91Èȱ¬

It'll soon be make-your-mind-up time about Iran.

When Russia and China join the rest of the world in condemning Iran for lack of cooperation over its uranium enrichment programme (Cuba, Venezuela and Malaysia were the only countries to vote against the IAEA resolution last week), you can be pretty sure things are getting serious again.

A couple of months ago, it looked as if Iran might be prepared to go along with the idea that it should open up its hitherto-undisclosed nuclear research plant at Qom and send its low-enriched uranium to Russia to be further enriched so that it could be used for medical purposes. (I wrote about it at the time here.)

But since then, there's been no progress - and now Tehran has that it plans to build 10 more uranium enrichment plants to produce fuel for a big expansion of a nuclear power programme.

So what's going on? Is Tehran just stringing the UN along, dropping tantalising hints every now and again that it might be prepared to cooperate, while all the time carrying on with its enrichment programme?

Or is there is a behind-the-scenes power struggle under way, with different factions in Tehran fighting for supremacy?

The former White House Iran expert Gary Sick argues that the apparent hardening of the Iranian position is a sign that following the bitterly disputed presidential election in June, the Revolutionary Guards have in effect seized power.

He writes on the website: "I am personally convinced that the Revolutionary Guard Corps is now rapidly becoming the dominant force in Iranian politics--greater than President Ahmadinejad, and greater even than Ayatollah Khamenei himself, though the pasdaran [Revolutionary Guards] and others continue to pay lip service to his "leadership."

"I base this judgment, among other things, on the fact that senior leaders of the pasdaran no longer have any compunction about taking positions that differ from those of the President or the Supreme Leader; yet neither the President nor the Supreme Leader ever dare disagree with the pasdaran."

Whoever is calling the shots in Tehran, the Obama administration will soon have to decide what to do. There are three options: keep trying to talk, but in the knowledge that Iran may, despite its consistent denials, be well on the way to developing a nuclear weapons capacity; introduce a Security Council resolution to mandate tougher sanctions, but in the knowledge that they may have only a marginal effect, if that; or start gearing up for a possible military strike, as is being urged by Israel.

Steven Simon at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations has written a detailed piece about how Israel may be tempted to go it alone with military strikes against Iran's known nuclear facilities.

He says: "Israel is capable of carrying out these attacks unilaterally. Its F-16 and F-15 aircraft, equipped with conformal fuel tanks and refueled with 707-based and KC-130 tankers toward the beginning and end of their flight profiles, have the range to reach the target set, deliver their payloads in the face of Iranian air defenses, and return to their bases.

"The munitions necessary to penetrate the targets are currently in Israel's inventory in sufficient numbers; they include Bomb Live Unit (BLU)-109 and BLU 113 bombs that carry two thousand and five thousand pounds, respectively, of high-energy explosives. These GPS-guided weapons are extremely accurate and can be lofted from attacking aircraft fifteen kilometers from their target, thereby reducing the attackers' need to fly through air defenses. Israel also has a laser-guided version of these bombs that is more accurate than the GPS variant and could deploy a special-operations laser designation unit to illuminate aim points as it is reported to have done in the attack on the al-Kibar facility in Syria."

But of course if Israel were to decide to send its bombers to Iran, they would need to cross Iraq first, and that would mean either getting permission from Washington, or running the risk of US air force interceptors scrambling to stop them.

Steven Simon argues that it is very much in US interests to ensure that things don't get to that point. "Israel is not eager for war with Iran, or to disrupt its special relationship with the United States. But the fact remains that it considers the Iranian threat an existential one and its bilateral relationship with the United States a durable one, and will act if it perceives momentous jeopardy to the Israeli people or state."

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I have a question for you: where have more US military personnel died this year - in Afghanistan, or Iraq?

Afghanistan, of course, is the right answer: 297 deaths so far this year, compared to 144 in Iraq. (There have so far been 98 UK military deaths in Afghanistan.)

But it's also the wrong answer. Because more US men and women in uniform have committed suicide this year - at least 334 - than have died in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

I mention it because it's worth taking into account as we prepare for President Obama's announcement next Tuesday evening (Wednesday morning if you're in the UK) on his plans for future military deployments in Afghanistan.

