The Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) says that Romania will announce that it is receiving a $26 billion aid package, with 2/3 of the money coming from the IMF and the rest from European institutions and the World Bank.
It’s nice when one thing in the Financial Times acts as an unplanned yet completely effective rejoinder to another. First, we have Jose Manuel Barroso explaning what a brilliant job he’s doing in getting tax and regulatory havens under control, notwithstanding the absence of any explanation of how exactly they contributed to the crisis –
Just check this out. The Dutch baseball team beat The Dominican Republic in the WBBC. Not once, but twice! This is like the football team of Luxemburg beating the Brazil squad twice in a row. I like the comment of Dutch coach Delmonico:
“I don’t have big names, but I’ve got some long names,” Netherlands coach Rod Delmonico joked.
And what about this:
Even with all the controversy swirling, the loss to the Netherlands was improbable. The Dutch team has just one major league player on its roster (Marlins pitcher Rick VandenHurk), and he didn’t even play Saturday. Its most celebrated player, five-time Hoofdklasse (Dutch major league) pitcher Cordemans, has never pitched professionally in the United States. As the Hoofdklasse’s highest-paid pitcher, Cordemans earns just $40,000 a year, less than half of what Rodriguez earns each day.
Reminds me of the US basketball Dream Team at the Olympics…
Well, I suppose the WBBC fun will be over soon enough for the Dutch. But, hey, this rocks!
It all started as an idle conversation in the loo. The next thing The National Bank of Hungary (NBH) and the Hungary’s Financial Supervisory Authority (PSZÁF) had to come out in public to declare that they were closely monitoring the status of the financial system, adding that from what they could see from their monitoring the Hungarian banking system is sound, and depositors’ money safe.
The problem was not the loose talk in the lavatory (at the Hungarian Banking Association apparently) but the fact that that august body then sent out a letter, warning its members about the existence of “groundless rumours” that banks were planning to freeze deposits on 13 March. Possibly this is the quickest way to start a run on bank deposits known to humankind. Continue reading
An interesting wrinkle for those who care about summitry: Barack Obama’s visit to Europe in April will include Prague for what is being billed as the annual EU-USA summit. Normally this includes just the Commission, the USA, and the Council Presidency which of course is the Czech Republic at the moment. Last year’s summit was in Slovenia in June so they seem a little ahead of schedule. But more importantly, it won’t be just the 3 leaders –
After consulting the European Commission and the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, Mirek Topolánek will invite the highest representatives of all 27 EU Member States to the EU-USA Summit.
Thus it’s going to be a big show, but presumably at the expense of getting much done with 28 heads of state/government and the Commission in attendance. It will get in a lot of “grip and grin” handshake photos for Barack Obama. Is this the format that the Obama team wanted to make worthwhile a visit to a “small” state?
What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about. And at the moment, much of the international effort there is counterproductive and fairly immoral. Don’t ask me; ask hugely influential counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, who makes the obvious point that air strikes into the Hindu Kush probably aren’t helping win the support of the people.
Surely, what we need is a solution under which a reasonable Afghan government would be left in place, the intrusion of foreign forces, their road convoys, fortified camps, heavy weapons, and inflationary spending removed, and as many pieces of the diverse coalition of forces that make up the Taliban reconciled? Perhaps there is one; but first, it’s necessary to remove some of our preconceptions. Everyone knows about Afghanistan, right? Soviet invasion, daring resistance, Western secret aid, eventual withdrawal in 1989, mujahedin triumph, and then it all goes horribly wrong.
Well, this is actually quite misleading. The war began before the Soviet intervention, and in a sense even earlier, in the form of the bitter internal troubles inside the Afghan communist movement. More importantly, the mujahedin/future civil warriors/further future Taliban didn’t win in 1989. To considerable surprise, they failed to take even one town from the Afghan government until 1992. Many important mujahedin leaders were willing to be reconciled with the government as long as the Red Army was withdrawn and, of course, the government made it worth their while. The ones who fought on only succeeded because all assistance to the Afghan government was cut off at the end of the Soviet Union – which included things like wheat, diesel fuel, cash, and ammunition.
In fact, the withdrawal was about the best idea the Soviets had in Afghanistan. Having decided to go, they pursued a policy of building up the Afghan government, changing the military strategy to one based on defending the bulk of the population (to stop this happening) and leaving the mountain wilds to the enemy, pouring in aid of all kinds, negotiation with those who were willing, and leaving a strong advisory mission in place. Here is a US Army study of the withdrawal (pdf); I should hope we could avoid providing the Afghan police with their own ballistic missiles. Seriously – the Najibullah government insisted on having its own Scuds, and assigned them to a unit of the secret police. They eventually fired over 300 of the things.
