November 2016 – Page 4

Obama visit Ashdown Sunday Times Piece (16.04.16)

Ashdown Sunday Times Piece (16.04.16)

Barack Obama is coming to Britain next week. Brexiters from Boris Johnson downwards, say he shouldn’t – or at least if he comes he shouldn’t give his views on Europe (though they are happy to quote lower rank US right-wingers giving theirs). They say to do so, is “hypocritical” and interferes in a decision that is only ours to make. They are right as far as they go. But they only tell half the story.

Ninety-nine years ago next month, the United States entered the World War I and sent its young men and women over the Atlantic to fight for our freedom. They did it again in the Second World War. And again in the Cold War which followed, when the peace of Europe depended more on Washington than on any other single capital in the world, including those on the European mainland. They made none of these sacrifices because it was in our European interests. They made them because they were in their own – or rather because their interests on that side of the Atlantic, and ours on this, coincided.

For the last century, the Atlantic relationship has been key to our peace and security. And the key to the Atlantic relationship has been its strongest strand – the partnership between the United Kingdom and the US. Together we have done more than any other two nations in the world to up-hold a peace based on the values we jointly share. Surely that entitles a US President to tell us if he believes we are about to take a step which diminishes both our influence in Washington and the strength of our partnership?

As the White House said following Boris Johnson’s intemperate criticism of our closest ally: “the US deeply values a strong ally in the UK as a part of the EU.” Ever since Kissinger and Kennedy, Washington’s policy has favoured a “twin pillar NATO” based on a strong US and a united Europe. They understand that a weakened – or worse, disintegrating – EU would give opportunities to Vladimir Putin and damage the Atlantic relationship as an instrument to pursue our joint interests in a turbulent and instable world. If that is Mr Obama’s view, then surely he is duty bound to put it?

And he is not alone. All our friends in NATO, the Commonwealth and well beyond, take the same view – and for precisely the same reasons. There is, however one person who does agree with Messrs Johnson and Farage – but he is very far from a friend. It has long been a cardinal strategic aim of Vladimir Putin’s to bring about the break-up of the EU. Some even claim that Russia secretly funds some of Europe’s anti-EU political parties. I am sure that is not happening in Britain, of course. But that does not alter the fact that, while all our friends would mourn Brexit, Vladimir Putin would cheer it. It’s what he wants us to do.

Next week will mark President Obama’s last visit to Britain while in office. Who will be our next US Presidential visitor? Though I do not predict it and pray for the opposite, we have to face the fact that by next year Donald Trump could be in the White House and American foreign policy will have taken a turn towards the incoherent, the bizarre and the dangerous all at once. This is a man who has proposed South Korea and Japan arming themselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons to deal with the threat posed by North Korea. A man who has called NATO “obsolete”. Trapped between an overbearing, senseless Trump to our West and an increasingly emboldened Putin to our East, the last thing our continent needs is to become more fractured and less secure.

These are most dangerous times for Europe – arguably more dangerous than any in my life time. To our west we have United States in the throes of a convulsive and unpredictable election; to our east, the most assertive – some would say aggressive – Russian leader of our times, prepared to use military force to deny a European democracy its chosen future; to our south-east an Arab world in flames; to our south a Maghreb in turmoil right down as far as Mali in central Africa. And all around us new economic powers emerging which are as strong or stronger than any individual European nation acting on its own.

If now, in the face of these threats, we were to abandon our European solidarity in favour of a lonely isolation which rejects the advice of our allies, then the difficult decades ahead of us, will be much, much more difficult and dangerous, not just for all of us in Britain, but also for all of Britain’s friends around the world.

802 words

ENDS

Lib Dem Conference News of the World 21 Sep 2010

News of the World 21 Sep 2010

Liberal Democrats heading to Liverpool this weekend may be leaving the comfort zone of more familiar party conference venues; tranquil and sunny Bournemouth or the seaside glitz of Brighton. But we will be heading to a city where Liberals and Lib Dems have never been afraid of the tough choices that come with power and where, since the 1970s we have often run this great city and played a huge part in its regeneration.

While the antics of the Militant Tendency was Labour’s response to the Thatcher years, our Liberal Democrat colleagues in Liverpool learned long ago that politics is about winning power and using it effectively. And exactly the same principle applies today.

No doubt there will be ferocious discussions – and dissenting voices, too in Liverpool. We are, after all liberals and democrats – so we are not afraid of debate and disagreement

But this will, over all, be a constructive Conference – and one one of the most important and exciting in our history.

My good friend Ming Campbell said there was a risk that we would become like the owner starts to look like their dog. But I think the opportunities ahead are far greater than the risks we face. Entering this coalition partnership has its dangers, of course. But it also presents us with a unique opportunity to give the people of the country we serve the benefits of the policies we believe in. And that’s what I came into politics for.

We made a promise to the British people at the last election that, if we had the opportunity to give the country stable Government and a chance for a new kind of politics, we would not shirk it. Honouring that promise was right. And it now gives us a chance of changing British politics for the better by working together in a way which we Lib Dems have always said we believe in and the British people have always said they wanted.

Both sides of this coalition seem to understand what is at stake. This goes far deeper than just the chemistry between Nick Clegg and David Cameron. We don’t obviously agree with the Tories about everything – but we do agree about the big things; the need to clean up the mess Labour left behind. The need to tackle the economic crisis. And the need to face the tough choices now, rather than ducking them until later, like Labour. There is real strength behind this partnership – and in my view, it will carry us through the very difficult times ahead as Britain fights its way out of recession in an increasingly competitive world.

