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

Better relations with Iran could be key to solving Afghanistan

Aaron Ellis 10.42am

You can’t govern properly by just reacting to events. But that is what the Government’s lauded National Security Council (NSC) does, putting day-to-day crises into a larger context and shaping a strategic response to them.

Speaking in Washington, D.C. several months after its creation, William Hague boasted that the NSC had already made Britain’s policy in Afghanistan strategically “coherent”.

Yet our handling of Iran suggests otherwise. The Iranians ought to be our allies in Afghanistan but Western sabre-rattling towards the Iranian nuclear programme undermines our efforts there. If the Government truly wants to resolve these crises, it must adopt a truly strategic approach. It cannot just react.

It was reported this week that Iran may have tried to exacerbate anti-American riots in Afghanistan in February, after careless US soldiers burned copies of the Qur’an.

The typical reaction of hawks to these stories is to see Tehran’s mischievousness as a sinister bid for global mastery - rather than defensive measures to deter Western military action against them. When Iranian weapons allegedly destined for the Taliban were seized in Afghanistan last April, the former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, said:

“This confirms my often repeated view of the dangers that Iran poses not only through its nuclear programme, but its continuing policy of destabilising its neighbours. Supplying weapons to help the Taliban kill [ISAF] soldiers is a clear example of the threat they pose.”

The hawk-talk about Iran in Afghanistan adds another stroke to the war drums beaten over Iran of late, but it also undermines the Government’s goals in both countries. It is unlikely that Iran will participate in a regional settlement if we persist in branding it a malign actor. Any solution to the nuclear impasse also grows more difficult to find.

Instead of reacting to these crises separately, the Government must adopt a combined approach. Sound strategic thinking involves reappraising Iran’s role in Afghanistan, recognising that our actions towards one impact the other, and taking various diplomatic steps to achieve the various goals stated above.

Though some actions suggest different, Iran’s interests in Afghanistan coincide with Western objectives. The Government has to be mindful of this. One former senior diplomat has noted, correctly, that Tehran has no “rational interest in continuing instability in [the country], or in a Taliban victory.” This point was covered in great detail in a RAND paper last year.

Given this, why the Iranian mischief-making? The RAND paper’s authors, Alireza Nader and Joya Laha, point out that Iran’s enmity towards the US determines its interests in Afghanistan.

Iranian leaders view the US and coalition presence in Afghanistan with great anxiety, especially in light of the US military threats against Iran’s nuclear facilities. As it has reportedly been employed in Iraq, Iran’s asymmetric strategy would use proxy insurgent forces to tie down and distract the United States from focusing on Iran and its nuclear program, and provides a retaliatory capability in the event of US military action.

The Government has to rethink its rhetoric about Iran, and recognise that country’s involvement in Afghanistan is defensive rather than offensive. We can forget any regional settlement post-2015 if we exclude one of the region’s biggest stakeholders. We must also restart diplomatic dialogue between Tehran and London.

This means first reopening the embassy in Iran. As former diplomat Mark Malloch-Brown has written, “Without embassies the basic function of diplomacy - keeping some kind of dialogue going even when views are diametrically opposed - is essentially suspended.”

Then Britain must begin talks with Iran about how we can co-operate over Afghanistan. If we persuade the Iranians to help, not hinder, the winding down of the war there, it might be easier to negotiate a solution to the nuclear impasse.

Mr Hague once said that the National Security Council would not only minimise the risks we face but also “look for the positive trends in the world, since our security requires seizing opportunity as well as mitigating risk.”

Yet with Iran and Afghanistan, the Government has emphasised risk over opportunity. If we want to achieve our goals, this emphasis must change.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

We must leave the Gordian Knot of Afghanistan

Aaron Ellis 7.30am

‘A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne’.

This is how it feels any time a great tragedy is reported from Afghanistan.

One often asks, warily, “Why the hell are we there?”

The deaths of six British servicemen in Helmand last week prompted David Cameron to answer,

“We are there to prevent that country from being a safe haven for al-Qaeda, from where they might plan attacks on the UK or our allies.”

