The Middle East peace talks will resume today amidst renewed hope of a permanent peace, with President Obama last night urging Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to let the chance of peace “slip away” – warning that “this moment of opportunity may not soon come again”.

Isreali prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said there was a real chance for a “secure and durable” peace, “peace that will end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all, that will last generations”; President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas said: “We do not want any blood to be shed, one drop of blood, on the part of the Israelis or the Palestinians… We want them to live as neighbors and partners forever. Let us sign an agreement, a final agreement, for peace and put an end to a very long period of struggle forever.”

President Obama said:

“We are but five men. Our dinner this evening will be a small gathering around a single table. Yet when we come together we will not be alone. We will be joined by the generations of those who have gone before and those who will follow.

“Do we have the wisdom and the courage to walk the path of peace?”

Adding:

“The purpose of the talks is clear. These will be direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. These negotiations are intended to resolve all final status issues.

“The goal is a settlement negotiated between the parties that ends the occupation which began in 1967, and results in the emergence of an independent democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with a Jewish state of Israel and its other neighbours

“We are under no illusions. Passions run deep. Each side has legitimate and enduring interests. Years of mistrust will not disappear overnight…

“After all, there’s a reason that the two state solution has eluded previous generations. This is extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily difficult. But we know that the status quo is unsustainable.”

However, fears persisit that peace may remain elusive, with the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen explaining:

“President Obama has started what will be an intensive diplomatic push. He will have been pleased by what seemed to be a warm handshake between the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Even so, Mr Abbas is still insisting that Israel must stop building homes for Jews in the occupied Palestinian territories. Mr Abbas has threatened to walk out of the talks on the settlement issue. It’s not clear where the compromise will come from. Warm words alone won’t do it – but perhaps Mr Netanyahu’s were a start.

“There might not be room for many more failures. The conflict is changing. A religious war is now being grafted on what used to be fundamentally a competition for territory between two national movements.

“You can make deals with nationalists. It’s much harder with people who believe they’re doing God’s work.”

And in The Independent, Rupert Cornwell writes:

“The roll-call of place names associated with such efforts since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 is long: Madrid, Oslo, Wye, Sharm el-Sheikh, Camp David, Taba and most recently Annapolis. One thing, though, they have in common: failure. And so to Washington, September 2010.

“Just 24 hours after formally winding up the US combat mission in Iraq, Mr Obama yesterday began two days of intensive summitry with separate White House meetings: first with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, then with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas…

“But Mr Obama’s determination is a two-edged sword. Yes, he is acting much earlier in his presidency than his two predecessors but that carries added risks of its own. Already, this president has clashed more publicly with an Israeli prime minister than any of his predecessors.

“But Mr Obama faces what could be a tricky re-election bid in 2012, in which he will not want to have added the powerful American Israel lobby to the list of his opponents…”

Our guest writer is Charlie Samuda of the Labour Campaign for International Development (LCID/@LabourCID)

Though four weeks remain till the result of the leadership election is known, there are a few things of which the Labour Campaign for International Development can be certain. No matter who wins on 25th September the party will continue to be a passionate supporter of development issues given the encouraging responses of all the candidates to a series of LCID interviews, which can be seen here.

Ed Miliband said:

“The plight of the world’s poorest people always has to be a moral imperative for us as a political movement.”

When David Miliband spoke recently of the leadership debate as being ‘too comfortable’ it was meant as a slight criticism of the major areas of policy overlap between the candidates. When it comes to agreement on policies to help some of the poorest countries and people, however, this can only be a good thing.

Interviews with the five candidates revealed not just an embrace of the development agenda but four substantive areas of agreement:

• Support for a Robin Hood Tax on the financial sector to help the world’s poorest;

• The need to protect the DFID budget from cuts;

• Importance of pressing the coalition on its actions on development policies as well as its promises;

• That Britain must remain an international leader on the issue of poverty reduction.

Andy Burnham said:

“As PM I would set the most ambitious vision for DFID to carry on their work changing lives around the world… and driving through progress on the MDGs.”

Each of the candidates talked passionately about development as a priority of the party and spoke of New Labour’s record on the issue as being as source of pride. There were concerns, however, that the coalition government might undermine much of this good work. Ed Miliband, for example, noted that much of the Conservatives early enthusiasm about action on climate change – vital to addressing the needs of the world’s poorest – has slipped off the agenda.

Pressure is needed, argued all of the candidates, to make sure that the Coalition Government’s policies reflect the spirit not just the letter of development commitments such as the funding target of 0.7 per cent of GDP.

Diane Abbott said:

“I think trade, not just aid, is the key to giving justice and decent living standards to people in the third world.”

Ed Balls said:

“Labour must make sure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the world don’t suffer from climate change.”

Another theme in the videos was the need to push for policies on climate change and trade at a multilateral level as a means to helping the world’s poorest. Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and David Miliband made the case for working through the European Union on trade and environmental policy to support development aims; each noted that the Tories’ lack of alliances in Europe would make this more difficult.

Ed Miliband referenced his experience in climate negotiations as the type of international decision making forum where Britain needs to show leadership and ambition. Diane Abbott noted that that if Africa, much of Asia and Latin America were to increase their trade by just 1 per cent that would take 128 million people out of poverty.

On the Robin Hood Tax David Miliband said:

“It’s essential that we make sure that responsibility and check and balances are put into the [financial] system.”

It was also encouraging to see some specific proposals for the future of development policy in opposition as well as in government. For labour in government development should be about “both campaigning and resources” (as Ed Balls put it), keeping up the pressure on the coalition and foreign government to make development a priority. A Robin Hood Tax enjoyed support from each of the candidates as a just and sustainable means to fund development overseas and prevent cuts to public services at home.

The overall message is clear; the future direction of the party will encompass strong support for the world’s poorest whoever ends up as leader.

On 9th September, LCID is hosting a hustings in Bristol where you can put more questions to the candidates in person; to vote in the Leadership election, you must join the Labour Party before 8th September.

President Obama’s timetabling of the forthcoming withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan has been described as playing into the hands of the Taliban. Retiring US Marine General James Conway yesterday acknowledged that the July 2011 timeframe had given fighters a ‘morale boost’ – that the deadline was “giving our enemy sustenance”.

In making these comments he aired the opinion widely held in military circles that the withdrawal deadline has handed the Taliban an immediate propaganda victory, with the possibility of political, and therefore military victory, too.

As has been mentioned before, in a battle of endurance you do not tell your opponent when you are going to give up.

In Kabul, US Lieutenant General William Caldwell, responsible for the recruitment and training of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), questioned the viability of the withdrawal date when he said the ANSF would only be able to take the lead in ‘isolated pockets’ before October 2011.

In a paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, it has been considered that:

“Afghan forces needed to bring about security and stability is a far more difficult problem than many realize, and poses major challenges that will endure long after 2011.”

Chronic desertion, resignations and a casualty rate of 23 per cent amongst the Afghan National Army are hampering General Caldwell’s efforts at creating security forces of over 300,000. This is believed to be the figure required for President Hamid Karzai to make good his pledge of Afghan control of their own security by 2014.

General David Petraeus, overall commander of NATO force in Afghanistan, entered the debate earlier this week; saying that he was “determined to provide the most forthright advice” on the impacts of the proposed withdrawal to his Commander in Chief.

