from Commentaries:
Shelved missile shield tests NATO unity
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.
from The Great Debate UK:
Brown must create Afghanistan war cabinet
- Col. Richard Kemp is a former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and the author of Attack State Red, an account of British military operations in Afghanistan published by Penguin. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Disillusionment with the inability of the Kabul administration to govern fairly or to significantly reduce violence played a role in the reportedly low turnout at the polls in Helmand.
It is critical that this changes if we are to avoid another Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army, well trained and equipped, lost heart once the U.S. withdrew, collapsing at the first push, partly because their corrupt and ineffective administration was not worth fighting for.
That an election was held at all in Afghanistan’s most violent province is an achievement. But despite a major operation to drive out the Taliban, the insurgents deterred large numbers of voters. This illustrates just how steep a mountain NATO has to climb. But it does not mean we cannot prevail against them in Helmand.
As President Obama says: "This isn’t a war of choice; it’s a war of necessity." Home grown British terrorists have only demonstrated an ability to kill our people when they have attended serious training and had face-to-face direction from war-hardened jihadists.
The Al Qaida leadership and their camps were driven into Pakistan in 2001. U.S. pursuit across the border using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes has been remarkably effective, resulting directly in the recent reduction of the UK terrorist threat level.
Al Qaida is not just a “global franchise” but also a solid organization that needs places to meet, to plan and to train terrorists. It cannot all be done on the internet. Substantially unable to function now in Pakistan, the leadership is actively seeking a new base – perhaps in Yemen, Somalia or North Africa. In any of these they would be much more exposed. Their real desire is to return to Afghanistan. NATO forces are preventing that.
Hopefully Mr Brown has the energy and ability to make such decisions. He does a very good impersonation of the “invisible man” and seems to leave Peter Mandleson to do all the talking. It’d be nice to see him taking some kind of leadership role not just in regard to the Afghan war (along with other NATO “leaders”), but the economy as well. The way things seem to be going there won’t be much need for the British born terrorists to destroy anything in the UK, it’ll slowly shrivel up and die all by itself and the winners will be India, China and the other Asian nations.
Obama’s plea to EU on Turkey carries risks
– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Basking in adulation across Europe, U.S. President Barack Obama chose to expend some of his political capital to urge the European Union to open its doors to Turkey.
This public reaffirmation of long-standing U.S. policy fits in with Obama’s attempt to restore the United States’ standing in the Muslim world, using Turkey as a platform for his first state visit to a Muslim country. It also helps rebuild strategic ties with Ankara that sank to a low ebb under George W. Bush, when Turkey refused to allow U.S. forces to use its territory and airspace to invade Iraq.
And it contributed to convincing Turkish leaders at the weekend to drop their opposition to appointing the Danish prime minister as the new head of NATO.
But it risks raising unrealistic expectations that may cause deeper disenchantment between Turks and Europeans if the EU accession negotiations remain in a slow lane to nowhere.
Obama’s call drew an instant brush-off from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Sarkozy said it was up to EU members to decide who joins and that “the immense majority” of EU states opposed full Turkish membership. Merkel said there were obviously “differences of opinion.”
SECOND THOUGHTS
Our problem here in the U.S. is that most Americans would not be able to locate Turkey on a map, let alone grasp the outlines of the situation. We have the same problem with Pakistan.
It appears that our knowledge of the world grows mostly after having had a war in a region. A certain number of people (few) end up having insights into a region or a people, but this knowledge is neglected and ends up vanishing in a short time.
It seems to me that our nation should be engaging Turkey on many levels, but we do not have the competence yet to be making pronouncements. I was pleased to hear President Obama emphasize that he was there (in Europe and the Middle East) to listen, but isn’t it astonishing that some people attacked him even for that?
I am even getting tired of listening to myself say “Look at the record.” It’s the same story over and over again. We don’t learn and seem to have little desire to.
NATO and Russia
By Gareth Evans, President, and Alain Délétroz Vice President (Europe) of the International Crisis Group. Any views expressed are the authors’ alone.
The biggest unresolved challenge facing the NATO countries’ leaders when they meet on the Rhine this week is how to manage the organization’s relationship with Russia. Nobody wants to relive the Cold War, but habits of mind from that era persist on both sides, continuing to influence behaviour and inhibiting the clean break from the past that would be in everyone’s interest.
Russia’s invasion of Georgian territory last year seemed to confirm every latent NATO fear about the aggressive resurgence of the beast-from-the-east which the organization was formed sixty years ago to counter. And it is hard to argue that Moscow’s response to the situation in South Ossetia was not an indefensible overreaction, whatever judgment one makes about President Saakashvili’s contribution to the course of events. But what was missing from nearly all the Western reaction was any thoughtful reflection on what its own leaders’ contribution might have been, over the years since the USSR collapsed, to Russia’s newly assertive posture.
