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´óÏó´«Ã½ BLOGS - Newsnight: Mark Urban

Archives for June 2008

Pakistan: Has the ceasefire with militants collapsed?

Mark Urban | 15:45 UK time, Monday, 30 June 2008

mehsud203.jpgThe in the tribal areas once again, and , the most prominent of the militants says his truce is over. Other armed groups are following his lead.

If the tentative peace negotiations begun since Pakistan's civilian government was elected in February are over, then it is a factor of the gravest importance for that country and the wider region. Mr Mehsud, after all was blamed by the Pakistani president for a reign of terror that included the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and scores of bombings.

The tribal areas, moreover are the key sanctuary for three distinct groups of Islamist fighters: the so-called Pakistan Taliban of Mr Mehsud and his ilk; Afghan Taliban operating against Nato troops across the border; and the foreign fighters of al-Qaeda - Osama bin Laden and his confederates still believed to be hiding in those mountains. If things go badly wrong there, the results could be calamitous.

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Radiohead, Zimbabwe and the spirit of '68

Mark Urban | 16:56 UK time, Wednesday, 25 June 2008

yorke203.jpgThere was a chant of 'Free Tibet' during Radiohead's gig at London's Victoria Park on Tuesday night. Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, joined in. Opinions differ on whether he started the mantra, or just joined in (when people spotted the Tibetan flag on his piano), but in any case it petered out pretty quickly, with a man near me shouting 'Free Beer!'

Radiohead are a thoughtful, concerned, group - a couple are even regular Newsnight watchers, I'm told. But is this the extent of protest these days ? The wag who wanted free beer got me thinking.

What connection do people feel with world events ? How far do they think they can influence them ? I ask because of the current debate about Zimbabwe, and Tibet in particular but it might equally apply to a host of other situations around the world where people feel outrages are being committed.

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Why don't we put Robert Mugabe on trial?

Mark Urban | 22:25 UK time, Friday, 20 June 2008

Why don't we put Robert Mugabe on trial? Well, there is a legalistic answer and there are all the other ones, the more political ones.

Legally, Zimbabwe did not sign up to the International Criminal Court. What's more, referring the country's senior officials to it would require a resolution of the United Nations Security Council. Talking to Judge Richard Goldstone (Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal 1994-1996) tonight, he feels that the main obstacles to such a UN resolution would be China, which has lucrative arms and mineral deals with Zimbabwe, as well as Russia.

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How to win Helmand

Mark Urban | 14:00 UK time, Thursday, 19 June 2008

Now that British troops in Afghanistan , it's worth asking whether anyone knows how they might win in Helmand, let alone across the whole country. Elected politicians take the decisions in the British set up, they make policy too, but it is pretty clear that they are heavily dependent on their civil servants or military officers to define their choices.

The days are long gone when defence secretaries like Peter Carrington (Conservative) or Denis Healey (Labour) could strike terror into poorly prepared officers - both men had won the Military Cross in the Second World War. Today's incumbent, Des Browne, has the best grasp of the Afghan issue of any cabinet minister, but these days key choices are often made by senior officers, and ratified afterwards by politicians.

It is a bitter irony that John Reid, the Defence Secretary at the time of the costly 2006 decision to fight in the upland valleys of Helmand, was told about it after it was made by officers on the ground, yet is remembered for having expressed the hope that British troops would perform their mission in southern Afghanistan without firing a shot.

So who are the people really directing the British campaign, and what do they hope to achieve? There are half a dozen key figures in the formulation of current plans. These include: Brigadier Mark Carlton-Smith, currently commanding British troops in Helmand; Sir Sherard Cowper Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul; Lieutenant General Sir Nick Horton, Chief of Joint Operations, the senior UK-based officer overseeing what's going on; Lieutenant General Peter Wall, the Deputy Chief of Staff and link man between senior commanders and politicians; and Hugh Powell, a civil servant, of whom more later.

Each British brigade going to Helmand has its own battle plan. Since few believe it would be right for a rigid template to be imposed from Whitehall, many defend passionately the ability of the man on the spot to do things his way - what the army calls 'mission command'. The problem is, that the army changes its brigade every six months and different commanders have very different ideas.

Last summer, under the aegis of 12 Brigade, the approach was tough and pro-active - or 'kinetic' to use the current Nato buzzword. One officer preparing to deploy this April told me, "they would start each presentation to us with a slide of how many million bullets they had fired or thousands of shells, I thought it was totally wrong".

Over the winter 52 Brigade struck a very different tone, it's commander, Brigadier Andrew McKay telling his officers, "body counts are a particularly corrupt measurement of success". Brig McKay produced an 'Operational Design' for the campaign which has dominated recent thinking about how Britain might succeed, it cautioned, "the more force is used the less effective it is and counter intuitively the more we engage in force protection the less secure we may be".

