The big problem with catching Osama bin Laden is that everyone has forgotten what he looks like.  That, or he’s hiding in an ungoverned quarter of Pakistan.  One of those two.  Just in case it’s #1, the FBI has put out new photos of what the world’s most wanted man might look like today.  Here’s the FBI’s best shot of our man pre-9/11:

And here he is as he might be today… perhaps living on your street, caring for your children, or maybe just hiding out in some ungoverned corner of Pakistan:

Whoa! I mean… who’d have believed it?  Look at the guy.  It’s almost impossible to think it could be the same person.  For a start, he has got rid of the blanket over his shoulder.  And everyone (MI6, CIA) thought that the Bin-man wouldn’t go anywhere – like, for example, a well-guarded cave in an ungoverned quarter of Pakistan – without his beloved safety blanket.  He’s like Linus in Peanuts: no blanket, no identity.

And the turban!!! Where’s the cheeky bit of extra cloth flapping about? Gone. Is there nothing this man won’t do to hide his whereabouts?  He’s even started wearing (look closely) a brown shirt with a silver floral pattern!  Lucky the FBI put that photo out.  Without it, hell, anyone could have stumbled upon a well-guarded cave somewhere in, ooh, the Afghan-Pakistan border area, and met this blanket-free, small-turbaned, crap-shirted dude and thought “hey, isn’t that… no, my bad, that’s definitely not OBL. No resemblance.   Sorry about that fine sir, I’ll be on my way…”.

Some unexpected data comes in from the BBC:

Of more than 1,500 Afghans questioned, 70% said they believed Afghanistan was going in the right direction – a big jump from 40% a year ago. Of those questioned, 68% now back the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, compared with 63% a year ago.

The survey was conducted in all of the country’s 34 provinces in December 2009. In 2009 only 51% of those surveyed had expected improvement and 13% thought conditions would deteriorate. But in the latest survey 71% said they were optimistic about the situation in 12 months’ time, compared with 5% who said it would be worse.

Compare that with these Gallup figures, released last week:

Sixty-three percent of Americans describe their outlook for the United States during the next 20 years as “very optimistic” or “optimistic.” Americans expressed greater optimism about the country’s future near the beginning of the 1990s and 2000s, but the current level optimism exceeds that of Americans heading into the 1980s.

So, there you go: there’s 7% more hope in Afghanistan!

- Writing in E!Sharp magazine, David Charter examines some of the contentious debates surrounding the shaping of the new European External Action Service (EEAS). Jan Gaspers, meanwhile, suggests that the EEAS will mark the “real vanguard of a stronger EU in international affairs”, and given time could pose a significant challenge to national diplomacy.

- Bruce Schneier offers his take on the reaction to the attempted Christmas terror plot. “The problem”, Schneier argues, with the solutions being proposed (full-body scanners, passenger profiling, etc.):

“is that they’re only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.”

[…]

“What we need is security that’s effective even if we can’t guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation and emergency response.”

- Elsewhere, Samuel Brittan, argues in favour of taking a “fresh look” at certain liberal values – “[h]owever difficult it is to define a liberal”, he suggests, “it is not hard to spot anti-liberals.” John Gray, meanwhile, explores the relationship between neoliberalism and state power, suggesting that “[t]he consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.”

- Finally, the FT’s Gillian Tett has an interesting piece on the potential social impact of fiscal cuts and the implications of this for bond markets and national standing over the next decade.

The next stage of our journey presents a dilemma. We have to get from Guinea-Bissau, where we are now, to Sierra Leone.

The overland route would be by far the most attractive option, but the violence in Guinea-Conakry, which lies between our starting point and our destination, rules it out. There is a very long overland route which bypasses Guinea, but which takes you through Liberia and Ivory Coast which, like Guinea-Conakry, are both on the UK Foreign Office’s blacklist of places to avoid (being on this list invalidates travel insurance, so if you fall ill or get shot or blown up, you will be skint as well as dead). There are no flights from Guinea-Bissau, so that leaves flying from Gambia or Dakar, Senegal as the only options (and you take your chances with West African airlines).