Our troops are not only securing the future of the United Kingdom, but also “the future of the world”.

It became difficult to take seriously such grandiloquent rhetoric by the Prime Minister when, nearly two years ago, he placed an arbitrary deadline on securing the future of the world.

The contradiction is typical of an Afghan policy that Mr. Cameron and the Foreign Secretary William Hague have tied up in knots since the summer of 2010. They should cut themselves free from their bonds as this war is not worth the loss of another British life.

David Cameron and William Hague like to think that they are grand strategists who will reverse the drift of the Labour years and prepare the country for the challenges of the 21st Century.

Perversely, I think one of the tightest knots binding us to Afghanistan was tied by Mr. Cameron trying to pursue this ambition. The myopia of his actions prompted a U-turn that over-committed the UK to a country of only marginal importance. It has put the Tory leaders in an embarrassing position vis-à-vis withdrawal.

On 25th June 2010, the Prime Minister announced that our combat troops would be out of the war by 2015.

“We cannot be there for another five years having effectively been there for nine years already.”

Many pundits saw this deadline and other foreign policy decisions that summer as repeated gaffes. I took a different view; these “gaffes” were part of a deliberate strategy that he and Mr. Hague were pursuing at the time, one which I likened to flying a hot air balloon.

They sensed the turbulent winds heading our way this century and believed that the best way to avoid them was to chuck overboard weighty foreign policy commitments in order to make Britain’s balloon soar higher.

It was for this reason that Mr. Cameron tried to cool the Special Relationship, push away Israel to align closer with Turkey, and reset our relations with India at the expense of Pakistan.

Unless we changed our ways, the Foreign Secretary warned in July, we were set to decline “with all that that means for our influence in world affairs”.

Afghanistan was a commitment that David Cameron and William Hague were unsure about chucking overboard that summer, though the 2015 deadline suggested that they had put it on the edge of the basket.

“By that time we will have been applying ourselves to this [conflict] for 50% longer than we applied ourselves to the Second World War”, Mr. Hague once remarked, in exasperation.

The deadline was also typical of the caution with which the Tory leaders have sometimes viewed the handling of the war. It came just two days after President Obama dismissed General McChrystal as the head of allied forces in Afghanistan, reopening a debate about U.S. strategy that many thought had been settled by the President’s West Point speech several months before. Mr. Cameron may have felt that this was the last straw.

“We cannot be here for another eight years”, he said during a trip to Helmand in December 2009; the strategy that Obama had laid out that month was “our last big chance for success”.

Had the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary stuck to this cautious approach, they would have anticipated the Americans’ sudden desire to “rush to the exit”, allowing them to drop the Afghan commitment.

Yet they quickly restored Afghanistan to its original place in the balloon basket and added to its weight in order to play down the strategic significance of the 2015 announcement. In January, David Cameron signed an agreement with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan which commits us to furnishing his regime with significant financial and military aid for years to come.

At the press conference, Mr. Cameron also made it clear that British combat troops would not leave before 2015, unlike the less dependable French.

The United Kingdom wants “a strong, safe, stable, democratic Afghanistan living in peace and stability with its neighbours”.

Just a few days later, however, the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that America will transition away from a combat role in 2013 and leave in 2014.

The partial U-turn that David Cameron and William Hague made on Afghanistan has now put them in an embarrassing position. If the “primary determinant” of their withdrawal timetable is U.S. policy and if that policy is to “rush to the exit” despite claims to the contrary, Mr. Hague and Mr. Cameron must join that rush just when they have increased our commitment to the country and raised the world-saving stakes of our presence there.

There are many other contradictions in the government’s policy – al-Qaeda is a grave threat to our security, yet we will leave Afghanistan in three years’ time whether or not the group is defeated. We are not there to build a perfect society, yet ministers often emphasise the progress we have made on development and human rights.

