday in a no-confidence vote. Three days earlier, Hungary’s prime minister said he would resign to let someone else pull that country out of its economic mire. Although serious, the developments were far from surprising if complaints about the economic crisis by anti-government parties and disgruntled voters were anything to go by.

But don’t blame it all on the economic crisis. Even with unemployment on the rise and housing prices tanking, wobbly governments in this region are nothing new and political mayhem is still far off.

In fact, only a handful of governments have ever won re-election in central and eastern Europe since the fall of communism, and none twice. A mid-term collapse is much more common. Now opposition parties ever on the lookout for opportunity — Topolanek’s no confidence vote on Tuesday was his fifth — have the deteriorating economy on their side. But that might also be a poison pill, particularly in countries like Hungary or the Baltics, where whoever holds sway will have to enact deep spending cuts to level out their imbalanced economies — spending cuts that won’t be popular among the voting public.

And who says those ousted from power actually step aside? Take the energetic Latvians. The country of 2.3 million has run through 14 governments since it quit the Soviet Union in 1991 in a revolving-door style of politics in which the same parties continue to cycle in and out of power. Its new prime minister is Valdis Dombrovskis, a former finance minister, who formed a six-party coalition including the four parties of the government that collapsed in February due to the economic crisis. One of his first actions was to approach the International Monetary Fund and the EU to let his cabinet spend more than originally agreed when Riga took a 7.5 billion euro rescue package last year, a move that has been received coolly by the Fund.

In Hungary, the soon-to-be-former leader of the ruling Socialist-led coalition, Ferenc Gyurcsany, sparked riots in 2006 when he let slip in a leaked tape that his party lied “in the morning… in the evening… and at night” about how bad the economy was so he could get re-elected. Now the economy is much worse off. Budapest had to agree to a $25 billion IMF-led bailout last year, under which it will have to make unpopular spending cuts. The economy will shrink by as much as 5 percent or more this year, according to some analysts. Gyurcsany tried to push through reforms but had to pull back due to public resentment. So now it’s time for a change in government, right? Wrong. Although Gyurcsany won’t be in the driving seat, his Socialists are working on a government with their former ruling partners the Free Democrats. The Free Democrats have called for strict budget prudence, which is exactly what the IMF and economists have prescribed for years, while Gyurscsany will remain the head of his party, with the potential to maintain some power behind the scenes. But the question is how viable any state spending cuts will be with budget revenues plummeting along with growth.

Topolanek’s case is also nothing new. The Czechs haven’t had a strong majority government since 1996, which still didn’t stop them from attracting billions of dollars in foreign direct investment, joining NATO and the EU, enjoying growth of 5 percent for several years running, and keeping their budget relatively in check. And even after losing Tuesday’s no-confidence vote, Topolanek, like Gyurcsany, will seek a new mandate for his party as well. Analysts say there’s only one way out of the situation for “super-deficit” countries like Hungary and Latvia, and that is to cut back. The Social Democrats who toppled Topolanek will want to spend more on social sectors if they can take power, but how far will they be able to go when tax revenues are falling with growth?