We can count on Labour to stand on the sidelines and shout like superannuated students, just as they did in the 1980s. This tactic will benefit them as much now as it did then.

What the country needs and expects is a Government which is not afraid to lead, a team which is prepared to tackle the tough decisions and a new kind of politics which is about working together in the national interest, not the old yah-boo scratch-your-eyes out politics which has done us all so much damage in the past.

That’s the challenge Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems face in Liverpool. And I am very confident they will rise to it.

Paddy Ashdown

555 words

The age of global interdependence The New Statesman October 2013

The age of global interdependence

In a world where everything and everyone is connected, nations and their governments must learn the power of the network

We are on the edge of one of those periods in history when the pattern of world power changes; when the established order shifts, and a new order begins to emerge. These are almost always difficult times for the weak, tough for those whose power is waning, and usually bloody for almost everyone.

This economic recession is not like any other we have recently experienced. We will not plummet down and bounce back comfortably to where we were before. This is about something deeper. The tectonic plates of global power are shifting, and when it is over we in the West will, relatively speaking, be weaker and those in the East will be stronger.

The last time we saw a shift of power on this scale was when leadership of the world passed from the old powers of Europe to the emerging power of the United States. And we all remember the convulsions which followed that collapse of empires and the emergence of a new order.

Some propose China’s ascent will follow a straight line, but I do not believe that. China’s ascent to great power status – and great power is her most likely destination – will not be smooth. Their economy may be largely liberalised, but unlike India, their society is not. My guess is as they begin to lose their old communist structures in favour of a freer society, there will be considerable turbulence. Chinese history is littered with instances when the nation, as disparate and ethnically diverse as Europe, stood at the edge of greatness and then descended into dissolution and chaos.

Nor do I agree with friends who tell me, often with ill disguised glee, that the United States has passed the zenith of its glory. The symptoms of decline in nations are scleroticism, institutional arthritis and resistance to change. And the United States shows none of these – as the still remarkable election of Barack Obama clearly shows.

But though the United State’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power is unlikely to change soon, the context in which she holds that position is certain to. We are no longer looking at a world dominated by a single superpower. The growth of new power centres means the emergence of a multi-polar world; one which will look more like the nineteenth century balance that great British Foreign Secretary George Canning used to call “The Concert of Europe”.

This will have a number of important consequences.

The Atlantic relationship will remain key on the both European and American side. But it will not serve as a lynchpin for all other policies, as it has over the last half century. The United States will have interests which do not always coincide with those of Europe, and vice versa. For Europe, this will mean a more subtle and sophisticated foreign policy, not simply hanging onto the apron strings of our friendly neighbourhood superpower. And for both, it means developing a more mature relationship, in which we can disagree without shouting betrayal.

Arguably the important consequence of this new shape will be this: we are reaching the beginning of the end of six centuries of the domination of Western power, Western institutions and Western values over world affairs. We are already discovering that, if we want to get things done – redesigning the world economic order, intervening for peace – we can no longer do them within the cosy Atlantic club. We will have to find new allies in places we would never previously have looked.

Power is not just shifting laterally from West to East; it is shifting vertically, too. It is migrating out of the structure of nation states and into the global space, where the instruments of regulation are few and the framework of law is weak.

Look at the institutions having difficulties at the moment – national governments, political structures, the old establishments. Note that nearly all depend on the nation state; their range of action confined within borders. Now look at those institutions growing in power and reach: the internet; the satellite broadcasters; the trans-national corporations; the international money changers and speculators; international crime and terrorism. Note that all operate oblivious of national borders and largely beyond the reach of national regulation and the law.

Not only power but problems, too, have been globalised. The uncomfortable truth – which Westminster refuse to acknowledge, and our old institutions find no way to cope with – is that almost no problem can be solved within the nation state or by its institutions alone. Not our ability to protect ourselves; not the cleanliness of our environment; not our health; not our jobs; not our mortgages. These and more now depend not on the actions of our governments, but on their ability to work with others in a set of institutions which are global in scope and international in character – of which history may say the EU was the first, albeit highly imperfect example.

Another factor is shaping our age in a way different in scale from anything before, and this is our increasing global interdependence.

Of course, what happens in one nation has always been of interest to its neighbours and allies – that’s why one of the oldest government functions is diplomacy. But today’s interdependence is of a completely different order. Nations today are not just linked by trade, commerce and diplomacy, they are intimately interlocked in almost every aspect of daily life.

What happens in one can have a profound, direct and immediate consequence on another. An outbreak of swine flu, the collapse of Lehman brothers, the revelations of 9/11 – these can set in train a domino effect across the entire globe in a matter of moment.

Everything is connected to everything, and this interconnectedness applies not just to external relations; it applies to internal organisation, too. But the problem is that our governments are not structured to do things in an interlocking way. They are made up of vertical stove pipes, steeped in a stove piped culture and are run, in the main, by people with stove piped minds.

Our present government took its form – as did every advanced Western democracy – in the nineteenth century. It followed the fashionable structures of the Industrial Revolution and the era of mass production: strong command chains; vertical hierarchies; specialisation of tasks. This was right and appropriate, for it suited the age.

But it does not suit our age. For this is the age of post industrial structures, of flat hierarchies; of networks dedicated to bringing disparate inputs together at a single focal point.

