Foreign policy

David Cameron’s address to the House contained no surprises. NATO and its allies are 6 months into a strategy to stabilise Afghanistan. All sides of the House were agreed that Britain should fulfil its commitments, but remain in Afghanistan not a day longer than necessary. That date is unknown. Like Blair and Brown before him, Cameron aspires to ‘improve Afghan security’. ‘Stability’ surely means the expulsion of al Qaeda from Afghanistan. How likely is that without the complete co-operation of the Taliban? (At what cost would that be secured?) And, as Julian Lewis MP pointed out, is al Qaeda more dangerous in Afghanistan than it is The Yemen, Somalia or

ABC was the acronym used for meetings of Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and William Cohen when they all worked for the President Bill Clinton. RAB will hopefully in future be an American-style acronym for the cooperation of the three people voted to chair the parliamentary committees for foreign affairs, defence and international development: Richard Ottaway, James Arbuthnot and Malcolm Bruce. If the government succeeds in welding together the different perspectives of the FCO, DFID and the MoD – a prerequisite of modern crisis management – then the three MPs will have to find new ways of working together too as parliament will have to scrutinise this new dynamic. They must

To all bar Tony Hayward, it is clear that BP is finished in America. A Macarthyite degree of opprobrium has been cast against the interloper. As Matthew Lynn notes, BP’s PR flunkies are grovelling across the networks, apologising in that singularly lachrymose British fashion. They should stop demeaning themselves and fight back. BP is to blame for the leak, but it is being demonised by an American President whose desperate populism and prejudice is masquerading as principled leadership; it is the latest British institution to be victimised by Barack Obama. Owing largely to the demands of the insatiable US market – which Obama has done nothing to abate, despite his

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs said Washington has now publicly made clear the US government is serious about negotiating with the Taliban. Speaking at a conference in Madrid, the US envoy said: ‘Let me be clear on one thing, everybody understands that this war will not end in a clear-cut military victory. It’s not going to end on the deck of a battleship like World War Two, or Dayton, Ohio, like the Bosnian war It’s going to have some different ending from that, some form of political settlements are necessary … you can’t have a settlement with al Qaeda, you can’t talk to

Having returned from Washington DC, where I spoke to a range of senior policy-makers about Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am struck by how much confusion there is about what President Obama meant when he said that he wanted US combat troops return home in 2011. Did he mean that 2011 would allow the first assessment of the progress and his strategy and a tokenistic reconfiguration or forces? Or did he genuinely mean that the date would see the beginning of a real, if drawn-out withdrawal? For what it is worth, I am convinced the US president meant the former. This is crucial to the UK, since so much of what

The Department for International Development (DFID) should forsake peaceful but poor countries and instead turn into “a world leader in tackling the problems of fragile states.” That’s what a new Chatham House report by Alex Evans, who used to be an adviser to Hilary Benn, and his colleague, David Steven, argue: ‘If the UK wants to deepen its commitment to backing the challenges posed by fragile states, it needs to remodel DFID extensively, with the department concentrating on developing a coherent preventive agenda for fragile states. The Secretary of State for International Development should make it clear that where a poor country’s main need is financial, the UK will not

I’m in Washington DC at a high-level seminar on trans-Atlantic relations with the “who is who” of Europe and the US, talking about issues of common concern. The Germans are here in force, as are the French, with high-ranking officials speaking about topics like Russia and Iran. Interestingly, the Brits are notable in their absence. It is probably a sign that the British government is still in transition mode, unable to explain any new policies, unready to stake out new positions. Or they may not be bothered with unofficial events such as these given the privileged access they have. But it is worth noticing nonetheless. The event is both off