Thank you very much. Let me give you my appreciation to our hosts, the Kingdom of Bahrain and this wonderful venue. I would also like to thank John Chipman and the IISS for a very useful meeting in the context of this region.
Even though I am a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy and I had quite a bit of input in his defence platform last year, I want to tell you that I am not his spokesman; I am a member of parliament, and therefore I am neither military or a diplomat, but a free man, and I will tell you my view of the situation. Carl Bildt was an excellence spokesman for the French presidency; Carl, thank you very much for doing such a god job defending Europe. My contribution will therefore be different in that I am going to try to look at the global picture, with special reference to Europe and my own country, but I will try to do it from a wider historical perspective.
As we were asked to reflect about the changing architecture of this region, I was reflecting that if Foster Dulles, the father of containment at the time, General de Gaulle, Guy Mollet, or Macmillan were coming back and looking at the Gulf region today, they would be amazed by the transformation of this area. The first characteristic is that this region is a worsening continuum of just about every possible threat that there is on the global scene, from sectarian ethnic strife to terrorism, from nuclear proliferation to a potential nuclear arms race in the region – there are already three nuclear states coming to the fore – from weak states like Afghanistan or failed states like Somalia creating new transnational criminal problems, such as drugs – the NATO taxpayer is bankrolling the largest producer of heroin in the world; it is one of the ironies of today’s world – to energy security, and deep historical disputes like Kashmir or Israel-Palestine, all in one region, all influencing one another.
The wider Gulf today is a single strategic map ranging from North African all the way to the Indian subcontinent. There used to be a time when you could isolate things; you could talk of the Israeli-Arab conflict, especially when it was an inter-state conflict. You could isolate the Gulf and talk about the Iran-Iraq war. You could isolate the Indian-Pakistani wars in the subcontinent. Today, we are dealing with a mixture of problems that affect Europe, the States, the Maghreb – the rest of the world – and each of these problems is linked to the other. The Israeli-Palestinian problem resonates throughout the Arab and Muslim world as a whole. The Gulf is now dominated by the rise of Iran, which threatens everyone, and the rise of a new nuclear power state. Not just that, but Iran has emerged through Hizbullah and Hamas for the first time as a front-line country in the Israeli dispute in the last few years.
The long Indian-Pakistani fight over Kashmir is spreading in a way into Afghanistan, and it has repercussions throughout the world, not only because of the nuclearisation of these two countries 10 years ago, and the effect felt worldwide after such events as 9/11 from Afghanistan. It is also felt today. Just last week, a terrorist cell was arrested in Belgium, comprised of militants coming from North African infiltrated by al-Qaeda Maghreb, which in turns trains its people at camps in tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tactics used in Iraq and in Afghanistan are directly imported from the tactics used by militants in Kashmir over the last 30 years – improvised explosive devices (IEDs), in particular, which successfully managed to nail down 500,000 Indian soldiers in the Kashmir area. This whole thing is linked; it is one map.
Unfortunately, these conflicts increasingly take on a life of their own, with less and less control from the outside. I know quite a bit about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; I know the actors. One of the things that strikes me is the political decapitation of political elites on both sides, for various reasons – the electoral system, the proportional system, in Israel, which is a catastrophe; the legacy of Arafat on the Palestinian side and the division of this poor nation into two sides. It is going to be very difficult for anyone to intervene and save them, but we need urgently to be there on the economic front, and we the Europeans and Americans need to re-invest soon.
In Iran, the nuclear situation is beginning to take very dangerous proportions. Those who have not done it, I advise you to read the latest report by the IAE, which I think is dated 9 November, Despite all of the diplomatic language, you do learn how much and how extensive this programme is in Iran – five enrichment sites, 650 kilograms of low-enriched uranium which can be turned very quickly high-enriched uranium in the next month, so time is running out. What is our ability to influence them? We heard from our Russian colleague this morning, and apparently it is not great for the time being.