He knows that for tens of thousands of American military families - and for many, many more who live in their communities - what matters is not only how many men and women are killed in action, but how deep are the scars, both physical and mental, that they bear long after they have returned home.

So my hunch is that the President will present his decision next week as a strategy for getting out of Afghanistan. This, he will say, is what we intend to do so that we can leave the place to its own people, knowing that we have given them a decent chance of running it themselves.

I suggest that you look not so much at how many extra troops he's decided to send (32-35,000 seems to be the current best estimate), but where he's sending them and what he's asking them to do. Because according to many analysts, there's now a growing realisation in Washington that killing Taliban fighters doesn't get you very far.

One of the most common questions that policy-makers get asked when they're making decisions about military deployments is: "How will we know when we've won?" After all, no one expects the Taliban to sign a formal surrender document.

So, the usual answer is: when the people of Afghanistan can be relatively confident that they and their families are secure, and when there is a degree of political stability that looks likely to last.

Take a look at how other insurgencies in the region have been tackled. According to Paul Staniland, writing on the website , the usual deal involves "messy and ambiguous bargains that states make with armed groups and local political actors combining accommodation, coercion, bribery, and coexistence."

He calls it "ugly stability". "The government accepts that insurgents will continue to control parts of their own community, but insurgents know that pushing the state too hard can trigger a crackdown. Governments flip over some former insurgents to act as pro-state militias, insurgents and warlords sponsor normal politicians, and both sides become linked to peripheral war economies. A strange but often enduring quasi-stability can persist, whether in Karachi, the Bodo hills, or Nagaland."

In other words, it's not anything like what you'll find in Westminster or Washington, but in a way, it works. And it's an approach that closely resembles what a US army special operations officer, Major Jim Grant, is reported to have outlined in a paper called "One Tribe at a Time: A strategy for Success in Afghanistan."

According to Fred Kaplan, of , Grant's premise is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will. Its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes - and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well."

So is this the picture that's emerging? Forget all that stuff about democracy and women's rights - what this is about now is getting out as quickly as possible without leaving behind too much of a mess. According to an increasing number of analysts, that's likely to be the best offer available.

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The Euro-chatterati can be divided broadly into two camps, following the choice of Herman van Rompuy and Cathy Ashton as EU council president and foreign policy chief respectively. In the words of a leader on Saturday: "Supporters of the European Union are dismayed, just as Eurosceptics are sneeringly exultant."

But just for the sake of argument - and simply in the interest of encouraging some debate - let us suppose there is a third camp, those who might suggest that for the people who live in the EU, this could have been something of a triumph.

Let us take the Financial Times leader-writer's viewpoint: "By lasering in on the lowest common denominator ... leaders of the big member-states ... reveal themselves as geopolitical pygmies."

If you were seeking to contradict that in a debate, I suppose you could reply: "On the contrary: by insisting that unelected officials must remain clearly and unambiguously subservient to the elected leaders of all member-states, the leaders have shown themselves to have a better understanding of what democracy means than some leader-writers."

And you could point to a comment elsewhere in the FT (in the print edition only, not the online version, oddly): an anonymous US official is quoted as saying "Selecting a foreign minister with next to no foreign policy experience has sent a discouraging and disappointing signal to anxious US allies."

Foreign minister? Who said anything about a foreign minister, you might ask. And you might in turn quote the FT's own Brussels bureau chief, : "Perhaps the real winners are the EU's governments and the cross-national centre-right and centre-left political party groups that dominate the European parliament."

In other words, you might suggest, the people who have actually been elected to represent the EU's 375 million voters.

The core of the Euro-enthusiasts' case is to be found elsewhere in that same FT article: "Globalisation is pushing the world into an age of unsentimental Great Power politics, in which Europe must get its act together to avoid being pushed to the sidelines by Brazil, China, India, Russia, the US and so on. The EU's remedy is the Lisbon Treaty, a set of reforms intended to strengthen its cohesion and upgrade its global influence."

