Afghanistan

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Will British judges be “responsible” for the next terrorist attack?

Con Coughlin has an awful piece up at the Telegraph arguing that, in the light of today’s decision in the case of Binyam Mohamed, “if another al-Qaeda bomb goes off in London, the judges will be as much to blame as Osama bin Laden.” Seriously. That’s what he wrote. It’s as preposterous as it is repellent. Happily, over at Conservative Home, Alex Deane does an excellent job dismantling this and the rest of Coughlin’s diatribe here. The crux of Coughlin’s argument – in as much as there is one beyond the notion that the judiciary is inviting al-Qaeda to attack the United Kingdom – lies in the idea that the

Friday

John Bew

Talking to the Taliban | 29 January 2010

After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered. Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for holding secret talks with Taliban in December 2007, President Karzai has become an advocate for such negotiations over the last two years. In the Spring of 2009, Saudi Arabia hosted tentative negotiations between Karzai’s representatives and former Taliban, with links to the current movement. But the idea now has a head of steam behind it.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Blair wants to tell Iranian tales

Iran. That’s the news story which poor Mr Blair is trying to spin to the panel – but they don’t pick up on his hints. It would have all been all right in Basra – he’d like to say – if it hadn’t been for those pesky Iranians. As Prime Minister, if he blamed Iran in public then that would have had implications. He’d have had to follow up on it. But now he wants to tell us, or he would if those chaps on the panel would kindly probe him on it. When he was talking to Baroness Prashar he tried to start: “If what you’d ended up having

Thursday

David Blackburn

Is the West rich enough to buy the Taliban?

The Lancaster House conference commences this morning and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has penned a stupefyingly worthy article in the Times, playing the same old tunes about the intention to ‘improve governance, fight corruption and bring Taleban fighters back into society if they are ready to lay down their arms.’ The Afghanistan mission has clarity of purpose in that attempts to build a democracy have been abandoned in favour of establishing lasting Afghan security. The nascent strategy relies too heavily on the Afghan National Army; as Daniel Korski notes, the non-ideological Taliban, those inscrutable soldiers of fortune, will facilitate or undermine stability. Richard Holbrooke is adamant that: “The overwhelming majority of

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate

Whitehall has turned into the lobby of the UN General Assembly, as dignitaries gather to give NATO’s Afghan campaign renewed impetus. Will it all amount to much? It depends. In this piece for the magazine E!Sharp I set out my stall: ‘[if the conference] is to achieve anything more than fill out the evening news, the gathering must have only one aim: to help Hamid Karzai begin reaching out to insurgents and fence-sitters, drawing them into a negotiation that can drain the insurgency of all but the religiously-committed warriors.’ Part of this will involve giving money, jobs and security guarantees to foot-soldiers, as I recommended in a report back in

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The Eikenberry cables: today’s Ellsberg papers

Sometimes government leaks tell the public what they did not know. But sometimes leaks just confirm what everyone knew. The view held by the US ambassador in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” and “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,” will come as no surprise to anyone. But the timing of the leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s cables in The New York Times will nonetheless be quite explosive. Does it matter? Not really. Hamid Kazrai has in most people’s minds joined Anastasio Somoza García, Ngo Dinh Diem, even for a while Saddam Hussein as the West’s, well, what was that phrase used by FDR?

Daniel Korski

Kabul needs a big UN beast

The London Afghanistan conference is meant to appoint a civilian NATO coordinator to help align the counter-insurgency effort. The well-respected British ambassador in Kabul, Mark Sedwell, is a front-runner (as, incidentally, was Geoff Hoon until he plotted against Gordon Brown). If the press just publish the news, many questions will go unanswered. That’s not right. For the new post means that a two-year effort to make the UN the main aid coordinator has failed, and the appointee is likely to produce little unless individual NATO allies award him some spending power – a very unlikely scenario. There is nothing easier than to add a job to solve a problem, and

