-Clare Algar is executive director of Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

Disappointed, but not surprised, was my first response to hearing President Barack Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not make the January 22 deadline for closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

During attorney visits over the past few weeks, Reprieve’s clients in Guantanamo have expressed their doubts regarding whether President Obama can live up to his promise to close the prison within a year of assuming office. ‘What is he going to do,’ one man asked, “put 200 people on a plane on the 22nd?”

And it is true – the maths doesn’t work.  Around 245 prisoners were being held in Guantánamo when Obama was inaugurated in January of this year and only around 30 men have left since then. If releases continue at this snail’s pace, the prison won’t close until at least 2017.

Who are the people who are left in the prison and why is it proving so hard to close? First there are the 90 or so prisoners from Yemen who the United States will not repatriate because of the country’s instability.  Another 65 people are considered prosecutable in federal courts or military commissions, the details of which are still being hammered out (the latest development being the recent announcement of the future transfer of five men, accused of involvement in Sept. 11 to U.S. Federal Courts for prosecution).

Then there is a group of around 60 men - Guantanamo’s refugees - 18 of whom are represented by Reprieve. Many of these people have been “cleared for release” by United States authorities, meaning they have been deemed to present no threat whatsoever.  These men would be free to leave Guantanamo tomorrow but they remain stranded there because they cannot return to their countries of origin for fear of torture.

They are from places like Uzbekistan, Syria, China, Algeria and Tunisia, countries where their being branded “terrorists” - despite them having been cleared - will make them sitting ducks for authorities with Kafka-esque human rights records.

In June, there was optimism that European states would offer homes to these men, but only a few countries have moved from talk to action. France, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium and the United Kingdom have accepted former prisoners, as well as the unlikely resettlement locations of Bermuda and Palau.  Why has Europe been so reluctant to assist?

Congress’s refusal – stoked by a scaremongering media - to accept any former prisoners onto American soil, has presented a huge stumbling block that Obama is struggling to scale. It is much more difficult for the U.S. (and Reprieve) to persuade European countries to take former prisoners when the U.S. refuses to do so.  In addition, governments have been hugely wary of the reactions of their political rivals and publics in determining whether to take former prisoners.

It has not helped that Obama himself persists in talking about “The Terrorists” and does not differentiate between the men held in the prison, the bulk of whom were sold for bounties and are far from being the hardened “worst of the worst” some paint them to be. It is worth making the point that the U.S. government has lost 30 of 37 habeas cases – that means that, in 30 instances, a judge, on reviewing the evidence against a prisoner, has found him not to be a threat to the U.S.

It is also worth mentioning the splendid Amherst, Massachusetts, which passed a resolution stating that that the town would welcome ex-Gitmo-prisoners.  This has not and will not happen, but the town’s spirit is commendable.

If European States want Guantánamo to be closed they must do more than continue to shake their collective heads and mutter about Obama’s naivety and optimism in setting so short a deadline.  It is true that it was a meet-able deadline.  But Obama not only needed support from Congress but also from his European allies.  Europe needs to step up and offer a home to the cleared prisoners and perhaps then the U.S. will follow its lead.  Only then can Obama’s promise of change really begin.

--  Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Prophetic words they were not. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula."

Thus spoke a euphoric President George H.W.Bush early in March, 1991, shortly after the 100-hour ground war that chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the oil-rich U.S. ally they had invaded and occupied in the summer of 1990.

The specter of Vietnam, far from being buried in the Arabian sands, has risen again as President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering the course of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year, increasingly unpopular, and considered unwinnable even by America's senior soldiers if it is fought alongside a corrupt government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

That the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well is obvious by the proliferation of analyses and commentaries drawing parallels, or dismissing them as nonsense, since Obama declared Afghanistan a war of necessity. (Type "Is Afghanistan Obama's Vietnam" into the Google search box and you get more than nine million references).

The cover of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is taken up by an iconic photograph of the Vietnam war, people clambering up a ladder to a U.S. helicopter waiting to evacuate them off the roof of a Saigon building the day before the city fell to communist forces on April 30, 1975. The story inside: what to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.

The answers to that question differ widely and the Vietnam analogy has come up routinely whenever the United States resorted to military action in the past three decades, from Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.  Obama himself has dismissed the parallel.