To which you might reply - if you still had the energy and appetite to debate these matters: "Fine, if that is the case, let us elect an EU president and an EU foreign minister so that they can meet all those other leaders as equals." Because the big difference between Brazil, China, India, etc. on the one hand, and the EU on the other, you might argue, is that the former are all independent nation states, and the EU is not.

But you would have to concede that whenever EU voters have been asked if they want the EU to resemble more closely a nation-state, or super-state, they tend to have answered with a resounding No. Which, you might suggest, could be why the EU leaders decided to do the choosing themselves.

Let me make it clear: it is not my intention to advance any particular argument. I just think these are interesting, and important, issues to consider.

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When you were at school, did you ever want to be friends with someone who just didn't want to be your friend? However nice you were to them, they simply ignored you?

Now, I wouldn't dream of comparing Barack Obama to a friendless school-child - after all, he's probably one of the most popular men in the world, and a former Harvard law professor as well - but he doesn't seem to be having too much luck at the moment making new friends among the people who count.

Iran, China, Cuba - you name it, he's tried to be friendly. But wherever he goes, whomever he talks to, they all seem to be disciples of the 19th century British statesman Lord Palmerston: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

Take Iran, for example: what do its leaders think are their nation's eternal and perpetual interests? To do what Washington (and, to be fair, many other governments too) wants them to do? Or to plough on with what looks to many like a secret nuclear weapons programme in order to emerge as a regional nuclear power?

Or take China. Where do its interests lie? In forming a strategic alliance with the US, or with continuing its economic development while keeping a firm lid on political pluralism?

If you were sitting in Beijing, or Tehran, or even Pyongyang, and the message came from Washington: "Hey, we've got a new guy in charge, and he wants to be friends", what would your immediate reaction be?

Would it be: "Oh, that's nice, let's tell him we want to be friends too", or would it be: "Hmm, how can we get something out of this?"

I don't want to over-simplify: it is perfectly possible, of course, for leaders to act in what they perceive to be their national interest and also to form alliances, or friendships, with former adversaries. But Palmerston's view was that it's the interests that come first, not the friendships.

Now, if you're the man in the White House - and you passionately believe that it should be possible to find common ground even with former adversaries - it can be a challenge to work out what to do if your faith in the power of shared interests isn't reciprocated.

What do you do about Iran, for example, if they seem to be stringing you along, saying that they might, one day, like to be your friend, but not just yet. What do you do about China, which seems to be making a lot of the right noises about reducing carbon gas emissions, but - again - not just yet.

"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," was Churchill's too-often quoted maxim. But if the other lot don't fancy jaw-jaw, do you perhaps need a Plan B that stops short of war-war?

The Obama line is that it's still early days. It takes time to create a new global diplomatic discourse; no one should expect new friendships to be formed overnight. And the White House can claim some success: there's little doubt now that there will be a useful US-Russia nuclear stockpile reduction agreement soon, and Moscow seems to be closer to Washington than it used to be on the idea of some tougher sanctions against Iran.

We'll be returning to some of these questions in January, when we'll be taking stock of Obama's foreign policy achievements on the first anniversary of his inauguration, with the help of some of Washington's leading public policy pundits.

More on that nearer the time, but meanwhile, just a very brief toot on the trumpet: I wrote a month ago that I didn't think Tony Blair was going to be chosen as President of the EU Council. And last night, he wasn't.

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Would there be less interest in it if we called the job-that-Tony-Blair-perhaps-wants the chairman of the EU rather than the President?

Might all the fuss be the result of a mis-translation? I ask, following a letter in the Financial Times recently which pointed out that the French word "president" can be translated both as "president" and as "chairman", as in chairman of the board of directors of a company.

You could argue that the job description as at Article 9B of the sounds rather more chairman-like than president-like.

Here's what it says:

The President of the European Council:
(a) shall chair it and drive forward its work;
(b) shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European
Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the
basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;
(c) shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European
Council;
(d) shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings
of the European Council.

The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity,
ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

After all, the man who started this whole process rolling was former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing. And I think we can safely assume that he wrote the original in French.

