Next slide, please. At last, we’re there – Chapter 4 of the SDR Green Paper tackles the classic question of alignment with the EU, NATO, and the special relationships. And it’s a highly post-American document. Our current relationships are mutually reinforcing. NATO remains the cornerstone of our security. However, as Europeans, we must take greater…
Read More Sunday SDR, Chapter 4: PartnershipWell, this is unusual; Londonstani confirms that the Pakistanis just arrested 50% of the Taliban high command, in so far as such a thing matters. Not only that, they’re willing to extradite one of them to Afghanistan. First of all, Pakistan and Afghanistan even talking is rare. Secondly, extradite? What is this, Germany? Don’t they…
Read More this diplomacy stuff seems to work…for someSo, here goes with the first in my series of posts on the strategic defence review as a blog. Here are what the MoD thinks are the major forces that will determine the political environment: The National Security Strategy sets out the key threats to the UK’s security and the underlying drivers of those threats.…
Read More Sunday Strategic Defence Review Blogging: Chapter 1This might have been a bigger story than it is.
Read More fatigueJean-Dominique Merchet writes about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and argues that the political preparation and the overall strategy of it give cause for optimism. I’ve thought this before, and then doubted it. There seems to be something of an optimism outbreak on after the London conference last week; here’s McChrystal, saying he expects that…
Read More random Afghanistan linksAs you’ll probably have guessed, I’m not terrified by the pantsbomber. As Spencer Ackerman puts it: it doesn’t do any good to blow this out of proportion, since blowing things out of proportion to spur an overreaction is Usama bin Laden’s explicit strategy However, as more details have filtered out, I’ve revised my original view…
Read More the boy’s a time bomb!We had a post about the MQM in Karachi and the Taliban. Strangely enough, Reuters got a fascinating interview with the MQM mayor of Karachi a couple of days later. It’s a must-read – one of the main points that comes through is the way in which the struggle up on the frontier and in…
Read More revenue engineAn American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he’s currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to…
Read More eternal SeptemberDaniel Davies speaks on Afghanistan, and comments ensue. Dan Hardie is mostly making sense; he argues that there are essentially three options – a strategy of trying to win the tribes, one of defending the cities and key locations and pouring in aid to the Afghans, or one of unilateral withdrawal. The first would be…
Read More arguing about AfghanistanSomeone’s been doing a good series on the recent loss of a Mi-26 helicopter near the British base in Sangin, a civilian machine chartered in to carry supplies around Helmand. The aircraft was ER-MCV, and it apparently belonged to Pecotox Air, an old and fairly dodgy charter operator from Moldova; however, it was apparently wearing…
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