Afghanistan donor conference in Kabul. The New York Times writes:
The most concrete commitment was a promise to increase to 50 percent the proportion of international development funds to be disbursed through Afghanistan’s own budgeting process, a change to be made over the next two years and a huge shift from the current situation. Now, many donor countries send money directly to individual ministries or to nongovernmental organizations, undercutting the government’s ability to plan how to use the funds. Critics of the move pointed out that most Afghan ministries had proved unable to spend the money they already got.
For Catherine Ashton’s speech at the conference go here.
Ashley Jackson (Oxfam) comments at the Huffington Post:
Today’s Kabul Conference lasted approximately six hours, with four-minute speeches by each delegate. While today’s proceedings may have been well choreographed, it offered little more than recycled promises.
Each of the nine international conferences on Afghanistan in the past nine years have increasingly focused on creating the appearance of progress without actually demonstrating any. Conference after conference has laid out new strategies, new plans and new pledges of support. Yet few have been followed through and delivered upon.
Bruce Jones (Brookings) adds:
All such conferences are a form of theater. On stage, each actor has their part. The western donors pledge billions of dollars of aid, only a modest fraction of which they will ever actually commit to the country, let alone disburse. They applaud the government for its important successes, chide it for its occasional lapses, and point to the amount of work still to be done. They make solemn commitments to coordinate more effectively with one another—pledges they’ll break before their planes leave the next day. The government in turn thanks the donors for their generosity, gently chides them for pledging more than they’ll actually give, and promises to do more on—whatever the checklist has on offer, be it anti-corruption, gender issues, human rights, what have you. Everyone knows that both sides are posturing for audiences foreign and domestic.
Saudi-Arabia’s nuclear ambitions. A growing number of countries across the Middle East are seeking to establish civilian nuclear energy programs. Last week, three leading nuclear industry-related firms announced a joint initiative to build and operate nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, Mark Hibbs (Carnegie) reports. He explains the political background:
Iran’s ambitious and ambiguous nuclear drive has shown states in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, that having nuclear energy facilities—particularly fuel cycle facilities—gives a country a sense of prowess and strength. Setting up their own nuclear programs give states long-term hedging options, particularly in light of concerns that U.S. security guarantees to its allies will become weaker. Some Saudi diplomats complain that, since 2003, the United States has permitted Iran to gain in influence in the region at the expense of Saudi Arabia and other states with Sunni majorities.
If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, some regional analysts and Western government officials assert that Saudi Arabia will react by entering into a nuclear defense pact with Pakistan, which tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and is now expanding its atomic arsenal. U.S. and European officials say privately that they are concerned about how Saudi Arabia would respond to a nuclear-armed Iran, given a lack of transparency in Saudi government decision making and the country’s precarious security situation.
The Saudi government has denied recurring rumors of murky nuclear relations with Pakistan and allegations of non-peaceful intentions. But as recently as this month, officials from the United States and Europe raised concerns that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program may have received financing from Saudi Arabian sources. Making a closer relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia more troubling are fears that China would take the opportunity to project its strategic interest in the Middle East through its close relationship with Pakistan.
Given Saudi Arabia’s limited human resources and science and technology infrastructure, however, Western governments do not appear worried that the country will any time soon be able to itself develop a nuclear weapons capability.
Labor unrest in China signals political change, says Minxin Pei (Carnegie):
For years, Western observers have been disheartened by the lack of political change in China. Modernization theory predicts that rapid economic progress should help liberalize the political system, but this hasn’t occurred in China since 1989. Until now. (…)
What’s interesting about this new political reawakening is that on the surface it doesn’t look all that political. Instead of calling for democracy and freedom, participants in these activities focus on issues directly related to their economic interests, property rights and social justice. Examples include fighting off local governments’ attempts to build polluting factories, seize farmers’ land without compensation and evict urban residents from their homes. Criticism of government policy and performance in delivering public services and protecting social justice are routine in Chinese publications and on-line venues. And, of course, the ostensibly apolitical nature of such civic activism makes it much harder for the Communist Party to suppress it with brutal force.