Government structure and culture remain resolutely stuck in the past. Ministers and Senior Civil Servants are judged on how well they hold the territorial integrity of their department, preserve its budget and defend its payroll. Networking with other departments is regarded as a threat, not an opportunity. The screaming of gears heard in Whitehall is the sound of institutions knowing that they ought to network, but finding it impossible to do so.

Time now to unveil my third law for the modern age: The most important part of what you can do, is what you can do with others.

It is an institutions’ ability not to do, but to network, which matters most. If you want to see the price of failing to understand that, you need look no further than Afghanistan. The chief reason for failure lies not in the ineffectiveness of the Afghan government, who we love to blame, but in our failure to have a co-ordinated international plan: our inability to work between nations, our determination to look solely through the prism of national, rather than international action and our refusal to speak and act with a single purpose. The real scandal of Afghanistan was that our soldiers paid with their lives because our politicians could not or would not get their act together.

It does not matter if you are an army unit, or an NGO, or an aid deliverer like DfID, or a Ministry like the Foreign Office – the most important part of what you can do is not what you can do by yourself, but what you can do with others.

And because everything is connected to everything, another revelation of our age is this: we increasingly share a destiny with our enemy. This concept is not new of course, for it has always been the proposition of poets and saints and visionaries that we should learn to live together. The great John Donne poem No man is an island says it all: “every man’s death affecteth me, for I am involved in mankind. Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”.

[William E.] Gladstone said it too in 1879, when Lord Roberts invaded Afghanistan, in his second Midlothian campaign:

“Do not forget that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan amongst the winter snows, is no less inviolate in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Do not forget that he who made you brothers in the same flesh and blood, bound you by the laws of mutual love. And that love is not limited to the shores of this island, but it crosses the whole surface of the earth, encompassing the greatest along with the meanest in its unmeasured scope”

But here is the difference between their age and ours. For Donne and for Gladstone, these were recommendations of morality. For us they are part of the equation for our success and maybe even our survival.

Global Power New Statesman 12 Nov 2012

Paddy Ashdown

As the nature of global power changes, how do we secure our enduring interests?

History comes in two modes. In one of them, the gimbals on which power is mounted are steady, stable and unchanged. These are predictable times, times when we can look ahead with confidence and know what will happen. They are not necessarily peaceful times but they are at least unbewildering times.

Then there is the second mode – the times of change, when power shifts. These are turbulent times, puzzling times and, all too often, bloody times. We are living in the second mode. All is changing, although you would not think so to look at our foreign policy or our defence policy, for they are anchored firmly in the past and pay no attention to the new world now emerging.

Power is shifting from the nations and institutions we are used to holding it, to those we are not – and it is doing so in two significant ways.

First, we are experiencing a vertical power shift. Power is now migrating out of the institutions of the nation state, onto the global stage. This is because today’s world is interdependent in a way it never has been before. When there is swine flu in Mexico, it is a problem for Aberdeen in the next few hours. When Lehman Brothers collapses, the global economy suffers. Fires in the Russian steppes cause food riots in Africa. The irresponsible burning of fossil fuels in the West drowns Bangladesh. We are deeply interconnected and it is that interconnection that matters. We used to pretend that there were issues which were domestic and others which were foreign policy. There is now no domestic issue that does not have a foreign policy quotient to it.

On this global stage, the institutions of democratic accountability are non-existent and the institutions of legality are very weak. The modern powers that are growing have no reference to the frontiers of nation states. They may be things which we like, such as the internet; free trade; global media and global finance but we must acknowledge and wary of the lack of accountability in each of these areas. Of course we also see things we do not like, such as ISIS, international terrorism and global pandemics. What these phenomena have in common is that they each represent a new arena, impossible to control through national law.

Historically the powerful have been relaxed about the existence of lawless spaces. Indeed, they have often benefited because they can exert their power to define the rules themselves. We as a nation have experience with this. However, sooner or later, unwatched lawless space is occupied by destroyers. With the degradation of the power of national law brought about by globalisation, this is exactly what has happened.

From this history of the nation state in the 20^th century, we can see that where power goes, governance must follow. In what looks to me like a deeply turbulent age, our capacity to create greater stability rather than greater turbulence will depend on our ability to bring governance to the global stage. We need to abandon isolationism and realise it is entirely in the interests of a medium-sized country which needs stability and security, such as the United Kingdom, to strengthen governance around the world.

For stability to be achieved, we will have to act. It will not be sufficient to stand on the side-lines and have a proliferation of further multilateral UN institutions. The world needs the UN as an international forum; as the developer of international law; as the legitimiser of actions—but when it comes to taking difficult action in non-permissive circumstances, my belief is that coalitions of the willing will have greater practical effect.

I know this from my own experience. As High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, charged by the international community with maintaining stability after the conflict in that region, I reported twice a year to the UN Security Council for the conduct of my mandate. But my managing board was the Peace Implementation Council—a body made up of those who had committed troops and resources to peace in Bosnia.

Governance on the global stage is most likely to be created through the growth of new, treaty-based, institutions. These institutions will, by necessity not be multilateral as the UN is but they will be more effective. We have seen some already emerging: the WTO is one; the International Court of Justice is a second; and the G20, is not quite a treaty but it has quasi-treaty powers, is a third. Kyoto is a fourth.