It is not fully appreciated, even now, in most NATO capitals how strongly Moscow feels that the organisation’s expansion, deep into the former socialist camp and the former USSR itself, was a brutally insensitive and confrontational response to the quick and generous Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Germany and Central Europe. The West rightly argues that all new NATO members have joined freely, and certainly not under pressure from the U.S. or EU member states. But the vast majority of Russians see NATO as an offensive military alliance, bombing Belgrade in 1999 without UN Security Council approval and now trying to surround Russia in spite of promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand eastwards.
NATO has become an easy target for nationalists in Russia who want to buoy anti-Western sentiment and convince the population that they are facing a significant threat from outside – basically the same as that during the Cold War. It is unquestionably the case that in the present environment any new enlargement towards Russian borders, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, will be universally perceived in Russia as an unfriendly act that will demand retaliation.
How can these tensions be defused in a way that will be constructive and forward-looking, but also acknowledge the political reality that neither NATO nor Russia will be very keen to fundamentally change its narrative of what has occurred so far? The best starting point, in our view, would be to acknowledge that the problem with NATO’s expansion was not so much that it extended to Russia’s borders, but that it stopped there. The most helpful single step, accordingly, that NATO leaders could take at this Summit would be to make a very clear statement that NATO is an alliance of the free open for membership by all countries on the European continent, including Russia itself, and encouraging Moscow to seek membership at a time of its own choosing.
Making such an explicit public statement would have at least three positive consequences. It would place the ball in the Russian leadership’s court, forcing it to consider the offer seriously and articulate a response. It would ease tensions surrounding Ukraine and Georgia: possible NATO enlargement here could no longer be seen as inherently unfriendly act towards Russia if the door is open for Russia itself to join the alliance. And it would paint into a corner the most nationalist politicians in Russia who use NATO so flagrantly to undermine any serious move toward real democratization at home.
Why would the west want Russia in NATO?
Russia is not a friend of the west. On the contrary, they and China are the only reason the UN is so powerless.
The only thing Russia wants is dependence. It wants its little central-europe tinpot nations to depend on their aid. They want Europe to depend on their oil and gas. They want America to depend on their land for supply routes to Afganistan.
Does that sound like a friend to you? Or someone wanting to have power over you?
If Russia is a friend, then the west will need to bend over backward to keep them happy. Better to let them smolder alone, with plenty of trading partners but no true allies.
Obama honeymoon ends in Europe
– Robin Shepherd is Director, International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His areas of expertise are transatlantic relations, American foreign policy, Middle Eastern relations with the West, Russia, eastern Europe, NATO and the European Union. The views expressed are his own. –
It is to be hoped that President Obama has a developed sense of humour. The man heralded by many as the new Messiah of political renewal lands in London this week not to the chorus of approval he might have expected on his first official trip to Europe but to crowds roaring with anger and frustration at the global economic system which his country underpins.
It isn’t personal – yet. Few but the most unreasonable would hold the new American president responsible for woes that he inherited. Nonetheless, Obama campaigned on a platform of change. The implicit claim that his election was a grand, indeed poetic, instance of the time finding the man will be explicitly rejected – in Europe as well as at home – if he fails to deliver. We know he can give a pretty speech. But at the G-20 summit in London this week, that simply won’t be enough. For the first time at a major international gathering the blinding lights of international scrutiny will pour over Obama’s credentials on substance. His mettle is about to be tested.
It is true, of course, that there is tremendous accumulated goodwill towards the new American president in Europe. But time may yet show that much of that was merely the counterpoint to a hostility felt by so many against his predecessor. That, at least, is the risk. Obama can no longer play good cop to George Bush’s bad cop. He alone now has the stage, and when people are losing their jobs and homes they will want to see results. As leader of the Western world, the buck stops with him.
What applies to the economy will also apply to the great issues of international affairs. Obama will be given a chance over his new strategy on Afghanistan, though murmurings of discontent are not hard to detect in liberal-Left circles across the continent even now.
The idea that the war is unwinnable is gaining currency, especially in Britain. If, as the veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian this week, Afghanistan comes to be perceived as a “Vietnam for slow learners”, then it is Obama who will be handed the dunce’s cap if things do not improve. The president’s sensible and predictable modifications to earlier intimations about a complete and quick withdrawal from Iraq have also raised eyebrows. America’s critics did not die with Bush.
That is simply a lie. The Europeans were not booing Obama
Obama and the Afghan narco-state
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two statistics.
One is Afghanistan’s ranking on an international index measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is 180th). The other is Afghanistan’s position as the world’s Number 1 producer of illicit opium, the raw material for heroin.
The two statistics are inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan, to write: “Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all else will fail.”
Holbrooke, who was not in government service at the time, took particular issue with the counter-narcotics strategy the Bush administration pursued in Afghanistan.
“The … program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective policy in the history of American foreign policy,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “It’s not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.”
Exactly what the Obama administration intends to do about that, and how it might break the narco-state, has yet to be articulated. Sending more troops to fight a growing insurgency does not necessarily translate into progress towards dismantling the “narco-state,” eliminating corruption or cutting down on the opium production whose proceeds help finance the Taliban.
