Fight them there or fight them here?

Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday's shooting dead of  five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.

Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain -- drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.

He accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities," a tacit acknowledgment that Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services.

His "Fortress Britain" theory takes into account indications that a growing number of experts feel the war against the Al Qaeda's supporters the Taliban in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It also makes the point that not all Al Qaeda training camps are in Afghanistan anyway.

Howells is Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog and his theory goes counter to the prevailing wisdom in Washington and London, both of which are preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Do you agree with him?

One can guess what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will say to Pope Benedict when the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion travels to the Vatican later this year. The more interesting question might be what  Queen Elizabeth is likely to say when she hosts the pope next year.

(Photo: Queen Elizabeth, 13 June 2009/Luke MacGregor)

The timing of the trips couldn't be more intriguing, especially the second one. The pope is due to visit Britain in September 2010 and is expected to preside there over the beatification of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, a famous 19th-century convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

The queen is, after all, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, many of whose flock the pope is seeking to poach with his offer last week allowing Anglicans to convert en masse while keeping many of their traditions. And among her honorifics is "Defender of the Faith." While that sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to Benedict's long string of titles including "Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church." But oneupmanship is a British sport, so one never knows how these things can turn out.

It is unclear how many CofE traditionalists, upset at moves to ordain women bishops and the issue of homosexuality, will move over to Rome, but the conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith suggested 12 Church of England bishops may switch - more than a quarter of their total.

It was suggested by the Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this month, before the Vatican effectively sabotaged decades of dialogue between the two churches, that the pope would receive a warm welcome at Buckingham Palace. "The warmth of her welcome will come as no surprise to the pontiff," it said.

Citing sources speaking to the Catholic Herald weekly, the Telegraph said the queen has "grown increasingly sympathetic" to the Roman Catholic Church over the years while being "appalled," along with her son and heir Charles, at developments in the Church of England.

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 11 Oct 2009/Max Rossi)

The Sunday Telegraph in July said the queen had told the heads of a traditional group that she "understood their concerns" about the future of the 77 million-strong global church.

But whether the warmth will stand up to the pope parking his tanks on her lawn, as Ruth Gledhill described it in The Times -- especially Buckingham Palace's lawns -- would be astonishing.

As head of her faith she must defend her church, and can do so on an equal footing in both political and spiritual terms, Vicki Woods of the Telegraph wrote. "When Pope John Paul II met the queen on his visit to Britain, he was for once wrong-footed," she pointed out.  "She spoke to him not as a fellow head of state but as a fellow head of the church: her church. Her faith. Which she defends. He was quite taken aback."

It is not only her church's clergy and laity which are up for grabs, but possibly also the buidlings.

And it was Queen Elizabeth I, after all, who so staunchly defended the English Reformation introduced by her father Henry VIII in 1534 in his dispute with Rome over his desire to divorce one wife and marry another.

The queen has already potentially been slighted by her Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who it has been reported in the media, apparently personally invited the pope to visit Britain during a private audience last February.

"He should read Carla Powell's diary in The Spectator," Woods wrote.  "Gordon Brown says he invited His Holiness, which if true would represent a gross breach of protocol. Only the queen can invite a head of state to Britain."

(Photo: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, 11 Feb 2009/Kieran Doherty)

The queen, needless to say, has said even less than her archbishop. The older royals don't often leave themselves open to be quoted. On one of the rare occasions they have, the late queen mother was reported to have only commented that church services should not last beyond an hour. The archbishop has barely said much more in response to the pope other than he did not see it as "an act of aggression" and that it would not derail dialogue between the two churches.

But when you become the focus of general sympathy, you must know that you have probably been dealt a rum deal.

The fact that the archbishop was only notified two weeks before the pope revealed just how far he was prepared to go in accommodating the Anglo-Catholics must have left him "starting to wonder if he has any friends left," Gledhill wrote in the Times over the weekend.  "He is like the academic boy at school who no one wants to play with because he doesn't understand the rules of fisticuffs," she added.

Many religious figures have been indignant at the way the Vatican has behaved towards Williams, with his predecessor George Carey urging him to protest at its "appalling" injustice.

The Vatican is expected to reveal more details about the offer in the next week or two. The conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith debated the offer in London at the weekend and decided its members would be consulted, with a decision due in late February after the CofE general synod.

Some women priests say that timing is cynical, based on emotional blackmail.

