Think twice Mr Cameron before arming Syria’s rebels

Aaron Ellis 11.03am

During a statement to the House of Commons yesterday about last week’s European Council, the Prime Minister warned that the Syrian crisis was “attracting and empowering a new cohort of Al Qaeda-linked extremists.” The only way to check their malign influence is if the West arms those “parts of the Syrian opposition that want a proper transition to a free and democratic Syria.”

“My concern is that if the UK with others is not helping the opposition, and helping to shape and work with it, it is much more difficult to get the transition we all want”, said Mr Cameron.

To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, practical men are usually the slaves of some bad pundit. In this case, the Prime Minister is the slave of pro-interventionist commentators like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who have been arguing this for months.

“Sooner or later some combination of the opposition groups will indeed control Syria,” she wrote in July.

“The eventual winners…will matter a great deal to the health, wealth and stability of what is still the most geo-strategically important region in the world. Syrians will remember those who remember them, those who cared enough to help save their lives.” Neither history nor recent events substantiate her argument.

As Micah Zenko wrote in response to Slaughter, it assumes a number of things:

First, that the post-Assad political leaders of Syria will be the same individuals who received U.S. weapons…Second, any country not arming the Syrian rebels will be remembered for their lack of enthusiasm, and suffer the wrath of Damascus for some period of time. Third, Syria’s political leaders will closely align their policy preferences with the United States, because the Obama administration armed them – rather than say the preferences of the Qataris or Saudis, who are providing weapons to Syrian rebel groups.

The situation in Syria is appalling, but it truly isn’t in Britain’s interests to intervene

Aaron Ellis 10.38am

Britain should help topple brutal regimes only where it is in our interests to help and our help ought to be proportionate to those interests.

I thought up the ‘Ellis Doctrine’ for humanitarian intervention in response to David Cameron’s justification for intervening in Libya, oft repeated by the war’s supporters.

“Just because you can’t do the right thing everywhere doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right thing somewhere”, argued the Prime Minister.

But by what criteria had he judged Libya to be “somewhere”? Why was intervention the “right thing” for us to do, as opposed to other forms of help? For years, the Conservatives had said that British foreign policy under them would be “strategic”, yet Mr Cameron’s justification for the Libyan campaign was extraordinarily non-strategic. The Ellis Doctrine offered a framework with which to think about a future crisis.

Given the crisis in Syria is far more complex than the one that confronted us in Libya, British policy needs to be appropriately nuanced. There are many reasons why Britain should help the Syrian people topple Bashar al-Assad, but we ought to limit our involvement as much as possible. The risks of too big an investment outweigh the rewards. We must limit ourselves to containing the spillover from the conflict into neighbouring countries.

Yet our policy is trending in the other direction. The Prime Minister has suggested arming the rebels. The Chief of the Defence Staff warned recently that troops may intervene if the humanitarian crisis worsened. And the ‘National Coalition of the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’ (NCSROF) has been prematurely recognised as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Syrian people.

If Britain is to surmount the challenges of the twenty-first century and re-climb the greasy pole of international affairs, we need a prudent foreign policy. The country must sort out its finances, build up its resources, and think carefully about where in the world it gets involved in and how.

David Cameron used to recognise this, and, in recent months, seems to have rediscovered his ‘grand strategic’ ambitions. At the Conservative party conference, he declared that “[e]very battle we fight, every plan we make, every decision we take” was designed to help the United Kingdom “rise” amidst the decline and fall of other Great Powers. “I am not going to stand here as Prime Minister and allow [us] to join the slide.”

As welcome as his rediscovery of ‘the vision thing’ is, he has also consistently fallen short of realising it whenever put to the test. Unless Mr Cameron wants Britain to become a hegemonic power in the eastern Mediterranean, then our deepening involvement in Syria is part of this disappointing trend. Involving us in a fourth conflict in a decade – with little at stake and with no coherent political-military strategy – will hasten our fall, not reverse it.

British policy must focus on stopping the civil war from spreading into the lands of close allies like Jordan. There are nearly 200,000 refugees there. Speaking in August, when the number was around 140,000, King Abdullah said: “We can’t afford anymore Syrians coming through because of the load it is on the system here.”

