Canada

Secretary General's Annual Report: 'For NATO, 2011 was one of the busiest years ever'

Jorge Benitez — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:57:14 -0600

From Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO: Many will remember 2011 as a year of austerity. But it has also been a year of hope. The international community united in its responsibility to protect. Much of the Arab world took a new path forward. And the European Allies showed they were willing and able to lead a new NATO operation.

For NATO, 2011 was one of the busiest years ever. From Libya to Afghanistan and Kosovo, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, the Alliance was committed to protecting its populations and active in upholding its principles and values. We enabled the Afghan security forces to start taking the lead for security for over half of the Afghan population. We successfully concluded our training mission which has contributed to improving Iraq’s security capacity. 2011 was also a benchmark year for reforms. We took significant steps to further streamline our structures, enhance our effectiveness and reduce our costs. At the same time, we strengthened our capabilities in many areas, including the prevention of cyber attacks. And we enhanced our connectivity by increasing cooperation with our partner countries in the Euro-Atlantic area, the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf, as well as with many other countries across the globe. This is a transatlantic Alliance that, despite the economic crisis, has once again demonstrated its commitment, capability and connectivity.

In 2011, our new Strategic Concept was put to the test. This report – the first of its kind – shows that we successfully met that test.

At the start of the year, few would have imagined NATO would be called to protect the people of Libya. But on 31 March, NATO took swift action on the basis of the historic United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. We saved countless lives. And seven months later, we successfully completed our mission. When I visited Tripoli on 31 October, Chairman Jalil of the National Transitional Council told me, “NATO is in the heart of the Libyan people.”

Operation Unified Protector was one of the most remarkable in NATO’s history. It showed the Alliance’s strength and flexibility. European Allies and Canada took the lead; the United States provided critical capabilities; and the NATO command structure unified all those contributions, as well as those of our partners, for one clear goal. In fact, the operation opened a completely new chapter of cooperation with our partners in the region, who called for NATO to act and then contributed actively. It was also an exemplary mission of cooperation and consultation with other organizations, including the United Nations, the League of Arab States, and the European Union. Throughout, NATO proved itself as a force for good and the ultimate force multiplier.

These achievements give me great confidence as I look forward to 2012. Clearly, economic challenges are likely to remain a dominant factor and decisions taken today may shape our world for decades to come. Our task is to make sure we emerge stronger, not weaker, from the crisis we all face. But we can draw great strength from an enduring source: the indivisibility of security between North America and Europe. NATO is a security investment that has stood the test of time for over six decades and continues to deliver real returns for all Allies, year after year.

2012 will be marked by our Chicago Summit in May. This will be an opportunity to renew our commitment to the vital transatlantic bond between us and to redouble our efforts to share the burden of security more effectively. We will take important decisions to keep NATO committed, capable and connected.

Afghanistan remains by far our largest operation, with over 130,000 troops as part of the broadest coalition in history. 50 Allies and partners are determined to ensure the country will never again be a base for global terrorism. Afghanistan is moving into the right direction and transition to Afghan security lead is on track to be completed by the end of 2014. As Afghan security forces grow more confident and capable, our role will continue to evolve into one of support, training and mentoring. But the Chicago Summit will show our commitment to a long-term partnership with Afghanistan, together with the whole international community, beyond 2014.

At Chicago, we will also take measures to improve our capabilities. During our operation in Libya, the United States deployed critical assets, such as drones, precision-guided munitions and air-to-air refuelling. We need such assets to be available more widely among Allies. In the current economic climate, delivering these expensive capabilities will not be easy. But it can be done, and it is critical if we are to respond effectively to the challenges of the future. The answer lies in what I call “smart defence”: doing better with less by working more together. In Chicago, we will deliver real “smart defence” commitments, so that every Ally can contribute to an even more capable Alliance.

NATO’s missile defence system to defend European Allies’ populations, territory and forces against the growing threat of ballistic missile proliferation is “smart defence” at its best and it embodies transatlantic solidarity. We have already made considerable progress. Along with a prominent and phased US contribution, a number of Allies have made significant announcements, including Turkey, Poland, Romania, Spain, the Netherlands and France. These different national contributions will be gradually brought together under a common NATO command and control system. Key elements of it have already been tested successfully and I expect the initial components of the system to be in place by the time of the Chicago Summit.

NATO has invested heavily in its network of partnerships. Continued NATO-Russia cooperation is vital for the security of the Euro-Atlantic area and the wider world. Twenty-two partner countries have troops or trainers on the ground in Afghanistan. And our successful operation to protect the people of Libya could not have taken place without the political and operational support of our partners in the region and beyond. At Chicago, we will recognize the contribution made by our partners who are willing and able to share the security burden with us.