"It is beginning to sound like an abusive marriage," said the pro-women ordination spokeswoman Reverend Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, chaplain at University College, Durham, in northern England. She suggested the disaffected will threaten to leave unless concessions are made on the possible ordination of women bishops, which is due to be discussed at the synod.

(Photo: Rev. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes)

The Vatican made moves 17 years ago to attract Anglicans when the ordination of women priests was being discussed.  "They could say we will leave unless you do this and that," she  said.

What do you think? Will Queen Elizabeth surprise Pope Benedict and defend the faith, as she did with Pope John Paul? Or will diplomacy prevail?

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British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has launched a rearguard action to revive Tony Blair’s candidacy to be president of the European Union.

For weeks, the former British prime minister was the front-runner for the post which will be created in the 27-nation bloc’s Lisbon reform treaty, which is still awaiting the signature of the Czech president.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, his initial sponsor, said he would have a hard time getting the job because Britain had not joined the euro single currency.

In a television interview on Sunday, in a speech on Monday and at a briefing with reporters in Luxembourg, Miliband set out his vision for a strong Europe that needs a leader like Blair.

“There is a precedent to be set about whether or not we want a strong leadership figure,” Miliband said. “My own view, in that context, is that Tony Blair, if he is a candidate, would be a very good choice.”

He said the changes set out in the Lisbon treaty offered an opportunity for the EU to renew its foreign policy.

“I genuinely believe that unless Europe does so, we will find … that a G20 informally, if not formally, emerges as the key decision making axis in the world - the U.S. and China,“ Miliband said.

He dismissed “as flanking manoeuvres” complaints about Britain’s absence from the euro zone and the borderless Schengen area, and about Blair’s decision to back the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

“This is about every country thinking: do we want a strong collective direct European voice in the world? And this is a job that needs someone who is persuasive, an advocate of a strong vision and committed to coalition-building. And I think that’s what Tony stands for,” Miliband said.

Does Blair still have a chance to become the first president of the EU’s council of leaders? Diplomats say that although his chances have receded, much will depend on the EU’s big powers - France and Germany.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner did not rule it out during foreign ministers’ talks in Luxembourg. He said he backed Blair but that there were others involved in any decision.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has not made her views clear on Blair but she now has agreement on a new coalition and is expected to show her hand soon.

President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain have deliberately raised the stakes in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme by dramatising the disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant. Their shoulder-to-shoulder statements of resolve, less than a week before Iran opens talks with six major powers in Geneva, raised more questions than they answer.

It turns out that the United States has known for a long time (how long?) that Iran had been building the still incomplete plant near Qom. Did it share that intelligence with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, and if not, why not? Why did it wait until now, in the middle of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, to make the announcement -- after Iran had notified the International Atomic Energy Authority of the plant's existence on Monday, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered a defiant speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday and after the Security Council had adopted a unanimous resolution calling for an end to the spread of nuclear weapons on Thursday?

Is this all part of Obama's choreography to  build international pressure on Iran by getting Russia, in return for the dropping of plans to put a U.S. missile shield in Poland the Czech Republic, to threaten more sanctions against Tehran? A U.S. official says Obama shared the intelligence with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev at the United Nations this week and China had only just been informed. Did Obama try and fail to get Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao -- both in Pittsburgh -- to join the three Western leaders on the podium? Or was his hand forced on timing by the fact that the New York Times had got wind of the Iranian nuclear plant and was set to publish the news on Friday?

The division of labour between Obama, Sarkozy and Brown was striking. The U.S. president sounded stern but his tone was measured. He stressed his commitment to dialogue and negotiation with Iran and to Tehran's right to peaceful nuclear energy. He did not mention sanctions, let alone the possibility of military action. It fell to the Europeans to inject a tone of menace.

Sarkozy accused Iran of defying the international community and taking the world on a dangerous path, and said that unless Tehran changed course by December, there would be tougher sanctions. Brown charged the Islamic Republic with deception and said the international community had no choice but "to draw a line in the sand", and that he did not rule out anything although sanctions were the preferred route. 

Will the latest disclosure on what Iran insists is a peaceful nuclear programme persuade Russia to renounce the sale of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran? Will it persuade China, which reaffirmed its scepticism about more sanctions this week and has begun supplying gasoline to Iran, to change its mind? The West sees Iran's dependency on imported fuel as a key vulnerability.