With its plain declaration that, "winning is how we out-think, compete with and wrestle consent of the population from the insurgent", Brig McKay's blueprint found favour with London, which longed for a less kinetic approach and also with Nato allies. Just last week I heard a senior official from another country bemoan the lack of a plan like Brig McKay's for Afghanistan as a whole.

Events though do not stand still. The additional troops now being sent include more 'force protection' (additional armoured vehicle and helicopter crews), something which seemingly flies in the face of Brig McKay's emphasis on contact with Afghans instead of force protection. His successor, Brig Carlton Smith knows though that too many British soldiers are being killed by booby traps, as the Taliban change tactics, and the political logic is that the troops should be less exposed. With Tuesday's loss of four near Lashkar Gah, the total of British troops killed in action has risen to 20, all but two of these lives being claimed by bombs.

In both Whitehall and Kabul they don't want Britain's military policy to meander about like the Helmand River, curving to and fro, more kinetic, less kinetic and so on. So Hugh Powell has been sent out, a Foreign Office man who until recently was in charge of security policy.

Mr Powell has taken up residence in the capital of Helmand Province, and outranks the army's brigadier. The military are not at all happy about it, they fear a divided chain of command, with the Nato military authorities pulling one way, and Whitehall, through its anointed representative on Afghan earth, Mr Powell, pulling another. His posting will last two years, long enough, the government hopes, to give continuity impossible with the army's six month tours. Long enough also, some subversive civilians declare, to drag the soldiers away from fighting, which at times during the past two years they appear to have relished too much, and drive the effort towards reconstruction.

At the end of this all then, the ideas about how to win Helmand are pushed and pulled between several key policy makers. They are contested by a cast of characters that shift and move according to government or service postings. As for the high level picture - a British Afghan Czar or supremo who can think long term about the big picture, you will not find one.

Two decades of diplomacy

Mark Urban | 09:00 UK time, Thursday, 19 June 2008

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, I savoured the surprise when I told British or American soldiers that my first embed had been with the Soviet Army, in Afghanistan, in 1988. In fact, I even accompanied the Soviet brigade that had garrisoned Helmand Province - now Britain's responsibility - as it withdrew from that country.

The world in which my early adventures in journalism took place seems so different. The Cold War was a huge defining fact for hundreds of millions of people. We were high with the heady excitement of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and the only high profile Blair was a dancer called Lionel.

Back then we devoted endless column inches to largely symbolic issues such as the updating of Nato's nuclear arsenal. Back then we probably could not have conceived of the kind of symbolic stories that might have power in 2007 or 2008 - for example that a Danish newspaper, by publishing some cartoons, might trigger outrage around the world, murder even.

markurban_img_1988.jpgAt the time of my early forays in Afghanistan, I was working for newspaper as Defence Correspondent. I had got there via a short spell in the , an International Relations degree at the , and the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s TV production training scheme. Long before I ever appeared on Newsnight, I had been an assistant producer on it, and indeed on a variety of other programmes.

The journey from Cold War to a global struggle based upon religious or cultural identity has been a long one. There were times, in the early 1990s, when experts declared that the big ideological conflicts were over - the end of history one called it - and many foolish media moguls cut back their foreign and defence staff as a consequence. During those years of dizzying change I charted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a New Russia and many independent republics. I spent one night in August 1991 roaming the streets of Moscow, looking for a statue of a communist leader to pull down. It felt like being an eyewitness to the storming of the Bastille.

In the disorderly rout of communism, time and again on our assignments we saw the basic instincts in human relations reasserting themselves. Through the early seismic struggles in the Balkans through to today's conflicts, realtions that conditioned the world before the East-West deep freeze have shown up again. These were not just the tendency of people to band together with those of the same colour, religion or nationality but also of humanitarian impulses, the struggle for international justice or the desire to help people far away in crisis.

mark_urban_image_intro.jpgCovering world events during these two decades, I have had the pleasure of many assignments that were about peace or the avoidance of conflict rather than 'bang-bang'. My time as the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Jerusalem Correspondent coincided in 1993-1994 with the Oslo peace process, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from some occupied territories and return of Yasser Arafat. In the Balkans too I reported on the avoidance of conflict in some places, such as Macedonia where a timely European intervention headed off the threat of war.

While the ideological flavour of world events may have changed markedly the basic struggle of every society from Huddersfield to Herat - for peace and prosperity - remains a constant, a universal aspiration. Old problems, like governing Afghanistan, have a way of coming around again in different forms, and that is when two decades of experience can stand you in good stead.

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