Chicago is about delivering important commitments. Personal commitment, too, has been key to the Alliance’s success. Dedicated civilian and military staff are working in operational theatres and in headquarters to protect our 900 million citizens. They work under demanding and dangerous conditions. This report is a tribute above all to their sacrifice, bravery, and professionalism.

Excerpt from Secretary General’s Annual Report 2011. (photo: NATO)

Canadian Naval officer accused of spying

Jorge Benitez — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:27:20 -0600

From the Globe and Mail: A Canadian Forces officer who served for a decade inside military intelligence has been charged with passing government secrets to foreign interests over the span of four and a half years – a case that threatens this country’s reputation among its closest allies.

The charge is the first ever laid under Canada’s rarely used Security of Information Act, passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The offence carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle, 40, works as an intelligence officer at the Royal Canadian Navy’s HMCS Trinity centre in Halifax. Trinity gathers and analyzes information for warships. It receives intelligence collected by unmanned aerial drones operated from vessels. And perhaps most critically in the eyes of Canada’s international partners, it is a nerve centre for information that is collected and then shared among allies including the United States. . . .

The Mounties would not say whether the allegations involve a country or some other group. CTV reported Monday night that SLt. Delisle passed information on to Russian interests. . . .

The Delisle case has the potential to anger allies because a Canadian military intelligence staffer might have access to the secrets of our allies.

“When it comes to signals intelligence, the league of English-speaking people are joined at the hip … you’d have a hard bargain trying to sell Canadian secrets, wouldn’t you?” said John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.Org website, in an interview. “He’s going to have had access to whatever the Americans have access to.”

The case will likely force the Pentagon to do a damage assessment over the possibility of compromised secrets, Mr. Pike added. Intelligence gathered by naval vessels “is how we keep track of China at sea … how we keep track of Iran and North Korea, their shipments around the world,” he said. (photo: Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

Creating a North Atlantic economic community with Britain in NAFTA

Jorge Benitez — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:06:54 -0600

From Iain Murray and James C. Bennett, the Wall Street Journal: Contrary to an oft-repeated myth, links between Britain and the United States are not reducible to the personal relationships between presidents and prime ministers. The U.S. and the U.K. have always been each other's primary financial partners. A few simple measures could substantially deepen this relationship, especially once Britain no longer needs to adhere to EU rules.

Foremost among these would be to admit a post-EU Britain to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nafta is not a perfect vehicle, but it has the enormous advantage of already existing, with a nearly 20-year track record behind it. And unlike the EU, Nafta would not seek to impose a single social vision on its members. For example, Nafta has had no effect on Canadian social policy, which is very similar to Britain's—except for Canada having more revenue to pay for it all.

The ongoing euro crisis will not be resolved any time soon, and America will continue to be impacted by bank write-downs and declines in U.S.-European trade. Increasing U.S.-U.K. trade would be one relatively quick and effective way of taking up some of the slack.

Up to now, however, the U.S. has pursued a policy of propping up the euro while discouraging British independence from Brussels. This is incredibly short-sighted. Using the vehicles of the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund to try to fill the gaping hole in Europe's finances will get everybody nowhere. Instead, British, American and Canadian policy makers (along with their Nafta partners in Mexico) should be taking the long view and preparing for a future in which the unsustainable euro zone inevitably collapses. Welcoming Britain back into the North Atlantic economic community would be a win-win for all involved.

Mr. Murray is a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. Mr. Bennett is author of "The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). (graphic: Clyde McDonnell)

The colder war: U.S., Russia and others are vying for control of Santa’s back yard

Jorge Benitez — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 16:18:02 -0600

From Heather Conley, the Washington Post: In April, President Obama signed a new command plan that gives NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command greater responsibility in protecting the North Pole and U.S. Arctic territory.

The Arctic region — covering more than 30 million square kilometers and stretching around the territorial borders of Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), Norway, Russia and the United States by way of the Alaskan coastline — is transforming before our eyes. And not just because the ice is melting. It’s increasingly the site of military posturing, and the United States isn’t keeping up with the rest of the world.

In 2009, Norway moved its operational command to its northern territories above the Arctic Circle. Russia has plans to establish a brigade that is specially equipped and prepared for military warfare in Arctic conditions. Denmark has made it a strategic priority to form an Arctic Command. Canada is set to revitalize its Arctic fleet, including spending $33 billion to build 28 vessels over the next 30 years. Even China has entered the Arctic race; it constructed the world’s largest non-nuclear icebreaker to conduct scientific research in the Arctic.

