UK News

from The Great Debate UK:

“Bullet proof” Matt Croucher tells his story

In 2008, as a Royal Marine with 40 Commando in Afghanistan, Matt Croucher threw himself on a booby-trapped grenade to bear the brunt of its blast in an effort to save the lives of three comrades who were with him on a covert operation behind enemy lines at night.

"It's bonkers what goes through your mind when you're about to die," Croucher writes in his candid autobiography Bullet Proof, newly released in paperback by Random House. "All that crap about your life flashing before you, is just that, bollocks."

Croucher's day sack and protective clothing took the main impact when the grenade detonated and he and his friends survived.

"Disoriented and gobsmacked, I couldn't believe I hadn't lost a leg or an arm or anything," he writes.

Later that year, the dramatic event earned Croucher a George Cross medal, the highest gallantry award for civilians, also awarded to military personnel for acts of gallantry not in the presence of the enemy. The equivalent award for gallantry in battle is the Victoria Cross.

In the following video clip, Croucher describes his war-time experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, his book and discusses his medal, which is kept stored for safety in a vault in the cellar of London's Imperial War Museum, along with his helmet.

Cameron: British patience with the Afghan mission is not limitless

New British Prime Minister David Cameron is not giving a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan but during his first visit to the country as premier on Thursday he was already looking ahead to a time when the British have left the country.

“Even after our troops have left Afghanistan — and I believe that they will — the relationship between Britain and Afghanistan, just as the relationship between Britain and Pakistan, are vitally important relationships for all of our countries,” Cameron said at a press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

Unlike his predecessor Gordon Brown, who talked cautiously about gradually handing over Afghan districts and provinces to local control, Cameron made patently clear that British patience with the Afghan mission was not limitless.

“No one wants British troops to stay in Afghanistan for a day longer than is necessary,” he said.

Cameron said repeatedly that 2010 was “the vital year”, clearly implying that the U.S.-led coalition has a year to turn around the situation in Afghanistan, which has seen a new upsurge in Taliban violence in recent weeks.

“We should be laser-like focused on the thing that matters most of all which is helping the Afghans to deliver their own security,” he said.

The question of sending more troops to supplement the 9,500 British troops locked in a bloody battle with Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan was “not remotely on the UK agenda,” Cameron said.

Brown takes a different tack on Iraq

Tony Blair said he had no regrets about removing Saddam Hussein when he ended his session before the Chilcot inquiry in January. Gordon Brown, not surprisingly, took a different approach.

Perhaps mindful of the anger that Blair’s words had reignited, Brown topped and tailed his appearance by acknowledging the  cost in human lives among British soldiers and Iraqi civilians of the conflict.

Brown was ready to admit to mistakes in reconstruction efforts but portrayed himself as a loyal cabinet member who had left the heavy diplomatic arguments to Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in the run-up to March 2003.

On the most contentious issue of funding, Brown said he had never short-changed the military, funding operations in Iraq to the tune of eight billion pounds.

With an election only a couple of months away, Brown will clearly be hoping to avoid any damaging political fall-out.

While Blair focused darkly on the parallels he saw between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2010, Brown had a more positive message. Discussing the concept of a “just peace”,  he said lessons learned on post-war rebuilding were being applied in Afghanistan where the coalition is trying to train a local police force and offer local people the prospect of a better economic future.

Brown will doubtless be relieved that his appearance lacked the drama of  Blair’s. Only a handful of protesters gathered outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster and Brown came in through the front door — unlike Blair who was driven in under cover of semi-darkness in a cloak and dagger operation.

from Afghan Journal:

Is demilitarised Europe affecting operations in Afghanistan?

German Bundeswehr army soldiers in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Picture by Fabrizio Bensch)

U.S. frustration with Europe's unwillingness or inability to commit resources to Afghanistan, both in terms of men and materiel, appears to have boiled over.  Last week U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington that public and political opposition to the military was so great in Europe  it was affecting NATO operations in Afghanistan. The alliance desperately needed combat helicopters and cargo planes, but years of successive cutbacks in defence funding by European nations had left it unable to rise to the challenge. 

 "The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st," he said, addressing military officers from many of NATO's 28 member countries at the defense university.

If Europe were seen to be weak, it could provide a "temptation to miscalculation and aggression"  by hostile powers, Gates said in the sharpest criticism yet of its ally. The message was that  "pacifist" Europe had to pull its weight, realise that even if its borders were safe there were threats further afield, and bolster its defences. So far only five out of 28 member nations of NATO had reached an established target of increasing defence spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product. The United States, by contrast, spends 4 percent of its GDP on the military.