Friday's dramatic announcement was a clear effort to appeal to the world court of public opinion and maximise pressure on Tehran before the Oct. 1 talks, but there is no sign that the Islamic Republic's leaders are even considering yielding on their nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, they seem convinced that the nuclear standoff will enable them to patch over deep internal divisions over the disputed June presidential election by playing the patriotic card.

One thing we’ve learnt from the crisis is that if something sounds funny it probably is. All that talk about slicing and dicing subprime debt to turn it into triple-A securities was hard to understand at the time and now we know it was just the 21st century equivalent of alchemy.

The current debate about the responsibility that surplus countries like China, Germany and Japan share for the crisis has a similar ring.

Plenty of people warned that the huge deficits and debts that countries like the United States, Britain and Spain ran up over the past decade were unsustainable. Recently the argument has been made that the countries that sold the Americans and Brits all those things they bought on credit share the blame.

In economic terms, it takes two to tango: if one country has a deficit, there must be a surplus somewhere else. In fact, if you run a big surplus, you are practically forcing someone else to have a deficit.

Well before the crisis broke, in March 2005, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke discussed the “global savings glut” as an explanation for the persistent and rising U.S. current account deficit.

In recent weeks, The Economist has subjected the economies of surplus countries China, Germany and Japan (as well as that of the United States) to critical examination in a series on “rebalancing the world economy”. In its latest edition, for example, it describes the Japanese as “serial exporters”.

People in those countries need to loosen up a bit, spend more, take longer holidays (the Germans? oh the Japanese), deregulate their service sectors and stop obsessing about selling us stuff that is so cheap or of such high quality that we can’t resist it. That way they’ll help us to spend less and save more and the world will be in perfect harmony.

To be fair, the Economist acknowledges that the last attempt to get the Japanese to spend more, in the 1980s, got out of hand, creating a huge bubble whose effects Japan and the rest of the world are still recovering from.

But doesn’t this sound a little like an effort to spare American and British voters from having to make painful adjustments?

We all know from looking at our own communities and circles of acquaintances that, usually, if you live beyond your means you eventually have to pay a price, which may mean tightening your belt and doing without things for a while.

It’s hard to argue that the guy up the road who works hard, lives frugally, and never runs anything up on his credit card is somehow responsible for our plight. We can resent his smugness and pity his boring life, but blame him for our mess? Hardly.

You can imagine a village where some people work hard and others sit back and enjoy themselves. Of course, if everyone else is so poor or in debt that they can’t afford to buy anything, the honest craftsman may have trouble selling his wares. To that extent surplus and deficit countries are linked.

But the basic difference between thrift and extravagance has been understood, intuitively, for thousands of years. Aesop described it quite well in his fable of the grasshopper and the ants.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Tango REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

Bubbles REUTERS/Claro Cortes

Grasshoppers REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

Ants REUTERS/Juan Carlos Ulate

The death toll among British troops in Afghanistan is rising fast.  The soldier who died on Tuesday was the seventh to die in the last week and the 176th since the war began.

Last Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe became the highest ranking British soldier to die in the conflict in Afghanistan when he was killed in Helmand. British commanders are quoted as saying things are going to get worse before they get better.

Not surprisingly, doubts are being raised about the price being paid in Afghanistan, about the nature of the mission itself and whether security can ever be made effective enough to rebuild the country after 30 years of war.

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth concedes there is gloom about the rising death toll but rejects comparisons with the Vietnam war that lasted over 15 years and says there is a "real sense of momentum" in Afghanistan.

Do you believe Britain should stay in Afghanistan?

Has German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck finally said what many world leaders think but are afraid to say? That the British government won’t sign up to meaningful reform of financial markets because it is too worried about what it would mean for the country’s most famous cash cow, the City of London.

The City, which accounts for around 35 percent of global foreign exchange turnover, has been a popular target for critics of capitalism for years. But it has rarely been singled out so bluntly as a problem by one of Britain’s close allies.

Even for a man not known for holding his tongue, Steinbrueck’s remark on Wednesday that Downing Street was impeding reform because it had “practically aligned” its interests with the City, was unusually undiplomatic. Just days before global leaders meet at a Group of Eight summit in Italy, Steinbrueck suggested the British government was plotting a “restoration” of the pre-crisis order to protect its own interests. The United States, by contrast, was now open to reform, he said.

