Good News from Afghanistan and Iraq: 4

Continuing the occasional series inspired by bandit.three.six, here are some stories you might not have seen in the mainstream media.

Schools are being re-opened in southern Kandahar.

In Helmand, army engineers are undertaking a range of projects.

The road between Kabul and Jalabad is under reconstruction.

A new hydro-electric power plant in Lagham province has been opened.

In southern Iraq, the RAF Regiment is building a mosque for the locals.

It is all step in the right direction.

Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq

Thought for the day.

This week, Prime Minister Tony Blair has expended much effort praising scientists, and trying to convince the country of the importance of science to society and to the future.

Why has he said so little about the importance to society and to the future of our armed forces?

From the BBC: Priced out of the armed forces

Tags: Army, Defence

ISI games.

MotlenThought examines the Indian dimension of the problems being caused by Pakistan's Directorate for inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), suggesting that Pakistan's "uneven" support for America may result from "the ISI's continued desire to use al Qaeda's allies in its proxy war against India."

Update 4.11.06 @ 17:55

I posted the above, went looking for something else and found this, from the Middle East Times: Pakistan and the terror nexus.

The instrumental role that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has played in fomenting international terrorism is well-documented. This paper [a leaked report] from an MoD-run think-tank shows clearly that senior intelligence officials are privately so concerned about this problem, that they are leaking the material at this time precisely to counter Musharraf's latest round of PR exercises in the USA and elsewhere.

The article goes on to rehearse details of ISI's involvement with terrorists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Serendipity!

Tags: India, ISI, Pakistan

"Crazy" David Cameron

Quentin Davies, Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford and a former shadow defence spokesman, has said that David Cameron's support this week, for a Scotch and Welsh Nationaist demand for an immediate inquiry into the Iraq war was "crazy". The Guardian reports that Davies told the BBC,

What the resolution said was that there should be an inquiry now with an open, public inquiry conducted by seven privy councillors into a military operation that's still going on.

I think that's an absolutely crazy idea and I can't understand that anybody responsibly would have wanted to go for it. Why we did that I don't know ... I didn't vote for it but most of the party did."

He added: "It's quite unprecedented, of course, in any kind of military operation to have a public inquiry like that while things are going on.

"Either it's a full and frank inquiry or it's not. If it is, then you're signalling to the enemy all your plans and all your weaknesses, and that can't make any sense at all.

"I think that soldiers serving out there in these very difficult conditions would have been just as amazed as I was."

Common sense from a Conservative MP. Perhaps there is hope for the party yet, despite the dismal leadership.

Link: BBC

Religious Wars in Glastonbury

In confrontational scenes reminiscent of the 6th century, at Glastonbury, Druids and Christians exchanged curses (proper ones, not bad language), spells, blessings and insults. Salt was thrown. As the Times reports the Romans police were called.

No doubt having conducted a health and safety survey and being reassured by the bones' configuration, the police concluded the Druids had the stronger magic and took their side, fining and cautioning a few Xians.

The Guardian takes the pagans' side.

It's just another day in the reversion of the UK to a pre-Christian dark age.

Tags: Christian, Glastonbury, Pagan

Blair discovers science.

Tony Blair has suddenly discovered the importance of science. He has been talking to the Guardian about it, making a speech in Oxford and talking to the New Scientist magazine. The Guardian has a report on the latter. The Guardian's links to related articles seem to make a mockery of government claims of seeking to encourage young people to take up science. I have no idea if the irony is intended.

The New Scientist is subscription only but you may get in through Google News. If not, the Downing Street website has an edited transcript and a podcast.

Tags: Science.

Gordon Brown's security empire.

Gordon Brown, the UK's finance minister is floating a plan to increase funding for the fight against terrorism. As the Independent puts it, he is proposing to

...create a single security budget by pooling the spending of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the police's anti-terrorism work, and relevant spending by the departments responsible for transport, communities, local government and culture.

The Guardian goes much further, discerning plans to create a department of homeland security and that Brown

...is clearly thinking of bringing together budgets from the Home Office, the intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence.

Both papers have been briefed that Brown feels some ministries are not doing enough to win a hearts and minds campaign within Islamic communities.

What to make of it? A good starting point is always to ask, not what politicians are saying but, why they are saying it at this particular time. Brown seems to assume that he will be anointed as the next prime minister when (if) Tony Blair stands down sometime next year. So this grandiose scheme may be a strategy intended to demonstrate that Brown is capable of taking a statesman-like, inter-departmental approach to policy. In this reading, the aim would be to answer criticisms that his approach to the business of government is constrained by his narrow experience of ministerial office, which has been limited to the Treasury. Equally the plans might be seen as originating within the Treasury, from senior civil servants seeing a chance to expand the power and influence of their bureaucratic empires.

Whatever, it is hard to see what an administrative re-organisation will achieve when at the sharp end of War on Terror, MI5 will still be struggling to find the resources to maintain surveillance on terrorist suspects.