If they truly wish to be great, grand strategists, David Cameron and William Hague should not spend their time in office fiddling with the knots binding them to Afghanistan, but cut them altogether. A famous conqueror of that land took a similar approach to knots and he didn’t do too badly…

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

Iran might be many things, but it is not the Soviet Union

Aaron Ellis 9.30am

Some of the worst decisions in history have been influenced by bad historical analogies. In an essay on the part played by such analogies in American foreign policy, Robert Dallek dubbed their malign influence “the tyranny of metaphor”.

“For all their pretensions to shaping history, U.S. presidents are more often its prisoners.”

The tyranny of metaphor is especially strong in this perennial debate over the Iran Problem. Those who want to attack the country often justify their position by comparing its regime to the Nazis.

One commentator noted recently:

“No other historical episode gets mentioned as often by pundits and policy makers in arguing that some menace or supposed menace needs to be confronted firmly. What is drawn from the Nazi analogy is an adage that a threat must be stopped forcefully now to avoid a bigger and costlier fight later.”

The comparison is ridiculous for any number of reasons, but it serves an important purpose: it is an easy-to-grasp analogy that helps coax those unsure about the use of force.

Yesterday in the House of Commons, in an urgent question to William Hague (video), Robert Halfon boldly described Iran as “the new Soviet Union of the Middle East”. Though his subsequent description of Iranian behaviour did not explain the comparison, there are two ways one can interpret it.

A generous interpretation would be that Mr Halfon believes the regime in Tehran is so crooked, contradictory, and such an aberration of Persian history that its eventual collapse is inevitable. It was this prophetic insight about Communism that led to George F Kennan devising the idea of containment, which won the Cold War. If we just applied continuous but restrained pressure, the Soviet regime would either yield to the West or be overthrown by the Russians and other subjected populations themselves. Going to war with the Soviet Union would not only be disastrous, but also unnecessary.

The more likely interpretation is that Mr Halfon genuinely believes that Iran poses the same degree of threat as the Soviet Union did, which is as absurd as thinking it poses the same threat as Nazi Germany.

Both Israel and the United States dwarf Iran militarily, whereas the Soviet Union’s conventional forces dwarfed those of the West years before the Russians successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949.

Iran has only one friend in the Middle East - Syria - and it is unlikely that friendship will continue if the Assad regime falls. Until the final years of the Cold War, Moscow had almost all of Eastern Europe under its thumb and, until the 1960s, the important support of Mao’s China.

If Iran is like the Soviet Union in any way, it is the Soviet Union of 1991, a basket case. The influential commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote earlier this month:

“The real story on the ground is that Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed the economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fractured and fragmenting.”

I wrote yesterday that the only way we can come to an informed decision about Iran is by raising the standard of the debate. Nik also wrote that a debate of such direct import must take place in the House of Commons before any substantive military move. Thankfully, Parliament was granted a preliminary murmur later yesterday afternoon.

Those who claim to have a solution to the problems posed by Tehran and its nuclear programme should furnish us with a coherent strategy, as well as explaining how to offset the trade-offs and indirect consequences of their preferred policies.

And yesterday highlighted another problem, which perhaps we shall never escape: the use and abuse of history.

Follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronHEllis

When will Parliament have its proper say about Iran?

Nik Darlington 12.20pm

Last November, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague refused to rule out military action against Iran. Ten days ago, William Hague again refused to rule out military action against Iran. And today, the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, has signalled a reinforcement of Britain’s military presence in the Gulf - in particular around the strategically important Straits of Hormuz. HMS Argyll already set sail to join US forces at the weekend.

Aaron has an excellent article on the blog this morning, which I strongly encourage you to read. In it, he criticises the blindly relentless march towards war from some quarters, and ineffective sanctions from others. The situation in Iran, always bubbling beneath the surface of the 24/7 news cycle, is escalating terrifyingly fast.

If Britain is genuinely set to commit more troops to the region, out of a combined forces that are already under pressure from the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan, the recent Libyan campaign and the heightened rhetoric surrounding the Falklands, then Parliament must have a say. The case for threats of force towards has not convincingly been made.

Supposing we do reinforce the area through which we receive approximately one-fifth of our oil and more than four-fifths of our LNG, what is the plan? Who, aside from the United States - and predictably enough, Israel - is on our side? China? Russia? The UN? What about the Arab League, so crucial to the Libyan sorties?