General Petraeus also talked up recent NATO success, saying that Taliban momentum has been reversed in the hostile Helmand and Kandahar provinces. This is part of the Petraeus’ strategy: he has already taken a tougher line against the Taliban than his sacked predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal.

Another element of his strategy will become apparent when NATO and ANSF surge into the Kandahar and Paktia provinces, aiming to dislodge the Taliban and wrest control back to the Afghan government. These operations, added to others, will then be used to highlight to the Taliban that they cannot win in Afghanistan, even if they cannot be beaten.

Such a show of force, it is hoped, will allow NATO to negotiate from a position of strength, rather than that of increasingly perceived weakness.

The fact that three high ranking US officers have publicly questioned the wisdom of their political masters within three days of each other clearly points to tension over the future course of the war in Afghanistan. It also highlights the military’s belief that they must establish a position of relative strength before negotiations with the Taliban can begin.

This article is jointly written by Will Straw and David Taylor

I almost fell off my chair last week when I received a call from International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, congratulating Left Foot Forward on our story about a leaked internal DfID document and inviting us for a conversation about the Coalition’s development policies.

David Taylor and I went to his spacious office near Buckingham Palace on Monday. “Are you the Labour apparatchik?” he jokingly asked David who heads up the Labour Campaign for International Development as well as writing for LFF. After taking our seats, the shoeless Mitchell was quick to claim that the perception created by the leak was “total and utter bollocks” and that any new Government had the right to a “bottom up” review of existing practice. Mitchell insists that his new approach – focusing on results rather than budget lines – is the only way to win public support for development in a tightened spending environment.

Mitchell was keen to stress that we should wait until the conclusion of his review of DfID’s operations before passing judgement on his programme. This is a reasonable point of view but we’d be advised to avoid holding our breath. According to a Written Parliamentary answer, the review of Bilateral and Multilateral aid will not conclude until early 2011. With what’s being dropped in the public domain, it is hardly surprising that NGO reaction has been one of concern.

 

Labour’s record

Mitchell was quick to claim that the Labour party’s response to his “output-based approach” had been tribal when the “real enemies to aid were not in Government but sceptics out there” (a reference to right-wing press).

We put it to the Development Secretary that the Tories were being tribal themselves by misrepresenting Labour’s approach as entirely “input-based” when a number of output-based commitments such as “Support 8 million children in school in Africa by 2010″ from a 2009 White Paper were in the list of commitments that Mitchell wants to replace. Mitchell told us that “I never rubbish the last Government’s record on international development”. He has certainly used Green Papers and Select Committee hearings to praise Labour’s record but the day before we met, a Sunday Times interview with him reported:

“the Conservatives are determined there will not be a repeat of the kind of abuses that slipped through the net under Labour, such as the time the President of Malawi bought himself a luxury jet with British taxpayers’ money.”

The truth in this instance was that DfID clawed back that money by withdrawing aid to the Government and channelling it through NGOs until a time the Malawian government gave reassurances it would not happen again.

Meanwhile, DfID has been praised for its record on aid effectiveness. Mitchell’s claim that, “We want to do for quality what Labour did for quantity” is a nice sound bite, but inaccurate. Indeed, the proud record may be in jeopardy. As we were meeting, a new report by leading global affairs think tank Chatham House warned against Mitchell’s ‘cash-on-delivery’ approach. It argues that in places like Tanzania – where UK aid has helped four million more children in school by financing the construction of 4,000 primary schools – the emphasis must be on the development of national systems and capacity rather than rewarding outputs.

We put it to Andrew Mitchell that instead of being on the defensive about UK aid he should be bolder in defending Britain’s proud record. If he believes UK aid is not a partisan issue then why not rebut sceptics by being more assertive? As we have reported, the last Government left DfID a world leading aid ministry that was regarded by NGOs and the OECD alike as being a leader in aid effectiveness and spending money well.

 

Watching the commitments

We pressed Mitchell that any dropped spending commitments (for example, £8.5 billion on education and £6 billion on health) would need to be replaced by equivalent commitments that brought the same results in terms of kids in school or hospitals built. If that can be achieved without a clear commitment on funding, then Mitchell will deserve praise, but the jury is out until we know the full picture.

The Secretary of State confirmed that money would be prioritised on countries suffering from conflict, particularly Afghanistan, and those in the Horn of Africa – a region which he said would “run through this administration like a river”. The focus is no bad thing, but we pressed Mitchell on whether this would mean money being diverted from existing commitments. Would it, for example, mean less children in school in Tanzania or midwives in Malawi? Mitchell assured us that the increases in DfID’s budget, in line with the 0.7 per cent commitment, would mean this wouldn’t be the case.

A subsequent leak, reported in the Observer, suggested that DfID would drop its commitment to help partner governments “abolish user fees”. Mitchell stated that basic services would be “free at the point of need”, while maintaining he would take a “non-ideological” approach to whether basic services were provided by the public or private sector. Free at the point of need is different than ‘free at the point of use’ and many in the development sector are deeply critical of the plans in the Tories’ pre-election Green Paper for ‘vouchers’ for private schools and private health care provision. Oxfam have concluded that:

“The vast majority of evidence shows that public services deliver best for poor people in most countries.”

On climate change, Mitchell obfuscated on whether aid for climate change adaptation would be additional to existing development spending. He said only that it would be decided after the spending review in October. Mitchell had previously stated he would wait until after the Copenhagen talks before making a decision on climate aid.

***

Andrew Mitchell, fresh from a trip to Pakistan, deserves praise for reaching out to his critics and clearly explaining the rationale behind his plans. But questions remain over what will replace the list of cherished commitments, whether it will genuinely deliver results, and what impact it will have on other countries – like Japan and Italy – who barely need an excuse to cut aid. We’ll be watching all the way.

More on the DfID leak story, as it emerged last night that Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save the Children sent a joint letter of protest to international development secretary Andrew Mitchell on the leaked cuts, news which follows yesterday’s report on Left Foot Forward that more questions were being asked of Mr Mitchell and also Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

The Mirror’s deputy political editor Jason Beattie reports that the aid groups are now demanding a meeting with Mr Mitchell when he returns from a trip to view flood devastation in Pakistan. War on Want’s John Hilary accused Tories of a “slash and burn” approach to the aid budget.

The Department for International Development confirmed to the Mirror they have received the letter: “We have received a letter and are in regular touch with aid charities. All programmes are under review to ensure they have the greatest impact on poverty.”

In addition, Left Foot Forward has learned that Labour members of the International Development Committee are calling on Mr Mitchell to explain himself in front of the committee at the earliest opportunity. According to the dates of the leaked documents (29 June) Mitchell was apparently considering dropping the commitments when he appeared at the Committee back on 15 July – but made no indication of this in his answers.

Ann McKechin, committee member and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Debt, Aid & Trade, told Left Foot Forward:

“Labour MPs on the International Development Select Committee, including myself, are very concerned with the change in direction that these leaked documents represent to DfID’s priorities.

“When Andrew Mitchell appeared before the Select Committee just a few weeks ago he gave no indication of the scale of the changes they appear to be proposing. It is on this basis that we have written to the Chair Malcolm Bruce urging him to recall Andrew Mitchell to the Committee in September, to explain himself and clarify his previous evidence.”

Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband, meanwhile, spoke of his concerns of the Government’s plans for DfID in an interview with the Labour Campaign for International Development (LCID):

“What worries me about what the Government is doing is that they saying they are protecting aid funding, but there is evidence they are going to start diverting this money elsewhere to other deparments, maybe to the foreign office, maybe to Ministry of Defence, maybe elsewhere. This would be a profound mistake.

“This is money that was put in place to help some of the poorest people, it is about our moral responsibility and they should never forget that. I’m very worried to hear that they are talking about dropping the commitment to abolishing user fees for going to school or for the health care.

“What I fear is that we are seeing maintenance of some of the commitments [to reach the 0.7 per cent target of Gross National Income to be spent on overseas aid] on paper, but actually the spirit of those commitments is being going to be undermined by what they are doing.

“So you’ve got to commit to the 0.7%, but you’ve also got to do it upholding our moral responsiblities, and our values of social justice and public services free at the point of use.”

The storm surrounding Andrew Mitchell continues to grow, with the Financial Times today reporting that Whitehall officials were drawing up plans to reclassify energy department programmes as aid. Aid for climate change is a controversial  issue, with many in the NGO community long demanding that aid to help poor countries adapt to the impact of climate change must not be taken from rich countries’ existing aid commitments – to do so would see poor countries effectively paying for a problem they did not cause.

That is why Labour imposed a cap on climate finance spending by the Department for International Development, which from 2013 will prevent the department spending more than 10 per cent of its budget on carbon reduction. As reported by Left Foot Forward, the Coalition Programme made no such commitment, leaving open the option of either transferring the Department of Energy’s £250m annual budget for international climate finance to DfID, or redefining the spending as overseas development aid.

Appearing before the international development select committee last month, Mr Mitchell refused to clarify if the 10 per cent cap would remain until after the Comprehensive Spending Review and his discussions with the climate change secretary. Today’s FT article gives the surest indication yet that those discussions will result in the scrapping of that cap.

As the FT points out, the template for reclassifying projects as development aid could be replicated across Whitehall, expanding Britain’s aid programme to include various Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence programmes.

This potential raiding of DfID’s budget again raises key questions of leadership; firstly, of Mr Mitchell himself: is he strong enough to stand up for DfID and its budget in the Cabinet?

If he can’t defend the budget from DECC, how will he stop his more senior Cabinet colleagues in the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence? When David Cameron announced in June £200m of support for Afghanistan through the DfID budget, Labour argued that some of this could have come from other departmental budgets – a sign of things to come?

Secondly, questions will be asked of the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg.

As Left Foot Forward reported previously, the Lib Dems have gone AWOL on their manifesto promises on international development. Specifically, their pledge on climate aid went further than Labour’s, promising a complete cap on climate aid so it would be 100 per cent additional.

Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore, previously the Lib Dem spokesman on DfID, even warned during the electon of the Conservative Party’s plans for raiding DfID, saying:

“One thing that we will need to look very carefully at is that we don’t see DfID’s budget being the recipient of a lot of resources only for it then to be funneled back to the FCO or the MoD.”

So where are the Lib Dems now? Only weeks away from a key UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals in New York at which the deputy prime minister is due to appear, instead of clear red lines and objectives we have only a leaked documents showing plans to abandon over eighty key international committments.

Shadow DfID minister Gareth Thomas has written to the Lib Dem leader to call on him to intervene to reverse the proposed DfID cuts whilst he is at the helm:

“I am calling on Nick Clegg to step up to the mark while he is in charge and step in to reverse this dossier of cuts to show leadership in advance of the UN Summit.”

On Wednesday Mr Clegg found himself red faced when it emerged the children’s centre he was visiting was being cut by his coalition partners; if he doesn’t intervene to stop the development secretary’s proposed cuts, he may find himself singing the blues and waking up to greater embarrassment in New York.

Our guest writer is Gareth Thomas MP, shadow minister for international development

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, returning from viewing the devastation in Pakistan for himself today has told the world to ‘wake up’ to the full scale of the disaster, now affecting an estimated 20 million people – including millions of children under threat from waterborne diseases.

I welcomed the government’s initial response to the terrible tragedy unfolding in Pakistan.

Along with the work of leading British humanitarian NGOs, in the short-term, UK aid will hopefully make a vital difference to the millions now affected.

But a series of revelations in recent days show that international development secretary Andrew Mitchell not only has a worrying lack of vision for reform of the global humanitarian system, but worse still is threatening the future ability of the world to respond.

Belatedly, he has finally taken to the airwaves criticising the slowness of the international response and the lack of funding for the UN appeal. I sincerely hope he has been backing up this media comment with actual phone calls and meetings with other donors.

But I could only listen with incredulity as Mitchell spoke in interviews about the work of the key UN disaster response fund, the CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund) and how the Pakistan disaster needed even more funds than the CERF was able to provide – at the same time as leaked proposals from his Department over the weekend showed that he planned to abandon Labour’s commitments to provide more funding for this vital mechanism.

Amongst a list of 100 projects earmarked to be dropped in a memo from DfID director of policy Nick Dyer is Labour’s promise to increase funding for key system-wide UN funds such as the CERF and the Millennium Development Goals Fund.

Questions are also raised by the leak about funding for individual UN agencies – likely to be those which the UK has traditionally supported like UNICEF and UNAIDS – and cynically earmarked for cuts under a category listed ‘unlikely to be noticed’ is support for the UN Peacebuilding Fund.

Oxfam has described the cuts proposals, if implemented, as:

“A desperately backward step for poor people.”

As the flooding in Pakistan has tragically shown, we need more global and coordinated funding read and able to be swiftly and effectively deployed – not less – instead of needing to pass round the begging bowl every time, when every minute and hour is key.

And not just in Pakistan.

Equally tragic, but nowhere near the headlines, is the ongoing food crisis across the Sahel belt of West Africa where drought and erratic rains have caused failed harvests and water shortages, devastating the lives of people across Niger, Mali and Chad.

More than 10 million people are now affected by the crisis, seven million of those in Niger where hundreds of thousands of children face starvation.

Yet as Oxfam have shockingly reported, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Niger, the country worst-hit by the West Africa food crisis, has been forced to make an “agonising” decision to abandon plans to provide emergency food to families with children over the age of two because of a huge funding shortfall.

In government, I was proud to have worked on helping the UN improve its response to disasters, and that Labour campaigned for the CERF to be expanded from 50 million to 500 million dollars after the Tsunami and Darfur crises left the UN struggling to even start responding.

And as the likely impacts of climate change became apparent, we had pushed for it to double again to one billion dollars because of the increasing likelihood of a number of climate-change related disasters.

Climate change is another area in which commitments are rapidly being abandoned by this unprincipled coalition – with the same leaked document revealing that Mitchell has abandoned Labour’s pledge to ensure that additional funds were provided, and that no more than 10 per cent of the aid budget would be diverted to pay for tackling climate change, and its impacts such as climate related flooding.

Mitchell has so far refused to comment on the leaked drafts.

If he continues to do so, his words of concern about the ‘woeful’ international response to the Pakistan floods will sadly ring hollow.

He needs to tell the global humanitarian community urgently whether he plans to continue to strengthen this key emergency response mechanism, and other UN funds, or whether he plans to jettison them along with the other commitments listed in his dossier of cuts.

Dropping this pledge will only increase the likelihood of woeful responses to future Pakistans and Nigers.

And the cost will be measured in lives.

