Posts Tagged → North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Go for it Gordon
Gordon Brown will next week address a joint session of both houses of the US Congress. This is a tremendous honour for him and for Britain. When Tony Blair made a similar speech in 2003 it was a brilliant performance the impact of which was muted because of the death of Dr David Kelly the following day.
The Prime Minister should use his speech to make the case for continued intervention in Afghanistan; not just the social programmes and electoral registration but the tough, targetted military intervention that continues to benefit us all at home through tackling the Taliban who happliy hosted terrorist cells, the terrorists themselves who continue to plot ’spectaculars’ in our country and the narcotics industry that also deals in death.
He should argue for larger military commitments by NATO members – and a larger number of NATO members too.
Go for it Gordon. Don’t just make the easy speech about shared values but the tough one about shared military service, shared sacrifice and shared security.
Obama’s Presidency means the excuses have all gone
Well done John Hutton. Today, he has called for Europe to commit more troops to the struggle against terrorism and lawlessness in Afghanistan (and increasingly in parts of Pakistan too). He has complained about other NATO member states leaving the ‘heavy lifting’ to the USA and UK whilst benefiting from the additional domestic security which tying down the Taliban and Al Qaeda brings.
There really has never been an excuse for NATO members’ reluctance to commit the necessary troops and equipment to Afghanistan. The arrival of President Obama takes even the lame excuse of ‘being seen to support ‘ George W Bush out of the equation.
NATO members have now simply got to accept their responsibilities. The NATO meeting in Krakow is the place for NATO to begin again to act as an organisation based on collective security rather than a forum for collective indecision.
All those Leaders who were so quick to send their congratulations to Obama now need to put their military where their mouths are.
Obama is a progressive President. He is no neo-con. There really is no excuse now.
Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan: NATO members must do more too
In preparation for the expected Taliban spring offensive President Obama has announced the deployment of up to 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan – an army brigade and a brigade of marines.
America already has about 14,000 troops serving with the Nato-led mission and another 19,000 troops under sole US command fighting the Taleban and al-Qaeda insurgents. Britain has something like 9000 troops in Afghanistan.
So the US and UK already make up around 60% of the 55,000 troop deployment.
The President’s announcement further demonstrates the extent to which Britain and America are shouldering the Afghanistan (and Pakistan) burden, whilst the rest of the Alliance benefits from the increased domestic security these commitments bring.
Take for example Operation Diesel – jointly executed by British and American troops in Helmand province between 6 February and 11 February.
The Operation disrupted facilities for making improvised bombs as well as seizing heroin and drug-making chemicals with a street value of more than £50m.
I said on Sunday that NATO members must step up to the plate. The President’s announcement makes that even more necessary, even more urgent.
A limp excuse for a Tory foreign policy
Phillip Stevens wrote this in the Financial Times today. I hope he does not object to me quoting him in full, because it needs to be said and heard more widely:
Such has been the Conservatives’ distance from power in recent years, no one has paid much heed to the party’s foreign policy. Now the opinion polls tell a different story. By the middle of next year David Cameron could be Britain’s prime minister. The Conservative leader’s view of the world suddenly matters. The snag is that I am not at all sure that Mr Cameron has a foreign policy.
Let me correct that slightly. On one thing, everyone can agree: the Tories do not much like the European Union. This euroscepticism has been slightly more muted of late. But for many in the party, hostility to European integration remains the issue that most clearly defines their politics.
The antagonism has crystallised in vehement opposition to the EU’s troubled Lisbon treaty. Mr Cameron will thus fight this summer’s elections to the European parliament on a pledge to hold a referendum on the treaty. He also intends to withdraw the Conservatives from the European People’s party, the loose coalition of centre-right parties in the Strasbourg parliament.
Were Mr Cameron to reach 10 Downing Street before the Lisbon treaty had been ratified by all of the other 26 EU member states, he would urge British voters to reject it.
It seems an odd proposition for a prospective government to advocate a plebiscite on an agreement it abhors – why not promise to cross out Britain’s signature on the treaty? But Mr Cameron is hooked on a referendum. Either way, he sees the latest plans to strengthen the cohesion of the EU as an assault on British sovereignty.
Things could get complicated were Ireland to vote Yes to Lisbon when it holds a second referendum later this year. The treaty might then enter into force before a British election. If that happened, Mr Cameron says, he would “not let matters rest”. What this last cryptic phrase actually means, no one knows. I once asked Mr Cameron. I received what you might call a non-answer. William Hague, who as shadow foreign secretary is still more eurosceptic than his leader, has hinted that there could be a renegotiation of Britain’s wider treaty obligations – diluting, in particular, the EU’s social dimension. Some Tory MPs see a more fundamental reappraisal as the route to eventual withdrawal.
On the other hand, Mr Cameron’s recent decision to recall to the shadow cabinet the fiercely pro-European Kenneth Clarke could be interpreted as a sign he has begun to consider the realities of power. It is easy to be obsessive about Europe in opposition. Prime ministers have to work with their European colleagues. After 13 years in the wilderness of opposition, would a Tory government really want to devote its first years in office to a fight with Britain’s partners? The voters, battered by recession, might not take kindly to such a diversion.
It would be a fight. Mr Cameron has recently sought warmer ties with Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. The chill, though, will return if he withdraws the Conservatives from the EPP. An attempt to overturn Lisbon would put relations into the deep freeze.
There is one other possibility. The treaty could fall as a result of a second No vote in Ireland. Conservative honour could thus be satisfied without an open rupture with Britain’s partners. I am not at all sure that in such circumstances other European governments, to adapt a phrase, would simply let matters rest. But there is a bigger point. Mr Cameron’s determination, one way or another, to put more distance between Britain and the rest of Europe does not add up to a foreign policy.
