Cameron's War - by Richard... Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Cameron's War - by Richard... Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Although much hailed before the event, getting information on yesterday's meeting of Cameron's national security committee is proving extraordinarily difficult. All we have so far is a very limited statement from a Downing Street spokesman, telling us that: "There were wide-ranging, intensive and productive discussions during the extended session on this, the Government's top foreign policy priority."

"The Prime Minister and the NSC," we are also told, "expressed their great admiration and support for our troops serving in Afghanistan and paid tribute to the essential contribution that they and their civilian colleagues make. The NSC will now continue its work to ensure that the UK does all it can to support the agreed Nato strategy in Afghanistan to succeed."

Separately, we have a report in The Guardian which makes the claim – attributed to officials - that Britain is putting pressure on Afghanistan to assume full responsibility for its own security as soon as possible.

If that is true – and there is no reason why it should not be – it quite possibly represents the ultimate example of hope triumphing over experience, there being any number of accounts which attest to the incompetence of Afghan security forces.

The latest of these comes in the New York Times which describes the Interior Ministry's most promising force, which has been "undercut by drug use, petty corruption and, at times, a lack of commitment in the face of the ordinary hardships and duties of uniformed life." 

This piece deserves to be read in full but particularly relevant is the observation that many of the police from the force profiled were Tajik, and did not speak Pashto, southern Afghanistan's dominant language. Unsurprisingly, one of them complained: "Nobody can find a lot of information about the Taliban."

What, of course, this destroys is the facile idea that the southern, predominantly Pashtun population is ever going to accept the rule of Kabul, bolstered as it is – and has always been historically – by the northern tribes of an entirely different ethnicity.

Thus Simon Jenkins is telling us in The Guardian that Cameron should take the opportunity of the switch in Helmand from British to US control to admit the obvious and start to plan how best to leave. It is idle to pretend, he writes, that Britain's 2006 expedition to bring Helmand under the control of the Kabul regime has anything but failed.

Yet, rather than take that opportunity, the Cameron stance has been to support the last administration's policy and, as he did during the session allocated to PMQs in parliament today, commit to providing the military with "whatever they need", thereby effectively taking ownership of the conflict. It may have started off as Blair's war, then to become Brown's war, but it has now undergone a glacially smooth transition, on its way to becoming Cameron's war.

There ius no obvious political reason why the Cleggeron leader should so easily assumed responsibility for this conflict – other than, perhaps, he has been unduly influenced by today's leader in The Daily Telegraph, which intones that "tangible results" are "desperately needed" to reassure an increasingly sceptical public that the war is winnable - an outcome which only this newspaper can believe is possible. 

"Providing clear and unequivocal support for the military effort would be a good start," the paper says, advice which Cameron seems to have taken, unwittingly falling into a trap from which he will find it difficult to extract himself.

As a harbinger, the significance of which it is unlikely he would understand, yesterday we learnedof the death of another Danish soldier, since identified as 22-year-old Private Sophia Bruun. She was killed close to Bridzar military base in Helmand, after a Piranha armoured personnel carrier was hit by an IED.

The point that will escape Cameron is that this vehicle type was intended to be the base for the FRES utility vehicle which, given a choice, the Army would have preferred to the Mastiff and other protected vehicles. Affording the Army "unequivocal support" may prove to be unwise, given that it most often has no real idea what it really wants and, in any event, should be given what it needs rather than what it wants.

In return, however, the one thing Cameron need not expect is "tangible results", other than seeing the number of deaths climb from today's figure of 290 – with yet another Royal Marine killed by a bomb in Sangin – to 300 in the very near future. For his first performance in the PMQ slot today, he had to read out three names. Already, he has another for next week's list and soon enough he will be dealing with the torrent of media "celebrating" that macabre third century.

By then it will truly be Cameron's war. And if he makes 400, it will be the only thing he "achieves" from it.

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The same old stench - by Richard...

This is the sort of day when there are lots of things to write about, but mostly ongoing stories rather than brand new issues. One of those is the David Laws story, which we have already visited several times. 

There cannot, you might think, be much more to say on the subject, except that Heffer in The Daily Telegraph op-ed finds a great deal to say – mostly about what the affair tells us of the "new politics" espoused by the Cleggerons.

As always, there is no point in reinventing the wheel – let Heffer's words speak for themselves. But one has to say on this that he is right. The Law affair tells us a great deal, not least about the "us and them" divide which now separates us from the political classes. 

The response of "them" has been highly instructive – they have rushed to defend one of their own, and in so doing have illustrated with absolutely clarity how different mores apply to those who are "above the line". Thus, we find, with absolutely no surprise, that new politics or not, we have the same old stench.

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Ryanair joins in - by Richard...

With easyJet considering taking on the government over the volcanic ash debacle, we now haveMichael O'Leary (pictured), the head of Ryanair, getting in on the act.

This is good to see as, when I first raised questions about this, I was rather out on a limb. The bulk of the comments were distinctly hostile to my thesis and there was only limited support for my view that the closure of the airspace was an over-reaction.

