27 January 2010: New York Times
By Katrin Bennhold
Once John Chipman, the director general of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, had baptized the session on Rethinking Security in the 21st Century an open brainstorm — “where people are allowed to say provocative things” — the floodgates were open. For one and a half hours in the Davos bubble, well-worn diplomatic slogans were replaced with, well, provocative ideas.
Lilia Shevtsova, a senior analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that if the West wanted to make it harder for Russia to feed anti-western propaganda to its people, it would only have to offer it membership in NATO. In fact, she said, “they should have invited Russia into NATO in the early 1990s,” suggesting that current tensions with Ukraine and Georgia might have been avoided altogether.
The solution to the mess in Afghanistan, according to Abdullah Abdullah, the country’s former foreign minister and ex-presidential candidate, was not sending more troops, but throwing out the constitution and turning Afghanistan into a highly decentralized federal country — a bit like Switzerland.
“Can you imagine an official sitting in Bern thinking about every detail of national policy?” he asked. The current Kabul-centric approach was doomed to failure in a tribal culture like his own, Mr. Abdullah said: “A highly centralized system doesn’t work.”
Mr. Chipman himself floated the question of diplomatic “shock therapy” in the Palestinian-Israeli standoff. Should European countries unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state to jolt the peace process back into action? And should the Arab League battle a perceived clash of civilizations by making Israel, with its substantial Arab population, a member?
Amre Moussa, the Arab League’s secretary general, was in the room. But even in an open brainstorm he looked a little unsettled by this idea. “We’ll talk later,” he said, “when the Palestinian issue is solved.”
Certainly food for thought. Unfortunately few members of the international business and political elite will get to chew it over: About 80 percent of the room was empty as attendees headed for simultaneous panels focused on the economic and financial questions of the day.
Tellingly, according to a poll CNBC conducted among its viewers and released in Davos on Wednesday, only 9 percent of respondents believed the geopolitical concerns were a priority for governments.