Bernd, we have been waging a worldwide war on drugs for decades now and it has never worked. I feel that the first and best defense against the worldwide illegal drug trade is for Americans to stop buying illegal drugs. Maybe Mr. Obama can use his magic to convince the American people to stop using. Sadly I don’t see such a thing happening anytime soon. The US government buying the opium crop would surly change the dynamics of the opium market. The purchase would take the existing supplies off the illegal market on the one hand, but the opium producers will have another major purchaser pushing up the price of their product. The higher price will result in more opium production in new areas of the world. I see such a dynamic pushing the cost from $2 billion to $10 billion or more and still not reduce the funding for the Taliban.
I can see the current recession doing more to reduce the demand for opium then any action governments can take.
Obama: plus ça change?
Robin Shepherd is a senior research fellow at Chatham House in London. The opinions expressed are his own.
Which part of the word “change” did Barack Obama not understand? A year from now it is a question that many outside America will be asking about his foreign policy.
American forces will still be in Afghanistan; the handover in Iraq will continue, with some troops coming home as they would have under President Bush; U.S. support for Israel will remain unchanged, while the Annapolis process begun under Obama’s predecessor continues to take its course.
The “war on terror”, though repackaged under a different name, will have shown no signs of abating. The world will still be sleep-walking its way towards a nuclear armed Iran, with America unable to rally China and Russia to participate in meaningful sanctions. Tensions with a neo-authoritarian Russia will have shown no signs of abating as commitments to NATO allies and partners, particularly on Russia’s periphery, take precedence over temptations to appease the Kremlin.
How, the world will ask, did the candidate of change become the president of continuity?
Cynical? Perhaps. New American presidents always inherit baggage from their predecessors. It would certainly take more than a year for Obama to unburden himself from a legacy as fraught as the one he was bequeathed.
The bigger question is this: does Barack Obama bring to the White House a vision for change in foreign affairs which will so fundamentally re-jig the puzzle?
This article paints a lovely picture of what could potentially come…the most salient point being that people’s expectations are not necessarily tempered by a realistic outlook of the challenges that Obama faces.
Nonetheless, despite the “cure” mentality that many hold concerning Obama, the voter choice in the election represented the only choice that had the realistic potential for a positive outcome. McCain and Palin would have only furthered the disastrous course Bush set the U.S. on.
Separately, I’m very tired of hearing that Bush succeeded in stopping a terrorist attack on U.S. soil again, as if after 9/11 any other President would have ensured that a second attack occurred. Please. The man had few successes and an endless list of failures.
To the question of: does Barack Obama bring to the White House a vision for change in foreign affairs which will so fundamentally re-jig the puzzle?
Time will tell; but it is certainly a positive thing to hope. The real lesson here is that people need to properly manage their expectations if their hopes are not fulfilled.
Obama must redefine success in Afghanistan
– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Barack Obama says he will make Afghanistan the central front in his fight against terrorism but the incoming U.S. president will have to scale back the war aims he inherits from George W. Bush and redefine success.
Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 to oust a Taliban government that was harboring al Qaeda militants blamed for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
His declared goals were to defeat the Taliban, create a stable democracy and promote economic development, but he turned his attention quickly to Iraq before the task was done.
Since 2005, a revived Taliban insurgency has made growing inroads against understaffed U.S., NATO and Afghan forces, while President Hamid Karzai’s ineffective government has been mired in corruption and a booming illegal drugs trade.
The most Obama can hope to achieve in a mountainous country that wore down British and Soviet invaders is probably an ethnic power-sharing pact, including tribes that now help the Taliban, in hopes of keeping al Qaeda at bay once Western forces leave.
That is far from assured and would require cooperation from a weak Pakistani government transfixed by tension with India.
This may be a case of winning the war, but losing the peace. Vietnam was similar. A growing insurgency, a war-weary American public.
Step 1: We need a massive surge of soldiers, like in Iraq. We need to beat down the insurgency again, to put them on the defensive.
Step 2: Pakistan needs to get its mess in order and establish control of its own borders. Support for the Taliban is coming from Pakistan’s west, cutting into NATO supply routes.
Step 3: The USA needs to grant further assistance to Pakistan, to assist in their domestic insurgency problems.
Step 4: Afghanistan needs to build up an army, trained and capable of taking on the insurgents. Encourage tribal militias, who can defend their homes from Taliban threats.
Step 5: Stamp out the corruption. Get the Afghani government to pass laws against corruption. Burn the poppy fields. Establish farms for food, not heroin. Build mosques and roads. Give the citizens a reason to support their country. Encourage tribal councils to take control of their regions, and make sure they form part of the government.
Step 6: Once the previous steps are complete, the time is right to start making overtures to the Taliban government for a peace agreement.
This is the most promising sign coming out of the US in recent years. This is truly the way forward with Russia and the best signs the new US administration is willing to back it’s words with actions and real change. Thank you Mr. President. You are following up on all of your campaign promises despite a very loud minority of misinformed American that continue to be misled by the constant bombardment of right wing propaganda coming out of some cable news channels.