In October, the New York Times reported that the United States had sent military personnel to the country to help the Jordanians handle the crisis. Given our long history with the Hashemite dynasty, this is what we ought to be doing.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

From our own correspondent… with William Hague at the Foreign Office

Aaron Ellis 10.30am

I felt a bit ashamed when I joined Twitter a couple of years ago. It felt like I was Winston Smith at the end of George Orwell’s 1984, finally giving in to oppressive forces. Yet the social networking site has furnished me with opportunities I would not otherwise have had - such as meeting William Hague.

Last month, the Foreign Secretary asked his Twitter followers to say what they think should be the United Kingdom’s top foreign policy priority. The best five would then meet him to discuss their suggestions.

Last week, the winners of this competition – Katie Jamieson (@kejamieson), Antonia King (@antoniaking), Jack McCann (@Jack_Mc_Cann), James Willby (@JamesWillby), and I – met Mr Hague and enjoyed a long, interesting talk on a wide range of issues, including trade promotion and the war in Afghanistan.

A chunk of the discussion was about British foreign policy and the ‘Pacific Century’, which had been the topic of my winning suggestion. I argued that the United Kingdom had to define its role (or non-role) in a world where power was concentrated in Asia-Pacific, as it would impact on all our other defence and foreign policies. The Foreign Secretary emphasised to me that we had to be in the region, but he didn’t show that he appreciated how big an effort would be needed by the British to become real players there. ‘It would represent the most judicious, and audacious, use of the hard/soft power combination yet seen in contemporary politics,’ one expert has warned.

Mr Hague agreed with me that a potential role for the United Kingdom would be to “fill in” for the Americans as they retrench to the Pacific, which was what I argued in these pages in the summer. He used the Libyan intervention as an example of this “filling in”, ironic perhaps given my opposition to the campaign. I was too polite (as well as awed) to point out that the United States enabled 90 per cent of the military operations there, which implies we don’t yet have the capacity to take up Washington’s mantle in many areas of the world.

The other issue that I raised was British policy in Central and South Asia; as I argued in May, the United Kingdom is pursuing policies in the region that are incompatible with one another. We want a stable Afghanistan, a special relationship with India, and a strategic partnership with Pakistan – the problem is that the latter two countries believe stability in Afghanistan comes at the expense of either one or the other.

Mr Hague recognises the dilemma – in contrast to the Defence Secretary, Phillip Hammond, who denied it exists when I put it to him in December – but he thinks that the British are best placed to mediate a solution. As an example, he pointed to the recent meeting in New York between David Cameron and the Afghan and Pakistani leaders.

Though I am often critical of this Government’s foreign policies, I have always believed that Britain needs William Hague as its Foreign Secretary – a belief reinforced after meeting him. His policies are good for the country, even if I think some of them are strategically discontinuous. Mr Hague is also likeable, charismatic, and he has built up good connections with leaders around the world, which aren’t bad things when it comes to diplomacy.

The meeting also showed his enthusiasm for engaging younger people via new technologies, on the issue of the many challenges facing this country in the early twenty-first century.

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Arab politicians continue to use distant British history as an excuse for their own mistakes

Aaron Ellis 2.31pm

For many in the Arab world, the Sykes-Picot Agreement is what the Yalta conference was for many conservatives in the United States during the Cold War. It is a betrayal of people seeking freedom; a damning indictment of Great Power politics; and the source of all problems in the Middle East.

As with Yalta, all kinds of things are attributed to Sykes-Picot years after the event. For instance, the veteran Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has said the Syria crisis is “unravelling” a deal that created the countries of the region. This lazy understanding was reinforced by the Guardian’s Martin Chulov writing that the Agreement was adopted by Britain and France in 1919, not 1916…

The Sykes-Picot Agreement divided up the Middle East between the two Great Powers and the Arabs; it did not create the nation states we know today.

France got modern Lebanon and southern Turkey, as well as a sphere of influence over an Arab kingdom in Syria. Britain acquired most of Mesopotamia and exercised influence over a Y-shaped Arab kingdom that stretched from the Egyptian border to northern Iraq and down into the Arabian Peninsula. Though the post-war carve-up vaguely resembled the deal, it actually began to unravel almost as soon as it had been negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot.

