So Prime Minister Gordon Brown has succeeded – by the skin of his teeth — in getting Britain’s House of Commons to approve new police counter-terrorism powers that were condemned by civil liberties groups, a former prime minister, a U.N. human rights investigator and several dozen of Brown’s own Labour MPs. The Guardian newspaper writes about ‘Liberty, security and an anxiety over lost rights’.

And even the government admits the power to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before charging or releasing them has never been needed until now: it wants it as an insurance policy against future attacks or plots in which the police may need more than the 28 days they now have in order to investigate tangled international links, false identities and masses of encrypted computer files.

So what’s going on? The bald figures suggest Britain is way out of step with other democracies. The six weeks allowed under the bill for initial questioning of terrorism suspects compares with one day in Canada, two in the United States, Germany, South Africa and New Zealand, five in Spain and 12 in Australia.

But the bald figures don’t tell the whole story. Police in most European countries, for example, hand cases over to a judge or prosecutor after the first few days and the suspect may wait in jail for months or years while the investigation proceeds. Britain can also plausibly argue, on the basis of the number of plots intercepted in the past few years, that it is more threatened than most countries by al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Opinion polls suggest the public backs Brown on this issue, although his overall popularity rating is dire. And with the House of Lords likely to oppose the bill and send it back for re-consideration by the lower chamber, Brown is far from being out of the woods.

Expect more debate in coming months on possible alternative means of tackling terrorism — particularly on whether to let British police, like their counterparts nearly everywhere else, use evidence from tapping suspects’ phones as ammunition to prosecute them in court.

Despite the embarrassment caused this week when a senior security official left top-secret intelligence documents on a train, the British authorities have a strong record in countering terrorism. Since 2004 the country has seen at least one major plot each year, and many smaller ones. Only one succeeded: the July 2005 London suicide attacks that killed 52 people. So far, 2008 has been a quieter year — but the emergence of any major new threat could once again shift the goalposts in the security debate.

At the Munich Conference on Security Policy back in 2003, Joschka Fischer stared down Donald Rumsfeld and told him what he thought about Washington’s case for invading Iraq.

“I am not convinced. That is my problem,” the feisty German foreign minister told a glaring Pentagon chief.

Five years on, Iraq has dropped down the agenda of this high-profile annual gathering of foreign policy and defence experts, but it still casts a long shadow over U.S. efforts to press its policy in Europe.

This year in Munich, the focus has been on Afghanistan. U.S. officials, spearheaded by Rumsfeld’s successor Robert Gates, have pressed European nations to send more troops there and take a more active role in repelling a fierce Taliban insurgency.

On Sunday, Gates made a case for Afghanistan that might have made even Fischer proud — but Iraq is getting in the way.

“Our mistakes in Iraq have made it hard to convince Europe to do more in Afghanistan,” Lindsey Graham, Republican U.S. Senator from South Carolina told me. “These are two different conflicts but they are lumped together here.”

That’s partly the Bush administration’s fault. It has lumped Afghanistan and Iraq together under the banner of its “global war on terror”.

As long as Bush remains in office, it will be hard for European leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel to convince their deeply sceptical publics that a stronger commitment is needed in Afghanistan.

When a President Clinton, McCain or Obama comes knocking, it may be tougher to resist.

Gen. John Craddock, NATO’s supreme allied commander, Europe, surprised American reporters by using soccer to explain his problems in Afghanistan.

Craddock,  a four-star U.S. Army general, says he does not have as many troops as he needs and too many nations place restrictions on how their soldiers can operate.

“It’s kind of like we’re a soccer team that’s two players short and I can’t move the defenders of midfield to attack and I can’t move the forwards back to defend,” he told members of the Pentagon press corps travelling with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

One American reporter joked he was impressed the Belgium-based commander had been in Europe so long that he could use soccer metaphors.

But Craddock felt the analogy came in handy in explaining his problems to European governments.

“They understand that here. They don’t understand football,” he said, referring to the American game.

As the travelling Pentagon press this time contains a Scotsman and a French reporter, his point was not entirely lost on his audience on Sunday.

It is ironic that one of the world’s foremost gatherings on defence and diplomacy takes place in the city linked to one of the most colossal gaffes in the history of statesmanship.

Perhaps the great and good who make the annual trip to the Munich Conference on Security Policy shudder to recall that here was where major powers signed a 1938 pact with Nazi Germany that merely emboldened Hitler in his quest for European domination.

Yet still they keep coming year after year to spend two days closeted away in a plush Bavarian hotel to pore over today’s security worries, be they the chill in Russia-West ties, transatlantic exasperation, or what to do with Iran.

Launched in 1962, the conference attracts presidents, chancellors, four-star generals and diplomats by the score.

Aficionados know it by the German name “Wehrkunde” — roughly, “defence craft” — and call it the Davos of the defence world because of its pulling power.

By and large, regular attendees — including the hundreds of journalists jammed into a press room so cramped it is like spending a weekend strapped into an economy-class air seat — expect and get a pretty good show.

Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin turned up to unleash a volley of abuse at the United States, accusing it of trying to become the world’s “one single master”.

“I do hope historians in future don’t say another world war broke out here,” Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit weekly said at the time in comments that were only partly a joke.

In 2003 German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer stunned the audience with one of the most blunt diplomatic put-downs seen in public, telling U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld he did not believe the case for invading Iraq — barely minutes after Rumsfeld himself stepped up to the podium to present it.

Some credit that exchange itself for contributing to the subsequent downhill slide in U.S.-German relations that are still being repaired.

True, some Wehrkunde events can appear a little formulaic.

The Americans accuse west Europeans of not pulling their weight militarily, who in turn indignantly preach “values” to the Americans.

Then everyone agrees on the vitality of the “Euro-Atlantic partnership” before heading for the beer halls and the sausages.