• Donate to the Disasters Emergency Committee Pakistan floods appeal by logging on to http://tinyurl.com/pak-floods

Update 1:45

Earlier today, Andrew Mitchell was on Radio 4 answering questions on the Government’s response to the Pakistan floods. Astonishingly, he actually referenced the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund in his answers – despite the fund being amongst the 100 commitments he has reportedly agreed to drop: 

“….Well the particular fund is a standing fund that was set up actually under a British initiative [by the Labour Government], the CERF fund, from which $27 million have come so far but what is required is way in excess of the CERF fund and will require members of the UN, particularly the G8 nations now to step up to what is an absolutely appalling disaster…”

It is time for Mitchell to comment on the leaked documents and come clean on CERF and the 100 commitments to be cut.

To deal with the Pakistan floods, the UN is asking for at least $465 million and so far is only 20-23% funded. Mitchell cannot claim this is “simply not good enough” in public whilst cutting the very same fund in private.

---

Yesterday The Observer reported that it had received an email confirming that only eight of Labour’s 100 commitments are to be saved. They come as part of the Tories’ drive for ‘value for money’ for UK aid, something we at Left Foot Forward have consistently argued is a bonfire of straw men.

As we reported on Friday, the Department for International Development is already a world leader in aid effectiveness – yet the implementation of the key commitment on Aid Effectiveness is one of 100 that have been dropped.

The Tories said DfID must be independently audited, and we showed that it already is. They said we are wasting away money to Russia and China, and we showed how Labour was already ending those programmes. They claimed DfID wasn’t focused on results, we reported how it was, and how an over reliance on outputs can mean long term solutions are overlooked.

The transparency initiative the Coalition have launched deserves praise. But beyond that, where is the vision? Where is the leadership? Where is the ambition?

We’ve seen the prime minister let the Gleneagles promises on aid be dropped at this year’s G8, no clear plan for the Millennium Development Goals summit which is just weeks away, and now the dropping of key commitments that would have – and in some cases actually have been – making a huge difference to poor people’s lives.

It is no good for DfID to remain silent on these leaked documents when they pose so many questions:

Health and education

• What now for budget sector support? If £8.5 billion and £6bn on education and health respectively are to be dropped, how are governments going to be supported to develop their own national systems (and thus become less reliant in the medium-long term on foreign aid?

• Eight million in school by 2010, 55 million with access to water – what ‘outputs’ based targets are these to be replaced by?

• DfID is to drop its commitment to abolish user fees. Does this mean the Tories will push through support for ‘vouchers’ for private schools and the privatisation of health care as outlined in their Green Paper (and slammed by NGOs)?

Trade

Trade has been moved out of DfID, and now commitments are to be dropped to quadruple support for fair trade, provide £1bn a year for growth and trade, and support the International Labour Organisation on workers’ rights. They have also dropped a pledge to work with international partners to provide $10bn (£6.42bn) a year for infrastructure in Africa.

Shadow international development minister Gareth Thomas told Left Foot Forward that Andrew Mitchell’s decision to drop these crucial commitments was “a massive step backwards for fairer trade for the world’s poorest farmers and producers”, adding:

“This relatively small amount of UK aid spending was helping some of the world’s most vulnerable in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is a further signal that the coalition is failing to show real leadership on development.”

• Labour removed forced trade liberalisation as a requirement of UK aid – will aid be kept untied from commercial interests as promised in the coalition’s Programme for Government?

• Why drop support for aid for infrastructure, growth and trade when they provide long term routes out of poverty?

Climate Change

The Programme for Government said nothing on climate change finance. The leaked documents suggest they will keep Labour’s Fast Start climate finance commitment, but they are dropping a raft of other measures.

• How is the Coalition to address climate change, when it is dropping a strategic review on how to integrate climate change adaptation into our aid programmes? Or when it drops commitments to help developing countries develop low carbon technologies and reduce deforestation?

• Will future climate aid be additional – or is just going to be sucked from existing funds?

Conflict and humanitarian aid

• Why has support an International Arms Trade Treaty been dropped when the commitment was one promised in the coalition’s Programme for Government?

• Why is the Government to scrap support to the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) – just at a time when the UN is struggling to raise the funds needed to deal with the devastating floods in Pakistan?

The Government promised the aid budget would be ring fenced; if these commitments are to be cut, where and how then is the money to be spent?

Mitchell has said aid should be redirected from other projects to Afghanistan. He’s now dropped a commitment to allocate aid on the principles of “country income and population size”. So how is aid to be distributed in future, exactly how much will be redirected to Afghanistan?

And who is going to spend it? Will aid be re-directed to the MoD, or to the Home Office to pay for immigration costs and student visas, as OECD guidelines allow? Last month the Labour Campaign for International Development (LCID) wrote a letter to the Treasury to ask if the level of aid spent through DfID will remain at 88 per cent – they have still not replied.

Mitchell recently described one of his party’s manifesto commitments on aid as “the sort of thing you say in opposition then rather regret in government… ” some of the world’s most poorest people may yet feel the same about the coalition’s entire approach to aid.

• Donate to the Disasters Emergency Committee Pakistan floods appeal by logging on to http://tinyurl.com/pak-floods

Patrick Bury is a former Captain in the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment who has served in Afghanistan; he delivered his Masters dissertation on Military-Media Relations and a memoir of his experiences, ‘Callsign Hades’, is to be published in September by Simon and Schuster

The leaking of the contents of log reports two weeks ago from an American military headquarters in Afghanistan may have surprised the media and the populace, but it will not surprise any soldiers who have served there.

It appears that much of the media and many people are out of touch. That they still think that war should be clean, clear cut and concise. It is none of these.

Maybe the precedent of low casualty victories, like Iraq in 1991 and Kosovo in 1999, delivered by the technological Revolution in Military Affairs, has helped shape this false belief, maybe it is the failure of the media to convey the true horrors of war, but for leaked reports, detailing civilians getting killed by accident, special forces operatives on ‘kill or capture missions’, and Pakistani intelligence service collaboration with the Taliban to surprise anyone who knows anything about either war or Afghanistan, is ridiculous.

Of course, the media has an important watch-dog role in modern society and there is a definite need for the primacy of rule of law in military operations. Yet the way some of the media, and therefore the population in general, expect soldiers to win wars that are ostensibly fought in their name is unrealistic, and given the changing nature of war, becoming even more so.

The leaked logs show higher civilian casualties than previously reported. When our enemies fight us amongst the people, high rates of civilian casualties are unfortunately inevitable. Indeed, as in the Taliban’s case, inducing the West to cause civilian casualties is an explicit tactical and strategic goal of insurgents. And it seems much of the West’s population and media are not aware of this manipulation.

Moreover, heavily armed young men, despite the best training and restraint, make mistakes sometimes. You would, if you were in Afghanistan and a car that you couldn’t make out was hurtling toward your checkpoint and ignoring your shouts and warning shots and driving right toward you, and what about that report of three vehicle borne suicide bombers in the bazaar just before you left base?

And unfortunately, war makes both states and men act in ways they may not like to act normally. Special operations provide an example. They operate in the grey area between Realpolitik and law, they execute foreign policy at the tactical level, with all the myriad moral complexities this entails. If you think ‘kill or capture missions’ are morally suspect you are right, if you think they are always unnecessary you are wrong.

War has changed, probably irreversibly. The prospect of defeat in Afghanistan for NATO and the U.S is now real. Wars amongst the people and Improvised Explosive Devices have negated Western militaries’ once all powerful control of the battlespace and turned soldiers into little more than heavily laden slow-moving targets.