"You never step into the same river twice," he said in October, "and so, Afghanistan is not Vietnam. But the danger of overreach and not having clear goals and not having strong support from the American people, those are all issues I think about all the time."

Both in scale and geopolitical context the difference between the two conflicts is vast: at the height of its involvement in Vietnam, the United States had more than half a million troops there, fighting both Viet Cong insurgents and North Vietnamese army regulars who could count on aid from China and the Soviet Union.

In Afghanistan, the United States has some 68,000 soldiers, a number that is likely to grow to 100,000 or more (depending on what decision on reinforcement is taken) by the end of Obama's term. Neither the Taliban insurgents nor al-Qaeda can count on the kind of outside support America's antagonists in Vietnam commanded. In Vietnam, more than 58,000 soldiers died. The U.S. death toll in Afghanistan stood at 916 in the first week of November.

VIETNAM SYNDROME AND FLAGGING SUPPORT

But there are also parallels, and the Vietnam syndrome the elder President Bush had declared kicked is doubtless one of the reasons why public support for the war in Afghanistan has been declining steadily, despite Obama's assertion that the American commitment would not be open-ended. The latest poll, by CNN, showed that 58 percent of those questioned were opposed to war.

And the parallels? In the words of Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who turned into a war critic after his deployment, "Once again, our enemy blends in with the local population and finds sanctuary in a neighboring country. Once again, the danger of being perceived as an occupying force by a war-weary population remains perilous.

"With Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, we have a president facing pressure from the military."
President Lyndon Johnson, Kerry wrote, failed to stand up to his military commanders when they warned that the U.S. was facing defeat without additional forces - the argument that the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal made when he put forward options to Obama, including up to 40,000 more troops.

History does not repeat itself but the similarities between Obama in 2009 and Johnson in 1963 are striking. Both inherited a war that became their own at a time when they were pushing far-reaching and costly domestic reforms. Johnson's Great Society programs ranged from reducing poverty to improving medical care. Obama's key project is universal health care.

Most of Johnson's reforms were enacted in the first two years of his presidency, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. By 1968, the war in Vietnam had eroded his popularity to such an extent that he decided not to run for re-election.

The House of Representatives passed Obama's health care bill this month, the Senate is expected to vote on its version soon. Polls show Obama's popularity has been slipping, though his approval rate is still above 50%. Where it will be in a year's time, halfway through his term when the U.S. goes to the polls for mid-term elections, will partly depend on how the war in Afghanistan is going.

The ghost of Vietnam hangs over the White House.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.

Former President George W. Bush used to talk about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." He was talking about education in the United States.

But these days, that phrase could easily refer to the U.S. government's attitudes towards Afghanistan. Just look at the following phrases from American officials this year.

"We never promised Afghans a perfect democracy," "Afghans have lower expectations in terms of security," "we have to recognise Afghanistan will always remain a poor, conservative land with a low-level insurgency," "our goal in Afghanistan is simply to prevent al Qaeda using its territory to attack us."

All perfectly reasonable in many ways, but hardly a compelling manifesto to win Afghan hearts and minds.

The concern is that there has been such a concerted effort to lower the bar in Afghanistan this year, and to downplay what is achievable, that failure sometimes seems almost inevitable.

The United States convinced Hamid Karzai to agree to a run-off election, but failed to convince him to clean up the Election Commission that had perpetrated the fraudulent first round. That made more controversy almost inevitable.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs just declared Karzai the "legitimate leader of Afghanistan" and that the world could take heart that the laws of Afghanistan had prevailed.

Abdullah Abdullah and many Afghans would surely take issue with that bold statement. The laws of Afghanistan do not allow for elections to be rigged and for perpetrators to go unpunished.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that the Afghan decision is the "defining test" of Obama's leadership.

"President Obama will have to take personal responsibility for the outcome of the war in Afghanistan, betting his historical reputation and second term on the outcome," Cordesman said.

The United States, some experts argue, needs to show a clear and unwavering commitment to winning the war in Afghanistan -- and demand a clear and unwavering commitment from the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the same goal.

Half-measures will never work. Weakness or a lack of commitment will embolden the worst elements of Karzai's government, encourage the Pakistanis to keep playing both sides, and be exploited ruthlessly by the Taliban.

It isn't just a question of how many troops are sent, but whether there is a coherent strategy that will leave Afghanistan standing on its own two feet.