Rather than attempting to smooth ruffled feathers when she addressed parliament on Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel picked up the thread, saying she would not tolerate efforts to stall reform at the G8 summit, though she did not name Britain.

Steinbrueck’s comments generated a strong response on German websites. Though he belongs to the centre-left Social Democrats, many readers of conservative daily Die Welt wrote in to praise him. “Finally the truth”, “genius” and “backbone” were some of the remarks his stance provoked. Across the channel, the most popular reader’s comment posted online in an article by Eurosceptic British newspaper the Daily Mail also backed the 62-year-old. “I’m with the German finance minister,” it begins.

Whether one agrees with his approach or not, Steinbrueck knows he is not talking into a vacuum. Large swathes of the commentariat believe not enough has been done to stabilise financial markets over the long term. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, wrote on Wednesday that without radical changes, another banking crisis is inevitable.

PHOTO: German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck addresses a news conference in Berlin, May 13, 2009. Steinbrueck said on Wednesday Germany’s interbank lending sector was still suffering from weak confidence. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Germany’s defence minister gets his tongue in a twist every time he tries to explain why the German army is not in a “war” in Afghanistan, even though more and more German soldiers are coming home in coffins.

“If we were to speak of ‘war’ then we would only be focusing on the military aspect in the region and that would be a mistake,” Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said after three more German soldiers were killed on Tuesday, raising the total to 35.

“The goal of the German army is, alongside providing security, to help the country rebuild and with its development. We are not occupiers. Unfortunately there are situations where our soldiers have to fight. But we’re not looking for fights.”

Jung sounded even more opposed to the term “war” in a television interview: “That is not war. In a war you don’t build schools, you don’t set up the water and power supplies and you don’t build kindergartens and hospitals and you don’t train the military and the police.”

Jung is not in an enviable position as the conservative defence minister of a deeply pacifist country that has had to jump over some very long shadows of its troubled past before it was able to send troops abroad as part of international peacekeeping operations. That Germany is even part of a military deployment abroad and getting involved in combat despite the ghosts of its past is something that I could not possibly have imagined when I first came to the country in 1989.

Yet Germany has the third-largest contingent of NATO forces in Afghanistan — 3,720 soldiers concentrated in the north — even if the German forces are not allowed to shoot unless fired upon first and their Tornado aircraft are restricted to unarmed reconnaissance flights.

Public opinion is nevertheless overwhelmingly against Germany’s involvement in the NATO mission in Afghanistan — even though West Germany was a prime beneficiary of NATO’s unyielding support during the Cold War. With their post-World War Two indoctrination against war on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, it is hard to underestimate the deep anti-war sentiment throughout Germany — they are weaned on the notion of Nie Wieder Krieg! (War never again!). And Jung’s party, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, is eager to win the parliamentary elections in three months — and does not want any turbulence or a national debate about Afghanistan to get in the way.

Military leaders have quietly grumbled about how Merkel has largely avoided the whole Afghanistan complex and left Jung on his own to take the heat.

So that is why Jung, who last year was at the centre of a similar semantics debate about his reluctance to use the military-sounding term “fallen” (”Gefallene”) when talking about troops killed, is now soldiering on for his party and is forced to perform semantic backflips to avoid uttering the word “Krieg”. He repeatedly rejects any suggestion that German troops are involved in “war” even though his long answers to the simple question — “Is Germany at war?” — only invite more journalists to press him again and again for a clear answer.

The centre-left Social Democrats, partners in Merkel’s ruling grand coalition, are growing tired of Jung’s verbal gyrations. “The chancellor has to come out and explain to the people of Germany: this is a deployment in which people could get killed and we are in a war against terror,” said Peter Struck of the SPD, who leads the SPD’s parliamentary group and was a highly popular Defence Minister before Jung took over in 2005.

And the SPD’s Reinhold Robbe, parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, indirectly criticised Jung’s avoiding the term “war” once again this week. “It’s still being denied that the German army is fighting a war in the Hindukush,” Robbe said. “We’ve got to stop turning a blind eye to the facts.”
(Additional reporting by Dave Cutler in London)
PHOTO - Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung attends a session of the German lower house of parliament Bundestag in Berlin, June 18, 2009. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

- Luke Baker is a political and general news correspondent at Reuters. -

The mountains and deserts of southern Afghanistan are far removed from the elegant charms of Trieste in northern Italy, but there will be a link between the two this weekend.