Meanwhile a lightly armed, agile militia called the Taliban are using every trick they can to win. They use children proxy bombers, they use human shields, they lay ambushes for NATO soldiers returning Taliban dead to their mosques. They do not care for the Geneva Convention, nor human rights. And it pays off.

And they have time and a long term view of strategy.

The only time the West fights to win is in a war of necessity, such as in World War 2. Then the rules are bent and the gloves come off, for a period. This is usually acceptable, if unknown, to the population the state is acting to protect. This happens in a war of survival; survival of the fittest, the most adaptable.

A government should not go into a war if it is not a war of survival, if it is not prepared to fight to win. It owes that to those risking their lives on its behalf.

Unless there is a change in how it perceives the nature of warfare, the West will lose the war in Afghanistan, despite declaring victory, and spend the next 10 years in splendid isolation wondering what went wrong.

Earlier today Left Foot Forward published a leaked document from the Department for International Development showing a list of nearly 100 public commitments recommended for the chop. But behind the headlines, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell’s “focus on outputs and outcomes” raises two key questions.

Firstly, if close to 100 ‘input’ based commitments are to be dropped – what are the ‘output’ based commitments that will replace them if DfID is to avoid failing its commitments to the world’s poor?

The Coalition Programme committed DfID to support actions to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by prioritising aid projects that ensured access to clean water, sanitation, healthcare, and education. Fast forward two months, and DfID is proposing to drop commitments to spend £8.5 billion on education, £6 billion on health, and £1 billion on water and sanitation. And not just ‘inputs’ too – output-based commitments to help 8 million children go to school in Africa and 55 million people gain access to water and sanitation too.

So how exactly is the Coalition to make progress on the MDGs in the absences of these commitments? The signs are worrying. The upcoming UN Summit on the MDGs should be an opportunity to continue Britain’s leadership in this area. Yet despite repeated questioning in Parliament, the Coalition has failed to set out clear red-lines and objectives for the Summit, merely talking about how they seek agreement on an ‘action agenda’. In a Parliamentary Answer Andrew Mitchell admitted that he and Nick Clegg have only met once formally to discuss the Summit.

Secondly, why the obsession with “outputs”, when DfID is already considered a world leader in aid effectiveness?

Just last month a major independent review by the OECD praised DfID’s effectiveness under Labour. It said:

“[DfID has gained] national and international recognition for its professionalism and ability to deliver its aid programme effectively…

“The UK performs well against the key aid effectiveness indicators … DFID’s ability to implement its aid effectiveness commitments is supported by its decentralised model, and by significant use of general and sector budget support.”

In addition, the One campaign’s 2010 Data report outlined that “the UK leads all other G7 countries on ODA [aid] effectiveness”.

The new Coalition government risk putting this leadership at risk. A move towards ‘results’ based aid may seem appealing as pressure intensifies to demonstrate value for money, particularly when the aid budget is growing whilst other departments are cut. But as NGOs including Save the Children have pointed out, this can actually reduce aid effectiveness:

“[Results based aid] works best for interventions that involve a discrete output, such as the construction of a road, and less well for more complex structural changes – like civil service reform – where judgements about progress are more subjective.”

Today’s leaked documents are deeply worrying. DfID’s recommendation to drop key commitments is bad enough – but Mitchell’s push for ‘results’ is a crusade against straw men that risks trying DfID in knots, reducing the effectiveness of UK aid and failing to achieve the one thing he seems to care about most – value for money.

Additional reporting from David Taylor

Civil servants in the Department for International Development are recommending that Ministers drop close to 100 public commitments including many with “strong public backing”. Among those for the chop are commitments to double support to global education and to spend £6 billion of new money on health services and systems.

A ‘submission to Ministers‘ from DfID’s Director of Policy, Nick Dyer, sets out the full list of commitments that officials “recommend dropping”. The submission says:

“The full list of commitments we recommend dropping is at Annex 1. These have been categorised by those we think have strong public backing and are likely to be resisted; will upset other government departments; have individual vocal support; will be overtaken by new Ministerial priorities or initiatives; or are unlikely to be noticed. There will be stakeholders who will argue we should keep some of these eg. the US and the Gates Foundation with respect to polio and neglected tropical diseases.”

The list includes plans to:

• Double support to global education, reaching £1 billion by 2010 as part of a commitment to spend at least £8.5 billion in the 10 years to 2015;

• Spend £6bn on health services and systems by 2015;

• Quadruple support to fair and ethical trade; and

• £1 billion per year on support to growth and trade.

The recommendations follow the Conservative party’s intention – set out in ‘One World Conservatism‘ – to achieve “value for money through output-based aid” through an approach that “will measure success by outputs and outcomes, not inputs.” The approach was not endorsed in the Coalition Programme. Many of the proposals listed in Annex were proposed in Labour’s White Paper last summer, ‘Eliminating World Poverty: Building our common future‘.

In addition to worries about the public commitments that face the chop, there will be concerns that some policies recommended for the scrapheap are actually output-focused. These include existing pledges to “Support 8 million children in school in Africa by 2010″ and to “Help 25m people gain access to water & sanitation in Africa over next 5 years & 30mn people in S. Asia by 2011″.

UPDATE 17.01

Responding to Left Foot Forward’s story, Shadow Minister for International Development, Gareth Thomas MP said:

“This leaked list is deeply shocking. It shows behind all the warm words about keeping our commitments to the worlds poorest – Tory Ministers are planning to abandon many of the key commitments which have established the UK as a leader in tackling global poverty and disease over recent years.

“Other commitments amazingly earmarked for dropping include Labour’s commitment to scale up funding for the incredibly successful ethical and fairtrade movement, and to support work with faith based organisations.

“Officials have also been asked by ministers to cynically earmark commitments they think can be dropped without anyone noticing – including UK support to the UN Peacbuilding Fund.

“These revelations seriously undermine any claims the government have made about taking the international development agenda seriously and will shock many of the organisations who have campaigned over many years for these commitments.”

Joseph O’Reilly, Chair of the UK Global Campaign for Education said:

“This is deeply worrying document. If the commitment to doubling aid to education is scrapped it would undermine years of good work by campaigners and the public to put education in developing countries on the government’s agenda. Developing countries could be currently losing out on as much as $70bn a year in economic growth by not offering quality education to all citizens, so to scrap plans to double aid for schools is economic short-termism of the highest order. David Cameron must resist this cut, and re-state his commitment to International Development and education in particular.

The announcement of Wyclef Jean’s candidacy for the Haitian presidency has leant the upcoming election an air of celebrity, and a media spotlight it wouldn’t usually attract.

However, while mainstream news networks fall over themselves to offer predictions on a “crowded race” steeped in “excitement” and “intrigue”, very few have drawn attention to a crucial and self-evident fact of Haitian politics: regardless of how his actions might affect the Haitian nation or its people, the incoming president is unlikely to see out his term in office without it being violently hampered, or even terminated, unless he demonstrates a clear willingness to succumb to the political and financial demands of Washington and Wall Street.

US involvement with Haiti began in the early 20th century. The Caribbean nation had struggled for more than a decade with economic hardship and political instability – thanks in the main to the crippling debts that had been imposed on it by its former colonial master, France – and in 1915, Woodrow Wilson dispatched an invasion force of 330 marines.