If the war, as Obama once said, is one of "necessity," then it is surely time for what Cordesman calls "real leadership."

Much as the president likes to find a middle road, there simply does not seem to be one any more in the Hindu Kush.

What do you think is the best route for Obama to take through this potential minefield?

Photo credit: Reuters/Morteza Nikoubazl (Afghan man dances in celebration of Karzai's victory),  Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Protest group Code Pink near White House on Halloween)

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Message to Israelis disgruntled with President Barack Obama's Middle East policies: you've got used to U.S. presidents pouring affection on you. Forget that. Obama is not "a lovey-dovey kind of guy".

That assessment came from an old Middle East hand, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, in an exchange in the closing minutes of the inaugural national conference of J Street, a new pro-Israel lobby for the liberal majority of American Jews (78 percent voted for Obama) who do not feel represented by traditional pro-Israel advocacy groups, chief of them the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The conference, in the words of J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, marked "the birth of a movement, a coming-out party for those who want to widen the tent and are not stuck in the mindset that because we are pro-Israel, we must be anti- somebody else".

Now director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, Indyk was on a panel entitled "Why Two States? Why Now?" He responded to a question from the audience on the advisability of American presidents getting personally involved in Middle East peace-making. They shouldn't get involved in procedural detail, he said, but for Obama it would be "really important" to go to Israel. Why?

His approval rating, according to Israeli polls, hovers around five percent, a sharp contrast to the 88 percent drawn by George W. Bush, a man thoroughly disliked almost everywhere else. The majority of Israelis think Obama is pro-Palestinian and see his visits to Egypt and Saudi Arabia as evidence that he wants to distance himself from Israel and curry favour with the Arabs. Unless he can dispel that public perception, the Israeli government is unlikely to make concessions.

Without major concessions, both from the Israelis and the Palestinians, there is no chance that Obama will succeed where other American presidents have failed. As far as concessions from Israel are concerned, J Street expects to help the Obama administration convince Congress that questioning Israeli policies is not tantamount to being anti-Israel.

Thanks largely to the enormous influence of AIPAC, which calls itself "America's pro-Israel lobby," criticism of Israel has been rare in Congress; debate of U.S. policies towards the largest recipient of U.S. economic and military aid even rarer. In a controversial 2006 essay, two prominent political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, concluded that AIPAC had a "stranglehold" on Congress.

It's too early to tell whether this will change, now that there is another lobby that calls itself pro-Israel but does not shy away from questioning Israeli policies. J Street reacted to last December's Israeli attack on Gaza by criticising Hamas for raining rockets on Israeli civilians and Israel for punishing 1.5 million Gazans for the actions of extremists.

OUT OF TOUCH?
That stand drew furious responses both from the political right and the center. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish religious organisation in America, called J Street's position "morally deficient" and "profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment".

On the right, the Gaza statement transformed J Street into an anti-Israeli, pro-Hamas organisation. One right-wing blogger called the group's conference, in the last week of October, an "anti-Israel hate fest".

(J Street, by the way, takes its name from a gap in the Washington street grid. There's an I Street and a K Street, home to most lobby firms in the capital, but no J Street. Missing street, missing voice).

Despite his disagreement with J Street over Gaza, Yoffie attended the conference and took part in a debate over what it means to be pro-Israel. There was agreement on a theme that ran through much of the meeting --  Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank make it impossible to establish a Palestinian state. Time is running out for a two-state solution. The alternative is worse.

That would be living together in one country in which Jews would be outnumbered (Palestinian birth rates are higher) and faced with the choice of abandoning democracy by exerting apartheid-style minority rule or giving up the idea of Israel as a homeland for all Jews.

The establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a cornerstone of the Obama administration's Middle East policy, has been reluctantly embraced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but prospects look very bleak for soon resuming the peace talks that stalled last December.

Still, the mood at J Street was upbeat. One of the reasons: an attendance that convincingly ended arguments whether there was an appetite for a left-wing organisation that shuns the reflexive Israel-right-or-wrong attitude of the established lobbies.

"We planned for 1,000 delegates and when I first mentioned this figure, my staff thought I needed psychiatric treatment," Ben-Ami said. "We got 1,500." The under-estimate made for conference rooms so tightly packed that many delegates had to sit on floors and debates were frequently simulcast to spillover rooms.

