Brown to support Obama's Afghan plea - Prime minister will back American call for more Nato troops

[Turborama]

Source: The Observer (UK)

Prime minister will back American call for more Nato troops on his US visit

Toby Helm in London and Paul Harris in New York

Gordon Brown and Barack Obama will plot a joint strategy to persuade other Nato countries to send more troops to Afghanistan when the prime minister makes a historic visit to Washington this week.

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The president recently announced the dispatch of 17,000 more US troops, in addition to the 24,900 already there. Sources in London and Washington insisted last night that Obama would not "demand" more troops from the UK, which currently has an 8,300-strong force taking part in Operation Enduring Freedom, most of them in the danger zone of Helmand province.

"Obama will not be sitting down and saying, give us more British troops," said a senior British official. "It will be about persuading other Nato countries to contribute more."

The two leaders are likely to focus on how to use a Nato summit next month to convince nations including Germany, which has 3,460 troops in Afghanistan, and France, which has 2,780, to significantly raise their numbers and be prepared to commit more to the conflict.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/01/gordon-brown-barack-obama-afghanistan

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A timely reminder of what's next door to Afghanistan...

Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare

Source: NYT

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Deep inside the garrison lies the small compound for Strategic Plans, where Khalid Kidwai keeps the country’s nuclear keys. Now 58, Kidwai is a compact man who hides his arch sense of humor beneath a veil of caution, as if he were previewing each sentence to decide if it revealed too much. In the chaos of Pakistan, where the military, the intelligence services and an unstable collection of civilian leaders uneasily share power, he oversees a security structure intended to protect Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from outsiders — Islamic militants, Qaeda scientists, Indian saboteurs and those American commando teams that Pakistanis imagine, with good reason, are waiting just over the horizon in Afghanistan, ready to seize their nuclear treasure if a national meltdown seems imminent.

In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwai’s modest compound may prove far more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan to close down sanctuaries for terrorists.

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At the end of Bush’s term, his aides handed over to Obama’s transition team a lengthy review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, concluding that in the end, the United States has far more at stake in preventing Pakistan’s collapse than it does in stabilizing Afghanistan or Iraq.

“Only one of those countries has a hundred nuclear weapons,” a primary author of the report said to me. For Al Qaeda and the other Islamists, he went on to say, “this is the home game.” He paused, before offering up the next thought: For anyone trying to keep a nuclear weapon from going off in the United States, it’s our home game, too

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11pakistan-t.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all