As a medium-sized nation, it is in our interests to play our part in the creation of these institutions. Yet this idea of a rule-based world order features nowhere in the Government’s foreign policies. British civil servants and diplomats were the people who created the United Nations; we have an immense role to play and the ability to make an immense contribution here. But our response is instead to cut the budget of the Foreign Office

The second great power shift, is, of course, is that from west to east. We have come to accept this in terms of the new economic power of the Pacific basin. What we may not realise is that these will transit into political power and military power in due time.

We are moving from 50 years of a monopolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world in which the role of our foreign policy and our defence will be wholly different. If you want a model of what comes next, do not look to the last century as we often so myopically do; look rather at the Europe of the 19th century. Europe then, with its many viable powers is a far better model of today’s situation that then bi-polar arrangements of the cold war. In those times Britain’s role was not fixed; we always played to the balance. This was a period of much more subtle foreign policy. Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister in the 1800’s once said: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. Contrast that with our present policy in which we cleave to the old, simple, certainty that we need to do no more than cling to the United States.

Now, if we want to operate in the world, we have to move beyond the Atlantic club; we have to bring in other partners, including for instance the Chinese. Of course, we do not share their values but in many cases we do share their interests. Think of the 3,700 Chinese serving under the blue flag and the blue helmet of the UN. Think of the problems of the Somali pirates off the horn of Africa, where the Chinese provide the largest naval unit that is today fighting the pirates. Why? Certainly not out of charity. They want to keep the sea lanes open, just as we did in the days of our mercantile power. What we must recognise this is in our interest as well, whether we share values or not. These are the kind of relationships we should begin to develop.

In the modern age, the most important part of what you can do, is what you can do with others. The most important thing about our structures, whether nations or any other organisation, are not their vertical capacities but are rather the interconnectors, the docking points, that help us to build the wider coalitions that create the networks that produce effective outcomes.

We will, of course, rely on the Atlantic alliance and Europe as our primary alliances, but we will have to build alternatives and new coalitions beyond that. Where we do that is where we will succeed, and where we do not do it is where we will fail.

We must shed some of our recent geo-political instincts. We see a problem in the world and our first response is to bomb it. We believe we live in a kinetic age, but we do not. We live in the new age of diplomacy, in which our capacity to build wider coalitions to achieve the interests of our nation, not necessarily coalitions of values but coalitions of interest, will define success or failure.

Paddy Ashdown is xxxxxxxxx

NATO NEEDS BRITISH-FRENCH LEADERSHIP NOW 29 Sep 2012

NATO NEEDS BRITISH-FRENCH LEADERSHIP NOW

These are confusing times for supporters of NATO. On the one hand, the transatlantic alliance has completed its Libya mission without suffering a single casualty. On the other, NATO’s future looks uncertain in the face of fiscal austerity, growing burden-sharing problems and dwindling US faith in its utility. The onus is now on Britain and France to show the way forward.

In 2000, the US share of total defence spending among NATO members was around 50%. Today, it has risen to 75%.Many European nations have cashed in on continental peace, re-directing spending towards other priorities and free-riding off the US in dealing with overseas threats.

This burden-sharing problem will only get worse. Every European NATO member will see severe defence cuts over the foreseeable future, including France whose review of the Livre Blanc begins next year. So we can expect European capabilities and share of NATO defence spending to decline further.

But Europeans are not just spending less on defence; we continue to spend badly. Military spending is channelled through dozens of separate national programmes and structures creating enormous duplication and failing to achieve economies of scale. As a result, while there are half a million more European military personnel than the US, Europeans can deploy just a fraction of those that America does on overseas expeditions.

The second concern is future US foreign policy. In his last European speech as US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates warned that the US is looking west across the Pacific as much as east across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, what they see in NATO is yesterday’s vision of the future: allies with declining capabilities, reluctant to put troops in harm’s way, an institution ill-suited to addressing US overseas interests. Moreover, looming US defence budget cuts means the mood in Washington is to focus US overseas commitments its core interests.

Libya is a case in point. After the initial airstrikes, the US played a substantial but supporting role, encouraging Britain and France to lead what they saw as an operation primarily of European interest. As a result, the mission suffered from substantially reduced firepower with less than a quarter of the planes used in Kosovo, flying less than a fifth of the air sorties and ammunition running dangerously low at times. Without US military assets, the mission would have been impossible.

As in Bosnia in the 1990s, so again in Libya today, this operation has cruelly exposed how poorly equipped, organised and prepared we Europeans are for undertaking serious and sustained missions, even in our own backyard. Given that the Americans are clearly less willing to lead this sort of operation in the future, this should be a sharp wake-up call.

So what can we do? How do we reassure the Americans that Europeans are fully committed to the transatlantic alliance? How do we Europeans deliver greater military capabilities when money is tight? How do we provide for our own security interests if and when the US declines to lead in a cause vital to Europeans in the future?

Some say the answer is a European army. But this is a pipedream for lazy thinkers requiring a common budget, common equipment, and integrated command, under clear political direction: none of which are intended by its advocates. Yet the status quo is equally unpalatable. I welcome last year’s British-French Defence Treaties. If we will them, these could deliver real cost savings through joint procurement, R&D, maintenance, training, and shared military doctrine essential for joint operations. But therein lies the rub. Without the will to develop a wider vision, they risk descending into the black hole for good intentions that swallowed up St Malo.

The first deficiency of the London-Paris defence axis is the assumption that deep co-operation can be achieved by bringing the Generals together to agree how to collaborate on the battlefield; or fitting aircraft carriers with catapults. This is a perfectly sensible idea. But it is neither big, new nor original. It’s what Blucher and Wellington tried at Waterloo, Hague and Foche attempted at Flanders, what my father hoped for in the British Expeditionary Force before Dunkirk, and what I did with the Dutch Marines in the 1970s. Working co-operation, even integration, between troops is sensible. But it will not lead to the deep co-operation and cost-saving we need.