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Do you remember the floods of summer 2007, when some parts of England suffered more than twice as much rain as the average? On one day alone in London (20 July), Heathrow airport cancelled more than 140 flights, and 25 stations on the London Underground were closed. There was huge disruption affecting millions of people.

Now, fast forward to 2012. The opening ceremony of the London Olympics: 27 July. And just suppose it comes after two solid weeks of unusually heavy rain. Public transport has been disrupted, power supplies are down, in some places, food is running short. Could London cope? Are planners already trying to work out what they would do?

It would be what's known in the trade as a "low probability, high consequence event"; in other words, it's not very likely to happen, but if it does, it'll have very serious consequences. And it is directly relevant to the current debates over climate change, in the run-up to the international climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen next month.

I spent a day discussing all this at a conference earlier this week, organised jointly by The World Tonight, the foreign affairs think-tank , the journal , and the scientific academy . (You can hear the discussion that we broadcast at the end of the conference by clicking below.)

It was one of those conferences that leave you with plenty to think about. So here's some of what I learned:

-- Planners are already working on "worst case" climate change scenarios. They regard climate change as a "threat multiplier"; in other words, all the other challenges that we may face over the coming decades -- food security, access to clean water, increased demand for energy -- become even more acute because of climate change.

-- But traditional planning theory is based on the assumption that certain things will remain constant: rainfall in the future will be more or less the same as in the past; water flow in major rivers will remain pretty much what it was. If constants become variables as a result of climate change, how do you make your plans?

-- In the Himalayas, average temperatures are already rising much faster than elsewhere. Glaciers are melting rapidly, which means that water flow in the major rivers, which depends on ice melting in the summer, is already down by 60 per cent or more.

-- One quarter of all humanity depends on that water; and three of the nations in which those people live are nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, and China. Military forces in those countries are "war gaming" how they would deal with a major water crisis.

-- Black carbon, soot, is one of the major causes of warmer temperatures in the Himalaya region because millions of people heat their homes and cook their food on open fires. But black carbon is not a carbon gas, so it will form no part of the discussions at the Copenhagen conference next month.

-- The US Department of Energy has set up an Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence to provide detailed analysis of all available data on energy and climate-related issues. The US government regards the possibility of climate change-inspired conflict as a major potential security threat.

-- Some intelligence officials worry about what they call "organisational adaptive disabilities"; in other words, they fear that governments simply aren't up to the job of dealing with some of the scenarios under consideration.

(Our editor, Alistair Burnett, has written about the reporting of climate change issues on the 91Èȱ¬ Editors blog here.)

By the way, did you hear about the major power cuts that hit much of Brazil this week and left nearly 60 million people in the dark? Unusually strong storms brought down power lines, apparently, and knocked out all electricity supplies to Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and several other major cities. (Brazil will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Think about it ...)

But yes, I did pick up one bit of good news: the global economic slow-down has resulted in a significant reduction in the emission of carbon gases. We've got about four more years than would otherwise have been the case.

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I suspect you've been reading and hearing quite a lot about Afghanistan over the past few days. But how much have you been reading about Pakistan?

The shooting dead on Tuesday of five British servicemen by an Afghan police officer whom they'd been training seems to have brought to a head many of the nagging questions that a lot of people have been asking about the whole Afghan operation.

Can we trust them? Is it worth it? Might it be better just to leave them to get on with it?

In Washington and London, the answers from government are Yes, Yes, and No. As I write, Gordon Brown has just re-stated his government's determination to stay the course - Britain, he says, "will not be deterred, dissuaded or diverted."

Meanwhile, in Pakistan ...

The army is conducting a huge operation against Taliban fighters in the border region of South Waziristan. No foreign observers or reporters are allowed anywhere near the scene, other than on tightly-escorted trips ... so we have no idea what's happening. But it's hugely difficult terrain, and it has defeated countless military operations before.

The government has been told to its face, by Hillary Clinton on her recent visit, that Washington doubts its resolve in dealing with jihadi insurgents. Many Western analysts believe that some army elements are still quietly backing jihadis based in Punjab, close to the border with India, even as the military are battling against their fellow-jihadis at the other end of the country.