These are the questions the Defence Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and, eventually, the Prime Minister needs to stand up in Parliament and answer. And they need to do it soon.

Tories should think twice before hurling insults - the party wins when united

David Cowan 6.00am

Ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been conventional to divide the Conservative party into alternating factions. Ultras and liberals; dries and wets; eurosceptics and europhiles - there has always been something amounting to disunity in the ‘One Nation’ party. In this vein did my co-scrivener Giles Marshall describe the ‘Tory Right’ as “the poison that too often infects the Conservative party”. Furthermore, they:

…do not actually want a ‘common-sense’ policy on immigration - they want a good old-fashioned ‘bash the immigrants’ policy. The NHS reforms are supported because in reality much of the Conservative right-wing believes that the whole concept of the NHS is a little old fashioned and we should all be paying private health insurance… As for the ‘desire for spending control’, there is little spending from the public purse - probably excepting defence - that a section of right-wingers agree with at all.

I believe this description to be perhaps a bit too crude. It offers too much credence to the false caricature of the Tories as a ‘nasty party’ or too ‘right-wing’.

From 1997 to 2005, it was clear that the Conservative party had become too narrow minded, backward looking and dysfunctional. A humbling electoral reverse at the hands of New Labour proved consumptive rather than cathartic.

There were avoidable blunders, such as William Hague’s ‘foreign land’ speech, thesupport for Section 28, and the relentless attention to immigration during the 2005 campaign.

The Conservative party clung on to a bygone era that they thought existed, but didn’t. For instance, the support for grammar schools was believed to be a quintessential Thatcherite policy, despite the fall in the number of grammar schools during Mrs Thatcher’s time in power.

Conservatives failed to come to terms with Thatcherism being a product of its time - not a universal doctrine.

The Conservative party had to shift focus to new battlegrounds, such as public service reform, civil liberties, and the environment. We should be grateful that this shift has occurred under David Cameron’s leadership.

However, it is absurd to claim that modernisation of the party involves a ‘castration of the Right’ (as Tim Montgomerie did in May). It is also absurd to claim that the ‘Tory Right’ is a band of callous xenophobes. Take Nick Boles, a prominent moderniser on the back-benches and a close friend of Mr Cameron: as well as advocating a 2015 electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Boles has argued for a very tough immigration policy, including denial of social housing and forced removals. The Tory Reform Group’s very own Damien Green is implementing the Government’s immigration policies as a Home Office Minister.

Dividing the Conservative party, therefore, into left and right, Thatcherites and Modernisers, etc, is overly simplistic. Moreover, to ridicule certain beliefs held by many grassroots members is unhelpful.

The many subtle traditions and groupings within the Conservative party have contributed to its dynamism, innovation and nurturing of talent. One Nation Conservatism has been invaluable in the struggle for a welfare state without socialism, the preservation of ancient liberties, and standing up for peace, prosperity and liberty abroad. Equally, the ‘Tory Right’ has been crucial for liberalising our economy, protecting ancient institutions and upholding our national identity. Of course, these functions and achievements are not mutually exclusive, and when these traditions combine the Conservative party is at its most potent. When differences have sown division, as in 1846, 1903 and 1993, there has been ruin.

Pitt, Canning, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan, and Thatcher - just some of the many great individuals to have led the Conservative party. They came from very different backgrounds, travelled in different directions and led very different administrations. However, they all had one common aim, an aim best articulated by the original One Nation visionary, Benjamin Disraeli:

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.

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Libya: mission creep

Alexander Pannett 2.15pm

The news today that the UK will be sending military advisers to Libya draws ominous parallels with a similar military escalation in Vietnam 50 years ago.  William Hague confirmed that the advisers “will advise the National Transitional Council on how to improve their military organizational structures, communications and logistics.”

