The Camden Conference, Camden, Maine
We are pleased to present our first Camden Conference Highlights Video, featuring the 2011 Camden Conference, The Challenges of Asia.
2010 Conference Articles
The articles below provide information and background on the subject of the 2010 Camden Conference.
Conference eyes conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan
By Fred Hill for Bangor Daily News December 4, 2009
A common criticism of American foreign policy is that the American public itself is not well informed about the world.
Foreign policy guru Zbigniew Brzezinski recently commented in Foreign Affairs that presidents face three systemic weaknesses that undermine a decisive, long-term policy: The disproportionate role of ethnic lobbies, lack of bipartisanship and “one of the least informed publics” in the world.
“How can a public unfamiliar with geography or foreign history,” he wrote, “have even an elementary grasp of, say, the geopolitical dilemmas in Afghanistan and Pakistan?”
Thanks to the Camden Conference, which recently held its 23rd annual gathering, on Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, the people of Maine are well out in front of the curve.
Take the War to Pakistan
By Seth G. Jones for The New York Times December 4, 2009
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN. President Obama’s decision on a timetable for withdrawal of American troops only makes official what everyone here has known for a while: the clock is ticking in Afghanistan. The Taliban have long recognized this, and many captured militants have reminded their interrogators that “you have the watches, but we have the time.”
As we quicken the pace, the top American commander here, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has repeatedly noted that there are many issues to focus on: building more competent Afghan Army and police forces, adopting more effective anticorruption measures and reintegrating “moderate” Taliban and other insurgent fighters into Afghan society and politics.
A bridge to build between India and Pakistan
By Ahmed Rashid for The Washington Post, November 24, 2009
LAHORE, PAKISTAN. Visits from three senior U.S. officials in three weeks indicate troubles in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship as tensions rise in South Asia. Pakistan is critical to any Afghan strategy the Obama administration undertakes, and the friction appears to be contributing to the long delay in announcement of a new U.S. strategy. Pakistanis hope that President Obama will push his first state guest, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to be more flexible toward Islamabad. But Pakistanis also must realize that its army cannot differentiate between good and bad terrorists.
Don’t neglect India
By Fareed Zakaria for The Washington Post, November 23, 2009
Barack Obama has been criticized for kowtowing to the Chinese and the Russians over the past few months. So far this is all about atmospherics. The administration has not made any unilateral concession of substance to either country. It is taking a strategic view that developing strong relationships with both countries, particularly China, will yield long-term benefits. Strangely, however, that focus has been lost in dealing with Asia’s other rising giant, India.
Repositioning military, civil affairs forces could help
By Fred Hill for The Bangor Daily News, November 19, 2009
Dividing Iraq into three separate entities, if not nations, emerged as an appealing option at the worst point of civil war in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The split-up would have left effectively independent regions based on ethnic identities – the already largely autonomous Kurdish north, a Shiite-dominated south and a large, but oil-poor Sunni enclave – with a thin layer of national authority in Baghdad.
Even Joseph Biden, now vice president, was an advocate at the time.
Thankfully, the Bush administration rejected that alternative. For all its crazy-quilt 1920 borders, Iraq had developed a national identity over the years and its oil resources could not be easily carved up.
Today, as President Barack Obama nears a crucial decision on strategy to deal with the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, some shift in the extent of lands under central government control might serve as a temporary framework to turn the tide.
Defending the Arsenal: In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?
By Seymour M. Hersh for The New Yorker, November 16, 2009
“In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.”
Pull the plug on the Afghan surge
By Charles Kupchan and Steven Simon for The Financial Times, November 3, 2009
“Although the aborted electoral run-off in Afghanistan has further weakened the country’s already troubled government, the Obama administration has little choice but to work with President Hamid Karzai. Indeed, the electoral mess paradoxically makes it easier for President Obama to decide on America’s next steps in the war. The turmoil in Kabul should convince the White House that General Stanley McChrystal’s plan to pursue counterinsurgency in the countryside is a bridge too far.
The US commander in Afghanistan would have coalition forces adopt a “population-centric” strategy in which they address “the needs and grievances of the people in their local environment”. In Iraq, a similar strategy did succeed in undercutting the Sunni insurgency. But Iraq’s central government was in the midst of stabilising and increasing its effectiveness, enabling it to rebuild the institutional infrastructure of a functioning state. With an Afghan government of questionable legitimacy and limited efficacy in control of only 30 per cent of the country – and much of the rest under the sway of local warlords – surging thousands of fresh troops into lawless rural areas is a recipe for chasing after unattainable ends with insufficient means.”
The west’s strategic options in Afghanistan
By Max Hastings for The Financial Times, October 28, 2009
“Wednesday’s explosion in Peshawar, which killed more than 90 people, was the latest in a series that highlights the destabilisation of Pakistan. Western public opinion has turned against the Afghan war, perhaps irrevocably. President Barack Obama is criticised for alleged dithering. Yet the White House is struggling to answer two related and very hard questions. Are western strategic interests in the region vital? And is success plausible, in pursuing them by military means?”
“The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, whose books on the Taliban and regional crisis have gained an international audience, argues in the current National Interest that the US must stay the course. If it does not, he says, there is a serious prospect of “Talibanisation” of the entire region and the Taliban is inseparably entwined with al-Qaeda. Neighbouring Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan face pauperisation, and consequent Islamic insurgencies against their corrupt and incompetent rulers. Mr Rashid paints a bleak picture of Pakistan’s predicament, with the civilian government too weak to stand up to the army – still obsessed with India – and the economy in freefall. Mr Rashid suggests a danger of a “colonels’ coup”, which installs an Islamabad regime sympathetic to the Taliban.”
Obama has few Afghan options
By Max Hastings for The Financial Times, September 22, 2009
“It is striking to behold the caution with which the White House has reacted to the leak of General Stanley McChrystal’s Afghan review to the Washington Post. Though the document has been with the president for several weeks, a spokesman says that no decision on a further troop commitment is imminent. It is easy to see why.”
A Somber Warning on Afghanistan
By Alison Smale for The New York Times, September 13, 2009
Western powers now in Afghanistan run the risk of suffering the fate of the Soviet Union there if they cannot halt the growing insurgency and an Afghan perception that they are foreign invaders, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.
In a speech opening a weekend gathering of military and foreign policy experts, Mr. Brzezinski, who was national security adviser when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, endorsed a British and German call, backed by France, for a new international conference on the country. He also set the tone for a weekend of somber assessments of the situation.
In Afghanistan, Let’s Keep It Simple
By Ahmed Rashid for The Washington Post, September 6, 2009
For much of the 20th century before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was a peaceful country living in harmony with its neighbors.
Factors for Calming Afghanistan’s ‘Perfect Storm’
By Fred Hill for The Bangor Daily News, July 16, 2009
The rugged terrain and tragic history of Afghanistan have generated a colorful range of analogies and aphorisms, many from the fateful “Great Game” played out between Britain and Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There’s Lord Curzon’s memorable 1907 lecture on “the razor’s edge” to describe how the life and death of nations can stem from poorly marked borders — apt for how the Durand line divided tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s the gruesome image of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Young British Sol-dier,” “wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains.”
But the most fitting description of the volatile condition of Afghanistan 2009 is the recent remark of a British soldier that counterinsurgency efforts in southern Helmand province are like “mowing the lawn.”
2010: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India: Crossroads of Conflict