British officials in Cairo hated the Agreement and worked to undermine it: they wanted Syria to be part of a Greater Egyptian viceroyalty that would rival the Indian Raj.

“I am afraid that swine Monsieur P[icot] has let M. S. badly down,” wrote the Tory politician and diplomat Aubrey Herbert, an intelligence officer in Cairo. “This is what comes of disregarding the ABC of Diplomacy and letting Amateurs have a shy at delicate and important negotiations.”

In 1917, the deal unravelled further when the Bolsheviks leaked its details to embarrass the Allies, prompting a fierce reaction to what was viewed as outdated imperialist thinking, especially in the United States. The Russian Revolution had also removed Britain’s geopolitical reasoning for giving the French such a huge chunk of the Middle East: creating a buffer zone between them and the Russian Empire, which had been promised land in Turkey. Sykes wrote that the sooner the Agreement was scrapped the better, as the world had “marched so far” since it had been negotiated a year before and it could “now only be considered as a reactionary measure”.

His about-turn coincided with one higher up in government when David Lloyd George became Prime Minister in December 1917. Lloyd George wanted to increase Britain’s sphere of influence beyond that which Sykes had negotiated just a few years before. In his book A Line in the Sand, James Baar reports a conversation between Lloyd George and French premiere Georges Clemenceau in which the latter conceded to British demands. “Tell me what you want,” Clemenceau is supposed to have asked him.

“I want Mosul.”

“You shall have it. Anything else?”

“Yes, I want Jerusalem too.”

“You shall have it,” said Clemenceau. These concessions were recognised in the many peace conferences after the First World War, thus by 1922 the Sykes-Picot Agreement had completely unravelled.

The Middle Eastern order that people like Mr Jumblatt fear is disintegrating was created long after this much-maligned deal was a dead letter, and centuries-old problems in the region cannot be blamed on what was even then considered to be old-fashioned thinking about Great Power politics.

Britain can be rightly blamed for many things, but too often Arab politicians use our decades-old faults as an excuse for their own mistakes.

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Book review: ‘The Godfather Doctrine’

Aaron Ellis 10.12am

There is nothing wrong with using popular culture to enliven international relations. I once argued that The Magnificent Seven can be viewed as an analogy for Afghanistan, while this article explains why outdated warfare methods and institutional group-think made the Jedi a poor choice to lead the Grand Army of the Republic.

Undoubtedly there are those who will scoff at such things, yet if it is the job of an expert to communicate complex issues to the layman in a way he understands then popular culture is an important resource.

In The Godfather Doctrine, two experts try to use the best film of all time (yes, I said it…) as a parable for American foreign policy in the early 21st Century.

John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell argue that the world is changing at the expense of the United States and that it has been ill-served by both the liberal institutionalism of Tom Hagen and the neoconservatism of Sonny. If the country is to maintain its position in the world, it must adopt the realpolitik of Michael Corleone.

Unfortunately, the book’s premise is undermined by bad analogies – and as I have said in these pages before, bad analogies are fatal in foreign policy analysis.

Michael Corleone did not merely preserve his family’s power in the criminal underworld; he made it even more powerful and hegemonic than it was under his father Don Vito. He did not do it through ‘smart power’, as the authors of the book believe, but by murdering his rivals. If the United States literally tried to follow Michael’s example, it’d wipe out Brazil, Russia, India, and China in a pre-emptive nuclear strike and then become rulers of the galaxy…

This bad analogy, which undermines the premise of the book, is followed by many others which makes one wonder whether the authors have actually seen The Godfather. For example, they blame the “neocon” Sonny for the gangland war that followed after the murder of the drug-dealer Virgil Sollozzo – just as happened in Iraq. Yet it was Michael who triggered the conflict, first suggesting the hit to a reluctant Tom and Sonny and then carrying it out himself.

An analogy is also made between Sollozzo and Iran. Messrs’ Hulsman and Mitchell rhapsodise about Michael’s use of diplomacy and limited force and say that he would talk to Iran, as well as apply economic sanctions ‘to bring them to their knees’. Of course, in the film, Michael actually puts a bullet in Sollozzo’s head and then weathered the ensuing storm, just as the Israeli strategist Ron Tira argued his country could do a couple of years ago.