To get to Gambia or Dakar, however, is not easy. You either have to go by land through the Basse Casamance region of Senegal, where there has been a low-level but dangerous rebellion for years and where a 9-year-old girl was murdered by bandits a week ago and where gunfights between rebels and soldiers are common. Or you have to endure a gruelling two-day road journey east through Guinea-Bissau, up into Senegal and around Gambia to Dakar. We have done this journey once, and the idea of doing it again makes me suicidal. It too is not without risks, for the roads are atrocious and littered with overturned or burnt out vehicles.

So there is no easy option. The road up through Casamance is also on the FCO’s blacklist, although if we can make it the 18km to Ziguinchor tomorrow we can then ask in town whether it is safe to go overland up to Gambia. If it’s not safe, we can go by boat to Dakar (safeish if the boat doesn’t sink, as it did a few years ago). We have decided on the latter course, which means 18km of danger – approximately half an hour. Ziguinchor itself is quite calm and well guarded by police.

I will post again when we get to Ziguinchor. I have been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life, where he got caught up and regularly fired on in the Angolan war of independence, as reassurance. This would have been a cakewalk for him.

Yesterday on our way back to Bissau from the south, we were stopped at a military checkpoint and forced to empty our rucksacks. Well, empty them until the soldier got bored halfway through and told us to stop – he didn’t look at the other half.

The reason for this sudden rigour (at the same checkpoint a few days previously mentioning Manchester United was sufficient to avoid a bag check) is the return to Guinea-Bissau of General Bubu, the former head of the navy. Bubu had to flee the country 18 months ago when he was discovered plotting a coup d’etat against the then president, Nino Vieira. He took sanctuary in Gambia.

Last Monday, weary of exile, the general returned secretly to Guinea-Bissau in a dugout canoe, entering via one of the country’s many rivers. Eluding checkpoints such as the one we passed through, he arrived in Bissau, walked into the United Nations building and claimed refugee status. There he remains today.

The government wants the UN to give him up so they can try him for his crime – although Nino Vieira is now dead and Bubu claims he has come in peace, you can’t trust anyone around here, especially someone with his popularity. But the UN constitution makes handing him over impossible, so there is deadlock. All that can be done is for soldiers at checkpoints to make sure people like Bubu don’t get through in future (although checking only half of one’s bag and not asking for ID may not be failsafe). After us, the regional governor passed through the same checkpoint. His bag was searched too, and he angrily asked the soldiers why they were shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The soldiers, chastened, shrugged.

The arrest of a Nigerian national suspected of plotting to blow up a transatlantic plane is another worrying piece in the jigsaw of West African Islamic terrorism. Until a year or two ago, Al Qaeda’s presence in the region was more a rumour than a serious concern to Western governments. The group was thought to be involved in diamond smuggling during the Sierra Leonean civil war in the 1990s, and some observers believe it has profited from the heroin trade through the Gulf of Guinea.

But as recently as February this year, when I gave a talk to the UK’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, the British government did not believe Islamic extremism in West Africa would coalesce into a serious threat, especially outside the region itself. Although the FCO has placed half of Mali and Niger and all of Mauritania on its list of travel blackspots, their people still seemed unruffled when I talked to them about their West Africa strategy a couple of months back.

They may be sleeping less easily now. Although Al Qaeda’s infiltration of the region remains at a fledgling stage, the arrest of the Nigerian and the kidnappings of four Spaniards and two Italians – all in the past six weeks – are an indication of the potential dangers both within and without West Africa’s borders. And the pressure that is encouraging young Africans towards extremism – the great collision between demography and poverty that is taking place against a background of inept and venal governance – is intensifying by the day.

The authorities are doing what they can. Nigeria’s police cracked down violently on the Islamist Boko Haram movement back in August, and Mauritania’s police take copies of taxi drivers’ ID cards so that they can haul in their families if passengers disappear.