A second reason for high spirits: Obama's decision to send his National Security Advisor, James Jones, to make the keynote speech. It broke no new ground but ended with a promise that the Obama administration would be represented at all future J Street conferences.

What better sign that the neophyte group has arrived as a serious participant in the foreign policy debate?

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com)

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Words of wisdom from an American leader: "The United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.

"If we are an arrogant nation, they'll view us that way but if we are a humble nation, they'll respect us."

President Barack Obama, the newly-minted winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, speaking about U.S. engagement with the rest of the world, including anti-American leaders? No, the exhortation for superpower humbleness came from George W. Bush when he was running for president in 2000.

Whether this was campaign rhetoric or conviction will never be known but if it was the latter, it ended eight months into Bush's first term.

The word "humble" disappeared from Washington's political lexicon after the Sept. 11, 2001 mass murders in New York and Washington and during the rest of Bush's eight-year presidency, the United States came to be seen, in large parts of the world, as the epitome of superpower arrogance.

"Humble" is back in fashion. Nine months into his first term, Obama told the United Nations General Assembly he was "humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me" and determined to meet the challenge of collective action. Three weeks later, he stood in the White House Rose Garden to say he was "deeply humbled" by the Nobel Committee's decision to give him the Peace Prize.

But like his predecessor, who was resented in much of the world, Obama is running into foreign policy problems as resistant to humility and the collective action the president often conjures as they were resistant to Bush's unilateral approach. Does Obama's rock star-like celebrity help?

So far, not really. In Germany, for example, 93 percent of those polled in a survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project said they had confidence the U.S. president would do the right thing in world affairs. Would that translate into more German troops for the war in Afghanistan which is unpopular in Germany? Not likely.

In his speech to the United Nations, Obama pointed out that American unilateral actions had fed "an almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction." While anti-Americanism may be on the wane in many parts of the world, there is no sign of a corresponding increase of support for U.S. foreign policy on key issues.

Nor is there evidence of a wholesale decline in the tendency of a good number of U.S. political figures to assume that people from other countries think like Americans. That has been a perennial problem in America's dealings with the world. It was the reason, for example, why the Bush administration was so surprised by the resounding 2006 electoral victory of Hamas, the Islamist group shunned as terrorists by most of the West, in Gaza.

CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?

More recently, that's why some in Washington were taken aback by the angry reaction in Pakistan to a bill passed in Congress this month that tripled U.S. assistance over the next five years. It was meant as part of an effort to build a new relationship with Pakistan, whose cooperation Washington needs to fight Taliban and al Qaeda elements along the border with Afghanistan.

The bill contained language on conditions tied to the tripled aid that were seen by many Pakistanis as a humiliating violation of national sovereignty and an affront to dignity, an issue particularly sensitive in Pakistan, which is one of the few countries apparently immune to Obama's charm. (The Pew survey's favorability rating for the United States showed a drop from 19 percent in 2008 to a dismal 16 percent in 2009).

What seemed perfectly legitimate to lawmakers in Washington -- no disbursement of aid unless Pakistan demonstrated a "sustained commitment" to crack down on terrorism -- was seen as an insult by the Pakistanis. Which raises the question whether a humble superpower is a contradiction in terms.

Or whether humility will impress the leaders Obama has to deal with if he wants to succeed where Bush and other presidents failed - get North Korea and Iran to drop their nuclear ambitions, persuade Israel and the Palestinians to end their conflict, defang international terrorists and last but not least, achieve his dream of a nuclear-free world.

On that, he sounded a somber note when he commented on his Nobel Peace Prize: maybe not "in my lifetime." Sobering detail: Obama is 48.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com)

-- Neal Kimberley is an FX market analyst for Reuters. The opinions expressed are his own --

Twenty-four years ago, major nations called for depreciation of the dollar to rebalance the global economy. Now, as another effort at rebalancing looms, the dollar will again bear the brunt -- though officials will try to ensure its fall is less dramatic this time.

That's the implication of President Barack Obama's announcement this week that he will push world leaders for a new global "framework" in which the United States would cut its huge trade and budget deficits.

Agreeing on this framework would be politically difficult, since it would require policy changes by many countries -- China, for example, would probably have to rein in its explosive export-led growth.