If I had to recommend a gangster film that would best explain American foreign policy to the layman, it would be the Coen Brothers’ Millers Crossing: the erratic, headstrong boss Leo whose temper is just about controlled by his realist right-hand man, Tom.

Not to mention being awesome with a firearm…

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The West, Russia & Syria: Foreign policy is rarely a zero-sum game

Aaron Ellis 6.12am

It is perfectly possible for one country to argue with another over a controversial issue at the same time as co-operating with them on several others - as long as they both get their priorities right and are diplomatic in explaining their differences publicly.

Unfortunately, both Britain and the United States have failed to do this with regard to Russia: they have given more attention to Syria, where they disagree with the latter, than to the many more important issues on which they share common interests. The way British and American officials have explained their differences with their Russian counterparts has also been appallingly undiplomatic and, unsurprisingly, counterproductive.

If London and Washington want to withdraw from Afghanistan, negotiate an end to the Iran crisis, reduce nuclear weapons, and expand NATO, they must give less ‘airtime’ to Syria when dealing with Moscow. If they want to stop the violence there, they must be more respectful of Russia’s views, no matter how heartless they believe them to be. Otherwise, the Kremlin will take a zero-sum approach to the issues listed above, making the world a considerably more dangerous place.

Anyone familiar with the history of Anglo-American relations with Russia knows how difficult it can be to get them on your side, no matter how obvious it is that your approach to an issue will benefit them as much as it would benefit yourself. Russian foreign policy is characterised by interplaying contradictions. Its practitioners can be refreshingly honest one minute, deceptive the next; they can play the aggrieved party in a dispute when they are actually the aggressor; and can alternate between undermining the international order and being one of its key pillars

Yet there are best practice principles that can be teased out of our difficult history with the Russians.

One, respect their interests and treat them the way a great power ought to be treated, even if it is obvious they’re not one. Two, be honest about your own interests and don’t try to trick them, though they may be trying to trick you. Three, don’t be a hypocrite, no matter how hypocritical you think they are behaving. Essentially, keep in mind Ronald Reagan’s dictum: trust, but verify.

If this is “best practice”, both the United Kingdom and the United States have badly mishandled the Russians during the Syria crisis. They have not tried to safeguard their interests in the country should Bashar al-Assad fall, nor have they taken seriously their view of the crisis, as Giles Marshall argued they should in these pages last month. Rather than be diplomatic about their differences, some Western officials have publicly attacked Russia, as the US Ambassador to the UN did in February.

Some of the British and Americans’ actions have just been tin-eared: for example, leaking that David Cameron thought about using Special Forces to stop a Russian ship from allegedly taking weapons to Syria.

For months now, the conflict has preoccupied Anglo-American diplomacy, yet there are many other issues that are much more important to us than Syria and which require Russian support – or at least acquiescence. If we continue to bungle things with the Kremlin, it will become less cooperative on Iran and Afghanistan, even taking a zero-sum approach. One official said as much yesterday, warning that “if Russia doesn’t like the outcome” in Syria, it will start selling long-range surface-to-air missiles to Iran.

Given that Russia is part of one of the two routes via which NATO supplies troops in Afghanistan, its support will be vital over the next two years as we withdraw, as the only other route out of the country is through Pakistan…

British and American officials are understandably exasperated with Russia’s Syria policy, for it is cold, self-interested, and hypocritical. Vladimir Putin attacked humanitarian interventionism a few months ago, yet he justified the war with Georgia on the same as grounds as those calling for military action in Syria. Unfortunately, the terrible things happening there simply aren’t important enough to us to risk an open breach with the Kremlin and losing its cooperation on much more vital issues.

Much of what Otto von Bismarck said over a hundred years ago holds true today, not least his belief that the secret of foreign policy is to make a good treaty with Russia…

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A British Empire could rise again…on American coat-tails

Aaron Ellis 10.07am

The rise and fall of great powers is a familiar theme of history and a regular concern for politicians. Yet few appreciate that a country can rise and fall and rise again.

During the past millennium, England has held and lost many empires, and gone from one of the known world’s foremost powers to its weakest and back again. An Anglo-Saxon chronicler lamented in the late tenth century that England’s navy was not what it was just sixty years previously, “when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land.”

England can be one of the world’s foremost powers once more, but it is a long-term ambition, and I will be long gone if and when it is achieved.