But without economic development the region’s governments will be fighting an impossible war. Al Qaeda’s wealth will buy off police and army as well as luring in new recruits. It is development that people need – relevant education and infrastructure investment provided by their own governments that are responsive to them and not to donors or other vested interests, and that provide a fair enabling environment for businesses large and small; assistance from the West by means of getting out of the way of trade and migration and forcing Western businesses to behave honestly; and they also need a large dose of luck: they need leaders to emerge who have the will and courage to stop the cycle of selfishness and corruption at all levels of government and to shed the burden of aid in favour of self-reliance; and they need their neighbours to remain stable and peaceful. Only West Africa itself has the power to stop extremist violence in the long-term. As many people I have spoken to in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau realise, the rest of us can help most by clearing their path.

- With the US and Russia reportedly close to agreeing a successor START deal, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi chart the next steps for a secure nuclear future. Details of their recently published report on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament can be found here. Henry Kissinger, meanwhile highlights the importance of kick-starting progress on six-party talks with North Korea.

- Elsewhere, Nouriel Roubini reflects on “gold bubbles” and the need to beware the calls of “gold bugs”, given that the “recent rise in gold prices is only partially justified by fundamentals”. The FT’s Alphaville blog offers an alternate view.

- Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, outlines her vision of a “quiet diplomacy” keenly focused on “getting results”. The BBC’s Europe Editor, Gavin Hewitt, assesses the upcoming challenges she is likely to face – whether a winter energy crisis, shaping a coherent EU policy towards the Middle East, or establishing the much-trumpeted EU diplomatic service. Charlemagne, meanwhile, argues that when it comes to European foreign policy there are simply “too many cooks”. Philip H. Gordon, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, offers his thoughts on what the post-Lisbon landscape is likely to mean for US-EU relations.

- Finally, Prospect presents 25 key public intellectuals that have helped us navigate the squalls of the financial crisis – Simon Johnson, Avinash Persaud, and Adair Turner make up the top 3. Niall Ferguson, meanwhile, offers his take on the most influential thinkers of the past now showing renewed relevance – Keynes, Polanyi, Kindleberger and Darwin, among others, have places on his list.

Yesterday, President Obama announced the U.S. would start drawing down in Afghanistan by July 2011.  Sounds pretty specific, huh?  Or maybe not.  Here are extracts from the NYT’s (first-class) live blogging of today’s Senate hearing on the plan, starring Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates plus Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen:

9:55 a.m. Senator McCain sharply questions Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates about the president’s announcement that a drawdown of troops would begin by July 2011. The senator grilled the military leaders, saying he found it contradictory that on the one hand, a decision to withdraw would depend on evaluating conditions on the ground and on the other, a withdrawal timeline was in place. “Which is it?” Mr. McCain asked, asserting “you can’t have both.”

Mr. Gates told the senator that the military would do a thorough review in December of 2010 to evaluate whether the withdrawal objective could be met. But Mr. McCain, who has derided the idea of a withdrawal timetable at this juncture, said that a specific date – without clarifying that more evaluation will be needed before withdrawing – gave the “wrong impression” to the American public, soldiers and to the enemy.

Why July 2011 anyway?

10:25 a.m. Secretary Gates interjects that the July 2011 withdrawal date was arrived at, in part, because it will then be two years since the Marines arrived in Helmand.

That feels just a bit arbitrary, doesn’t it?

12:18 p.m. About that July 2011 target date for beginning to withdraw — how does it square with the idea that the actual conditions at the time will determine what happens? Several Senators have wanted to know that. Here are some of the answers from the witnesses. Mr. Gates: “I think the president, as commander in chief, always has the option to adjust his decisions.” Admiral Mullen: “The president has choices, as the president.” Mrs. Clinton: “It is the best assessment of our military experts — as evidenced by Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus, General McChrystal and others — that by July 2011, there can be the beginning of a responsible transition that will of course be based on conditions.” The real point of the target, she suggested, was to make sure that the Afghans know we don’t want to occupy their country.

This one could run and run…

So, we have the speech on Afghanistan.  The official text was, according to my computer, about 4,600 words. How many times did certain words appear?