Anyhow, from a safe distance after the event, O'Leary has now rounded on the Met Office's Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre for its handling of "aviation's biggest crisis since the war", launching a "vitriolic attack" on their forecasters. Met Office charts, he says, "suggested the that the big black plume of volcanic ash had spread from Iceland all over the southern Atlantic, much of continental Europe and half way across Russia as well as over a large part of the arctic circle."

"The fact is the sun wasn't blocked out in any of these areas and none of us could see a bl**dy thing didn't seem to worry the Met Office, where we suspect the only place that there was volcanic ash was in the basement of the Met Office or in between the ears of the people who produced these charts," he said.

"I don't mind paying passenger right to care when it is our fault. But if it is not our fault and some stupid regulator or government has closed down airspace, because some idiot in a basement in the Met Office in London spills coffee over the map of Europe and produces a big black cloud, we shouldn't be paying for your right to care," O'Leary continued.

"They made a complete dog's balls of it yet passed this cost onto the airlines. We paid compensation for their mismanagement for and incompetence," he then concludes.

O'Leary, though, has got it wrong – as he did with the Irish referendum. As we pointed outearlier, it was not the Met Office, per se that was wrong, but the regulators relying on the Met Office models, without insisting on independent, physical verification of data – using direct measurement from airborne sampling.

Picking on the Met Office alone is bound to be highly entertaining, but it isn't going to win a court case. For that, the actual decision-makers need to be identified, which is not going to be that easy, given the way responsibility has been diffused. 

Also, the airlines are not going to be able to walk away from their own responsibilities. They had plenty of opportunities to comment on the IACO contingency plan and one wonders how many – Ryanair included – complained about the inadequacies and the lack of resources, before the event. 

And how many now really understand why and how the system went wrong? It doesn't look as if O'Leary has quite got a handle on it. If he is not careful, there will be another "dog's balls" in the making – only it will be his this time.

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An ex parrot - by Richard... Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Notice how John Major (on 1:20) does not applaud.

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David Laws is a thief and a liar - by Richard...

"My problems have been caused by my unwillingness to be open about my sexuality and not by any intention to exploit the MPs' expenses system," saysDavid Laws.

"James Lundie and I were aware that we could have been far better off financially if I had been willing to be open about our relationship - but I was not," he adds. "I decided, therefore, to keep my sexuality secret, and the further time went on the more difficult it seemed to be to tell the truth."

"When the rules changed in 2006 to prevent MPs from renting from partners, I should probably have changed our arrangements. I could have done so without any financial cost, but getting a mortgage and buying a house together would have meant revealing our relationship - which I was not prepared to do."

But says Laws, his lover never used the parliamentary entitlement to travel for partners nor any financial entitlement that would result from the "formal recognition of partnership". And: "That is why I thought it would be all right for him to be treated as just a friend, when actually we were much more than that," he says.

So, rather than revealing his relationship, David Laws decided to break the rules ... his choice. He decided to take money under false pretences, pretending that his lover was not a "partner", when he knew damn well he was, and has now admitted as much. 

That means he was not entitled to the money he claimed, under the specific terms under which he claimed it – and he knew that to be the case, at the time he made the claims. It is no defence to say that had he made a different application, he could have claimed more money, perfectly legally. He did not so claim. His choice was to make a false application. That makes him a thief.

His rival at the general election, Tory Kevin Davis, would have him as a liar as well. 

"David (Laws) chose to base his whole campaign against me on two premises. He based his campaign on his image and comparison with me and not on policy," says Davis. "The first premise was that he was a squeaky clean MP on expenses. The second premise was that I did not live in Yeovil but lived in London. The first premise has now turned out to be a lie. The second one is hypocrisy."

We need to spell this out. David Laws is a thief and a liar. He is also (still) an MP - and "Call me Dave" thinks him "honourable".

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You can't blame the Messenger - by Richard...

The Cleggeron administration has at least provided one useful service in publishing the Civil Service "rich list" – the names of the 172 senior civil servants who earn more than £150,000 a year.

Included in that number (although not exactly a civilservant) is CDS Jock Stirrup, one of 22 MoD officials earning more than £150,000. He is currently on the pay band £240,000 - £249,999. This, of course, does not include his perks which include full-time servants, limousine and chauffeur provided at public expense.

On current performance, however, Stirrup is being paid probably ten times what he is worth, not least as a greater part of his responsibility – the campaign in Helmand - has just been removed and handed to a US general, Maj Gen Richard Mills, of the USMC.

Whether that will lead to any improvement in the conduct of the campaign is moot, although given the objective declared by British theatre spokesman Maj Gen Gordon Messenger, it is unlikely that it could make things worse.

Messenger's view of how to win, as expressed to the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, comes straight out of the Janet & John Book of Counterinsurgency (budget edition). It is all about providing security, he says, which is the "bedrock" on which a peaceful Afghanistan would be built. "Ultimately," he prattles, "the key to this is the allegiance of the population. When the population demonstrate their allegiance to the Afghan government, we will have done our job."

The funny thing is, you could have given this man a job with US public affairs in Vietnam in the 1960s and he would have been saying much the same things. But, with a dismal and highly-overpaid boss like Stirrup, even now you can't blame the Messenger. 

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