We are only a secondary world power today and, since the 1940s, we have been dependent on the United States for our security. Trident is not the only thing for which we rely on Washington: half of the material processed by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) comes from American sources. We could not have intervened in Libya without the help of the US military either, no matter how fiercely the Prime Minister believed that venture was vital to national security.

In order to justify the many benefits we enjoy from our close relationship with the Americans, Britain tries to make herself useful. Yet we will find this more and more difficult to achieve as successive administrations in Washington “pivot” to the Pacific, and as successive governments in London try to keep the defence budget as respectably low as they can.

So how could Britain make itself useful? There is an option: take responsibility for those parts of the world the US can no longer afford to look after.

Not only would this justify perks such as intelligence sharing and the nuclear deterrent, it would also give time to develop these and other capabilities ourselves or wait for emerging powers to develop them and realign ourselves accordingly. It also offers Britain an opportunity to build her influence in those regions vacated by the Americans in the twentieth century.

By limiting ourselves to a few “spheres of influence”, Britain can also prove itself useful to the US without overstretching. Moreover, if the British are to be “deputy” to the American “sheriff”, we must choose parts of the world where we have real interests at stake. This requires thinking strategically and making tough choices in defence and foreign policies. We would also have to put our money where our mouth is on the subjects of “hard” and “soft” power.

There are several regions the Americans could turn over to Britain. For instance, rather than evenly divide its navy between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the US plans to shift its emphasis to the latter in the next eight years (with a 60:40 ratio). Britain could make up the difference and gradually take on full responsibility for the Atlantic. This would require us to build up our own naval power.

We could also relieve the US of responsibility for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The British have a better relationship with Islamabad than the Americans do, putting us in a better position to oversee security in the region once troops depart Afghanistan next year.

Britain has tangible national security interests at stake: the head of MI5 has said that half of the terrorist plots against the country come from Pakistan. With the latter paralysed by political crises and its army suffering an ideological crisis, it is unlikely that figure will go down in the foreseeable future.

Yet if we were to assume the burden of security in that region from the US, we would have to try to match their presence. This won’t merely be about “hard power” (i.e. US counterterrorism), but also about diplomatic presence and financial assistance. One expert has described British aid to Pakistan as a “drop in the ocean” compared to America’s.

Though British politics is becoming increasingly eurosceptic, Washington would like to see us play a bigger part in the continent’s security, preferably by helping to forge a better working relationship between NATO and the EU. The always-sharp Christopher Coker has suggested the UK can earn real gratitude here, “provided we are seen to be a useful European ally to our European friends.”

This entire approach is ambitious in the long term but prudent in the short to medium terms. In order to sustain the special relationship throughout the twenty-first century, it sticks to the theme of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: if we want things to stay the same, things shall have to change.

As for the twenty-second century, it offers an opportunity for the United Kingdom to lay the foundations for yet another rise to the top of the world.

No Englishman should have any less ambitious a vision.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Can democracy save us from Pakistan?

Aaron Ellis 7.30am

British foreign policy in Central and South Asia is in a bit of a bind.

The goals we pursue are incompatible due to the geopolitical rivalry of India and Pakistan.

Rather than recognise this and make tough choices about our regional priorities, ministers either deny a problem exists or offer democratic politics as a solution to geopolitics.

David Cameron and William Hague believe they can achieve their goals in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan if the cause of the enmity between the three – Pakistan – becomes a genuine democracy. She should end her support for the Taliban, as well as her decades-old conflict with India. Thus Britain, the former colonial power, would not have to make tough choices and pick sides in Central and South Asia, as everyone would inevitably be on the same side.

If they really want Pakistan to become a genuine democracy, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary must resolve Pakistan’s disputes with her neighbours, as these have often been a catalyst for her lurches from democracy to military rule and back again.

This is especially important for regional and global security, as both civilian and military governments in Islamabad have traditionally used insurgents and terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir as legitimate means of resolving these disputes in their favour.

Yet it is unlikely that Mr Cameron and Mr Hague will try to resolve them because it would mean doing what they specifically do not want to do: make tough choices and pick sides. This reluctance stems from their lack of a grand strategic vision for Britain’s role in Central and South Asia. Unless they come up with one soon, they will not achieve any of their goals in the region, as its geopolitical rivalries will continue to undermine them.