September marked the lowest recorded levels of sea ice in the Northern Polar Region. The polar ice cap today is 40 percent smaller than it was in 1979, and in the summer of 2007 alone, 1 million more square miles of ice beyond the average melted, uncovering an area of open water six times the size of California. As quickly as the polar ice cap recedes, commercial opportunities in the resource-rich Arctic advance. The Arctic is governed by the U.N. convention on the Law of the Sea. That framework allows a coastal state to have exclusive economic control 200 miles off its coast — and possibly to extend authority 600 miles beyond, depending on certain scientific claims.

In the 21st-century Arctic, large corporations and countries are racing to reach and capture the abundance of offshore oil and gas as well as iron ore, nickel, cooper, palladium and rare-earth minerals. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the Arctic contains 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil resources and 30 percent of its gas resources. And as the ice melts, cargo transport could increase from the 111,000 tons in 2010 to more than 1 million tons in 2012, according to some Russian estimates. . . .

But the U.S. strategies and policy statements about the Arctic are poor substitutes for action in the Arctic. And that’s where the United States falls flat. The Coast Guard has no operating bases or stations above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. That means that any search-and-rescue or maritime deployment in the U.S. Arctic Sea is delayed by at least eight hours by air and days by sea. Today, the United States has only one medium-duty operational icebreaker in commission, the Coast Guard Cutter Healy. The Coast Guard’s entire inventory of such vessels includes two heavy icebreakers, Polar Sea and Polar Star, both of which are not operational. The future of this fleet is in Congress’s hands, where the House and Senate are wrangling over funding decisions. . . .

Five years ago, Russia fired cruise missiles over the Arctic in a summer military exercise, resumed surface naval patrols in Arctic waters in 2008, reinforced its strategic nuclear forces in the North, and is currently building eight ballistic missile submarines planned to be completed by 2015. Last year, two Russian strategic bombers carried out a routine patrol mission over the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and were shadowed by a large number of NATO jet fighters, the first time in recent memory that such a large NATO response occurred.

Heather A. Conley is the director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former deputy assistant secretary of state. She is the author of “A New Security Architecture for the Arctic: An American Perspective,” forthcoming from CSIS. (photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

The power of the anglosphere

Jorge Benitez — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:47:23 -0600

From Neil Reynolds, the Globe and Mail: Now, in The New World Order, a study published in November by the London-based Legatum Institute, [American geographer Joel] Kotkin and nine academic associates conclude that the anglosphere will remain the ascendant player on the world stage for a long time to come. . . .

The anglosphere accounts for 26.1 per cent of global GDP ($19-trillion U.S.) – the same share the British Empire held at its height. The sinosphere accounts for 15.1 per cent ($11-trillion); the indosphere 5.4 per cent ($4-trillion). On a per-capita basis, the anglosphere leads by lopsided margins: the anglosphere, $45,000 per person; the sinosphere, $7,500 per person; the indosphere, $4,000 per person.

“Today, the anglosphere is predominantly a union of language, culture and shared values,” Mr. Kotkin says, with a population of 400 million. Beyond the anglosphere itself, two billion other people live in countries with a strong English-language bias: the countries of the Commonwealth, for example, and Singapore – which, its Chinese population notwithstanding, is a country where English is dominant.

“Since the Second World War, English has replaced French, Russian and German as the primary language of business and science,” Mr. Kotkin notes. English is now spoken by 40 per cent of Europeans, French by just 20 per cent.

Further, the ascendancy of English in Asia, Mr. Kotkin says, “all but cements its status as the world’s ‘world language.’ ” The number of Chinese who speak English will soon outnumber the English-speaking population of the anglosphere itself. . . .

Of the top 500 software companies in the world, 450 are based in the anglosphere.

Equally important, Mr. Kotkin says, is the unique capacity of the anglosphere to attract immigrants – and its ability to “incorporate” cultures. In the past 10 years alone, 14 million people have emigrated to the anglosphere, among them 27 per cent of the 20,000 Chinese entrepreneurs whose incomes exceed $15-million a year. (graphic: britainandamerica.com) (via Real Clear World)

The end of military interventions or the rise of R2P?

Jorge Benitez — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:12:06 -0600

From Doug Saunders, the Globe and Mail: Ten years and seven weeks ago, this paper’s front-page headline read, in banner letters, “Canadians head off to war.” That would become the longest, and possibly the most controversial, military combat operation in Canadian history. On Thursday, with the lowering of the Maple Leaf flag at Kandahar Air Force base, it effectively came to an end: For the first time in more than a decade, Canada is not at war. . . .