Proper defence co-operation will not be driven by the Generals at the top, but by integrating defence industries at the bottom. Address this and we will open up genuine co-operation driven by the requirement to rationalise a common interlocking strategic view as a prelude to achieving common procurement. That’s what will give reality to genuine defence co-operation. That’s where the huge savings we need will be made. That’s how we can finally begin to construct a globally competitive European defence industrial base.

The second problem is that London and Paris see these Treaties differently. For Euro-sceptics, it’s a step back to the future; the entente cordiale re-created; an exercise stopping at Paris. But for Paris it is much more. There is already an active structure for Franco-German co-operation, the UK-Dutch Amphibious Force and the Nordic Grouping. The London relationship adds to it. The French vision is to create a wider process of pragmatic defence co-operation between like minded European parties based on practical steps and what is in our interests to do. This is the right vision. But it is anathema to some in London.

London must realise that in isolation, British-French cooperation will not provide the European capabilities required to strengthen Nato. By itself, it will not deliver the cost-savings needed to rescue defence budgets. Without others, Britain and France will not be able to provide for our collective security interests when the US declines to lead.

So we must deepen our bilateral cooperation. We need to actively explore defence cooperation with other serious European partners. And we should be relentless in exporting our cooperative model across Europe. As British-French leadership in Libya comes to an end, British-French leadership in Europe needs to begin.

NATO at Bucharest Paddy Ashdown 30 March 2008

NATO at Bucharest

Paddy Ashdown

30 March 2008

NATO’s post-Cold War accomplishments are legion and have confounded those who in the early 1990s predicted the Alliance’s demise. Key achievements include the Alliance’s expansion and its Balkan operations, which extended the Euro-Atlantic community’s reach and created a ‘zone of peace’ across the European continent.

But as NATO leaders prepare to meet in Bucharest, considerable challenges remain. Two immediate operational tests stand out: First, NATO’s Afghan operation; second the KFOR mission in Kosovo. Beyond operations, NATO needs to rescue its enlargement strategy – initially towards the Western Balkans and Ukraine – and launch a new approach towards its partners, notably Australia and Japan but also the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.

For Afghanistan, in the next three years, ISAF needs to build the Afghan army and even the Afghan police’s capabilities, expand security across the southern and eastern provinces and develop a modus operandi not only with the Afghan government but also with international organizations such as the UN and EU, so that a truly “comprehensive approach” can be brought to bear.

From now to spring 2009, the key challenge will be to hold the alliance together, ensure enough additional troops to guarantee that Canadian and Dutch contingents remain and to prevent a spring offensive by the Taliban.

With the Germany reluctant to move south, NATO needs to find ways of “alternative burden-sharing” e.g. support for NATO’s southern mission by partners with troops deployed in the north. This might include establishing an Afghan Army Fund to pay for the army’s development.

For many European countries, however, counter-insurgency is not a politically palatable narrative. But democracy-promotion might well prove potent (even post-Iraq). NATO should therefore use the Afghan elections in 2009 as the catalyst for continued allied commitment.

From spring 2009 onwards, when a new U.S president is likely to surge additional troops to the south, it will be vital to ensure that while NATO’s southern operation becomes “Americanized”, other allies do not withdraw. Here it will be key to examine new ways of collaborating with the EU. One idea would be for the EU to take charge of reconstruction in Afghanistan’s 12 largest cities, with NATO providing security inside and U.S forces operating in the provincial hinterland. A “Kabul Security and Development Plan” could be a first step; another, could be for European gendarmerie forces – either through NATO or the EU – to help build the Afghan police.

In addition, NATO should look for ways to contribute to a regional solution, involving Pakistan and India, possibly by examining the scope for an external Baker-Hamilton-style commission to review current policies.

Risks abound, not least that the U.S will come to see the decision to hand ISAF over to NATO in 2003 as a mistake and will again favour a “coalitions-of-the-willing” policy, with consequences for intra-NATO solidarity and, at the tactical level, an increased gap between a U.S-led “RC South caucus” and the rest of the Alliance.

NATO’s second immediate challenge will be to maintain its credibility in Kosovo, to ensure peace throughout the territory of the newly-independent state, and assist the EU’s police-and-justice mission in tackling Kosovo’s major problem: organized crime.

An early priority will be to ensure institutions such as the police and EULEX gain access to Mitrovica while, at the same time, giving neither side the opportunity for further violence. In time – if the political decision is made – NATO should plan handing over security responsibilities to the Kosovo government, perhaps aided by an EU force.

Both the Afghan and Kosovo missions will necessitate better integration of civilian and military assets and increased NATO-EU and NATO-UN cooperation.

NATO-EU relations remain famously difficult and reliant on the EU’s relationship with Turkey and the status of peace talks on Cyprus. But there may be scope for increased tactical cooperation, especially in-theatre, which could exploit a strategic rapprochement between NATO and the EU should one occur.

Practical areas for EU-NATO collaboration, including in-theatre ISAF support to EUPOL, joint training and pre-deployment preparation for PRT staff and joined-up civil-military exercises.

Outside current commitments, two long-term operational challenges for NATO are likely to emerge. The first is NATO’s potential role in any Israeli-Palestinian settlement including peacekeeping tasks and assistance in building Palestine’s security institutions. The second, longer-term challenge, is how to deal with Africa.