Britain wants a stable Afghanistan, a special relationship with India, and has signed up to a strategic partnership with Pakistan. Individually these goals make sense, but it is hard to fit them together into a single regional policy, especially when it comes to Afghanistan. Both Islamabad and New Delhi believe that stability in Afghanistan comes at the expense of either one or the other and that the price of their cooperation is helping to restrict their rivals’ presence in the country.

Just a few months before Afghanistan and India signed a strategic partnership last October, a survey of Pakistan’s foreign policy elite showed many worry that India’s involvement in the country goes beyond economic development, and has become a real security concern.

“Pakistan wants the international community to set certain limits on India’s involvement”, regional expert Farzana Shaikh has said. It is the “minimum that [it] might be prepared to settle for to ensure its co-operation” in ending the war in Afghanistan.

Yet acquiescing to India’s involvement may be necessary for a “special relationship” with New Delhi.

In an email exchange with a former Indian intelligence chief, I asked what the UK would need to do for India vis-à-vis Afghanistan to help build the kind of relationship that David Cameron envisages between our two countries. “Accept India has a role [there], encourage this and not let Pakistan have a veto”.

Thus British policy in Central and South Asia is in a bit of a bind.

Ministers are denying a problem exists. When I put it to Philip Hammond in December that India and Pakistan regard stability in Afghanistan as coming at the expense of either one or the other, the Defence Secretary rejected my assertion.

The Prime Minister, on the other hand, believes that democracy can save us from Pakistan. If the civilians truly directed national security policy, not the military, they would not support the Taliban or terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), because democracies just don’t do that sort of thing.

Mr Cameron has always drawn this contrast between a democratic Pakistan that is a peaceful actor in the region and an authoritarian, terrorist-supporting Pakistan. “We have to make sure that [they] are not looking two ways” about exporting terrorism to their neighbours, he once said. “They should only look one way, and that is to a democratic and stable Pakistan.”

His faith in the power of democracy to resolve great power rivalry is a manifestation of the Liberal half of his self-described “Liberal Conservative” approach to foreign policy. Speaking in Pakistan just weeks after the country’s dictator Pervez Musharraf was forced from office, Mr Cameron stated that democracies “tend not to go to war with each other” - an old Liberal belief.

This faith is misplaced as far as Pakistan is concerned, as successive civilian governments have used insurgents and terrorists to further their goals in Central and South Asia.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of the late Benazir Bhutto, waged a proxy war against Afghanistan in 1975 using Afghan exiles. Ms Bhutto herself helped the Taliban to take over the country in the mid-1990s. Her successor as Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, shielded them from American pressure to hand over Osama bin Laden because of the al-Qa’ida leader’s help in fighting the Indians in Kashmir.

In the spring of 2010 the current president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, allegedly told senior Taliban prisoners: “You are our people, we are friends, and after your release we will of course support you to do your operations.” A few months later, his government angrily rejected Mr Cameron’s claim that their country “looked both ways” on terrorism in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

It is not the constitutional make-up of the Pakistani government that determines its use of terrorism therefore, but its geopolitical rivalries, and it is only by resolving them can we hope to bring about a true change in the country’s behaviour. Yet the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are unlikely to do this, as they are reluctant to pick sides and have no grand strategic vision to guide them.

Soon after becoming Foreign Secretary, William Hague ruled out involving Britain in Indian-Pakistani disputes. “It will not be our approach to lecture other countries on how they should conduct their bilateral relations,” unlike his Labour predecessor David Miliband, who upset the Indians by bringing up the Kashmir dispute the year before.

Mr Hague’s approach may help build a special relationship with New Delhi, but at the expense of our relations with Islamabad, which he also regards highly. In September, the Foreign Secretary said:

We will stand by Pakistan as it addresses the challenges it faces and build a durable relationship that we know will stand the test of time. We can be confident of doing so because ours is not a new relationship founded on a narrow set of interests.

Britain wants to have her cake in Central and South Asia and to eat it too, yet this policy is unsustainable in the current geopolitical climate.

David Cameron and William Hague must decide which of their goals are important and which of them must be discarded. If they do not do so, they will not achieve anything in the region.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis