Italian soldiers of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force stand guard in a tank near their base in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 27.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been the most successful military alliance in history. But NATO is confronting massive challenges today, in many ways more perplexing and explosive than during the Cold War, when its existence was credibly justified to its publics by the threat of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union disintegrated long ago. And new threats and dangers to the alliance and its cohesion are neither state actors nor confined to Europe, NATO’s traditional area of responsibility.
NATO has bet its future on succeeding in Afghanistan, where, for the first time ever, the alliance is fighting a land war. The European Union has eclipsed NATO as the pre-eminent European structure in European political, social and economic integration.
NATO suffers from inter-alliance strains, such as with Turkey and America’s global war on terror and intra-alliance tensions over enlargement of member states and missile defense that antagonize Russia. And it must resolve the most profound and testing dilemma of all--maintaining a strong, cohesive military alliance long after the military threat that created it has imploded.
Throughout its nearly 60 years of life, NATO has always been at one dramatic crossroad or another. Some argue that NATO has outlived its usefulness, as war between major European powers thankfully is nonexistent. Instead of the border between East and West Germany serving as the main battle line, Afghanistan is now NATO’s center of gravity and Achilles’ heel.
In 2006, NATO took command of the entire International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, consisting of about 32,000 personnel. But civil reforms have not taken hold there. Drug production seems impervious to counternarcotics efforts and continues to increase. Corruption reigns.
The courts, legal system and police forces have yet to become fully functional. And while NATO has won every battle against the Taliban, the insurgency still grows.
Casualties especially for the Netherlands and Canada have weakened domestic support. Those governments may choose to extend deployments for another year, but beyond that is problematic.
Other allies have set “national caveats“ on the use of their forces, greatly restricting combat roles and alienating other allies whose militaries bear the brunt of the fighting. Expenses are mounting. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has yet to win control over its own country. And, NATO governments still refuse to deploy the required troop strengths.
The future status of Kosovo, given powerful Russian resentment against independence, challenges NATO. With a total of some 55,000 troops deployed worldwide, member states’ militaries are stretched. The NATO Response Force was originally a highly capable force of 25,000 prepared to deploy outside Europe within 60 days for extended periods. Within months, it was clear those numbers could not be sustained. So, last week’s meeting of NATO defense ministers in the Netherlands had no choice but to reduce the response force by as-an-yet-undetermined number. These and other issues attack and erode the integrity of and political support for the alliance.
If NATO is to remain viable, two vital steps are needed now. NATO requires a credible rationale persuasive enough to convince cynical or skeptical publics that the need for the alliance remains critical and possibly even more so than in the past. To achieve this, a new strategic direction must be created. The point of departure is to transition beyond a military alliance to one that deals more broadly and comprehensively with collaborative security.
Neutralizing extremism, reducing or preventing instability, protecting energy and national infrastructure, preventing proliferation of nasty and dangerous weapons and conducting humanitarian relief and reconstruction are all candidate roles toward which NATO has been moving.
However, any change in strategic missions and indeed for altering the very basis for the alliance must be approved by all 26 members, a daunting task at best. That will take time, but action must start now before the internal and external forces impinging on the alliance grow too powerful to keep cohesion and common purpose intact.
WASHTIMES.COM

It’s an unlikely recipe for peace: Take one unpopular Israeli prime minister still suffering from setbacks in Lebanon; add one politically weak Palestinian president who has lost control of part of his territory; fold in lukewarm support from Arab states. Now, beat the mixture with an energetic secretary of state and cook over high heat.
The diplomat in the chef’s hat, Condoleezza Rice, hopes to produce something palatable in time for a big peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, in late November or the first half of December.
The conference will bring together Israelis and Palestinians, along with a coterie of Arab and international officials. The goal is a document that will commit everyone to creation of a Palestinian state and recognition of the state of Israel.
Will it work? The answer will become clear during the next several weeks as Rice pushes both sides to draft the document that will open the conference. But already, Rice is adjusting the recipe--making the process simpler and less demanding--in ways that lower expectations and, in that sense, make success more likely.