China is world’s biggest energy consumer. The BBC reports:
China has overtaken the United States to become the world’s top energy consumer for the first time, a new report says. Provisional figures from the International Energy Agency indicate that China’s energy demand has doubled in a decade. The IEA said China had taken first place because it was hit less hard than the US by the global financial crisis. China challenged the report’s findings, saying its figures were unreliable.
Turkish foreign minister meets Hamas leader. The BBC has the story:
Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu has met with exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria, Turkey’s official news agency reports. The pair discussed ways of improving relations between Hamas and Fatah Palestinian groups, according to Anatolia news agency. The Hamas website said they also spoke of how to break Israel’s Gaza blockade.
Turkey’s moves away from the West not Europe’s fault, says Henri Barkey (Carnegie) in the Los Angeles Times. Instead of criticizing the EU for “having lost” Turkey, Washington should push Ankara to pursue domestic reform, which would help bringing the country closer to the EU.
In an interview this month with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, President Obama suggested that the European Union’s continued reluctance to accept Turkey into its ranks has pushed Turkish leadership to “look for other alliances” and move toward closer relations with other Muslim nations in the Middle East. These comments echoed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who last month blamed Europe for Ankara’s movement away from the West.
Both men are wrong. They are wrong in their analyses of Turkish behavior and wrong on the policy prescriptions implied by their statements. Fully engaging with and understanding Turkey is of critical importance for this administration, and blaming Europe oversimplifies the situation and could lead to unintended consequences. (…)
The Turkish government’s increasing overtures toward non-Western governments is driven in part by an over-inflated sense of its importance on the world stage. Turkish leaders believe their country should be among the premier world powers, and that its strategic location, economic prowess, historical ties and cultural affinities with the Muslim world are assets that can be marshaled behind an activist foreign policy designed to further enhance Ankara’s importance. This ambition weighed down by an unhealthy dose of hubris is one of two drivers of the new foreign policy.
The second is Turkey’s commercial interest. A forceful export drive and an appetite for foreign investment have fueled growth and made Turkey the 16th largest economy in the world. As President Obama acknowledged, trade benefits were one of the factors that drove the Turks to side with Tehran and against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council vote on sanctions. Turkey is in a constant search for new markets for its wares and its Middle East policy has helped open new opportunities and consolidate existing ones. (…)
When it comes to the EU, Turkey has two fundamental and difficult problems that are unlikely to disappear anytime soon and will remain the main impediments to progress for EU membership. The first is the Kurdish question. (…) The second problem is that although Turkey is a country of laws, it does not embrace the rule of law. (…)
Both of these impediments will take years, if not decades, to deal with. Therefore, to blame Europe for Turkey’s difficulties is unfair and unnecessarily alienates the Europeans. It made sense for the U.S. to push the Europeans on Turkey in the 1990s when Europe was pushing Turkey away. Now, however, a process has been put in place for Turkey to pursue EU membership. The current U.S. rhetoric and silence on domestic issues relieve Turkish leaders from the burden of reform and from being honest with their public about the travails ahead for EU membership. It does not do Turkey any favors; on the contrary, it solidifies the distance between Turkey and the EU. A smarter American policy would focus on pushing the Turks to reform. The faster Ankara institutes reforms, the closer it will get to EU membership.
Shale gas “revolution” unlikely in Europe. A new source of gas, found naturally in rocks, has already transformed the US energy market. Shale gas has the potential to make Europe self-sufficient, ending its energy dependency. But given the many technical and political obstacles, the prospects for a shale revolution in Europe look thin, says Paul Stevens (Chatham).
From the think tanks: Álvaro de Vasconcelos (ed), A strategy for EU foreign policy. ISIS, here. — Michael Emerson/Piotr Maciej Kaczyński, Looking afresh at
the external representation of the EU in the international arena. CEPS, here. — Muriel Asseburg, Ending the Gaza Blockade – But How? SWP, here.
Read today on Global Europe: Drifting apart? Europe must do more to get a seat at the top Asian table. By Shada Islam, a Senior Programme Executive at the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels.
To sign up for the Global Europe Morning Brief, please send an email to globeurope@gmail