By way of re-establishing “peace and order” and teaching the Haitians “how to elect good men”, Wilson dismantled the national constitution, reinstated virtual slave labour, and oversaw a bloody two-decade occupation by US military forces which Haitian historians estimate resulted in 15,000 civilian deaths.

By the time American forces withdrew in 1934, they had put Haitian finances completely under the control of the White House, supplanted the Haitian army with the US-controlled Gendarmerie d’Haiti, and more than tripled the profits of American banking interests in the process.

Now widely recognised as “a crucial moment in the development of American imperialism”, this “friendly protection, guidance and assistance” lent to the Haitian people by Wilson set the tone for all future US-Haiti relations. Ever since, the White House has made sure that anyone who doesn’t protect US business interests in the nation’s lucrative export industries, or restricts access to the impoverished cheap labour force, doesn’t remain in office.

For example, between the fifties and eighties, US presidents supported the Duvaliers, two of the most brutal dictators in Latin American history. As ‘Papa’ and ‘Baby’ Doc shut down the entire press, demolished schools, deployed death squads specifically tasked with crushing democratic movements, and ordered the deaths of upwards of 30,000 Haitian civilians, the US praised them for providing “stability in the region” and sent them vast amounts of aid, so impressed were they with the Duvaliers’ enthusiasm for foreign investment, and their ferocious opposition to communist Cuba.

However, when Haiti’s first free election came in 1990 and the poor majority entered the political arena to elect, by a two-thirds majority, populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the US was forced to intervene. The White House had been backing World Bank official Marc Bazin, and when it emerged that Aristide viewed capitalism as “a machine devouring the planet”,  and was more concerned with enacting social reforms than facilitating US investment, George Bush Sr. swiftly stepped in to “promote democracy” by overthrowing a democratically elected leader in a violent coup.

After three years, Bill Clinton restored Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, on the condition that he accept a neoliberal economic programme masterminded by the world bank aimed and aimed at aiding the “enlightened, business class”. Without an alternative, Aristide acquiesced, and throughout the rest of the nineties thousands of farmers went bankrupt and Haiti’s economy shrunk by 0.4 per cent every year, turning it into the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

A decade later, when Aristide began to mobilize populist forces again in a desperate attempt to win back some semblance of economic sovereignty, George Bush Jr. first orchestrated the halting of more than $500 million in aid slated to pay for safe drinking water and literacy programs, and then, like his father before him, followed through on his pledge to “support the growth of democratic movements” by overthrowing a democratically elected leader who commanded 90 per cent of his country’s popular vote.

This has been a whistle stop tour, and Aristide is by no means a saint. Nonetheless, if the historical record tells us anything, it tells us this: whoever adopts the Haitian presidency, and regardless of his level of democratic support, what determines whether he is afforded a genuine chance at a presidency is how far he is willing to bend to the will of the White House.

And as Obama’s ‘change we can believe in’ doesn’t seem to extend to US policy towards Latin American self-determination – he has already tacitly supported the military coup which ousted left-leaning President Zelaya in Honduras last year, and is overseeing a broad remilitarisation of the region in reaction to political developments in countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia – it is difficult to see how this state of affairs won’t continue to prevail for Haiti’s incoming president, ex-Fugees singer or otherwise.

Our guest writer is Peter Fletcher

The WikiLeaks revelation that US Forces had to shoot down one of their own, out-of-control drones demonstrates an important principle about unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). No matter how much information they collect, their misapplication is clouded by old-fashioned secrecy. This is tragic in that, in principle, drone technology has the potential to enhance jus in bello and make war crimes investigations more efficient.

The debate

A debate is quietly raging in the US press over remote-controlled warfare. On one side is the Wall Street Journal, which ran an editorial in April praising the expansion of UCAVs under Obama. The piece argued that such systems are a more precise and thus more moral way of disrupting terrorist networks. Their accuracy minimises collateral damage and UCAVs, by definition, keep troops out of harm’s way.

A second contention is that the legal controversy over drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen is misplaced, as America has been at war with the Taliban and al-Qaeda since 2001.

On the other side is The New Yorker and The Nation, with Tom Engelhardt of the latter taking a strong line. He regularly argues that UCAVs lend themselves to extra-judicial assassinations, their accuracy is exaggerated by the defence industry and, most importantly, efficient in uniting host nation civilians against a distant, misinformed West.

In short, Englehardt understands drones as part of a myth of hygienic war and an enabler of mission creep; The Wall Street Journal presents them as the reality of hygienic war and the West’s answer to the suicide bomber.

This debate mirrors another about whether mediating war through computer screens makes soldiers more fair-minded or bloody-minded, less partial or less empathetic. As the equivocating prophet of robotic warfare PW Singer put it:

“Technology might well lessen the likelihood of anger-fuelled rages, but it might make some soldiers too calm, too unaffected by killing.”

Singer cites Steven Green, the sociopath soldier prosecuted for raping a 14-year-old Iraqi and murdering her family. Green later claimed that killing a person felt no different from squashing an ant. According to Singer:

“The true fear… is that turning killing into merely the elimination of icons on a computer screen might make the experience feel the same way even for otherwise normal troops.”

A happy inversion of this example is the case of a US soldier who, inadvertently, was filmed by a drone abusing an Iraqi detainee under his guard.

Ultimately, one’s position on drones boils down to trust. Does one trust the military when it claims to have killed an ‘insurgent’? Exactly how does the CIA gather information in Pakistan? Was that an AK-47 or a broom? Does the gunner care? The arguments are Guantanamo Bay all over again, with wings.

The Solution, in an ideal world

The virtue of unmanned systems is that they record everything. UAV operators and troops on the ground use secure (but not unbreakable) satellite links to discuss the images being relayed. In principle, almost every aspect of the decision-making behind every shot can be stored and reviewed. Indeed, the online chatrooms which UAV operators and intelligence analysts commonly use to communicate are ideal for the logging of conversation.

The point is that most UCAV systems continuously collect evidence on their operators, potentially strengthening cases against those with a bloody mind. Indeed, regular, independent reviews of the evidence would deter young recruits from reverting back to their childhood world of Grand Theft Auto. This capacity is something new for the military.

A US Army survey found 45 per cent of soldiers would not report a fellow soldier they witnessed injuring or killing a non-combatant. The unflinching gaze of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles have the potential to remove this human element completely.

Aspects of design can enhance such a process. Currently, the huge amounts of data collected by UAVs make the review of operations tiresome. A conversation is being had in defence circles about how better to store, tag and retrieve the important bits. The US Air Force has spent $500 million on software similar to that used by television football pundits, during the half-time match analysis. Sky Sports employ people to ‘tag’ the live video feed of games, attaching electronic notes to players every time they do something special (i.e. ‘Robert Green: Cock-Up’ or ‘Rooney: Anguished Face’).

The military rationale for embracing this software is mainly pedagogic: to understand insurgent behavioural patterns and to develop and teach doctrine. However, the same technology could be used to investigate whether UCAV, UCGV, ACUV and UCSV operators are acting within IHL (international humanitarian law). As Asim Quershi has argued, killing rather than capturing suspected terrorists is legally dubious. At the very least, making the review of footage from combat drones easier would dissuade operators from laughing when they shoot.