Tags: Gordon Brown, War on Terror

BBC embedded with the Royal Mairnes in Afghanistan

BBC reporter, Alastair Leithead is in Helmand, Afghanistan, embedded with the Royal Marines and sending back daily reports.

In the best post-Reithian traditions of BBC journalism, on 2nd November Leithead signs off on a negative note, by focusing on the damage done to buildings rather the successful performance of the soldiers under attack from the Taliban. It does not seem to occur to him that the army must be doing something right for the villagers to tip them off about the Taliban's presence.

Perhaps it is understandable, given that the BBC will be anxious to maintain good relations with its Taliban friends.

Tags: Afghanistan

Isreal and Hezbollah: Another war?

In today's edition of the Daily Telegraph, resident military historian, John Keegan, argues that another war in the Middle East is inevitable because the Israeli's cannot afford to allow Hezbollah to rebuild its fortified zone in southern Lebanon.

What happened in south Lebanon earlier this year has been widely misunderstood, largely because the anti-Israel bias in the international media led to the situation being misreported as an Israeli defeat.

It was no such thing. It was certainly an Israeli setback, but the idea that the IDF had suddenly lost its historic superiority over its Arab enemies and that they had acquired military qualities that had hitherto eluded them was quite false. Hizbollah suffered heavy losses in the fighting, perhaps as many as 1,000 killed out of its strength of up to 5,000 and it is only just now recovering.

What allowed Hizbollah to appear successful was its occupation of the bunker-and-tunnel system that it had constructed since June 2000, when the IDF gave up its presence in south Lebanon, which it had occupied since 1982.

To ensure the security of its population, perhaps sooner rather than later, Israel will have to remove the tunnel systems and the missile threat it poses. Keegan thinks that, this time, Syria might defend Hezbollah but their intervention would offer both the USA and Israel a chance to deal with a state increasingly regarded "as Iran's advanced post on the Mediterranean shore."

Tags: Israel, Hezbollah, Middle East

IPPR report on teenagers' bad behaviour

The Institute for Public Policy Research has produced a report, to be published next Monday, which argues that parents who leave children to their own devices are responsible for producing the most delinquent teenagers in Europe.

The press are already having a field day: the Daily Telegraph has a fairly straightforward report; the Guardian, which ran the story yesterday, lets loose Polly Toynbee; and the Times links the IPPR report with the latest hoodie-hugging plea from David Cameron. This time Cameron has called for a "tough love" approach to the problem, which has been dubbed "love a lout" by one Labour wit.

We will have to wait to see the detail but it seems from the initial reports that the IPPR is up to the old trick of taking a widely accepted common view - parents leaving their children unsupervised causes disciplinary problems - and using statistical evidence to generalise a localised problem - "bad" behaviour by some young people - into a national crisis.

Tags: Deliqunt, IPPR, Teenagers

Recruitment and retention problems in the UK's armed forces.

The National Audit Office, the British government's official spending watchdog, has produced a report, Retention and Recruitment in the Armed forces, which argues that the UK's armed forces are about 5,000 understrength. It is not just recruitment which is a problem. The report asserts that vastly increased workloads, resulting from over-commitment in deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, are causing problems with retention. The problems are across all branches of the services. Both the BBC and the Times have more.

The NAO report only confirms what is already known to anybody with an interest in defence policy: government is still behaving as though there is a "peace dividend" to be had and 9/11 never happened. As Lord Guthrie pointed out this week, the last strategic defence review was in 1998 and had been "geared to a dramatically different world." Since then, the UK government has made series of worldwide commitments without paying detailed attention to how they are going to fulfilled, a prime example being North Korea. We have finally reached the point where the hard political decisions can be deferred no longer.

Tags: Defence, NAO

NATO ask for EU help in Afghanistan.

In a wonderful example of wishful thinking, NATO has asked the European Union to make a greater contribution to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post the request was made after a meeting with the UN, the World Bank and the EU.

"Particularly the EU has a great opportunity to make a significant and very timely difference in the area of the judiciary and the police," NATO's top civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Daan Everts, told a news conference.

"The goal is wide open. They just have to kick the ball," he said...

...there was an acute need to train and equip judges and police and to build administrative capacity -- areas of EU expertise.

The EU is more likely to kick the ball in its own net, so the best NATO can hope for is funding. The last thing Afghanistan needs in the imposition of EU-style administration from an organisation which is a textbook example of an over-staffed dysfunctional bureaucracy, in which fraud and corruption are out of control. Moreover, it is becoming clear that European police forces cannot control Islamic extremists in their own backyards, but it might be fun to see them trying to police the Taliban, on their own turf.

Update 3.11.06 @13:30

There is now more details of the meeting on the NATO website, including an audio file (with so much reverb it could have recorded underwater) and a transcript of the press conference, and also video interviews with Everts and a World Bank official.

Tags: Afghanistan, European Union, NATO.