Afghanistan: 44 times

America: 20 times

Terror and/or terrorism and/or terrorist: 3 times

NATO: 3 times

China and/or India: 0

Europe: 0

Victory and/or exit: 0

Ninety minutes from now, Barack Obama will give his Afghanistan speech, and almost certainly say he wants NATO allies to send 10,000 more troops to match 30,000 new U.S. personnel.  It’s a bit iffy, but my guess is that he’ll get about half that number from the Europeans.  This will make everyone feel good about transatlantic cooperation after a few months of stories about how America doesn’t love Europe any more. 

But, as I argue in a new piece for the Indian magazine Pragati this week, the fact that NATO will cough up a few more troops shouldn’t conceal the lack of a real strategic debate in Europe about Afghanistan:

The quality of strategic debate on Afghan affairs in EU capitals is far lower than that in Washington. “We ask what pulling out of Afghanistan would mean for the transatlantic alliance,” one respected French strategist admits, “but not what it’d do to Afghanistan.”

He could go further. Although European commentators are typically well-informed about Pakistan’s instability, they rarely put “AfPak” in a wider strategic regional context.

How would a NATO failure in Afghanistan affect relations between China and India? What impact would it have on Russia’s Central Asian ambitions, or Iran’s defiance of the West? These are not questions you are likely to hear seriously discussed in Europe.

Why so? Here are a few possible reasons:

Defence intellectuals and politicians share an underlying duty of care for soldiers in the field. If—as many European observers have concluded—those soldiers are being killed for a lost cause in Afghanistan, it would be immoral not to prioritise their welfare and sacrifices.

But power politics has to be factored in too. And the Afghan case confronts Europeans with the harsh fact that their global power is diminished. Yes, they could fly more troops to Central Asia. But they would still be secondary players (by a very long distance) to the Americans—and China and India would still have far greater influence in the region.

European analysts who see Afghanistan in transatlantic terms (“What does this do to NATO?”) are in denial on this point. The future of Afghanistan is clearly of far greater significance to the triangular strategic relationship between China, India and the United States than it is to European affairs. But no-one likes to admit they are a second-order issue.

I’m not the first person to argue that the EU should measure its global influence by Asian metrics. I’ve previously cited the work of James Rogers here – he focuses on maritime security, and the Indian Ocean in particular. James blogs at European Geostrategy – a new outlet with lots of good contributors – and so does Luis Simon, who has been thinking about the EU’s place in Eurasia. I recommend their stuff.

But I also recommend another new piece by Tomas Valasek of CER on European policy towards Iran – which obviously rivals Afghanistan as a test of Europe’s relevance in the Eurasian wilds.  He has a warning for the EU’s new foreign policy chief:

Catherine Ashton, like Javier Solana before her, will be expected to maintain dialogue with Tehran while the UN debates sanctions, and after the Security Council agrees a new regime. But one wonders if this is the EU’s last hurrah on Iran. If the combination of sanctions and talks fails, and if Israel strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities, Tehran will certainly call off the EU-led talks. The other choice before the world is to start working on containing a nuclear Iran, by making its neighbours feel secure (so as to discourage them from building nuclear weapons themselves). But this will almost certainly be a job mainly for the US, rather than the EU. So while Baroness Ashton will spend a lot of time on Iran at the beginning of her term, the EU may gradually lose its leading role.

We can add that to the list of “scenarios we aren’t thinking enough about”…

From Bloomberg…

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits.

Uh-oh. Next we’ll hear that Goldman partners are getting together at weekends to watch classic Kurt Russell movies…

The UN is pessimistic about the situation in Guinea. In Tambacounda last night, in the south-eastern wastes of Senegal, I met a World Food Programme employee from Dakar. Like everyone else in this one-horse town, he was on his way somewhere else, in this case to Kedougou, near the border with Guinea. He is going to investigate whether there are sufficient telecoms and internet facilities there, in case war breaks out in Guinea and a flood of refugees pours into Senegal. Similar preparations are taking place in Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The UN’s caution may be well-founded. Guinea’s increasingly-unhinged leader, Dadis Camara, has recruited South African mercenaries to train his supporters in the art of war, in case the majority Peul population decides it has had enough of him and moves to unseat him from power. I asked the WFP man what the Senegalese government’s position is. He said that the president, Abdoulaye Wade, supported Camara when he took over last December, and has maintained a discreet silence since. “Guinea is rich in resources,” he explained. “It doesn’t pay to antagonise those who control them.”