But as the euro's climb to a new one-year high versus the dollar this morning shows, markets are starting to think the rebalancing process may start as soon as this week's Pittsburgh summit of leaders from the Group of 20 nations.

The Plaza Accord of 1985 called for "orderly appreciation of the main non-dollar currencies against the dollar"; it was followed by central banks' coordinated intervention to ensure that happened.

This time, with the world shakily emerging from a financial crisis, policymakers are likely to try to manage the dollar's drop in a more low-key fashion.

They are unlikely to issue an explicit call for the dollar to fall. In fact, the U.S. Treasury may continue proclaiming its "strong dollar policy" in an attempt to keep the markets calm.

No one in the G20 wants to risk a freefall of the dollar that could disrupt global trade as it recovers from recession. And in contrast to the 1980s, developing nations such as China are now challenging the dollar's long-term role as the world's top reserve currency.

The dollar's premier status helps the United States to obtain foreign capital and in order to keep that access, Washington is likely to encourage central banks around the world to continue holding dollars. This would require slow depreciation of the currency rather than a panicky slide.

So unless policymakers completely lose control of the forex markets -- which cannot entirely be ruled out -- the dollar's slide is likely to be slower and smaller than it was after the Plaza Accord, when the currency sank about 50 percent versus the yen between Sept. 22, 1985 and the end of 1987.

The overall direction of the dollar does not look in doubt, however. Top presidential adviser Lawrence Summers has said he wants a U.S. economy that is "more export-oriented and less consumption-oriented".

A lower dollar is a logical tool to achieve that goal, and letting the currency weaken would probably be faster and easier than most other big policy steps to reshape the U.S. economy, such as tax changes and health reform.

The International Monetary Fund, which is advising G20 nations on economy policy, is hinting heavily at the need for currency realignment.

In a report released this week, it said "current policies and the assumed constellation of exchange rates may not be sufficient for the needed rebalancing of demand."

It added that policy reforms by the world's big economies to restore growth "would be more effective if accompanied by a real effective renminbi appreciation, offset by euro and dollar depreciation".

An international understanding on dollar depreciation may well not be reached in Pittsburgh. A French official said last Friday that Pittsburgh would merely set the stage for future talks on foreign exchange rates.

"At this stage there will not be currency discussions, but the framework that we hope to put in place...is a way of discussing later the question of exchange rates," said the official, who declined to be named.

But giving China and other developing countries more power in the IMF and the World Bank could be part of an informal quid pro quo in which China quietly undertook to resume appreciating the yuan against the dollar.

The rise of the euro as high as $1.4821, breaking the December 2008 peak of $1.4719, is a technical signal that the market thinks the dollar is increasingly vulnerable.

For many traders, the break suggests a good chance of a rise to at least the psychologically important level of $1.50 in coming weeks or months.

The European Central Bank might seek to limit speculation against the dollar by expressing concern about such a move. But the market does not appear to worry that the ECB could actually intervene to support the dollar.

When the European Union's Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said last week that excessive appreciation of the euro could hurt Europe's economy, the euro fell back only marginally and briefly.

The market knows that even at levels just above $1.5000, the euro would remain well below its all-time high against the dollar of $1.6038, hit in July 2008.

And any rise of the euro against the dollar in the current circumstances would probably be seen by policymakers as the result of general dollar weakness, not excessive euro strength. When euro/dollar reached its July 2008 peak, euro/yen hit a similar high; now, euro/yen is a full 35 yen lower.

The Japanese may also be willing to see their currency strengthen. Before new Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii took office this month, he said a strong yen was generally good as it boosted the purchasing power of Japanese.

Fujii subsequently backed away from that comment, but speculation will remain that after sweeping to power last month, the Democratic Party of Japan may try to shift the country away from its reliance on exports and its opposition to yen strength.

In the context of a G20 drive to rebalance the global economy, this could easily cause the market to think the yen should be trading stronger than 90 to the dollar.

After just six weeks as NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has his first crisis. The alliance may be slowly bleeding in an intractable war in Afghanistan, but the immediate cause is the U.S. administration's decision to shelve a planned missile shield due to have been built in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The shield, energetically promoted by former President George W. Bush, was designed to intercept a small number of missiles fired by Iran or some other "rogue state". But Russia saw it as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent and NATO's new east European members saw it as a useful deterrent against Russian bullying, by putting U.S. strategic assets on their soil.

