Pakistan will become a ‘mortal threat’ if the Taliban manage to take power in that country, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent testimony before Congress. The immediate cause for this warning was the agreement the government of Pakistan has entered into with local leaders of the Taleban permitting the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the Swat-Valley adjoining the Afghan border. The Taleban has, moreover, advanced to approximately 100 km from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Clinton suggested that with present trends the Pakistani nuclear bomb may fall into the hands of the extremist Muslim movement. A mortal threat. The developments in Pakistan are negating the plans of President Obama to make a new start in Central Asia. At the Afghanistan conference held this spring in The Hague, a list was unveiled topped by the demand to win the hearts and minds of the population through durable assistance and restrained military behaviour. Clinton, when speaking in The Hague, offered the Dutch approach in the province of Uruzgan as a model for the United States and other partners in the NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan. The American military leaders think differently. They do not think that the allies are sufficiently...

The terrorist with a nuclear bomb is the spectre that has now haunted us for some years. It has kept security agencies more than busy. The legal position of free citizens has been sacrificed in the process, and it has justified massive defense expenditures. And then, suddenly, we hear about the collision of two nuclear submarines in oceanic depths, the British HMS Vanguard and the French Le Triomphant. Both were carrying nuclear ballistic warheads. Their names by themselves are suggestive of the military fairy-tale that has produced these vessels. As if we are still living in the time of Napoleon and Lord Nelson, the navies of these NATO allies and European Union partners are keeping their navigation details hidden from each other. With a near catastrophe as the result. It took several weeks before the world heard snippets of information about it. A position analysis is overdue. The financial crisis demands all attention. We have “change”, the key promise of Obama’s election campaign, in abundance, but it is of quite a different kind than the new president would seem to have envisaged. He would re-unite the American nation, correct the disastrous excesses of the domestic and foreign policies of his...

Recent casualities among the Dutch soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have come at a very inopportune moment for the political and militairy leadership of the Netherlands. Discussion has begun, inside and outside Parliament, as to what form the Dutch presence in that country could take, when Dutch leadership of NATO troops in the province Uruzgan terminates at the end of next year. American pressure on the government in The Hague to remain active in Afghanistan, militarily if possible, is considerable and is likely to increase. On the other hand, increasing doubt and criticism among the public forces the political top to rethink the meaning of the project and, one step further, reflect on the question as to whether membership of NATO remains at all meaningful for the Netherlands. The continuing loss of life, the duration of the war (longer than either of both world wars in the twentieth century), and the apparent hopelessness of the undertaking are eroding whatever was there as a public foundation for the exercise. The death toll among the Dutch soldiers serving in Afghanistan reached 21 when last week a 44-year-old sergeant major riding in an open jeep hit an improvised explosive device. A few days before...

A sharper contrast is hard to imagine: The images of Gaza inhabitants, shell-shocked and bivouacking on the rubble of what once were their homes, and under which their loved ones are buried, and the images produced by the wave of enthusiasm flooding Washington this week. They were produced on Sunday, January 18th, a few days before the inauguration of the first non-white president of the United States, and at the beginning of a wobbly truce between the state of Israel and the Islamitic Hamas movement. It was also the day on which the Israeli army allowed American and British journalists to enter the Gaza strip for the first time. To quote the International Herald Tribune: “It was a day of digging and bitter discovery. Houses had lost walls, and the dead, after three weeks of war, had lost their faces. Families identified them by their clothes. Families clawed at rubble and concrete, trying to dislodge relatives who had died weeks before”. Aside from more than thirteen hundred dead (among them hundreds of children, according to British prime minister Brown) and thousands of wounded who could sparsely be attended medically, Gaza lost the infrastructure that makes government possible. The IHT again:...

Is Europe missing a great opportunity to position itself, finally, on the world’s stage? Is its euphoria brought about by Obama’s outstretched hand over the Atlantic so overwhelming that it smothers, once again, any critical thought? If so, this means that the bad spirits of the just departed George W. Bush regime continue to linger and continue to encumber Europe-United States relations. It means that yet another opportunity to overcome European infantilism will be allowed to pass by. “Without America nothing works” is the inherited slogan that reveals the often panicky separation anxiety among European politicians and pundits. This anxiety has for decades made them blind and deaf for new chances, for a needed fundamental change that puts in the shade what the new American president appears to have in mind. Where Obama offers deliberation and consultation the Europeans ought to develop their own contribution, their own conceptions, their own strategy. The era of a Europe being told what to do by Washington should come to a close. That post-World-War-II era, in which some European countries would shove the burdens of American demands onto the shoulders of other European countries or, conversely, would march ahead of the music so as...

Both the speech of vice-president Joe Biden of the United States before the annual security conference in Munich and the reactions it triggered were very disappointing. The speech had been anticipated with more than normal eagerness, and the euphoria of Biden’s European audience was palpable. But just at this time at which they had an opportunity to present the United States with a European approach to the deadlocks that have emerged in the world these past eight years, they remained remarkably passsive. By allowing the opportunity to slip by unused they have remained the vassals that George W. Bush has made of them. Even the Russian vice-premier Sergei Ivanov spoke of a “very strong signal” for the restoration of the dialogue between the United States and Russia. But that can stand on its own. After all, there can be no doubt about the independent position of the Kremlin and its influence on what is happening in the world. If we take the concept ‘change’ from Obama’s election campaign as point of reference, it applied in Munich mostly to the tone rather than content. Biden: “I come to Europe on behalf of an administration that is determined to set a new...