Terrorism

Tuesday

David Blackburn

A PR disaster for Israel

Prematurely, the world’s press has condemned Israel. As I wrote yesterday, the facts have to be established before Israel can be adjudged to have acted disproportionately. At the moment, the facts seem to support Israel. Video footage shows commandoes descending into a maelstrom of baseball bats and knives, armed with items that resemble paintball guns. The latest pictures released show a hoard of improvised explosives, machetes, bats, crowbars etc. Those sources’ veracity should be scrutinised, but there is nothing else to go on at the moment. Iain Martin has debunked Jon Snow’s absurd genuflection that this is our fault. Being British I apologise for everything, but not this time. Israel

Thursday

Daniel Korski

A new Afghanistan strategy

In opposition, the Conservatives pursued an AfPak policy that can best be described as loyal criticism – while they supported the mission they criticised the means and methods employed to achieve it. It was an effective line of attack. But now that they have the internal documents and can call for further intelligence assessments, they should instead undertake a zero-based review of the current strategy focusing on: 1) the viability of the current US approach; 2) the likely timing and manner of a US shift; and 3) the best role for the UK in the next six months, in the next 2 years and in the next five years. In

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Blood relatives

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at Oxford to learn about classical tragedy. The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was at Oxford, over champagne outside the Examination Schools, when she inquired piercingly of a subfusc linguist, ‘Racine? What is Racine?’ Older and richer than most undergraduates, and as a Harvard graduate presumably better educated, she was already world famous, and was obviously not at

Peter Oborne

Crying in the wilderness

For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in May 2002. In the summer of that year an Israeli newspaper named Crooke as an agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, and shortly after he was recalled to London. It has been reported that his sympathy with the Palestine cause caused embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government. However, he soon returned to the

Saturday

James Mather

Annals of war

‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I felt there was a real danger that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.’ How, half a decade later, was that prescience brushed aside by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the rush for regime change? The Chilcot Inquiry, whose committee of the great

Saturday

Richard Beeston

Almost all against all

Early one morning in September 1986 three gunmen patrolling Beirut’s scarred Green Line came across what they believed would be easy pickings. Early one morning in September 1986 three gunmen patrolling Beirut’s scarred Green Line came across what they believed would be easy pickings. David Hirst the diminutive, silver-haired and donnish veteran correspondent was stranded by the side of the road in one of the most notorious areas of the city. Scores of Westerners had already been seized by militant groups allied to Iran and Hirst was pushed at gunpoint into the back of a BMW for what should have been the start of several miserable years handcuffed to a

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The philosophy of war

Every war takes its time to produce a good film or even a piece of journalistic analysis that goes beyond running commentary. Apocalypse Now came years after the end of the Vietnam War and it took seven years before this year’s Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker, could be produced. The newspapers are full of excellent reporting from Kabul, with The Times Anthony Loyd, The Guardian’s Jon Boone and the NYT’s Dexter Filkens matching anything that came out of the Saigon. But sit-back-and-think-hard reporting has been rare.   Nine years after the ousting of the Taliban, author Robert D. Kaplan’s piece “Man versus Afghanistan” in the April issue of The Atlantic

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Waterboarding for Slow Learners

Astonishingly there remain some people who don’t think that waterboarding prisoners rises to the level of torture. In Dick Cheney’s off-hand formulation it’s merely “dunking in water” – as though the process was some kind of ride at the funfair or comparable to having a bucket of gloop tipped over you in a TV game show. Helpfully, Mark Benjamin has a piece at Salon explaining how it really works: Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to

Monday

Daniel Korski

Will we lose Turkey?

Earlier this year, Transatlantic Trends, an annual survey of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, was published. Key highlights from the survey included a quadrupling of European support for President Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But what really caught my eye was how badly the relationship between the West and Turkey had frayed. 65 percent of Turks do not think it is likely their country will join the EU. Nearly half of Turks polled think Turkey is not really part of the West, while 43 percent think Turkey should not partner with the EU, the US or Russia in solving global problems. The break-down of the alliance between

Sunday

Alex Massie

Bravo Iceland!

Our plucky friends in the north have done the right thing: Icelanders have overwhelmingly rejected a plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of pounds lost when Reykjavik’s banks collapsed in 2008 Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93% opposed the deal and less than 2% supported it. The rest cast invalid votes. Good for them. Quite why the Icelandic government should be liable for the UK’s entirely voluntary decision to bail out Icesave customers is a mystery. Still, it was the use of anti-terrorism laws to seize and freeze Icelandic assets in the UK that was especially disgraceful and, of course, a