President Barack Obama's decision to drop plans to install it on Polish and Czech territory leaves those former Soviet satellites feeling betrayed -- because they expended political capital to win parliamentary support -- and more exposed to a resurgent Russia, especially after its use of force against Georgia last year.

Obama's move is clearly part of a warming of U.S. relations with Moscow from which Washington hopes to gain help in return on supply routes to Afghanistan, pressure on Iran to rein in its nuclear programme, and an agreement on radical cuts in nuclear arsenals. But this "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations has only exacerbated the rift within NATO over Russia.

The three Baltic states and Poland were particularly critical of NATO's low-key response to Moscow's military action in Georgia. Some said the refusal of west European allies led by Germany and France to agree at a NATO summit last year to putting Georgia and Ukraine on a path to NATO membership emboldened the Kremlin to act. President Dimitry Medvedev's harsh attack on Ukraine's leader in an open letter last month fanned their fears of Russian bullying of its neighbours.

East European officials cite Moscow's playing with the gas taps and trade disputes, and its apparent determination to keep its Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Odessa Sevastopol beyond a 2017 deadline agreed with Ukraine as part of a strategy of tension intended to reverse the "colour revolutions" in Kiev and Tbilisi, and bring other former Soviet republics to heel.

All that makes it a particularly awkward moment for Rasmussen to deliver his inaugural keynote speech on NATO-Russia relations on Friday in Brussels. The former Danish prime minister has put a few noses out of joint in his first weeks by making clear he intends to run NATO in a more results-oriented way, leaving less room and time for ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council to debate any idea to a standstill. He has set strict time-limits on council meetings, streamlined flabby agendas and outsourced the drafting of a new Strategic Concept to a group of 12 experts led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on which not all allies are represented.

His personal management style and high media profile (monthly news conferences, a blog and Twitter chatter) has sharpened the traditional Kabuki dance in which a new boss and the old board flex their muscles at each other in mutual suspicion, insiders say. It is the first time a former prime minister, used to running a government and to talking to fellow national leaders, has been picked for the job. Previous secretaries-general were former defence or foreign ministers, more accustomed to being servants of the member nations.

Both camps within NATO (which privately brand each other the "Friends of Russia", and the "Cold Warriors") will be watching every word of Rasmussen's Russia speech to ensure he does not depart from alliance policy. The fact is that NATO has been unable to agree on an overall policy towards Russia since the 1990s, when it declared that Moscow was no longer an adversary.

Rasmussen hopes to launch NATO's own modest "reset" of ties with Russia, offering closer cooperation on Afghanistan, a joint threat assessment and work on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. NATO officials have received assurances that Moscow will respond positively and breathe new life into the NATO-Russia Council.

None of that will assuage NATO's east European members, who are likely to press harder now for practical steps to give credibility to the alliance's Article V mutual defence commitment. That could involve drafting military plans to reinforce the Baltic republics and Poland, and holding joint military exercises on those countries' territory. The French and Germans have resisted such ideas in the past as unnecessarily provocative to Moscow. If NATO cannot agree to such moves, the United States may have to do more on its own to compensate its jilted friends.

(note: corrects Odessa to Sevastopol in 6th paragraph)

“Think about it. If you are a member of the union right now, you’re spending all your time negotiating about health care. You need to be spending some time negotiating about wages, but you can’t do it," he said.

In fact, the UAW locked itself into a contract limiting wages and changes to health care, without the ability to negotiate with a threat of strike, until 2015. These stands were agreed to by the union at the prodding of the Obama administration, which demanded that union autoworkers accept lower wages -- as a condition to the bailout that saved Lordstown -- to match non-union workers at Toyota plants in Kentucky and Honda plants in Ohio.

Even so, Lordstown is something of a success story for both the UAW and GM, and Obama's remarks were punctuated with enthusiastic applause.  After winning deep concessions from the UAW in 2007, GM agreed to invest $500 million to retool the plant to make a new fuel-efficient small sedan, the Chevy Cruze.

Obama had nice things to say about the Cruze, which GM expects to get more than 40 miles-per-gallon in highway driving.

"I just sat in the car," Obama said of the Cruze. "I asked for the keys. They wouldn't give me the keys. I was going to take it for a little spin. But it was nice sitting in there. It was a roomy car."

