Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

4 November 2003

GENERAL JONES-FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION

• According to Reuters, Gen. Jones told reporters in Berlin Tuesday that lawless parts of Africa would increasingly provide what he called a haven for terrorists. “Africa, with its large ungoverned spaces, is increasingly going to be a haven for terrorists, for merchants of weapons of mass destruction and for people who are engaged in illegal international activities. We should be concerned about the southern rim of the Mediterranean. We’ve seen (terrorist) incidents in Morocco and Tunisia. Algeria is certainly a country that’s had its share of experience with terrorist activity,” he reportedly told the Foreign Press Association. According to the dispatch, he stressed that NATO patrols in the Mediterranean, in the framework of Active Endeavor, had dramatically improved security at sea and reduced illegal immigration into Europe. He reportedly added, however, that traffickers were responding by developing new land routes via the Balkans and North and sub-Saharan Africa, and those parts of Africa were showing clear signs of increased terrorist activity and recruitment. “There’s a lot of recruiting going along. For people who are fairly desperate, it’s a fairly easy job to make a convert…. We have to worry about that,” the dispatch quotes Gen. Jones saying. The dispatch adds that Gen. Jones, who visited Iraq last week, described attacks on U.S. and foreign targets as the “aftershock” of the U.S.-led war to topple Saddam Hussein. “What we’re seeing now is the aftershock. We have to get through the aftershock period, and I think we will,” he reportedly said. AFP highlights that Gen. Jones dismissed comparisons between U.S. troubles in Iraq and Washington’s failed war in Vietnam, saying success in the war-ravaged country was being overlooked. According to the dispatch, he said the mounting number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq were a serious problem, but should not be allowed to overshadow the progress being made. “I do worry a little bit about the fact that every time there is an incident, someone draws the analogy and says, well, the coalition is losing its grip. I think a more balanced picture is that there are an awful lot of schools opening up, there is an awful lot of reconstruction going on and that word needs to get out at the same time that incidents are discussed,” Gen. Jones reportedly said. According to a related AP dispatch, Gen. Jones told the reporters it remains a political decision how to deploy the NRF, but he envisions it being used “pre-crisis.” Gen. Jones is quoted saying: “In other words, if you see a humanitarian disaster in the making, do you wait until the humanitarian disaster happens before you act, or do you want to act in advance of that? As happy as I am that NATO is in Afghanistan, it still happened after the fact.” The dispatch adds that differentiating the force from UN peacekeepers, Gen. Jones said the NATO troops would carry with them the threat of military action, even though their missions would ideally be “passive activities which build confidence.” Earlier, AFP reported that in Berlin Monday, Gen. Jones told a two-day defense conference that the NRF is the clear vehicle for NATO’s transformation in the 21st century. According to the dispatch, SACEUR said the Alliance must implement “a tiered response” to security crises around the world with a rapid deployment in as quickly as five days in some cases. He said the Alliance needed to be capable of deploying troops rapidly and for weeks or months at a time, and that NATO had to develop standards for the admission of new states into the reaction force. He reportedly warned, however, that two “cancers” were compromising the Alliance’s effectiveness: a discrepancy between the planning phase for military deployment and the way it was finally carried out; and the issue of national caveats, under which countries impose conditions on the use of their troops. “We have got to go beyond the point where commanders spend most of their time to work out what they cannot do instead of what they can do,” the dispatch quotes Gen. Jones saying. It notes that he insisted that NATO “remains the best and ultimate coalition of the willing and we should keep it that way.” A commentary in Die Welt opines that the test case for NATO’s seriousness will be the NRF, which will be comprised of about 20,000 troops, a quarter of them Germans. “If the force’s deployment is blocked because of a national veto, this will also block the force and with it the new NATO. Only a common- ground analysis can bring common ground for the strategy. That is the lesson of the Iraq crisis. If this has been learned in Washington and Berlin, a new NATO will replace the defunct one. If not, it will not,” stresses the daily.

ISAF

• In an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Nov 3, ISAF Commander, Lt. Gen. Gliemeroth, observed that the security situation in Kabul seems to be calm but it is not stable. “Almost every day we receive warnings of attacks. We adjust our operations to that; we try to protect our soldiers. But everyone has to be aware that there is no absolute watertight protection against suicide attacks,” Gen. Gliemeroth was quoted saying. According to the newspaper, he noted that “as ISAF, our mission, apart from protecting the Afghan interim government, is also to protect soft targets, that is, relief organizations, such as the Red Cross,” and added: “We cannot completely rule out that incidents like those that happened recently in Baghdad will take place in Kabul as well. We know that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters are operating not only in the south, but presumably also in the capital. We have to be prepared for the worst case. But at the same time, we must not develop a bunker mentality, because with this, the aggressors would already have achieved part of their goals.” Discussing the UN Security Council’s decision to expand ISAF’s mandate, Gen. Gliemeroth reportedly said: “We want to fulfill the strategic task of expanding the development, which has been positive so far, and the authority of the central government from the area of Kabul to the whole country as soon as possible. This is exactly what we pursue with our (PRTs). Currently we have four teams—and because of the successes that have been achieved so far we now want to increase the number of such units to 12 or 13. But we need more nations to contribute to that.”
  
  
• According to AFP, three international aid groups Saturday demanded an expansion of ISAF to establish peace and security in Afghanistan. “The deployment of a handful of additional (PRTs) would simply not be adequate to fulfill its mandate,” International Crisis Group, Care International, and the International Rescue Committee reportedly said in a joint statement. The dispatch notes that last Friday, Gen. Jones said the network of PRTs was an effective way of expanding peace and security in Afghanistan. It adds, however, that the aid groups said if security was to be improved, it was “imperative that ISAF’s presence outside Kabul be meaningful in scale.” Now that NATO has agreed to lead ISAF’s expansion, the statement reportedly added, we urge it to move quickly from planning to the implementation. The three NGOs said ISAF should focus on security rather than reconstruction work, stressing: “We urge NATO to focus the activities of all ISAF forces in Afghanistan, including additional teams deployed outside Kabul on security-related tasks … leaving the reconstruction to the Afghan government and civilian aid agencies…. While we welcome the willingness of Germany to send an ISAF team to Kunduz, we urge that NATO give priority in subsequent deployments to the most insecure locations.”

Stressing that President Karzai urgently needs international support, the Financial Times comments that the deployment of up to 450 German troops in the Kunduz province “is not a serious response to the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan.” The U.S. and its allies must strengthen Karzai and give him the means to gain control of his country and create a state. ISAF must be beefed up and, above all, the U.S., Britain and France must accelerate their efforts to build an Afghan army, the daily insists. The Independent notes that while a German advance team is preparing for the arrival of a 450-strong mission in Kunduz, no country has yet volunteered troops for an expanded ISAF mission to other parts of Afghanistan where the risk would be considerably higher.