It’s popular nowadays to say, for understandable reasons, that we should get out of the military-intervention business forever, and stick to blue-helmet United Nations peacekeeping, like we did before 1991. (The Persian Gulf war that year was Canada’s first full-fledged military commitment since Korea in the 1950s).

I can almost sympathize. But then I remember the horrible years of 1994 and 1995, when more than 500,000 Rwandans were hacked to death in a matter of weeks because peacekeepers weren’t allowed to stop them, and tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and thousands of Serbs and Croats were killed in terrible ways because the blue helmets were obligated to stand by and watch. . . .

The “humanitarian war” became the oxymoron of our age. Canada tried to codify it into international policy with the creation of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, an obligation to intervene to stop atrocities, which prime minister Jean Chrétien had the misfortune of attempting to sell to world leaders shortly after president George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. Its principles sounded far too much like the Iraq war’s cobbled-together self-justifications.

The R2P doctrine sprung back to life this year, because it was used to make the legal case for the Libya operation. But I doubt it could ever become a universal code: We’ll never intervene in Zimbabwe or Tibet, because we’d have no support from the surrounding countries and zero chance of success. We decided against intervening in Sudan’s Darfur catastrophe, in part because there was a good chance it would make things worse.

I fear that Libya will be seen as a precedent, rather than an exception. Or that Bosnia will be forgotten, and a “humanitarian corridor” to Syria will become another peacekeeping quagmire. But I also fear that another genocidal massacre will be allowed to pass without comment. War is hell, but it’s not the only one. (photo: Surghar Daily) (via Real Clear World)

NATO is a shell of its former self

Jorge Benitez — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:58:02 -0600

From J.L. Granatstein,the Ottowa Citizen: The budgetary chaos abroad and in Washington has clear implications for Canada. Thus far, the Harper government has maintained its support for the Canadian Forces, planning only the five- to 10-per-cent cuts that are to be visited on all departments and agencies as a deficit-fighting measure. But there are clear warning signs. The F-35 may be a wonderful aircraft, but if the British, Americans and Italians and others reduce their orders, the project might die or, at a minimum, face sharply increased per-aircraft costs.

The $9 billion Ottawa seems prepared to spend — even if almost no one except the defence minister really believes that figure — will skyrocket. If DND sticks to buying the F-35, therefore, other items will need to go. The big naval procurement plans, proudly announced a few weeks back, will certainly be slowed. So will the army’s Close Combat Vehicle project, the refurbishment of the Light Armored Vehicle fleet, and myriad other programs. Some informed sources have even suggested that the army’s nine infantry battalions might be reduced to six. And the government is cutting DND wherever it can, even slashing its small contribution to NATO’s AWACS fleet of airborne warning aircraft.

What all this means for the Canadian Forces and NATO seems clear. The Canadian Forces’ expeditionary capacity will be reduced, for if the U.S. and the U.K. are cutting their capacity, Canada certainly is not going to deploy its forces abroad on its own. The world does not look any more peaceful than it did a few years ago, but NATO’s ability, the United States’ ability, and the Canadian Forces’ ability — and willingness — to send troops abroad is decreasing. If the Libyan revolt had begun in 2013, say, rather than in 2011, the alliance’s capacity to deploy against Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s regime would have been limited indeed. As it was, the Royal Air Force, short of pilots and planes, could barely manage to play its part in Libya, and the Americans — for political as much as military reasons, to be sure — played a modest role after the first days.

NATO, in other words, is becoming a shell of its former self, a weak, financially wracked alliance that can do little now and even less in the near future. Perhaps it’s time for Canada, as it contemplates its own need to reduce defence spending, to begin asking if NATO still really matters.

Historian J.L. Granatstein is a senior research fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. (photo: NATO) (via Real Clear World)

Appathurai: R2P does not always lead to NATO Op

Jorge Benitez — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:42:25 -0600

From AFP: NATO on Sunday guarded against “unrealistic expectations” for peace and democracy in the Middle East and North Africa as violence flared in Syria and Egypt.

“The whole region is going through a complicated, difficult process of reform,” James Appathurai, NATO deputy assistant secretary general for political affairs and security policy, told a defense summit in Canada.

“I think it’s important for the public not to have unrealistic expectations about how quickly this will happen or that the outcome is necessarily foreseen to be the one we might wish it to be,” he told reporters.

“So, we have to be patient, offer support where we can, we can’t impose it, and that’s what we’re doing. . . .”

Appathurai reaffirmed that action in Syria was not on the table.

“There is no discussion of a NATO role with regard to Syria,” he said. “Responsibility to protect doesn’t automatically translate into a NATO operation.” (photo: NATO)