But some people are questioning why should Europe  go down the U.S. route? Stephen M.Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University writes in his blog on Foreign Policy that a case can be made to stop subsidising Europe's defence by itself, but not follow America in its  grandiose nation-building schemes on the other side of the world.  "Europe is peaceful, democratic, and loosely united within the EU, and the danger of serious conflict there is remote. So if the United States is feeling over-extended and looking for a place to cut back, Europe seems like an ideal candidate," he says.

"Just don't expect them to start matching America's bloated defense effort. The EU member states don't face any any significant military threats, and they aren't especially interested in our grand schemes for social engineering in various far-flung places. So it's not clear why they would want a military akin to ours, even if we were no longer protecting them."

How chaplains find peace during wartime

Dozens of chaplains from the Church of England are serving with British armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are there when soldiers seek redemption around the time of battle, and they there are, standing in the operating theatre, waiting until the surgeon can do no more.

They serve the needs of soldiers sent to war, and they also serve God.

While they adminster balm on the battlefield, their peers preach peace from the pulpit. Which is the more important for the CoE at a time of war?

A recruitment advert for the Royal Air Force in a Christian publication recently said it needed chaplains “to take the church to where it’s needed most” – moving with troops and air-crew, providing support on the front line and at the altar back at base.

Some vicars in the shires and cities would say they are most needed in the pulpit, preaching pacifism.

This is one of the busiest times for armed forces chaplains since World War Two – a war when the role of the church was possibly less blurred.

One of the highest-ranked chaplains in the armed forces touched upon this issue during the CoE’s General Synod in London this week.  The Venerable John Green, chaplain of the fleet and archdeacon for the Royal Navy, told members of the assembly that though they may have views on government defence policy, they should think of those carrying out those policies on the battlefield. You can listen to the audio of his presentation here.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

In Afghanistan: fighting over the terms of a settlement

At last week's London conference, two of the great truisms of warfare punched their way to the surface. The first is that wars are fought as much on the home front as on the battlefield. With public support for the war in Afghanistan ebbing away, the United States and its allies in NATO have shifted from seeking outright victory to looking for an exit strategy that will allow them to start bringing home their troops next year.  Rather as the British did after their two failed invasions of Afghanistan in the 19th century, they are sending in reinforcements in a display of military might which they hope will secure better terms in an eventual settlement.

The other truism is that if you can't win outright victory on the battlefield, then you have to negotiate with your enemies. President Hamid Karzai set the ball rolling by announcing he would hold a peace council to which, according to an Afghan government spokesman, the Taliban leadership would be invited.  Karzai has made such suggestions before, and it is by no means clear the Taliban leadership will send representatives. What was different this time, however, was the context.  Karzai's suggestion no longer met with the same resistance from war-weary governments, who stressed that it was up to the Afghans themselves to lead the process of reconciliation.  He also coupled his call for a peace council with an appeal to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia is a trusted interlocutor between the Afghan government and the Taliban leadership; Pakistan is the only country which still has some measure of leverage over them. Thus Karzai's call for a loya jirga, though not dramatic in itself, became emblematic of a broader shift towards seeking a political settlement to end the war.

What happens now is so complicated and so delicate, that no one can predict the outcome. Just as western governments have little clear idea about who might buy into a political settlement and on what terms, nor do the insurgents themselves. Contacts with various insurgent groups are expected to follow many  different tracks,  so that everyone -- on all sides -- is going to be watching what everyone else does to try to maximise their advantage.

The warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose men play a powerful role in the insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, has shown some signs of flexibility, according to the Wall Street Journal. In a video leaked to the WSJ, he said that "we have no agreement with the Taliban - not for fighting the war, and not for the peace."

"The only thing that unites the Taliban and [us] is the war against the foreigners," the paper quoted him as saying. "Unlike in previous videos, where Mr. Hekmatyar used a Kalashnikov rifle as a prop and expressed support for al Qaeda, in the latest tape, recorded in late December and provided to The Wall Street Journal by his aides in Pakistan, he assumed a professorial tone, wearing glasses and a black turban as he spoke in a quiet, soft voice."

A spokesman for Hekmatyar suggested last week that President Barack Obama's commitment to start drawing down troops in 2011 could be a possible step towards talks. "We do not see a hindrance to the negotiations provided a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces is set," said spokesman Wali Ullah.  "With Mr Karzai and (other) Afghans we have no problems."

The Afghan Taliban in the "Quetta shura" -- named after the Pakistani city where Washington says it is based -- will keep a close eye on any signs that Hekmatyar could switch sides. At the moment they are in a strong position, but this -- argues Ahmed Rashid in The New York Review of Books -- could give them an incentive to negotiate to try to extract concessions before the influx of U.S. troops and any breaking of ranks in the insurgency weakens their hand.

from Afghan Journal:

The Afghan conference: a meeting of victors or the vanquished ?