Why? Because to many of the military top brass, even after everything that has happened over the past two to three years, it's India that remains Public Enemy Number 1, not jihadi fighters. And if some jihadi groups can continue to make trouble for India in Kashmir - and let's not forget the attacks in Mumbai a year ago - well, that, they seem to think, is bound to be good for Pakistan.

Looked at from Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military HQ, India is a military giant: its standing army, including reservists, is more than 3 million strong, making it the second largest military force in the world, after China. And a substantial chunk of that military might is stationed along the border with Pakistan.

The Obama administration insists that it recognises the crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan as inextricably linked. Hence that ugly name AfPak for its strategic approach. But for the simple reason that there are US troops dying in Afghanistan, and not in Pakistan, that's where the attention is focused. (And because British troops are dying there too, we hear far more here about the Af than the Pak.)

So what flows from all this? Well, it's cerainly true that Pakistan is in a permanent state of crisis. It is used to weak government, rampant corruption and insecurity. I've lost count of the number of times I've read - or even written - that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Perhaps if the political leaders of Pakistan and India were able to do more to improve their relationship, then their military chiefs would stop glowering at each other with thousands of troops stationed more or less permanently on their borders. And then, perhaps, they could turn their attention to their domestic insurgents.

(The so-called Naxalite insurgency in India goes almost wholly unreported ... did you know, for example, that just a couple of months ago, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Naxalites, or Maoists, as "perhaps the gravest internal security threat our country faces"?)

My point is this: yes, of course, Afghanistan has to remain the priority as long as our governments are sending troops there to fight and die. But Pakistan remains a serious issue, with a gruesome series of bomb attacks over recent weeks already beginning to dull the senses with their frequency.

Perhaps the fog will clear a bit after President Obama has announced what he intends to do about the US military's request for tens of thousands more troops for Afghanistan. But the truth is that there is no end in sight. And things could get a lot worse before they get better.

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On Sunday 2 November 1975, the renowned Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead outside Ostia, near Rome. I was the one who broke the news to the world.

I was working for Reuters in Rome at the time, and was sitting quietly in the office minding my own business when a colleague from the Italian news agency ANSA, in whose building Reuters was then based, popped in to tell me the news. (In those days, ANSA didn't start up its news service till after lunch on Sundays - happy days!)

I phoned the police in Ostia to check it out, they confirmed what I had been told, and Reuters had the scoop. The police version of events was that Pasolini had picked up a young male prostitute in central Rome, taken him to Ostia for sex, and then the young man had attacked him and run him over in his own car, in which he was arrested some hours later.

But Italy in the 70s was a place rife with rumours. Pasolini was a man of the Left, and a dissident - many on the Left didn't believe the official version of how he met his death and suspected that political, even State-linked, opponents had killed him. As Geoff Andrews recalls in a fascinating piece at :

"Pasolini had made many enemies. In the weeks leading up to his murder he had condemned Italy's political class for its corruption, for neo-fascist conspiracy and for collusion with the Mafia. In articles for Corriere della Sera he had called for Italy's political class to be put on trial."

For a brief time, I was caught up in the maelstrom of rumour and counter-rumour. The investigating magistrate leading the inquiry into Pasolini's murder hauled me in for questioning: he wanted to know who exactly had told me of the film director's death and what they had said. I answered as best I could and heard no more about it.

But 30 years on, Pasolini's legions of admirers still insist that there are more questions that haven't been answered.

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It's not often that a mere radio programme can claim to have introduced a genuine constitutional innovation, but with all the talk of allowing ministers in the House of Lords perhaps to be questioned by MPs in the House of Commons, I am reminded of when we did it three years ago.

It was during the Lebanon war. Parliament was in recess, and many MPs were urging that the House of Commons should be recalled so that they could have an urgent debate. They were turned down, so that's where we stepped in.

We got 20 or so of them together, rented a hall just down the street from the Palace of Westminster, and held our own debate. We asked the Foreign Office to supply a Minister to reply, and they came up with Lord Triesman.

So for the first - and only - time, as far as I am aware, in British parliamentary history, a Minister who sat in the Lords was questioned by MPs. Now it seems, Parliament itself might follow our example.

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