The Indian subcontinent is very interesting also because, as someone who has been working quite a bit on Afghanistan recently, if there is one thing I know, we can stay 30 years fighting a war in Afghanistan, but if sanctuaries continue to be alone on the Pakistani side of the border, the tribal Pashtun area, there is no way we can solve this. It is a vicious circle. If security does not improve, you cannot rebuild the country, you cannot train teachers, you cannot protect nurses, you cannot protect schools, so you have to do something on the security side, and if you do not fix sanctuaries, you cannot do it. That is a reality, so at some point the solution of Kashmir, a deal between Iran and India, an India and Pakistan peace settlement, will have to be part of the equation if one is to solve Afghanistan.
Lastly, I want to say something about outside powers in all of this. Somehow the American influence, even though it remains predominant, and we saw yesterday even in this room how much was expected of the Obama administration, how much attention was given to Secretary Gates. The fact of the matter is, however, that the American influence has never recovered from the Iranian revolution 30 years ago. We have a situation where the US has not only damaged its image in the last few yeas, but one of the ironies of the war in Iraq in 2003, which was put in the name of weapons of mass destruction, is that we are ending up with a nuclear Iran and weakening the only counterweight in the area to Iraq. These are the consequences of this war. In this context, everyone is expecting and hoping for a return of a multilateral consulting, wise America, and I certainly as a Frenchman wish for that.
But, in the meantime, what you have observed is that other actors have had to move in. In Afghanistan in 2003, NATO moved in. Remember: Afghanistan was a purely American affair under Article 51 of the Charter, with some countries, including my own, helping, but it was not a NATO operation until 2003 when NATO pitched in, and Europe now has about half of its forces in Afghanistan. There are plenty of problems with NATO in Afghanistan, which I do not have time to dwell on, but one of the issues after the American build-up will be how we collectively run this operation, both on the military side and on the collective side.
My country now, as a result of the decision of President Sarkozy last year, operates in a strategic area in combat fashion, which has not been the case for the last seven years. One of the things that I am very attentive to is the right of France, and other allies, to be jointly not just consulted, but in charge of this, with somebody in charge of coordinating the military side and the economic side.
A word on my country. The election of President Sarkozy and the new defence white book certainly shows an absolutely lucid understanding of the difficulty of the time. We are not going to turn away from our responsibility. President Sarkozy has said that he is prepared to re-join NATO and play a full role in the alliance, assuming that the progress made in European defence continues, and that is what we intend to do. We are now playing an important role in NATO, which is a very exposed position. It costs not just the Treasury, but the blood of our soldiers. We are playing an important role in the Indian Ocean, with a considerable number of assets coordinated from Djibouti, from Abu Dhabi, from Réunion, which plays an important role in the stabilisation of this region, including in the struggle against piracy; the EU does play in important role in this fight.
On the next phase of all of this, there is clearly a need for a comprehensive regional approach. I was very interested to hear Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed al Khalifa the first day in his opening speech talk about the need for a regional Middle Eastern organisation. Yesterday, the Omani foreign minister also insisted on the role of Arab nations in this process. This morning, we heard the Turkish defence minister talk about very impressive diplomacy on the part of Prime Minister Erdoğan from Georgia to the Black Sea to the Middle East, to the talks between the Gulf States and between Israelis and Syrians. I think it is in the interests of all of us to welcome the emergence of regional participants in what has to be a comprehensive global solution to all of these conflicts because, as I have tried to show, all of these are linked. We therefore have to be not only comprehensive in the way that we combine military, economic and political action, but when we talk about Israel, Palestine, or the effects elsewhere, and when we talk about the Indian subcontinent, we need to think about consequences in other areas of the world.
I want to welcome these gestures, and I hope we will be attentive to this that from eras of gunship diplomacy to unilateralism, we will move to a much more constructive equation in which local powers, helped by outside powers, working together under the UN, will gradually fix each of these issues. It is difficult – it is a tall order – but I do not think we have any other choice.