Friday

Daniel Korski

Cutting drugs

On Wednesday, Baroness Kinnock told the Lords that a number of Foreign Office departments had been hit been hit by an estimated £110 million budget shortfall, and that an anti-drug program in Kabul has been cut.  Coming after British dismay at President Karzai’s desire to put Afghanistan’s former (and widely-discredited) Interior Minister, Zarar Ahmad Moqbel, in charge of the country’s anti-drug effort, the cuts are bound to cause concern. Afghanistan is the world’s leading supplier of opiates, trafficked as opium, morphine and heroin. Over 90 percent of the heroin on the UK’s streets originates from Afghanistan. Though cuts to counterterrorism programs are probably ill-advised, there is less reason to worry

David Blackburn

Has Brown got anything to hide?

Proof positive that Brown listens, sometimes at any rate. The Prime Minister will give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry before the election. Chilcot has been resolute in his wish to keep politics out of the probe, which suggests that No.10 may have put in a call following the mounting clamour for Brown to appear. Brown is something of master in expressing defiance with a single line: “I have nothing to hide,” he averred on Wednesday. Might this sudden decision prove to be, as Sir Humphrey might have said, courageous? As Daniel Korski noted two weeks back: ‘Brown’s role in the Iraq War, not that of Blair, that is the most

Thursday

David Blackburn

Poor communication is damaging the Afghan mission

He may be a chateau-bottled shyster, but there is no better communicator of policy than Alastair Campbell. He has penned an article in the FT arguing that the lesson that should have been learned from the Iraq war was how to communicate strategic ideas and objectives. The lack of clarity that came to define Iraq now afflicts Afghanistan: ‘It was hard to discern that approach in the run-up to the Afghan surge being announced, or after it. The surge should have been followed by co-ordinated communications across the alliance. That job is not being done with the vigour and consistency that it should, and the systems of co-ordination have weakened

David Blackburn

Ultimately, Brown is responsible for these anti-terror cuts

Seriousness comes naturally to Gordon Brown and yesterday he gave a speech detailing how Britain is defending itself by striking at the heart of the ‘crucible of terror’. What Brown has in seriousness of delivery, he lacks in realism. Britain has not fought for such a sustained period since the high-water mark of empire; but the ambitions of two prime ministers, and to be fair the severity of the threat that Britain faces, have outstripped resources; Britain is now completely over-extended. Hours after Brown’s speech, Baroness Kinnock divulged that anti-terror measures run by the Foreign Office have been cut – anti-narcotics campaigns in Afghanistan and de-radicalisation programmes in Pakistan. These

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

David Miliband’s big idea: an Af-Pak-India Council

An idea that has received little media attention in Britain, but is giving Foreign Office diplomats sleepless nights, is David Miliband’s push for a “regional stabilisation council” involving Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, to be unveiled at the international conference scheduled for January 28. The idea is seen as an innovate way to bring the three countries together, while at the same time allowing the Foreign Secretary, who will formally host the conference, to show leadership and initiative. The pretender to the post-election Labour throne needs something to get rid of his “Banana Boy” epithet. So far, however, the idea is not meeting with local support. Pakistan, in particular, is opposed

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Geoff Hoon, silent assassin

And so it came to pass that nothing came to pass. Geoff Hoon gave evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on the same day as a convention of anaesthetists visited the QE Conference Centre. Perhaps their presence contributed to the somnolent proceedings. Beneath the apparent narcolepsy, Hoon made two important points. First, he was convinced that the intelligence contained in the two dossiers established the threat of WMD “beyond doubt”, which will assist Blair when he gives evidence, especially after Alastair Campbell’s recent ‘clarification’. However, Hoon claims that the 45-minute claim was the only piece of evidence that he had not seen prior to publication, adding that he was on ministerial