Concluding remarks

Much of the above is a suggestion of what could be, rather than what is. However, we are still at the beginning of the unmanned revolution and need to think clearly about regulation. The US Department of Defense has an estimated 6,500 unmanned vehicles in its inventory and has signalled its intention to expand. In Britain, the production of the Watchkeeper UAV is underway and next year will be the first, optionally combat, UAV to be operated out of the country. It is not too late to develop mechanisms, both practically and institutionally, to test the claims of the anti-drone lobby.

Phillip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has warned that remote warfare may lead to the development of a ‘Playstation mentality’. He argues that a new generation of UCAV operators may lack context and dehumanise the enemy. However, military planners are impervious to such lines of argument. They would prefer waging war to be as simple as a video-game.

The only useful way to articulate concerns about combat drones is through the language of law, evidence and sensible design.

Britain has, to say the least, a chequered history with the tiny island of Diego Garcia.  Located in the near-centre of the Indian Ocean, the island was taken over by Britain in 1965 as part of a deal which saw them purchase the entire Chagos Archipelago from the then self-governing colony of Mauritius for £3 million.

Soon afterwards, as part of the establishment of the ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ the entire native population began to be forcibly displaced, with the eventual goal being that, as the Colonial Office reported to the UN, “there will be no indigenous population except seagulls.” By 1973, the entire native population had been transferred to Mauritius – a country where they didn’t speak the language, and unemployment was already at 20 per cent. Diego Garcia was established as a bonafide UK-US military outpost.

The native population’s legal battle for their right to return to Diego Garcia rumbles on* but right now the island forms the backdrop of a different dispute – that between the UN, and more specifically the US, and Iran.  Despite the fact that military and intelligence reports to Congress in April 2010 reveal that Iran’s military stance is “defensive, designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities,” that it has “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders,” and that its “willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons” forms part of a “deterrent strategy”, rather than anything aggressive, US military commanders repeatedly assert that Iran is the “single-most important” threat to the security of Israel and the United States. To that end, along with a fresh round of UN sanctions against Iran, Obama has overseen a rapid proliferation of military resources on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia.

According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald, Obama has recently dispatched “195 smart, guided, Blu-110 bombs and 192 massive 2000lb Blu-117 bombs,” specifically aimed at destroying hardened underground structures. Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, states:

“They [the US] are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran… US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.”

Which begs the question – why is David Cameron allowing this strategy to be pursued on British soil? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the intensifying implicit threat of military action against Iran is in direct violation of the UN Charter, which specifically bans the “threat of force… against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”  Furthermore, the US insistence on preserving nuclear weapons facilities on Diego Garcia is an open infringement of the nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaty established by the African Union last year.

US personnel on Diego Garcia may outnumber British personnel by nearly 500 to 1, but the island remains a British territory governed by British law – hence, a victim of ‘extraordinary rendition’ whose flight landed on the island was able to sue in a UK court. And yet neither Cameron, nor any prominent voices in the mainstream media have made any comment on these open violations of international law, or on the fact they would seem to directly threaten the likelihood of successful peace talks with the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One can only hope that Cameron understands the gravity of what he is allowing to occur on the little island of Diego Garcia, and that we are not headed for a repeat of 2003 – when, on 20th March, 48 hours before B-52s and B-1s deployed to the island carried out the initial aerial bombardment of Baghdad using the very same “bunker buster” bombs recently dispatched to the island by Obama, Tony Blair told his party, “I hope, even  now, Iraq can be disarmed peacefully.”

* According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “deportation or forcible transfer of population” constitutes a crime against humanity.

Our guest writer is John Hilary, executive director of War on Want

Last week, the UN General Assembly made history with its declaration that water and sanitation are human rights to which all people are entitled. The resolution was the fruit of many years’ labour by campaigners from around the world, and was eventually passed by 122 votes in favour to none against, with 41 abstentions. So why did the UK’s new Lib-Con government mount such a furious campaign against it?

The resolution itself was a simple one, with just three paragraphs of text after the preamble. The first paragraph contains the key statement that the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is “a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights”.

The rest of the text then calls for international efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all, and welcomes the ongoing efforts of the independent expert working on the issue under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Why was this so threatening to David Cameron’s government? Back in November 2006, the Labour government’s international development secretary, Hilary Benn, was happy to announce that the UK did indeed recognise the human right to water.

Yet in the run-up to last week’s vote, the new UK government joined forces with Canada and the USA in a concerted effort to undermine the UN resolution, arguing that there was no legal right to water or sanitation and that we should simply wait for the independent expert in Geneva to continue her research.

The UK government had particularly sought to kill the momentum behind the resolution by persuading other EU countries not to support it. This tactic failed, as many European countries declared themselves unwilling to join the UK in opposing the right to water and sanitation. In the end Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Spain all voted for the resolution, while none were prepared to vote against. Even the UK could eventually only bring itself to abstain.

The significance of declaring water and sanitation to be a human right is that it places an obligation on every state to provide those services to all its citizens, irrespective of their ability to pay. This in turn is often interpreted as a threat to the project of water privatisation, since in many countries – particularly in the global South – handing over control of municipal water systems to the private sector has seen the price of water raised far beyond what poorer families can afford.

As already noted eight years ago by the UN’s committee on economic, social and cultural rights in its general comment on the right to water, such “unaffordable increases” in the price of water should be seen as a violation of the right to water. This has led some private water companies themselves to question whether privatisation of water systems is compatible with the goal of extending water and sanitation services to all.

One possible reason, then, for the UK government’s opposition to the UN resolution is that it did not wish to jeopardise future involvement of British companies seeking to take on privatisation contracts in the water and sanitation sectors of foreign countries. Yet if that were the case, why did France, Spain and Germany all feel able to support the resolution, given that they each have their own private sector water companies operating around the world?

So maybe the reason is to be found in the Lib-Con government’s ideological bias against the idea that people’s rights might take precedence over market solutions. If there was some such thinking behind the UK’s opposition to the UN resolution, it has not been forthcoming. One of the officials whom I asked for the rationale behind the government’s change of heart told me bluntly that they would not share such details with the outside world. Or in other words, draw your own conclusions.

The call by former defence chiefs Lords Bramall, Beach and Ramsbotham to delay a new Trident programme for at least another 15 years as Britain no longer requires an “all-singing, all-dancing” version as currently planned, raises fresh concerns as to both the strategic value and value to the tax payer of the £97 billion defence procurement programme.

With Chancellor George Osborne fundamentally changing the nature of the Trident debate by requiring that the Ministry of Defence plan its Trident based expenditure out of MoD allocated funds rather than the Treasury’s own budget, there are further doubts as to whether the MoD can afford the programme.

Curiously the coalition continues to maintain the position that Trident should not be considered in this autumn’s strategic defence review – as called for last week by former defence secretary Des Browne – and yet Osborne’s decision effectively forces the MoD to consider it in the context of its other budgetary priorities.

The MoD is thus faced with a ridiculous paradox that defence sources say renders worthless the work of the defence planning team over the past few months. The Treasury requires it to review Trident’s future on a compare-and-contrast financial basis with other major planned financial expenditures whilst No 10 forbids it from considering Trident in a strategic context.

There is now a distinct danger that major budgetary and strategic decision making will be critically undermined by these contradictory positions with grave consequences for British defence planning in terms of a lack of joined up thinking between threat assessments and intended defence expenditures.