In different times, the Conservatives would have said they planned to cuddle up to the US. For many in Mr Cameron’s party the Atlantic has always been narrower than the Channel. The choice, though, has long been an illusion. Britain’s influence in Washington depends on its capacity to shape events in Europe.
Barack Obama’s administration intends to make the link explicit. On the big issues of the times – Iran, Afghanistan, climate change and the rest – it wants to deal with a more coherent, cohesive Europe. France is returning to full participation in the Nato alliance. The last thing Mr Obama wants, one adviser informs me, is for Britain simultaneously to loosen its relationship with the EU.
I am told by Conservatives that Mr Cameron has lots of other foreign policies. He would be tough on Russia; he backs the fight against the Taliban; he takes a hard line against Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. As for Mr Hague, he sometimes seems to hanker for the days when Winston Churchill fondly, and vainly, imagined Britain at the centre of three concentric circles of influence – the US, Europe and the Commonwealth.
What is missing is an anchor. Foreign policy has two essential dimensions – a range of objectives, some perhaps lofty, some practical; and, critically, a strategy or framework of alliances through which they can be pursued. The Conservatives, I suppose, could argue they have a set of impulses. There is no sign of the strategy. If he really expects to be prime minister, Mr Cameron should think harder about the wisdom of making enemies of natural allies.
Afghanistan: NATO members must step up to the plate
There was an interesting comment by Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Band, on the BBC’s Marr programme on Sunday. When challenged about the role and performance of the British armed forces in Afghanistan the first example that the Admiral gave for success was that ‘electoral registration’ has increased in Helmand province. Of course, that’s a good thing and, despite some elements of the media’s determination to paint it otherwise, Britain’s armed forces continue to do a vital and valuable job in difficult circumstances in Afghanistan: fighting the Taliban, building a functioning state, tackling the narcotics trade and reducing the threat that Afghanistan (and in light of the comments by their President today also Pakistan) becomes a haven for active terrorist organisations.
The reason the Admiral’s comments struck me though, is that often the terms of the debate about how countries engage in the struggle against terrorism is couched in terms of a choice between the use of ’hard’ power and ’soft’ power; between direct military engagement or nation-building. The remarks by the First Sea Lord, alongside the tragic death of another British marine, show that Britain is engaged in both. And both it must be.
Sadly, the campaign in Afghanistan has shown up one of the real strategic weaknesses amongst other NATO members at the moment. Too often too many NATO member states want to divide the response to arguably NATO’s most important operation in its 60 years of existence along these ’hard’ and ’soft’ options. The USA, alongside Britain and one or two other honourable European exceptions are expected to take on the ‘hard’ duties of military engagement. Europe is then left to lead on the ’soft’ diplomatic and humanitarian tasks of building schools and hospitals.
If NATO is to survive another 60 years large parts of Europe must stop freeloading; collective security is just that ‘collective’ and it is vital that every NATO member who wants to enjoy the benefits of it also contributes to the costs of delivering it; often, sadly, that cost is borne in the lives of our servicemen and women but it is made all the greater because so many NATO members are not pulling their weight within the Alliance.
The struggle in Afghanistan is not about a choice between ‘winning hearts and minds’ and winning the war. As the Admiral made clear on the BBC it is about both. You simply can’t expand electoral rolls, educate girls, build health centres without first establishing and then maintaining peace and security.
There is also too little done by NATO members to make the case for our military engagement in Afghanistan. When was the last time Gordon Brown, for example, made a speech setting out the case to the public for the security struggle which almost weekly claims the lives of brave British soldiers, sailors and airmen? Yet this struggle is about the collective security of every NATO member state because to be beaten by would-be terrorists in Afghanistan (or Pakistan) creates a real and present danger on our own streets.
President Obama is right to argue that significant increases in NATO force levels are necessary. They are. It is high time that every member of NATO stepped up to the plate.
Hillary looks East
After all the focus on who would be the first overseas politician to receive the honour of being received first by President Obama (it was Tony Blair), the first overseas visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have recieved less comment: she will visit Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia. Secretary Clinton said the decision to go East “signals that the US is not just a transatlantic power but also a transpacific power”.
There is a dual significance in this decision. It is a sure sign, if any were even necessary, that the World is indeed moving East – and the USA increasingly sees more of its strategic interests in that region. In recent decades, and since the warming in sino-American relations following Nixon’s historic visit to Chairman Mao, these visits have been largely about economics; the recognition that China represented a massive market for foreign direct investment. This trip though, is about politics more than economics. It is a recognition that China is an emerging superpower every bit as much as an emerging market.
The second point of significance is contained in Hillary’s comment about being a ‘transpacific power’ as well as a transatlantic one. The West should take a warning from her words. With NATO increasingly unsure of its direction, incapable of committing troops in sufficient numbers to Afghanistan and unwilling to expand its membership for fear of Russian reaction, the glue that bound the USA to its transatlantic allies feel a little weaker. The total lack of direction in which the European Union finds itself, especially at a time of deep recession, simply serves to make matters worse.
Secretary of State Clinton, and the Obama Presidency, are signalling that they have choices about whether they look East or West from the USA. The old certainties that that choice is always and inevitably towards us is no more. Such a World view, places the USA no longer just as the leader of the ‘West’ but at the fulcrum of the world map; at the centre of globalisation.
There is a significance in everything this new administration does in these early days, and not just the comfortable gestures around Guantanemo. Western Europe should wake up and smell the coffee: the US is looking both left and right, East and West more than ever these days. NATO members please note.
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