Daniel Korski

Deadly attack in Kabul = Taliban on the defensive

Many will claim that the Taliban’s recent attack in Kabul shows how powerful the insurgency has become. No doubt the psychological impact – the real aim of all terrorists – will be felt for some time. Faroshga market, one of the city’s most popular shopping malls, lay in ruins and the normally bustling streets of Kabul emptied. But the attack was an operational failure. All seven militants died in the attack; five were gunned down and two killed themselves. Three soldiers and two civilians — including one child — were killed. Seventy-one others were injured, including 35 civilians, but the majority are only slightly wounded. Such a toll must frustrate

Friday

James Forsyth

Fighting terror with the National Security Council

Since September 11, Britain has lost one war and is not winning another. But the question of why this is the case remains depressingly low down the agenda. There is remarkably little interest in why the “British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq”, to quote Gordon Brown’s and David Miliband’s favourite counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen. Today, the Tories launched their green paper on national security with speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. The document is a mixed bag. But the Tories deserve credit for squarely facing up to the fact that Britain is now an “incubator of extremism and an exporter of terrorism”. They are also

Thursday

David Blackburn

The growing threat of a military coup in Iraq

Predictably, insurgency in Iraq has intensified as the March elections near; its scale and frequency was not predicted. Alastair Campbell beamed as a benevolent Uncle when talking about Iraq on Tuesday but Coalition diplomats fear for the democracy’s future.  British ambassador to Baghdad, John Jenkins, told the Chilcot inquiry: “Iraq faces a real possibility of a military coup…Although I think where we are at the moment is much better than where we thought it was going be back in  2004-05 you only need look at the history of Iraq to understand that a realistic threat still exists.” Ayad Jamal Aldin, a Shia cleric who leads the anti-corruption, anti-Iranian and pro-secular

Friday

Daniel Korski

In preparing for war, the Tories differ from Labour in one respect – they would be prepared

In today’s Times, and on the occasion of George Osborne and William Hague’s visit to Helmand, the Tories are publishing proposals for how to improve the Government’s approach to post-conflict operations. Their central idea: to create a stabilisation force in the military, complete with the necessary expertise, training and so on to win the peace after combat. If it was not already abundantly clear, the Iraq Inquiry has shown how ill-prepared the British state – civil service, military and government – was for post-combat reconstruction. Though much has changed since the Iraq War – e.g. a dedicated department, the Stabilisation Unit, has been set up in Whitehall, and General David

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Cancel the London Afghanistan Conference

In a few weeks time, a slew of foreign ministers will descend on London to attend a conference on Afghanistan. No.10 will use the event to sell Gordon Brown as a statesman, confidently dealing with the nation’s threats. The Conservatives, in turn, will probably try to score the usual points about Britain’s failure, alongside its NATO allies, to make any in-roads in the fight against the Taliban. Together with Tony Blair’s evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, the conference may create one of the few moments in the drawn-out election campaign when the three party leaders stop talking about the NHS and focus on national security issues instead. Too bad, then,

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The “sleeper issue” of 2010: Yemen

As Melanie Phillips says in her article for this week’s issue of the magazine, the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab highlights the role of other, less frequently discussed, countries in Islamist terror. One such country is Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is thought to have trained at an Al Qaeda camp. The US believes there may be a few hundred al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, centered on a group of key network leaders who are operating a number of camps.   Yemen has slowly been getting more international attention. A few weeks ago I was meant to go on Al Jazeera, but my appearance was cancelled at the last minute because, I

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

2010: my predictions and yours

It’s that time of year – TV and radio are packed with special editions of Dr Who, news reviews and numerous best-ofs. So let me add to the cacophony with a look ahead to next year. Here are thirteen (and a bit) predictions for 2010: 1. The Taliban will mount a Tet-like attack on an Afghan town centre, such as Laskar Gar, prompting the Lib Dems to call for a British withdrawal from Afghanistan. 2. Iran’s regime will arrest and condemn to death one of the contenders in the 2009 presidential election. 3. Brazil will win the World Cup in South Africa. 4. The Pakistani president will be forced from