Biden in the European Parliament: All quiet on the Western front

Joe Biden gave a 30 minutes speech in the European Parliament today.

Most of it was charming Brussels, Europe and the European Parliament, mixed with statements supporting human rights, privacy, peace and individual freedoms. But all this was intertwined with the obligatory "triple axis" as @martiadroher put it: "Security, Security, and Security".

He underlined that he wants to use Passenger Name Record (PNR) data and financial transaction data (SWIFT) to fight terrorism. He supported this with the success US authorities had in capturing the alleged Time Square terrorist thanks to PNR data (and probably other intrusive measures that are used against citizens who are not terrorists every day).

And he defended the need to be in Afghanistan, totally in line with the CIA recommendations (published by Wikileaks) on how to get more public support from Europe for this war (e.g. focus on civilian and policing aspects). His final sentence ended with the words "... and may God protect all our troops" which shows that this was his actual focus, these were the words he wanted us to be remembered: Troops, troops, troops.

It is not some God who should protect "our" troops, it should be politicians protecting them by not sending them to fight, especially not to places where you are not providing actual help for more security or democracy (Afghanistan is not peaceful at all after 9 years and Karzai is definitely not a democrat) but costing our societies so much money that one can rightfully blame these expenses as part of the debt problem that many European countries and the US are facing today.

Well, Mr Biden, that was a nice speech, but I'm not convinced, not a bit, that you actually bring the change you are advocating...!

PS: A German MEP has a picture on how Biden's speech looked from the plenary.

Update: Conor has also written about Biden's speech. Erin has reacted to the content of Biden's speech.

OSCE: Kazakhstan's focus on Afghanistan is just distraction

The 2010 Kazakh OSCE presidency just has applauded the organisation's focus on Afghanistan.

And although the OSCE engagement with Afghanistan is not new, this press release is part of an obvious strategy:

By refocussing the attention and resources of the pan-European organisation to the political and military problems outside its actual scope - Afghanistan is not a member of the OSCE - countries like Kazakhstan with obvious human rights problems can distract from these issues.

Countries like Russia, that is trying for years to re-organise the OSCE to get rid of the disturbing issues like free elections or human right, Belarus or the Central Asian countries surely also agree with everything that makes the work of ODIHR less important.

But even outside these rights-oriented questions, there are still many security and co-operation problems within the Eurasian region, and the OSCE should focus its resources to these issues before thinking about something that is far beyond its competence and problem-solving ability.

In short: It is wrong that the OSCE looks outside its borders as long as there are so many problems within its member countries, and I can see nothing but distraction in the strategy of the Kazakh presidency that hasn't shown any particular interest in human and civil rights topics over the last two months.

Is there any EU citizen in favour of us killing civilians in Afghanistan?

The news is that the Netherlands are like to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan after the government collapsed over this issue.

I always had the question: Why are we down there?

It is true: I don't want to be killed by a terrorist - nobody wants - but I also don't want that 100s of human beings - many civilians - are killed to lower the perceived (!) risk that I get killed by a terrorist while not actually lowering the risk.

This thing (killing civilians) has happened time and time again and it will happen time and time again, because that is the idea of war. Soldiers from our armies are out there defending our "interest" by killing people, including civilians - probably more than all terrorist attacks have caused in the "West".

That is not in my interest. It has never been. What is human rights when my life is worth more than the life of someone living Afghanistan?

But pretending to save some lives of westerns with several billion Euros of tax money that could be put into fighting poverty or hunger or global diseases is worth killing Taliban as well as citizen happening to live there because this is where they live. It's worth making mostly young people from our armies murderers of civilians while they are risking their own lives.

I've never actually had the impression that many EU citizens were in favour of us being in Afghanistan. But our governments like it, and only when there is a group of killed people - civilians or our own soldiers - large enough to become noticed by our "journalists" who usually love to play the terror alert news cycle ("Earn money with fear.") doubts are rising and eventually a government collapses or an ex-defence minister has to resign from his new job (as happened in Germany recently).

The simple equation: 170 killed Afghans are worth 1 German minister. 21 killed Dutch soldiers are worth one Dutch government.

I know it's polemic, but it's still true.

PS.: Just got reminded that somebody said this much better than I can (just in German unfortunately):