Foreign ministers from the Group of Eight nations meet in the Italian city on the Adriatic on Thursday for three days of talks, with the state of play in Afghanistan, as well as developments in Iran and the Middle East, front and centre of their agenda.

Nearly eight years and tens of billions of dollars on from the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the Taliban, the United States and its allies appear no closer to bringing long-term stability to the country, with the Taliban resurgent throughout the south and west and the instability expanding across the border into Pakistan.

One of the major areas of unrest is Helmand, a vast desert and mountain province in the far south where around 8,000 British troops have been deployed for 3-1/2 years and 10,000 U.S. Marines are steadily being sent in as reinforcements.

While 18,000 troops backed by helicopters, jets, Predator drones, armoured vehicles and endless advanced weaponry may sound like more than enough of a match for bands of bearded militants who usually aren't armed with much more than a Kalashnikov rifle, it's not always the case.

Helmand, split down the middle by the Helmand river, is larger than Switzerland and has a daunting mix of terrain that the Taliban and their followers are far more familiar with than foreign troops sweating in heavy, cumbersome combat gear. And it's not just the challenges of the topography, it's the sheer size of the area that stretches any army's capability.

When I was in Helmand late last year, British troops at a Forward Operating Base in the far north of the province told me that they didn't have enough troops or back-up to venture any further than three kilometres from their small fortified camp to take on the enemy.

"The Taliban know it. If we attack them, they go just over three kilometres away and we have to come back to base," an officer at the remote outpost told me.

The absurdity of that situation partly explains why Britain and the United States have acknowledged that Helmand is currently in a "stalemate", a position they hope will be broken with a new strategy and the increase in troops in the coming months.

But the deadlock in fighting and the need for more manpower-- there are 90,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 50 percent less than in now relatively more stable  Iraq -- is not the only concern on the agenda for the G8 foreign ministers.

As well as trying to agree amongst themselves how they can best support the U.S.- and NATO-driven effort, they need to assess the implications of non-cooperation from Iran, on Afghanistan's western border, and the widening instability in the Pakistan tribal areas on Afghanistan's eastern border. Iran was due to send a delegation to the G8 meeting, but in the wake of international condemnation of the fallout from its disputed presidential election, it has cancelled its participation.

Afghanistan's election in August, when President Hamid Karzai will seek reelection despite broad unpopularity in the country and among some of his Western backers, will also be a focus of discussion. Karzai's high-profile makes him stand out among the 41candidates registered for the Aug. 20 poll. That greater degree of visibility is likely to secure him enough votes for reelection, according to some opinion polls, even if many Afghans express frustration at the scare progress made during his past 5 years in power.

Politically, socially and militarily, Afghanistan remains hugely in flux nearly eight years on from the Taliban's overthrow. While army commanders admit there can be no military solution to the conflict, diplomats and development experts are struggling to find a political way forward either.

Three days of talks among eight foreign ministers in Trieste is unlikely to go very far in resolving what is becoming an ever more intractable conflict 5,000 kilometres away.

For days now Britons have been regaled with newspaper stories detailing the dubious expense claims of their Members of Parliament.

The Honourable Members, it seems, have been charging for everything from a few thousand pounds for clearing a moat to a few pence for a new bath plug. An outraged nation has risen almost as one to denounce its greedy lawmakers.

But while the various schemes devised by the members of the Mother of Parliaments are ingenious in the way they exploit the generous rules laid down by the "Fees Office" of the House of Commons, they do lack a certain scale.

When it comes to separating the state from its money, politicians in Africa, for example, show none of the inhibitions of their British colleagues.

In Nigeria this month two senior lawmakers investigating corruption in the power sector were detained in connection with a scam involving electricity contracts. How much money involved? $41 million.

In March, Nigerian police arrested a former state governor who is under investigation for misappropriation of funds totalling $170 million.

Enormous sums of money compared with the thousands of pounds involved in Britain, but still small change compared to the billions stolen by Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Nigeria's Sani Abacha.

It's still not clear what the consequences of the British case will be.

But perhaps there are signs that African politicians cannot always rely on a blind eye being turned on their financial affairs.

The prosecutor's office in Paris is trying to block an investigation into corruption allegations against three African presidents who have amassed luxury homes and fleets of cars in France.

Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (who all deny wrongdoing) may never appear in a French court.

But anti-graft campaigners argue that the case does at least mean that the leaders' usually secret financial affairs are now being discussed in public.