But the principles apply quite well. Turn down the intensity of the war. Don’t state an explicit timetable, to retain bargaining power. Pursue population security. Build up Afghan authorities. Deliver aid and a strong advisory mission. Open all-party talks. And start removing foreign combat forces. Interestingly, polls of Afghan public opinion, for what they are worth, seem to suggest this may be a good idea.
According to the US Army study, the continuing assistance to the Afghan government cost the Soviet Union about $3-4bn annually – obviously those are 1989 dollars, but in the light of the huge cost of maintaining manoeuvre brigades in Afghanistan (twice as much as Iraq), that’s got to be better. The Soviet aid airlift consisted of 15 Il-76 aircraft a day; currently about 15 mixed Il-76 and AN-12 head to Afghanistan from the UAE a day from the private sector. You could call it a civilian surge if you like; you could also call it ending the Afghan war, if you’re a German Christian Democrat. Certainly, you’d have to involve Iran from the word go – after all, they have the only railhead near Afghanistan and plan to build the railway on into the country. It could be the shortest way from Europe.
It’s got to beat more wedding parties, with the twist that the Russians get to play politics with every transit shipment. Speaking of Russians, however, the man we want to hear from is Makhmut Gareev, who led the Soviet advisors after 1989. Call it the European option.
Well, will you look at this? Remember Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who was the author of a proposal to implement total Internet surveillance in the EU, in order to make the French record industry happy? (I’m sorry to say I spelt his name wrong.) We beat that one. But now look at him – here’s a letter he sent to today’s Guardian.
Lord Woolf and his colleagues were right to point out that the recent erosions of civil liberties are “one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war” (Report, 6 February). We already have the largest DNA database in the world and, under the terms of the Prum treaty, more and more personal data can be shared with other EU member states.It is vital that we weigh up whether we are sacrificing too many of our hard-won freedoms in our quest to tackle crime.
Dr Syed Kamall MEP
Con, London
Quite astonishing; Dr. Kamall has been saved as a brand from the burning. Did we turn him on to a weirder life? Or just scare him? Or has his local talking points cache been refreshed? Certainly, it’s a pretty impressive statement from someone who was looking for a mandate for compulsory deep-packet inspection throughout Europe only a few months ago.
Some of us had an early start to the week in Brussels, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressing a breakfast meeting of the European Policy Centre in the swanky surroundings of the Conrad Hotel, accompanied both by his new EU chief negotiator, Egemen Bağış, and the outgoing EU negotiator, foreign minister Ali Babacan. It was a significant event, Erdoğan’s first appearance in Brussels since the EU summit of December 2004; he had paved the way with a speech to Turkish immigrants in Hasselt the previous evening, appealing to them to integrate into their new homes, which got rather good coverage in the Belgian press. The audience was generally sympathetic (most Brussels insiders are in favour of Turkish membership of the EU, whatever one may hear from the French and Austrians).
On the topic of European innovation, this demo application from the Nokia Forum rocks. Basically, it uses the Sensor API in the latest version of Symbian S60 and the phone camera to detect what you’re pointing the cam at, and show information related to it.
Tagging Barcelona
Naturally this information could be sucked in from the Web, which opens up the healthy possibility of not just user-generated, but unofficial user-generated markup for the cityscape with constant feedback. A simple implementation might do something like hashing the geographical position of the feature with its direction and appending that to a selected URL.
The real purpose of this is surely the old Surrealist aim, to bring the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible; to put in the horrible details of how that particular bank wants to pass the SKU of the item you just bought back to headquarters with the credit card authorisation request, all for your own good, or how the owners of such-and-such a monster warehouse ordered the staff to moon for the camera because the newspapers wrote bad things about them. (I agree, these examples are prosaic, but then, that’s me.)
It’s not surprising, but no less brazen for that: the Irish government will apparently propose later today at the EU Summit in Brussels that the rejected Lisbon Treaty be put again to referendum no later than October of next year. So says the Irish Times which has seen the draft summit agreement. The package will essentially be unchanged from what was voted on before, but the 26 others will have to agree to keep the Commission at a size allowing at least one commissioner from each country. Declarations regarding Ireland’s neutrality and tax autonomy will apparently also be added, but the Irish government will be in the slightly strange position of arguing that these declarations are significant when it previously argued that the associated concerns were meaningless. It’s a packed agenda at Brussels, also including the need to patch up obvious disagreement between France and the UK on the one hand and Germany on the other on the size of fiscal stimulus. One suspects that some of the countries are annoyed that the Irish question is still hanging around.
UPDATE [1925 GMT]: Gordon Brown apparently believes that if the new guarantees given to Ireland have any legal content, the UK would have to reratify the treaty.