Here’s a summary of what’s cooking, drawn from US, Arab and Israeli sources. What’s clear is that Rice’s strategy has shifted slightly in the past several months, as she has encountered some of the realities of Middle East diplomacy. She now views the Annapolis meeting as the beginning of final negotiations, rather than as an end in itself.
Rice’s goal when she launched this new diplomatic initiative last spring was to move toward discussion of the so-called “final status“ issues that would determine the shape of a Palestinian state. The working assumption was that both sides understood the basic outlines of the final deal: Israel would withdraw to roughly its pre-1967 boundaries; there would be an exchange of territory to allow Israel to keep its big settlements around Beit-ul-Moqaddas, and for the Palestinians to open a corridor between the West Bank and Gaza. And, on the toughest issues, Israel would cede control of much of Arab East Beit-ul-Moqaddas and the Palestinians would accept that refugees could return only to the Palestinian state.
As Rice began prodding the two sides to draft language on the shape of the deal, she concluded that if she pushed too hard for compromises in the run-up to the Annapolis conference, the process might implode.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas would be denounced by more militant Israelis and Palestinians. The issue wasn’t simply the Annapolis document, she decided, but what would come the day after.
Rice also realized that it would be necessary for the United States to offer its own “bridging language“ on key issues. That was partly because the two sides had such different views of what the document should contain. The Palestinians wanted a lengthy blueprint for their new state; the Israelis wanted a postcard-size announcement of everyone’s commitment in principle to a two-state solution.
The bridging process has been evident over the past month as the two sides sought to marry the security guarantees promised in the existing “road map“ with the Annapolis document and its “political horizon.“
The hang-up was that under the road map, the Israelis demanded security measures as a precondition for further movement. To break the logjam, Rice’s team drafted compromise language that allows the US to act as arbiter of whether the road map’s security conditions are being met.
The hope is that during the next several weeks, negotiators can craft a document that commits both sides to end the conflict through creation of a Palestinian state and Arab recognition of Israel.
The document would list the issues that must be resolved as part of this final deal. But it wouldn’t force Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to walk the plank on Jerusalem and refugees, for now. Agreement on these deal-breakers would come later.
DAILYSTAR,CO.LB

Is Scotland on the way to separating from England, turning the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland into something different, maybe a federal kingdom?
The possibility used to be considered remote. After all the Union of Scotland and England has been in place for 300 years--since 1707--cemented by detailed institutional and political terms.
And the two nations shared a common monarch for about 100 years before that. It has been a very profitable union, bringing enormous benefits to both sides.
But now a number of forces have come bubbling and hissing to the surface which are threatening seriously to unravel this marriage, with major implications for both parties.
The first and most immediate of these is that Scotland now has a devolved Executive, or “Government“ as it is now called, which is run by the Scottish National Party.
In the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh this is the party that has a narrow majority and which keeps in place Scotland’s “First Minister,“ the unquestionably able Alex Salmond. This gives Salmond and his party direct control over a large range of “devolved“ matters, including social security, education, transport, courts, police and fire services and many other areas.
Scotland can make new laws on all these subjects and even has the power to vary the standard rate of income tax by a few pence --a power it has not so far been keen to use.
The unambiguous and eventual goal of the ruling Scottish National Party is an independent Scotland. Many of its members feel they are on their way.
The second factor is the growing resentment by the English that the Scots enjoy a number of social benefits not available to the English, including free health prescriptions, free long-term care for the elderly and free student tuition in their universities.
Why, ask some English voices, do the Scots receive more public expenditure per head of the population, enabling them to be more generous in their benefits? What have they done to deserve it?
The third factor--a truly ticking time-bomb--is that in the Westminster Parliament the members elected from Scottish constituencies are at present allowed to vote on English social and other domestic issues, while neither they nor their English colleagues can touch similar Scottish issues. These have been handed over to the Scottish administration and Parliament in Edinburgh.
The situation is made even hotter by the fact that the vast majority of these Scottish parliamentarians at Westminster are Labour and provide the Labour government with its majority to keep it in power. Deny these Scottish members a vote on certain issues at Westminster and the current government would lose its majority on a whole range of domestic English measures, being unable to muster a majority except on such national issues as defense and foreign policy, and overall budgetary and monetary policy.
