Atlantic Council

NATO foreign ministers will meet in Brussels today to, in the words of the April 3 NATO Bucharest Summit Statement, “make a first assessment” on Georgia’s quest for membership in the alliance.  In the aftermath of Russia’s August attack on Georgia, a Membership Action Plan (MAP) is not now politically possible.

Ukraine is seeking to repair relations with Russia as its hopes of entering NATO fade, the Times reports:

"The reappraisal comes amid debate in Kiev about the wisdom of antagonizing the Kremlin, particularly after the confrontation between Russia and Georgia in the summer.

President Yushchenko of Ukraine has ordered a policy review in an effort to defuse tensions with Russia over his country’s pro-Western leanings.  The shift is an acknowledgement that friction between Kiev and Moscow has made it harder for the European Union and NATO, particularly members such as Germany and France, to embrace Ukraine."

The news comes as NATO foreign ministers meet for a two-day summit in Brussels where the U.S. has backed off plans to push for Georgian and Ukrainian Membership Action Plans (MAPs) into the alliance.  The policy review marks a major change from Yushchenko's earlier stance:

"It is a remarkable change of tone for Mr. Yushchenko, who has raised fears about Russian aggression in Crimea.  He had also accused Yulia Tymoshenko, his rival and Orange Revolution ally, of 'high treason' for failing to condemn the Russian intervention in South Ossetia and Georgia in August."

At the same time, the Independent notes that Saakashvili is pressing NATO not to abandon its promise of membership to Georgia (and Ukraine) at the Bucharest summit last April:

"The Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, has urged NATO members to bury their differences and agree to a 'compromise' that would accelerate his country's membership of the Western military alliance, despite the fallout from Georgia's six-day war with Russia.

[...]

'Membership is the goal,' President Saakashvili said during a teleconference call from Tbilisi.  'How to get there is secondary.'  The Georgian leader believes that the diplomatic fudge at the NATO summit emboldened Moscow to retaliate with crushing force by invading Georgia proper when the Georgian military launched an offensive against the breakaway territory of South Ossetia last August."

Mission accomplished for Russia?

General Hans-Christoph Ammon, the head of the German army's elite special commando unit KSK, called Germany's contributions to the NATO mission in Afghanistan a "miserable failure" while speaking to the German press agency DPA.  IHT:

"Breaking with a military tradition of keeping silent about policy, a top German general has branded his country's efforts in Afghanistan a failure, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid.

Germany was responsible for training the Afghan police, but the German Interior Ministry, led by the conservative Wolfgang Schäuble, has come under repeated criticism from the United States and other NATO allies for providing too few experts and inappropriate training.

[...]

The government had provided a mere €12 ($15.2) million for training the Afghan Army and police while the United States has already given more than $1 billion, he said.  'At that rate, it would take 82 years to have a properly trained police force,' he said.  More damaging for Germany's reputation, Ammon said, was that its police-training mission was considered such a 'disaster' that the United States and EU had taken over responsibility."

Furthermore, the rare nature of Ammon's comments seems to have given gravity to his message:

"The Defense Ministry said Ammon was expressing his personal views. Even so, because such views are rare, security experts said they showed the level of frustration building among senior military officers over German reluctance to provide adequate financing for Afghan mission or even explain to the public why Germany has 4,500 soldiers there.

Neither Chancellor Angela Merkel nor her conservative defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung, have been willing to debate the issue publicly.  For the first time since German soldiers were sent to Afghanistan six years ago, Jung referred in November to the 'Gefallene,' or fallen soldiers, who had died there."

Merkel is facing increasing pressure both from her Christian Democratic Union party as well as from outside critics to more fully address the Afghanistan issue and Germany's role there.  This pressure will likely grow next year, as Obama is expected to push Europe for greater troop contributions to Afghanistan upon taking office.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will meet with NATO ministers to discuss controversial plans for proposed Ukrainian and Georgian membership of the alliance. Financial Times:

The US wants to defuse tensions with other Nato members on when Georgia and Ukraine will join the alliance by focusing on internal political and security reforms both countries must accomplish before they can join.

As she prepares for a two-day meeting of Nato foreign ministers tomorrow, Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, has said Washington will not press for the two former Soviet republics to gain immediate entry to the alliance's Membership Application Plan (Map).

Nato members agreed at a Bucharest summit this year that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members. But Germany, France and other states made clear the immediate offer of Map - a key stage in the Nato application process - would be seen by Russia as provocative.

Last week Britain had suggested finding other ways to bring the two countries into the alliance, and the U.S. seemed to back away from plans for full membership. The meeting will also focus on a new security architecture for Europe proposed by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

According to RFE/RL, the U.S. dropped plans to push for Georgian and Ukrainian NATO membership at an alliance meeting scheduled in December:

"U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on November 26 pulled back from offering Georgia and Ukraine a formal roadmap to join NATO and said Britain had proposed finding other ways to bring them into the alliance."

Speaking from Havana after a meeting with Cuban leader Raul Castro, Medvedev welcomed the move, saying:

"I am satisfied common sense prevailed.  Whatever the reasons, European pressure or whatever else, the main thing is that they [Washington] no longer push ahead with their previous ferociousness and senselessness."

Details of the proposed alternative means for the two countries' entry into NATO remain unclear.

On Monday, global shippers pressed for a blockade of Somali waters to stop outgoing pirate ships, the WSJ reported:

"Peter Swift, managing director of the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, said stronger naval action – including aerial and aviation support – is necessary to battle rampant piracy in the Gulf of Aden near Somalia.

[...]

About 20 tankers sail through the sea lane daily.  But many tanker owners are considering a massive detour around southern Africa to avoid pirates, which will delay delivery and push costs up by 30 percent, Mr. Swift said.

The association, whose members own 2,900 tankers or 75 percent of the world's fleet, opposes attempts to arm merchant ships because it could escalate the violence and put crew members at even greater risk, he said."

However, NATO rejected creating a blockade, saying it is beyond the purview of the alliance's mission in the Gulf of Aden:

"U.S. General John Craddock, NATO's supreme allied commander, said Monday the alliance's mandate is solely to escort World Food Program ships to Somalia and to conduct anti-piracy patrols.  Asked what he thought of a Russian proposal to jointly attack the pirate strongholds, Gen. Craddock answered: 'That's far beyond what I've been tasked to do.'"

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer similarly stated, "Blocking ports is not contemplated by NATO.  This is, at the moment, not on the cards."  He added that the blockade did not have the support of the UN Security Council.

Calls for the blockade follow fresh UN sanctions on Somali officials last week:

"Citing the continued lack of security in Somalia as a threat to international peace and security, the UN Security Council on Thursday, November 20, imposed a travel ban and a freeze of financial assets on some individuals considered obstacles to the peace process.

The council also imposed an arms embargo on those individuals or groups to be designated by a UN committee.

The measures are not related to the waves of hijackings of ships by pirates of the Somali coast, but are aimed at strengthening the process of ending lawlessness and violence destabilizing the transitional government."

Despite the insistence that the sanctions are unrelated to the country's piracy problem, timing suggests the recent ship seizures were influential.

Related Post:

• Somali Pirates: Trouble on the High Seas – Peter Cassata

RFE/RL reported today that the office of Russia's Prosecutor-General claims to have evidence that U.S. and other NATO mercenaries participated in the Georgia conflict in August:

"Russia has evidence that citizens from NATO member states including the United States and Turkey fought for Georgia in the five-day August war, Russia's top investigator has said.

[...]

Asked to list the nationalities of the foreign fighters it believes were involved, Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of the Prosecutor-General's investigative committee said: 'America, the Czech Republic, Chechnya, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Turkey.'

'It was a fairly small number of people.  They mainly fulfilled support roles,' Bastrykin told reporters in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg.  He said some had conducted training for the Georgian armed forces.  'There were also two snipers ... one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman,' he said.

He said he considered the presence of foreign fighters a criminal offense and said he would bring it up at a meeting with representatives of Interpol."

Interpol will likely get right on the case...  Georgia's National Security Council secretary Kakha Lomaia replied, "The statement that almost half of the world was fighting in our army in August is just a fantasy of those in the Russian leadership...."  The Russian claims echo accusations made by Putin last month that Ukraine gave military support to Georgia during the invasion:

"[Putin criticized] Ukraine's arms deal with Georgia, its diplomatic support for Tbilisi, and its desire to join NATO.  He speculated that Ukraine may have provided military support for Georgia during its conflict with Russia, RFE/RL reported.  Putin said, 'If this is confirmed, this will be what I have called a crime, because this is termed 'direct involvement in an armed conflict,' pitting Russian and Ukrainian peoples against each other.'"

One can't help but feel this is timed to coincide with the recent controversy over shots fired near the Georgian presidential convoy as it approached the de facto border with South Ossetia.

Amidst all the angst and astonishment about those wild and crazy Somali pirates, we seem to have forgotten that we’ve been through this movie before. It was more than two centuries ago when Muslim pirates were, after England, perhaps the most serious foreign threat bedeviling the new American republic.

"What can be done about the growing threat of Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden?" seems to be the question of the week.  Saturday's seizure of the Saudi ship Sirius Star, an oil tanker carrying about $100 million worth of cargo, set off a wave of pirate activity this week, culminating with news that an Indian frigate sank a pirate vessel late Tuesday.

The latest seizure of a Saudi oil tanker by Somali pirates presents an opportunity to improve relations between Russia and NATO.