The World Today

Billions of dollars have been spent, United States President Barack Obama has promised seventeen thousand more US troops, but still the situation in Afghanistan’s thirty-year war gets worse. A new approach is needed, one grounded in an understanding of Afghan history. But this approach does not involve presidential elections, so the polls planned for August must be put aside. A forthright exchange of views Afghan-style, is better than voting on a battleground.

Alliance is a serious business, as the last few years have proved. After a time in which the tendency was to treat NATO as another example of benign liberal institutionalism, useful for displays of multilateralism, reassuring conferences and some genuine integration, there is now far greater awareness that the Organisation is also about balancing adversary power and the conduct of war.

As NATO celebrates its sixtieth anniversary, it is worth considering to what extent the 26-member alliance has evolved since its founding. While ostensibly convened to defend Western Europe against a full scale Soviet military invasion or nuclear attack, the underlying mission of the world’s premier military alliance has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Now operating ‘out of area’ in Afghanistan, it has also had to confront the difficulties of operating in a totally different borderless realm.

The Russia-NATO crisis last August over Georgia did a lot of good for our relationship; from now on there will be no place for empty rhetoric and promises. A solid, integrated, comprehensive security system is needed for the nations of Europe. To achieve this, there must be a return to the 2002 principles that set up the NATO-Russia Council.

Russia is a member of both the G8 group of major industrialised democracies, and the G20 gathering of the largest economies. Having already tarnished its democratic credentials, bringing into question its continued G8 membership, Russia appears to be about to do the same with the G20. So how might the Kremlin react to increasingly hard times?

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, appears to be aligned with United States and western interests, but this may soon change. It is gearing-up for its third democratic election since authoritarian leader Suharto resigned in 1997. The immense legislative vote in April will fill over sixteen thousand seats at the national, provincial and district levels, presidential polling follows in July. More than one-hundred-and- seventy million eligible voters can choose between some four- hundred thousand candidates.