NATO has yet to find an effective way to assist the African Union (AU) in building its capabilities. Meanwhile, US plans for Africom risk marginalizing NATO as a security player in Africa. NATO should examine how it might operate with Africom and the AU as they stand or explore the possibilities for a new hybrid construct, such as an AU/NATO set-up – perhaps even involving the UN or EU – which could have a permanent presence in Africa, become a long-term partner for security assistance and work to prevent conflict.

Reforms are needed to improve both current and future operations including, adjustments to NATO’s command structures so that greater authority can be delegated to military commanders and in-theatre integration with partners like UN can be improved, without, of course, compromising the role of the NAC and the Secretary-General. Changes in the way NATO missions are financed should also be explored, perhaps through the development a commonly-financed NATO operations budget or, initially, joint financing for parts of NATO operations.

Unforeseen challenges will doubtless emerge. And both current and future operations will vie for attention with the “new” threats such as cyber attack, weapons proliferation and energy security.

NATO’s 60th anniversary in 2009 presents an opportunity to revitalize the world’s premier security organization and following this year’s US presidential election, to re-build a consensus on Euro-Atlantic security, including ways to improve NATO-EU cooperation.

As the NATO Secretary-General recently stated, this may include “updating” the Atlantic Charter and clarifying the meaning of Article V in an “age of terror”. This weeks’ Bucharest Summit should lay the groundwork for next year’s re-affirmation of the world’s most important alliance.

Mrs Thatcher 8 April 2013

Mrs Thatcher

“There is nothing I have done in my life which frightened me so much as standing up in the House of Commons as a wet behind the ears new Liberal Leader and being ritually hand bagged by her in front of the radio microphones of the nation (TV in the Commons did not arrive until later). I opposed almost everything she did (but found myself following many of them when I tried to get the Bosnian economy going by lowering taxes and freeing up the market). Though there will be many who saw her as the author of much destruction that we still mourn, much that she pulled down, needed to be pulled down. She was better as destroyer of old tired institutions and lazy ways of thinking than she was as the builder of new ones; better at defining divisions than building cohesion. But, probably that’s what Britain needed then. Had we on the left had not grown so lazy about our addictions to the easy ways of state corporatism, she would perhaps have been less successful at so cruelly exposing their hollowness. The pre-eminent attribute in politics is courage; the moral courage to hold to the things you believe in. And this, like her or loathe her, she had in abundance. Personally charming to all except those in her Cabinet; fearless when taking on her enemies, even to the extent of making up some of her own; utterly implacable in her patriotism, albeit of a kind which didn’t always serve the country’s long term interests. She won great victories for what she stood for at home and huge respect for our country abroad. If politics is the ability to have views, hold to them and drive them through to success, she was undoubtedly the greatest Prime Minister of our age, and maybe even the greatest politician.”

Mediterranean refugees -FT – 1 November 1943

Mediterranean refugees -FT – 1 November 1943

Over the years, British politicians have clashed with EU officials on everything from the size of bankers’ bonuses to the power consumed by vacuum cleaners to how knobbly a carrot can be before it no longer counts as a vegetable. But this week Brussels put forward a conclusion on a matter of life and death that elicited harmonious murmur of agreement from Whitehall. It is that the best way to discourage refugees from north Africa from seeking a better life is to let them drown.

In 2013 700 people, many of them women and children, are believed to have died trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. This year the figure is 3,000; the number of people setting out from the north African coast has probably increased by a similar proportion. About 180,000 have made it safely to European shores so far this year. Humanity and respect for life are basic European values. But in a crowded continent whose near neighbour is one of the world’s most impoverished and volatile regions, they are being tested.

Refugees travel far and wide after reaching dry land. The influx poses a problem for every European nation, but none has shown much interest in dealing with it. Or at least, none had shown much interest before last October, when the skipper of a stricken trawler squinted into the early morning sunlight and, seeing land, set fire to a blanket in hopes of alerting people on the shore. By the time help arrived the boat, crammed with fleeing Eritreans and Somalis and drifting about a mile off the Italian island of Lampedusa, had caught fire and sunk. More than 300 people are believed to have died.

That tragedy was the spur for Mare Nostrum, a yearlong Italian naval operation that has saved 150,000 lives. But Rome has had to shoulder the €9m a month cost alone. Other European capitals, content to benefit from the generosity and humanity of the Italians, have declined to lift a finger.

People-traffickers, many of them based in Egypt, have also been more than happy to take advantage of Italian compassion, often phoning the Italian navy to tell them about a leaky boat full of refugees off the north African coast. They know that under international law the Italians must then rescue those whom the smugglers have just abandoned. Not unreasonably, the Italians have concluded that they cannot continue to have their generosity abused.

And so the EU has been forced to act. It has chosen to do so, not by relieving the Italians or even by helping them, but by sending in the European border force. In place of Mare Nostrum will be an operation run by Frontex, the authority that polices the common frontier of the 26 nations participating in the Schengen area of passport-free travel. It will have only one-third of the funding of the Italian operation. And it will not be allowed to operate outside European territorial waters. It cannot rescue abandoned refugees in international waters, as the Italian navy has been doing; they will now be left to drown. This, it is suggested, will be helpful because it is considered that the salutary spectacle of women and children drowning in numbers could reduce the “pull factor” that is created when they are rescued.