Consumers will not get the keys to a new Cruze, either, until the middle of next year when it arrives in showrooms. In the meantime, Lordstown is stuck building the Cobalt, a budget-minded Chevy and vestige of the "old GM." 

Consumer Reports in its October edition branded the Cobalt as one of the five "cruddiest cheap cars" on the market.

(Writing by Kevin Krolicki. Reuters photo by Larry Downing.)

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

By making the war in Afghanistan his own, declaring it a war of necessity and sending more troops, President Barack Obama has entered a race against time. The outcome is far from certain.

To win it, the new strategy being put into place has to show convincing results before public disenchantment with the war saps Obama's credibility and throws question marks over his judgment. Already, according to public opinion polls in August, a majority of Americans say the war is not worth fighting. Almost two thirds think the United States will eventually withdraw without winning.

There are similar feelings in Britain, which fields the second-largest contingent of combat troops in Afghanistan after the United States. A poll published in London this week showed that 69 percent of those questioned thought British troops should not be fighting in Afghanistan.

In the United States, almost inevitably in a country that never forgot the trauma of the only war it ever lost, 36 years ago, pundits are conjuring up the ghost of Vietnam. A lengthy analysis in the New York Times wondered whether Obama was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who kept escalating the Vietnam war.

The war in Afghanistan is drawing into its ninth year and chances are it will still be going badly when Obama is gearing up for his campaign for re-election in 2012. According to a study by the RAND institute, a think tank working for the military, counter-insurgency campaigns won by the government have averaged 14 years.

"The insurgent wins if he does not lose," according to the U.S. Army's counter-insurgency manual, "while the counterinsurgent loses if he does not win. Insurgents are strengthened by the common perception that a few casualties or a few years will cause the United States to abandon (the effort)." A key to winning: "firm political will and extreme patience."

Patience is not an American virtue. The first call for Obama to set a "flexible timetable" for the withdrawal of American troops came this month, from Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Not exactly a reflection of firm political will and extreme patience.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban insurgents not only have been winning by not losing, they have actually been gaining ground. In the words of the top U.S. military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, the situation in Afghanistan "is serious and is deteriorating."

What does that mean? According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Taliban have expanded their area of influence from 30 of Afghanistan's 364 districts in 2003 to some 160 districts by the end of 2008. But, says Cordesman, a widely-respected authority on military affairs, "the military dimension is only part of the story."

CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE

The other part is a corrupt, incompetent government and an equally corrupt and inefficient system of disbursing international aid. In his war-of-necessity speech, Obama obliquely referred to that aspect of the Afghan war by saying it could not be won by military force alone. "We also need ... development and good governance."

Both have been in very short supply. "The Afghan government lost legitimacy over the past five years," says Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Whether, and how quickly, it can regain it is open to doubt, no matter who emerges as the winner of the August 20 election in which President Hamid Karzai was running for a second five-year term. (Full results are due on September 3. Both Karzai's camp and his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, have claimed victory on the basis of partial results.)

The extent of corruption and the lack of good governance are reflected by two international gauges - the Failed States Index compiled by the The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine and the annual Corruption Perceptions Index issued by Transparency International, a Berlin-based watchdog group. Afghanistan ranks 7th on the failed states list and 176th (out of 180) on the corruption scale.

This is not an environment that lends itself to swift solutions. There are powerful vested interests in maintaining what Cordesman calls a dishonest system of power-brokering and corruption. Jean MacKenzie, a Kabul-based reporter, said in a recent guest column for Reuters that foreign assistance coming into Afghanistan was one of the richest sources of funding for the Taliban.

"It is the open secret no one wants to talk about ... Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents," MacKenzie wrote. "International donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy."

Until recently, most experts thought that the Taliban was financed largely from taxes the insurgents levied on the production of opium, the raw material for heroin. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said last year (when he was not in government service) that "breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail."

He no longer thinks that the insurgency is mostly funded by the opium trade. Instead, he says that the volume of money flowing into the Taliban coffers from sympathizers in Gulf states and elsewhere exceeds that of the drug trade.