The more that English MPs and commentators grow restive at this state of affairs in London, the louder grow the demands of breakaway nationalists in Edinburgh that Scotland should separate altogether.
Their finances, they argue, would be underpinned by revenues from North Sea oil, of which Scotland claims the lion’s share and which at present all flow into the national tax “pool“ instead of being dedicated to the Scots alone.
There is a still deeper, but more powerful influence at work, fanning the flames of separatism. This is the widespread belief that the age of small nations has arrived. Scotland looks across the North Atlantic to tiny countries like Estonia or Latvia, both of which are prospering, and argues that it can do as well or better.
Its defense can be secured by membership in NATO and the European Union. It no longer needs, so the nationalists say, the English big brother to look after it.
These are powerful and persuasive sentiments. But there is one colossal flaw in the whole nationalist and separatist thesis. Scots and English are intertwined, inter-married and intermingled. Scotland was never a lesser nation annexed unwillingly by the British. On the contrary it was a Scottish king who took over the British throne and Scottish leaders who agreed to the bargain of the Union.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

On the day that North Korea took the first step toward disabling its nuclear reactor, the upcoming return of an accused financier trumped the nuclear issue as the headline-grabbing issue in South Korea’s hard-fought presidential campaign.
The US State Department described the decision to extradite Kim Gyeong-jun as a routine matter, but South Korean conservatives saw it as a sign of US anxiety to stay on the good side of the government in Seoul at a sensitive time in US-Korean relations.
Aides and advisers to the conservative presidential candidate, Lee Myung-bak, went into overdrive in anticipation of the trouble Kim may cause when he arrives in South Korea in about two weeks to face trial on charges of embezzling more than US$40 million from companies in which Lee was once a partner.
The fear is that Kim under interrogation by prosecutors will try to draw Lee into the net, implicating him in an asset management firm known by the initials BBK in which he says Lee was a partner and Lee claims only to have been an investor. Kim withdrew his appeal against extradition on October 18, giving the US State Department the 60 days required by law in which to send him back before the election on December 19.
No sooner had word come from Washington that the State Department had gone along with the extradition, as ordered by a California court, than Lee’s camp convened an emergency meeting to decide how to fight the case from both public relations and legal viewpoints.
Ideally, said conservatives, the scandal will blow over, and Lee will remain far ahead of his closest rival, Chung Dong-young, a former unification minister and candidate of the United New Democratic Party, an amalgam of factions that shares the common goal of perpetuating the government’s policy of reconciliation with North Korea.
Ideally for liberals and leftists, prosecutors will summon Lee for intensive questioning, forcing him to detour off the campaign trail while his image appears on front pages and on TV news walking in and out of interrogation sessions. The worst-case scenario is that prosecutors will ask a court to “detain“ Lee--that is, hold him for more interrogation and possible indictment.
Such an extreme measure, commonplace in investigations of massive corruption, is seen as highly unlikely, however, considering the crisis it would precipitate. “They will not do that,“ predicted one official, talking anonymously. “The case will not be that serious.“
Lee Bang-ho, secretary general of the opposition Grand National Party (GNP), was quoted by Yonhap, the government-owned news agency, as saying that top GNP aides had “held an urgent discussion to come up with strategies“ immediately after getting word that Kim would be returning.
That session was undoubtedly of far greater import to Lee than a meeting in Beijing between US nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill and his long-time North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan before a US team flew to Pyongyang for the very first step in disabling the North Korean nuclear complex.
“BBK“, as the case is known, and the nuclear issue are intertwined, however, in the fabric of a US-Korean relationship that has rarely been so delicately woven--or in such danger of shredding.
The US, steadfastly clinging to the US-Korean alliance, is parrying pressure to drop North Korea from the State Department’s list of nations sponsoring terrorism and then to agree on a “peace treaty“ with North Korea formally ending the Korean War.
The US administration, seemingly hard line toward North Korea in the first few years after the inauguration of President George W Bush to his first term in 2000, has grown increasingly enthusiastic about six-party talks that resulted in the nuclear agreement of February 13 under which North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear program.
ATIMES.COM