This little gem - spotted amid Iraq documents leaked to the Telegraph and apparently quoting one Colonel J.K. Tanner, chief of staff to the British general commanding a division in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 - is calculated to warm the cockles of Richard’s heart (enthusiast for EU military operations that he is):

“I realise now that I am a European, not an American. We managed to get on better militarily and administratively with our European partners and indeed at times with the Arabs than with the Americans. Europeans chat to each other whereas dialogue is alien to the US military.

They need to reintroduce dialogue as a tool of command because, although it is easy to speak to Americans face-to-face and understand each other completely, dealing with them corporately is akin to dealing with a group of Martians. If it isn’t on the PowerPoint slide, it doesn’t happen.”

It echoes the words of US counter-insurgency expert William Lind in one of my favourite columns of his, from March 2007:

The U.S. military has carried the formal meeting’s uselessness to a new height with its unique cultural totem, the PowerPoint brief. Almost all business in the American armed forces is now done through such briefings. An Exalted High Wingwang, usually a general or an admiral, formally leads the brief, playing the role of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. Grand Wazoos from various satrapies occupy the first rows of seats. Behind them sit rank upon rank of field-grade horse-holders, flower-strewers and bung-holers, desperately striving to keep their eyelids open through yet another iteration of what they have seen countless times before.

The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. PowerPoint, by reducing everything to bullets, goes one better. It makes coherent thought impossible. Bulletizing effectively makes every point equal in importance, which prevents any train of logic from developing. Thoughts are presented like so many horse apples, spread randomly on the road. After several hundred PowerPoint slides, the brains of all in attendance are in any case reduced to mush. Those in the back rows quietly pray for a suicide bomber to provide some diversion and end their ordeal.

When General Greg Newbold, USMC, was J-3 on the Joint Staff, he prohibited briefings in matters that ended at his level (those above him, of course, still wanted their briefs). Instead, he asked for conversations with people who actually knew the material, regardless of their rank. Five or ten minutes of knowledgeable, informal conversation accomplished far more than hours of formal briefing.

We’ve covered Blackwater a few times in the past here on GD, and when the founder of the firm was implicated in murder in two sworn depositions back in August, you might have thought that the firm’s star was waning.  Not according to The Nation, though, which has just published a lengthy piece on what the company is up to in Pakistan:

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found.

The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

And if you liked that, you’ll love this:

Some of the Blackwater personnel, [the source] said, work undercover as aid workers. “Nobody even gives them a second thought.”

Read the whole thing.

- With the new EU President and High Representative finally decided, the FT wonders whether current Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, is the true victor from all the horse-trading. The Times has news that, consistent with the Lisbon reforms, the EU is attempting to strengthen its presence at the UN. Sunder Katwala, meanwhile, suggests that European member states still lack a fundamental sense of what they want to achieve as one in the global arena.

- As President Obama continues to review Afghan strategy, the WSJ assesses the impact on US-UK relations. Con Coughlin, meanwhile, paints a more pessimistic picture of the “exclusivity of [Obama’s] style of decision-making”.

- Elsewhere, Fyodor Lukyanov heralds Mikhail Gorbachev’s idealism, suggesting he was “the last Wilsonian of the 20^th century”. Richard Haass, meanwhile, explains how lessons drawn from the Cold War could help address contemporary global challenges.

- Finally, World Politics Review has a series of articles on modernising the US State Department and creating a more integrated national security architecture. The Guardian, meanwhile, surveys the UK Foreign Office’s growing “brave new world of blogger ambassadors”.