Here are excerpts from General Taylor’s report, 3 Nov. 1961, on South Vietnam to President Kennedy:

To execute this program of limited partnership requires a change in the charter, the spirit, and the organization of the MAAG [US advisers] in South Vietnam. It must be shifted from an advisory group to something nearer-but not quite- an operational headquarters in a theater of war… . The U.S. should become a limited partner in the war, avoiding formalized advice on the one hand, trying to run the war, on the other.

Among the many consequences of this shift would be the rapid build-up of an intelligence capability both to identify operational targets for the Vietnamese and to assist Washington in making a sensitive and reliable assessment of the progress of the war. The basis for such a unit already exists in Saigon in the Intelligence Evaluation Center. It must be quickly expanded…

As noted on this website, defending Libyan civilians from unwarranted and indiscriminate attacks under the authority of a UN resolution was an admirable and correct decision for the government to take.  But they should be wary of engaging in a foreign civil war without a carefully crafted exit strategy and especially at a time of stringent defence cuts.  Plato said that only the dead have seen the end of war.  Let us hope that on this occasion he is wrong.  

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Blind spots lurk in UK’s National Security Strategy

Aaron Ellis 6.43am

The security minister, Baroness Neville-Jones, noted on here last week that the Conservative party has promised a fresh approach to defence and foreign policy. Anoraks like me eagerly awaited the new National Security Council (NSC). It would bring together disparate foreign policies into one, coherent whole and our leaders would fashion a grand strategy to handle the challenges of the coming century.

Unfortunately, one year into this Government, these eager hopes have yet to be satisfied. Baroness Neville-Jones is right to trumpet the progress made on national security policy but there are flaws in the Government’s approach.

As the world economy shifts eastwards and once vital international institutions are in crisis, we face many challenges in years to come. New powers are emerging who do not share all the same values as us in the West, nor our priorities. More broadly, demographics are changing; resources becoming scarce; rich lands perhaps uninhabitable. Britain must handle these challenges in a way that protects our interests and our values, and that brings together our disparate foreign policies into a coherent whole.

Baroness Neville-Jones believes that the National Security Strategy (NSS) offers the kind of grand strategy that we need.  I would argue that it falls far short. The NSS talks at length about the challenges that I listed above but fails to explain how Britain will handle them. How will we handle American decline? What if an emerging power like India opposes our efforts at democratisation in the Middle East because their own interests are conflicted? The NSS talks of global change but it relies on a static world order.

Intellectually, the Government is thinking about national security in the wrong way, prioritising threats over interests. A real grand strategy would have stated what Britain’s interests are in the world and how they will be protected. Talking to MPs in September, the academic Julian Lindley-French captured it perfectly: “Like it or not, Britain has global trading interests. That is what ultimately drives the shape of your security policy, military and civil.” Had the Government followed his advice last autumn, its defence review would have focused on bolstering the Royal Navy, given that most of our trade is maritime. In prioritising threats over interests, Ministers have embarked on a wild goose chase; as the great Sir Michael Quinlan once said:

“[Threats] we expect we plan and provide for. What we plan and provide for, we therefore deter. What we deter doesn’t happen. What does happen is what we did not deter because we did not plan and provide for it because we did not expect it.”

The Government should feel proud for having created the NSC, which improves on the poor attempts made by Gordon Brown at collective strategy formulation, but more needs to be done to institutionalise the thinking required to meet this century’s challenges.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Government has lost the capacity to think strategically. Bernard Jenkin and the Public Administration Committee investigated this problem last year and found: “the ability of the military and the Civil Service to identify those people who are able to operate and think at the strategic level is poor.” William Hague has also talked about this with regard to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The department “has not been as used as I would like it to be to being prepared to lead on all occasions”, offering neither the ideas nor the expertise that are “necessary to frame foreign policy”. Institutional changes will not solve our strategy problem but they are important and, again, the Government has a lot more to do.

Baroness Neville-Jones says that the Government is charting a new course for this country in the world and I believe that this is true. However, the vision has blind spots, which are causes for concern.

In pointing out a few of them here, I keep in mind the words of Pericles: “What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy, but our own mistakes.” Recognising our mistakes now will save time and money in the future, though Libya suggests that we had better get moving, and quickly.

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