Has Brussels really become so separated from common human decency that it can contemplate such arguments, let alone invite us to accept them?

The new European policy will not hurt the people traffickers, only one of whom has ever been arrested – in Egypt. Its intended victims are the hapless human flotsam those criminals have abandoned, who we now propose to leave to drown pour encourager les autres.

It will not work. The recent surge in Mediterranean refugees began after the sinking off Lampedusa, a tragic spectacle that did little to put people off. More deaths are unlikely to be much more effective as a deterrent. True, the Italian rescue operation also began after Lampedusa. But the passage is by any measure remains a dangerous one; the number of deaths has continued to increase. People attempt it because of the desperate circumstances they face. However grave the risks, little is more frightening than staying where they are.

This week the government said that Frontex ships would not be in breach of their international obligations to rescue those in peril at sea. The ships, ministers assured parliament, will be safely tucked away in European territorial waters, far away from the drowning refugees. It is a cynical justification, and one that belies the claim that this policy is motivated by a genuine care for the welfare of refugees

What should European nations, including the UK, be doing instead? Helping the Italians rather than abandoning them to do our dirty work would be a good start. Brussels could also do more to pressure the governments of Egypt and other north African departure nations to act against the traffickers – and provide them with the technical help to do so. In the 1960s the Special Boat Service was sent to the Caribbean to prevent drug traffickers from Colombia from reaching countries such as Jamaica and Barbados. If this worked in the Caribbean then why should it not in the Mediterranean now? People traffickers, too, are a grave threat to our security.

The EU should also invest much more development and diplomatic assistance in a region where conflicts have for too long been allowed to fester. Somalia is a failed state, Ethiopia close to one. And Eritrea is in the grip of a brutal regime that controls its citizens through open-ended “national service” for men and women from the age of 17. These are among the main sources of this caravan of human misery.

The UK should be pressing our EU partners to match the development assistance we have provided in north and east Africa. And we should all intensify our efforts. The west readily finds billions when it comes to fighting a war. But when it comes to preventing conflict or rebuilding peace, we offer little more than pennies.

Any of these – or all of them in combination – would be far better than the policy the EU proposes which, apart from being inhuman, immoral and potentially illegal, will also not work.

Learning Mandarin the easy way – April 2012

Learning Mandarin the easy way

The lingua franca of modern China is not actually called “Mandarin” (which comes from the bad old days before Communism and refers to the language spoken by the Mandarins or Court servants). The politically correct word nowadays is “Pu Tong Hua” (often written with the three words run together) – meaning the common or ordinary language.

But whatever you call it, this is now arguably, after English of course, the world’s most important language. And not because it is the common language spoken by the worlds biggest country in terms of population (1.3 billion now and rising fast – or nearly a quarter of the world’s population). Though that’s one reason, for it means that, if you can speak Chinese and English, then you can speak to around half of the entire humanity of our planet.

But now, China is more than big – it is also rising. There may be different views about whether this will happen quickly or slowly. I personally think that before China can achieve her full potential, she will have to democratise her society, just as she has liberalised her economy and this may be more difficult for her than many understand. But whether China rises quickly or over a longer period there are very few now who would not accept that she will be one of the major global powers of our age with interests in every part of the world and a global reach to go with this.

So this is a great language, with great potential.

But, grammatically at least, it is not a difficult language. Indeed there is really very little grammar in Pu Tong Hua.

The difficulties a foreigner experiences with Chinese are more human rather than intellectual.

And the first comes from the language’s beauty.

There is a wonderful mellifluous musical underpinning to Chinese ,which exists in no other language – indeed the language only works if you understand its music – or tones. This is because this is a monosyllabic language with the differentiation between one word and another being entirely dependent on the tone in which it is said (there are four tones in Pu Tong Hua, seven in Cantonese). And some of the tones even change according to their juxtaposition with others. The effect, when added to a great richness of regional accent (in Peking they role their “r” and slide their elisions in a way that would make any Devonian proud) adds up to a language which is immensely pleasing to the ear. Often when I hear Chinese visitors speaking Pu Tong Hua on the streets of London, I will hang around them for a bit, just for the pleasure of hearing them talk.

Learning to apply these tones accurately can be tricky for a foreigner at first and sometimes leads to hilarious mistakes (I once accidentally asked a very proper Chinese lady at a dinner party if she had ever sat on a flying penis – instead of what I meant to ask her – if she had ever flown on an aircraft!). But once you have them they become almost naturally.

To learn spoken Pu Tong Hua, you need a good ear (though not necessarily a musical one – I am hopelessly unmusical) and an ability to mimic.

To learn the written language, what you chiefly need is a good memory

Here the problem is that written Chinese is not spelt, it is drawn. Western written languages (and indeed most world ones) depend on words being spelt in letters from a alphabet. But in Chinese there is no alphabet. Each word is represented by a different picture – or pictogram, to use the proper technical term. This means that to read or write for a newspaper like, say the Sun, you would need to know perhaps six thousand pictograms – for The Times you would need ten thousand. And an educated Chinese would know upwards of forty thousand.

Learning these can be quite a sweat (though there are certain logical structures and simplifications which help the process). And, at the end of the day you do not NEED to know to write in order to be able to speak.

But there are advantages in doing so.

The first is that written Chinese is the same for all Chinese dialects. In this respect the pictograms perform the same function as Arabic numerals in European languages. The word for the number “four” is different French, German and English. But the written Arabic numeral means the same in all three. In Chinese this principle applies to pictograms across the whole language. Which means that, though a Pu Tong Hua speaker may not be able to speak or understand another Chinese dialect, they can use the written language and communicate perfectly.