If you listened to some of the rhetoric in the lead-up to Thursday's conference on Afghanistan in London and followed the coverage accompanying it, you would think it is a meeting of the victors of war.

Here we are, at a meeting attended by representatives from more than 50 countries, offering the Taliban a chance for peace before the "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. troops hits them. They better grasp it before the tide turns decisively against them, seems to be the message.  Host British Prime Minister Gordon, according to this report, vowed to "split the Taliban" while offering them a full part in the rebuilt Afghanistan if they united behind the government in Kabul.

Britain along with Japan will launch a fund at the conference, expected to total up to $500 million over the next five years, as part of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's plan to lure away mid-to low level Taliban fighters from the insurgency.

The only problem with all this is the "vanquished"  Taliban have not yet taken the bait. Indeed they don't look like the vanquished, especially after  making 2009 the worst year  for foreign forces since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. As this piece here notes, many of the nations heading to Thursday's conference attended a similar one, in Bonn, soon after the defeat of the Taliban more than eight years ago. They were victors then; today they are "terribly fatigued and almost bled white.".  It is not the Taliban but the most powerful nations on earth who are seeking out the insurgents to talk peace.

But can the Taliban give in on the negotiation table what they haven't lost on the battlefield ?  They rejected again the hand of peace on Thursday, saying all foreign forces must  first leave their land.

Can the Taliban really be bought over with  money asks New York Post columnist Ralph Peters  ? "After almost a decade of open warfare with Islamist militants, thousands of global terror attacks in the name of Allah and even deadly Muslim turncoats in our military, we continue to deny that our enemies might be fighting for their faith -- or, in the Taliban's case, for faith, tribe, tradition and territory."

The debate over the possibility of a reconciliation with the Taliban really gathered steam after the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley A. McChrystal said he could envision a role for the Taliban eventually  in the political establishment in Afghanistan. But as the New York Times noted the administration neither expects nor is comfortable itself with the idea of dealing with the Taliban's higher command particularly its leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and other hard core elements described  not too long ago as "not reconcilable."

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Failed airline attack raises fresh questions about battle against al Qaeda

In the absence of a coherent narrative about the failed Christmas Day attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the debate about how best to tackle al Qaeda and its Islamist allies has once again been thrown wide open.

Does it support those who want more military pressure to deprive al Qaeda of its sanctuary on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or suggest a more diffuse threat from sympathisers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa? Should the United States open new fronts in emerging al Qaeda bases such as Yemen and Somalia, or focus instead on the fact that the attempted airline attack did not succeed, suggesting al Qaeda's ability to conduct mass-casualty assaults on U.S. territory has already been severely degraded in the years since 9/11?

The evidence so far about the attempt by 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set off an explosive device on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit can  pretty much be stacked up in favour of whatever argument you want to make.

Abdulmutallab was from a wealthy family in Nigeria, where al Qaeda and its Islamist allies have been trying to make inroads, by and large unsuccessfully so far. Residents in his family home town said they believed he was radicalised during his studies abroad, which included education at a British boarding school in Togo, followed by a course in engineering at the prestigious University College London.  He would not be the first educated young man to be inspired by Islamist radicalism in London -- among those who came before him was Omar Sheikh, convicted for the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Does this mean Britain has been too soft about allowing radicalism to flourish in its universities, as the conservative Daily Telegraph argues?  Or has Britain's own support for U.S. policies, including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a security crackdown at home, so alienated its Muslim community that a tiny minority will turn to terrorism? (If you ask ordinary Muslims in London what should be done, they are just as likely to give you a lecture about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and Washington's failure to insist on an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.)

Abdulmutallab's name had been placed on a British watch-list, suggesting security is already very tight in a country which is on alert for any repeat of the London bombings in 2005.  How much tighter can it get, without a further erosion of civil liberties?

The trail from London then leads to Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral home, and a country which U.S. officials say is emerging as an attractive alternative base for al Qaeda, after it was largely pushed out of Afghanistan and has since come under growing military pressure in Pakistan. In U.S. questioning, Abdulmutallab said al Qaeda operatives in Yemen supplied him with an explosive device and trained him on how to detonate it, according to a U.S. official.

Keith Weir on PMQs wins and losses

Gordon Brown fended off some familiar darts from Conservative leader David Cameron about the recession during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, says Reuters UK chief correspondent Keith Weir.

Brown also spoke about Afghanistan after the prime minister confirmed on Monday that Britain would send an extra 500 soldiers to Afghanistan, bringing the UK troop level to about 10,000. The U.S. said on Tuesday it will increase its troop levels by 30,000 to about 100,000.

Was there a winner in the Wednesday session?

Watch Weir’s analysis here:

Drawing the line against the Taliban

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.