Monday

Alex Massie

Even the Pakistanis are “Soft” on Torture…

Meanwhile, today’s missive from the Party of Torture is written by Dana Perino and Bill Burck, Press Secretary and Special Counsel to George W Bush respectively.  The Obama administration is working with Pakistani intelligence to interrogate Mullah Baradar, reportedly the Taliban’s number-two man. We’ve been a little underwhelmed by the Left’s reaction to this news. […] The Left’s silence on Mullah Baradar is convenient. Gone are the hysterical cries of torture. Missing in action are the opponents of rendition. One searches in vain for impassioned denunciations of Obama’s outsourcing of interrogations to countries with long histories of torture. What happened to the sputtering self-righteousness of yesteryear, when Bush and Cheney

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Torture Party’s Desperate, Flawed Logic

I’ll say this for the Torture Advocates: they’re increasingly creative in their justifications for torturing prisoners and in their attempts to suggest that anyone with any qualms about any of this secretly wants the Bad Guys to win. Granted, this leads them to some strange positions. Here, for instance, is Victor Davis Hanson: It is time critics made the case that targeted assassinations fall within the legitimate bounds of a war in which we are properly engaged, while the water-boarding of three confessed terrorists was morally unacceptable torture of no utility and contrary to any of our own past protocols concerning apprehended and non-uniformed belligerents. Otherwise, their exercise in moral outrage

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Mossad’s suspected actions in Dubai may be a crime, but will they help Israel?

One of Israel’s most potent weapons has been the mixture of awe and fear with which its spy services are held. Now that Mossad is suspected of killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, and using fraudulent British passports in the process, newspapers will dredge up stories about the Entebbe Raid, the killing of Black September by Mossad agents and other daring-do acts. The other reaction to the suspected assasination of the arm-smuggling Hamas official will be indignation about the extra-judicial nature of Israel’s action. But these made-for-Hollywood stories and the West’s moral indignation mask some uncomfortable truths. That Mossad, its domestic equivalent Shin Bet and Israeli commandoes are bureaucratic organisations. Like

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

The new AfPak strategy in action – decapitation, reintegration and reconciliation (DRR)

It’s not quite the “we got him” moment, as when US soldiers unearthed the fugitive Iraqi dictator. But the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top militant commander who is said to be second in command to elusive Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mohhamad Omar, may be even more significant. By the time Saddam Hussein had been caught, the US was fighting a different enemy, though the Pentagon leadership had not realised yet. Baradar, who was in charge of the insurgency’s day-to-day operations on behalf of the so-called Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s leadership council, is very much today’s enemy – and his seizure should not be underestimated. Doubts remain as

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The End of Charlie Wilson’s War

Rarely are obituaries so full of parties, history-changing events and personal contradictions as those of ex-Congressman and rebel-armer Charlie Wilson, who died last night aged 76. War will mix with cocaine. Burqa-clad women will mingle with strippers. “Good Time” Charlie’s life was genuinely remarkable. Described as “one the most distinctive” congressmen, he spent most of his time partying until he found the cause of a lifetime: ejecting the Soviets from Afghanistan. As detailed in the book and film “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the Texan politician used his contacts and seat on a powerful Congress committee to arm the Afghan rebels. And he did it in style – all buttoned-down, white-collared shirts,

David Blackburn

The White House is bluffing

The Atlantic reports that the White House is considering altering intelligence sharing agreements with Britain in the light of the Binyam Mohamed case. White House spokesman Ben LaBolt briefed: “The United States government made its strongly held views known throughout this process. We appreciate that the UK Government stood by the principle of protecting foreign government intelligence in its court filings. We’re deeply disappointed with the court’s judgment today, because we shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations.” I detect a bluff. Britain and the US share information on an hourly basis, providing an essential understanding in the combined operation against al Qaeda. The US would never compromise

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Binyam Mohamed & the Missing Seven Paragraphs

So, the government has lost its case and the FCO has now published the famous missing seven paragraphs: v)  It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation.  The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.  vi) It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him.  His fears of being removed from United States custody and “disappearing” were played upon. vii) It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews  viii) It was

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

It’s striking how Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history, is now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides. This matters politically, because he has – I fear – poisoned the cause of liberal interventionism. I look at this in my News of the World column today. Blair’s Chicago speech of 1999 laid out what I regarded as a bold and coherent foreign policy case. It was time to stop letting genocides happen because they take place within the borders of sovereign states protected by the UN Security Council. I agreed with him when he said that, if the Rwandan genocide happened again, we

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.

David Blackburn

Blair, the Special Relationship and the Clash of Civilisations

So far so good for John Rentoul: Blair’s walking it, but there have been intriguing moments. The suggestion that Blair’s foreign policy was motivated solely by vanity is false. The former Prime Minister’s thinking is extremely coherent. That is not to say that he is right nor to deny his obvious vanity, or to overlook that this may simply be Blair in matinee idol mode. But he subscribes to an ideology. He stated, once again, that he saw 9/11 as an attack on “us”, not just America. The language is redolent of Samuel P. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations. Blair perceives a band of religious fanatics and a crucible of oppresive