The second advantage of learning written Chinese is its beauty. Indeed calligraphy is recognised by many Chinese as their highest form of art. Mao Tse Tung was a great soldier, a passable poet, a charismatic leader and a powerful and, in his time much respected Head of the Chinese state. But it is a calligrapher that he was and remains most admired.

But in the end, though the beauty of spoken Chinese and, especially of its written script, are good reasons for learning this language, they are not as important as the fact that speaking Mandarin or Pu Tong Hua, will give you contact with one of the world’s greatest civilisations, richest histories, most populous states and most important nations in the new world that is now emerging.

The Maghreb problem The Times 21 Jan 2013

The Maghreb problem The Times 21 Jan 2013

The so-called “War on Terror”, with all its sacrifices and failures, has lasted over a decade. Now the Prime Minister tells us it must go on for another. He is, unfortunately, probably right.

But it would be a strategic blunder to use what happened in the last decade as a template for the next.

There are three reasons for this. The way we have done it these last ten years hasn’t worked; Western defence cuts and public aversion to further conflict mean we can’t do it that way any longer, even if we wanted to. And with the old orders in The Middle East fragmenting and Western models being increasingly rejected, we are now engaged in a totally different kind of conflict.

So far the “War on Terror” (I hate the phrase; it re-enforces the Manichean view of the Islamic extremists) has been fought by primarily military means. Our weapons of choice have been invasions, main battle armies, lethal force, occupation and an attempt (failed) at government. The next phase will need to be regional in scope and based on partnership, intelligence, anticipation, political subtlety, close Western co-ordination and, perhaps most important of all the judicious use of aid and assistance to enable threatened Governments to cope for themselves. Where military action is required it will best be tightly targeted and small scale. Boots on the ground are a last resort because we have failed to act earlier – as in Mali, where Islamic extremism, its causes, consequences and connections have been very visible for ages – I wrote about them in this paper in early December. Watch Nigeria next.

In the struggle ahead, Libya, for all its deficiencies, is likely a better model than Afghanistan. Of course the Libyan outcome has been less elegant than we would have wished – but not less elegant than when we tried to do it ourselves. Of course, the empty spaces where Arab Spring Governments haven’t worked have been all too readily filled by arms they couldn’t control and the extremism they couldn’t suppress, as we have seen in Algeria – but has the consequent violence and instability really been greater than those created by our own mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

There are no comfortable ways of doing this – but enabling domestic Islamic governments to fight this battle for themselves, is likely to be better, safer and more effective than Western Governments trying to do it for them. Look at Somalia where careful patient western action (with Britain playing a key part) has enabled a democratic Somali Government to begin to recover their country from the ravages of al-Shabab extremism. It is far, far too early to declare a victory here. But in a region where the bright lights are few, Somalia at least provides a hopeful glow.

Perhaps the most important thing for our leaders to understand as they plan what to do next, is the true nature of the conflict in which we are now engaged.

In our usual arrogant Western way, we see this as a “war” in which we are the enemy. Thus, attacking the gas plant at In Amenas has been universally seen in the West as an attack on “us”. But it is much more likely to have been designed to turn an attack on a Western facility into a means to gain support in the world of Islam. In so far as the West was

the target, it was so by secondary consequence, not primary cause.

The underlying drive for most of what is happening in the world of Islam at the moment is not a war against the West, but a widening religious conflict between the Sunni and the Shia for the soul of Islam.

We have had such religious wars in Christianity, too. We can still see their distant echoes in Belfast and the Balkans. We should understand how destructive they can be.

Herein lies both a better understanding of the present danger and the possibility of epiphany.

Quietly, while we have been obsessing with Afghanistan, wringing impotent hands about oppression in Syria and fretting about the new Governments of the Arab Spring, a hidden revolution has been taking place in the world of Islam.

Join the dots and it is plain enough to see; in the recent elections in Egypt; in the growing influence of extremists amongst the Syrian rebels; in the contagion spreading into Lebanon; in the street slogans of Bahrain; in the rise of Al-Shabab in Somalia and in what is happening in Mali, where the real target of the Islamic extremists is not the Malian state but the quiet, tolerant doctrines of the Islamic suffis for which Mali is so famous.

Funded in large measure by the Qatari Government and private UAE and Saudi money (as Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan in its early days), salafist extremists have been building their influence right through the Islamic world from the Maghreb, south into sub-Saharan Africa, north through Syria and into the Russian Islamic republics. Their effect has been felt even as far away as Indonesia and – some say – amongst the Uighurs in China, too. The day was when this Islamic extremism defined itself by the war against the “Great Satan” in the West. Today they prepare for the conflict with the “Great Heresy” of the Shia. This is the context in which the deaths at In Amenas and the French intervention in Mali must be seen – a widening Sunni/Shia conflict in which the West is less prime mover than unwitting pawn, but which would have deadly consequences for peace of the Middle East region and so for us all. There is much more in play here than a tragedy at a desert gas plant, or the future of a small sub-Saharan country.

And the epiphany? It lies in understanding that in this struggle our most important allies will not be the armies of our Western partners, but our “moderate” Islamic friends who are trying to win back control of their region and religion. How we are able – sensibly, quietly and cautiously – to help them will determine the outcome of this struggle much more than boots on the ground or braggadocio in Western capitals.