by Alex Evans | Feb 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Tempers are fraying in NATO. Following Canadian PM Stephen Harper’s threat to withdraw its troops from Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan if other NATO countries don’t send additional troops to help, Germany has now rejected calls for it to send more help to the south. Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy sums up views in DC:
…if NATO members cannot support the military effort in Afghanistan, you have to wonder what it is that these countries stand for.
Here at Wilton Park’s conference on European security in 2020, tempers are fraying too. There’s dark muttering in some of the discussions in the margins that whatever Germany may say about only having signed up for peacekeeping duties in the north, the reality is that Germany sent troops to Afghanistan in order to curry support for its bid for a permanent Security Council seat in 2005, but isn’t there for its overstretched allies when the going gets tough. Chatham House’s Paul Cornish takes a similar view in the Telegraph today:
“Nato is in operations now and the whole of Nato has made this commitment to Afghanistan, so why should it be mainly American and British and Canadian boys who are fighting and dying? This all goes back to the key question about the health and vitality of the trans-Atlantic security relationship. Here we are, in extremis, and other Nato member states just don’t stump up the troops.”
Interestingly enough, though, the Weekly Standard – of all publications – thinks that US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has some blame to shoulder for the fractious nature of discussions, as Michael Goldfarb sets out:
Both the content and timing of Gates’s blunt letter to his German counterpart Franz-Josef Jung, which was leaked yesterday by the center-left paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, have left even staunchly pro-American politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU parties supporting Chancellor Merkel astounded and annoyed…
Current opinion polls indicate that about two-thirds of all Germans want an immediate Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan, but despite this growing public pressure, Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU allies are strongly committed to the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission and considering doing more (like in the case of [the Quick Response Force in northern Afghanistan). Given this highly charged domestic political context, aggressive demands from abroad that Germany deploy additional combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan tend to play into the hands of those who want a complete German military pullout.
by Alex Evans | Feb 1, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
In the margins of Wilton Park’s conference on European security in 2020, a timely reminder that for some of the delegates here – who, collectively, represent a clear majority of European states – the concept of ‘European security’ is much more real than for other delegates (like us Brits, who tend to see it as an interesting theoretical exercise in blue sky thinking).
Talking to two eastern European diplomats over lunch today, I asked them how they felt about the argument – made by a western European participant yesterday – that NATO had expanded too fast during the 1990s, and that perhaps some of Russia’s misgivings about the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement were understandable.
Rubbish, they answered immediately, and with surprising intensity. Both cited chapter and verse on when Russia had invaded their respective countries – and how many of their compatriots had been lost. Only when Russia was on the back foot, as it was during the 1990s, did their countries have a chance to make progress in foreign policy. From the point of view of many eastern European foreign ministries, recent Russian behaviour – on energy, on Lugovoi, on the British Council – is a totally predictable reversion to type.
by Alex Evans | Aug 26, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Middle East and North Africa
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Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or GMEI (by way of a reminder, here’s what Brookings had to say about it then). At the time, there was heavy criticism – not only of of the GMEI’s optimistic hopes about democratisation, but also its dubious geographical assumptions: could Iran and Afghanistan really be lumped together with all the Arab countries?
But here’s the thing. If the idea of a Greater Middle East was clumsy, there’s still a case for coming up with some new geographical categories to reflect changed political realities in the region. In particular, it’s surprising that we still have no one category that draws together Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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by David Steven | Aug 1, 2007 | North America
A breathtakingly thuggish op-ed on the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US in the FT today. The author? John Bolton, who these days is a senior fellow somewhere or other.
According to Bolton, the UK needs to take two teensy weensy steps to keep the relationship fresh:
- Pull out of the EU or face the consequences – ejection from the Security Council, end of intelligence co-operation etc.
- Join the US in invading Iran whenever it feels ready to stop European connivance in the Iranian ‘goose-step towards nuclear weapons.’
Laughably, Bolton tries to present his position as reflective of a bipartisan consensus in the US, while pompous to the last, he offers to wait a while (“but not forever”) for the British PM to pledge allegiance to neo-conservative orthodoxy.
I am sure Bolton’s screed is being read with great seriousness in Downing Street – 2 or 3 microseconds of attention at least. Then Brown’s team will get back to the serious business of working out how they can:
- Best ignore lame-duck-Bush and his increasingly batty minions, and
- Buddy up to the various brave souls volunteering themselves to clear up the mess Dubya will leave behind.
The FT is offering all and sundry the chance to put questions to Bolton in an ‘ask the expert’ session (expert in what? one wonders). Ask your questions here…
by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
The UN Security Council decided on Friday to terminate the mandate of UNMOVIC – the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, itself the successor to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to oversee post-war dismantlement of Iraq’s CBRN arsenal. Condi Rice and Margaret Beckett had written wrote a joint letter to the Security Council – the latter less than a week before her departure – saying:
“Together with the government of Iraq and other Member States, the United States and the United Kingdom … have been working since March 2003 with the objective of locating and securing, removing, disabling, rendering harmless, eliminating or destroying weapons of mass destruction … developed under the regime of Saddam Hussein … We wish to inform the Security Council that all appropriate steps have been taken to secure, remove, disable, render harmless, eliminate or destroy … all known elements of Iraq’s known weapons of mass destruction.”
There’s a certain amount of predictable sniggering at the news in many quarters. Well, sure they’ve been ‘secured, removed, disabled, rendered harmless, eliminated or destroyed’: there were none, right?
But in case you were thinking that UNMOVIC’s demise looked like an exercise in closing the stable door four years after the horse had bolted, Richard Weitz at World Politics Review argues that in fact, closing UNMOVIC down was a serious mistake.
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