"Obama inherited a disaster," according to Riedel, "a war which has been under-funded and under-resourced for six of the past seven years."  And what would happen if the Obama's war of necessity went wrong and the United States pulled out of Afghanistan? In the Muslim world, it would be seen as "a triumph on a par with the withdrawal of Soviet forces" from Afghanistan after their disastrous nine-year war and occupation.

Not to mention the impact it would have on Obama's political standing.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com)

- Markus Schultze-Kraft is Latin America and Caribbean Program Director at the International Crisis Group. The opinions expressed are his own. -

One cannot help being taken aback by the series of wrong messages the U.S. government has been sending to Latin America this summer. Starting with Honduras and followed by Bolivia, and now Colombia, everything seems to indicate that after a promising start President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are having difficulties defining an effective Latin America policy that does not repeat the mistakes of the previous administration.

With respect to Honduras, the U.S. reacted late and did not fully grasp that reversing the civilian-military coup against President Manuel Zelaya in late June would require forceful and immediate diplomatic action together with others in the region. This lack of understanding left the U.S. vulnerable to the foreseeable and inevitably strong and potentially dangerous backlash from Venezuela and other members of ALBA, Hugo Chavez’s regional bloc, which includes Honduras. The U.S. decision to maintain the suspension of trade preferences for Bolivia under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) was not necessarily unjustified but politically clumsy. The government of Evo Morales, who is campaigning for reelection in December, both seized the opportunity to step up its anti-American rhetoric and move even closer to Chávez.

And now the new U.S.-Colombian Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA). Plain political common sense dictates that it would have been more than just cordial if the U.S. and Colombia had made the effort to consult closely with Colombia’s neighbors and other South American governments before announcing their intention to give the U.S. access to seven - or perhaps more - Colombian air force, naval and army bases. The belated explanations of Secretary Clinton and her Colombian counterpart, Jaime Bermúdez, ended up complicating things even more.

In her 18 August statement, Clinton stressed that the new agreement with Colombia is exclusively a bilateral issue that “does not pertain to other countries” and is only about “security matters within Colombia”. At the same time, she deepened suspicions of a larger design by highlighting that the hemisphere as a whole “faces a number of pressing challenges, from economic crisis … to narcotics trafficking, terrorism and organized crime.” In fact, it is widely known that given the regional and transnational nature of these challenges and threats, to be effective any security cooperation agreement between the U.S. and Colombia logically would have to be part of a broader policy with the rest of the region. In the face of transnational, hemispheric problems, clinging to the worn doctrine of prioritizing bilateral instead of regional relations equals shooting oneself in the foot.

Of course, the DCA is a continuation of a very close relationship between Colombia and the U.S. that began in the late 1990s and is epitomized by Plan Colombia, as Secretary Clinton duly underscored. However, it is questionable whether the DCA is necessary, considering that in the past years Colombia has made headway, with substantial U.S. help, in the fight against the country´s insurgents and, more recently, drug-trafficking, including the arrest of several important drug kingpins and a near 30 per cent decrease in potential cocaine production in Colombia in 2008, according to UN figures.

It is also not a sign of great astuteness to commend Colombia’s “leadership on both global and regional issues” when the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe has been utterly unsuccessful at establishing working relations and necessary minimum confidence with his country’s both most important and most difficult neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, not least because of Colombia’s strategic alignment with the U.S. Further, it was unwise to single out Colombia for praise for its willingness to commit troops to Afghanistan or police officers to Haiti, when other South American countries, such as Brazil and Chile, can rightfully claim to be far more active in peace-keeping around the world and especially in Haiti - and clearly supersede Colombia in terms of global reach, economic weight and the quality of their democracies.

It remains to be seen how the governments of the South American countries that protested the lack of prior consultation or even explanation as to the new U.S.-Colombian agreement — in particular Brazil, Chile and Argentina — will react to Clinton’s statement. The chances are that there will be more — not less- concern about the U.S.’s apparent lack of understanding of the region’s political reality. As such, Washington may have missed an important opportunity to reciprocate on the signals of moderation that, under the leadership of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, came out of the August summit of the heads of state of the Union of South American Nations in Quito.

Clearly, those South American leaders already on an anti-American path, especially Venezuela’s Chávez and Bolivia’s Morales, can easily use U.S. missteps to further increase regional tensions for their own political gain, and will not let go by the opportunity to once again chastise U.S. policy vis-à-vis Latin America - especially when it is served up to them on a silver platter.