To resolve this the coalition should include Trident in the Strategic Defence Review, allocate the money that the Treasury previously planned to spend for Trident to the MoD and thus conduct a serious comprehensive SDR that assess Britain’s threats, capabilities and choices as recommended last year by the new Chief of the Defence Staff Sir David Richards.

Such an approach would allow concepts of continuous at sea deterrence  to be re-examined, the question of closer Anglo-French nuclear co-operation to be considered and feasibility studies of Trident alternatives to be properly conducted. The alternative is a status quo so unacceptable that it is said to be a contributing factor to the resignation of senior military advisor General Sir Richard Dannatt  at the weekend.

The doctrine of the Labour government in foreign policy was ‘humanitarian intervention’. The years, of course, were not kind to this ideal and revelations about Tony Blair’s commercial interests in, for example, the war in Iraq have  fuelled the fire of conspiracy theory; out with the old and in with the new though.

So, what does Cameron’s trip to India, one of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s first major expeditions since the coalition was negotiated, tell us about the new trajectory of UK foreign policy?

The diplomactic standing of the coalition government seemed doomed before it even began when David Cameron, at the time prime minister in waiting, used one of the televised leader’s debates to lump China and Iran into the same threatening category – countries which neccesitate the continuing commitment to Trident. Much to the chagrin of the Chinese embassy and the amusement of Tehran.

And now, it seems, Cameron is up to it again. His high profile critique of Pakistan, being painted by a bemused press team as ‘straight talking’, has raised many a diplomatic eyebrow. One of the most poignant points was made on Friday by shadow foreign secretary David Miliband, who highlighted the potential insensitivity of accusing Pakistan, a nation regularly rocked by terrorist attacks, of collusion in these very crimes.

This is not to mention the lack of expediency that such outbursts have in relation to the war in Afghanistan, in which Pakistan are playing a major role. A look at the FCO press releases accompanying the prime minster’s mission, however, reveals that this is all rather consistent. One element of the visit, which flew somewhat under the radar of Mr Cameron’s brash diplomacy, was the announcement of a new deal worth £700 million, to provide fighter aircraft to India.

With tensions still riding high between India and Pakistan over Kashmir the announcement of this deal, along with the accompanying sabre rattling about Pakistan, did wonders for the share prices of BAE systems and Rolls Royce, the British firms placed to profit from this deal, which both traded well in the wake of the deal.

The share prices of General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, meanwhile - major American suppliers of military equipment to Pakistan - suffered some turbulence following the prime minister’s announcement.

These trends, though anecdotal, are symbolic of the new foreign policy. One based not upon imperial ambition, Christian ethics or humanitarian good will, but, upon merely commercial interests. As stated here, the trip to India is:

“…evidence of our new, commercial foreign policy in action.”

A depressing basis for foreign policy indeed but, at least the coalition government are being honest about their motivations instead of pretending that it is about ethics or responsibility.

The candidates for the labour leadership should take note though and take a stand. Foreign policy can and must be about more than merely the pursuance of financial advantage, after all, the logical conclusion of good business for companies such as BAE and Lockheed Martin is, in the context of India and Pakistan, war.

Patrick Bury is a former Captain in the Royal Irish Regiment who has served in Sangin, Afghanistan; he delivered his Masters dissertation on Military-Media Relations and a memoir of his experiences, ‘Callsign Hades’, is to be published in September by Simon and Schuster

Prime minister David Cameron announced last week that British combat troops could begin leaving Afghanistan as early as next summer, if the conditions on the ground are conducive to a handover to Afghan Security Forces (ANSF). Unless there is a rapid and decisive improvement in the security situation in most provinces they will not be ready, and the shooting of two soldiers the same day in the relatively safe area of Lashkar Gah only serves to highlight this.

Meanwhile, at the Kabul security conference, President Hamid Karzai proudly stated he wanted Afghan National Security Forces controlling Afghan security by 2014. To reach this target he advocated a boost in Afghan National Army (ANA) figures to 170,000, an increase of about 30 per cent, and increasing Afghan National Police members to 134,000 from 90,000.

Yet such proposals need careful examination. An ANSF presence of over 300,000 police and soldiers from a population of 28 million equals 93 ANSF members per 1,000 members of the population. In Iraq the same ratio is below 20 per 1,000. Maintaining such a high level of ANSF after the withdrawal of NATO combat troops in a nation with a GDP of only $23 billion is simply unsustainable.

Meanwhile, the very ability of ANA units to conduct independent operations remains questionable. Army units are ranked from 1-4 on such criteria, and very few Afghan units have reached this stage after four years of careful mentoring.

The conference also pledged to transfer up to 50 per cent of total international aid into the Afghan government’s hands. The hope is that with the Afghan government taking the lead in development projects, ordinary Afghans, who are increasingly suspect of foreign intervention, can be won over.

Since 2001 over $36 billion has been pumped into Afghanistan, over $1,200 per head, but there has been little impact on development and governance. Indeed, most of this money seems to have been spent on ANSF, personal bodyguards and even villas in Dubai.

And it’s not just the spiralling cost of the war that is worrying NATO governments now. British casualties have also soared in the last 18 months to 14 deaths per 1,000 – twice that of the Americans. Casualties in the Helmand town of Sangin are running at approximately 25 per cent. This is roughly equivalent to the bloody breakout battles from the Normandy beachhead in 1944.

Amidst this situation it is not surprising that there has been a marked shift in the White House’s position on negotiating with the Taliban. Over the past months rhetoric has been changed noticeably from ‘defeat’ to ‘degrade’ and now to ‘reintegration’.

Finally, it seems, the US is heeding the advice of Pakistan and Britain, who have long urged the need for negotiations. According to senior military sources secret negotiations continue to be conducted with Taliban elements, but to date these have been ad hoc.

A US commitment to negotiations would see more centralised control of dialogue and the possibility of negotiations with Afghanistan’s big players. Mr. Karzai could take the lead in speaking to the Taliban’s spiritual father, Mullah Omar, the Pakistani backed Hiqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s insurgents.

Not all of these would want to talk, and the US and NATO will have to swallow some bitter pills just to get them to the table, including their pride and their much heralded protection of women’s rights. Yet a basic commitment to ending ties with Al- Qaeda, ending violence and accepting the (changeable) Afghan constitution may entice some.

But not many, I fear. The counter-intuitive July date for military withdrawal has handed the Taliban an immediate propaganda victory, with the real possibility of military victory, too. In a battle of endurance, you do not tell your opponent when you’re going to give up. Why should the Taliban negotiate when the perception is they are winning?

This may be just the perception, and NATO chiefs would point out that they have never been defeated tactically or operationally. But in calling for negotiations they are admitting the prospect of strategic defeat. Indeed, historical analysis shows that no insurgency with the strategic depth and operational flexibility of the Taliban has ever been defeated.

For the West to begin negotiations from a position of weakness could spell disaster for Afghanistan’s future. Without a resounding power sharing agreement that encompasses most insurgent elements, Afghanistan will face civil war when NATO leaves. The lesson of past counter insurgencies holds that governments must be in a relative position of strength before starting talks with those who seek to undermine their power.

The one thing the Taliban have more of than the West is time. They have a long term view of strategy and it is one that is not worried about human rights nor wavered by public opinion. Meanwhile, the West will continue to conduct its war with annual fiscal cycles, media response, the Geneva Convention and general and presidential elections as factors in planning military operations.

For all its might, the West seems weak, both to ordinary Afghans and the Taliban alike.