← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Fridge Magnets and Foreign Policy
00:28:09
Afghanistan's new Top Guns, and America's dilemma over sending more troops to the region.
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David Shukman
This is the BBC.
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Narrator/Presenter
Hello. Today, as Rwanda prepares for a presidential election, we go in search of anyone willing to admit they won't be voting for the incumbent. Not an easy task. Familiar sights in Mexico, a mariachi band, a shrine to the Virgin Mary. And pictures of the dead and the disappeared lost to the country's vicious drug war. We visit the great white wilderness of the Greenland ice sheet, a great only to find it looking rather grubby and full of puddles these days. And what do fridge magnets have to do with foreign policy? Our correspondent in Moscow has hit upon a new way of trying to decode Russian attitudes to the rest of the world. It's almost 16 years since international forces entered Afghanistan to try and force the Taliban out of the country. In America, discussion about how it can win its longest war has been replaced with talk about how it can minimise losses and of avoid losing altogether. A long anticipated announcement about additional U.S. troops has so far not materialised and the Trump administration is yet to reveal its strategy. In Afghanistan, the country's security forces continue to expand and modernize with the help of their allies. And that includes its fledgling air force, which, as Justin Rolatt found, has become a particular source of pride.
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Justin Rolatt
There is something almost lascivious about the way Major Hamayun Zarin touches his aircraft as he goes through the pre flight drill. He clearly loves the plane, stroking, no, caressing it as we talk. I guess you develop quite a bond when you fly something like the A29 into battle. It's a fighter plane, single propeller, not jet. Think spitfire rather than F16, but a vicious beast nonetheless. There's a 12 millimeter machine gun on each wing, a 20 millimeter cannon under the fuselage, and it can fire rockets and precision guided bombs. Major Zarin's ability makes him part of a new breed. He's one of Afghanistan's first fully trained fighter pilots for decades, a new generation of top guns. And he's also unwittingly become part of the heated discussion in Washington and about the future of his own country. That's because Major Zarin and his skills exemplify one of the key arguments the US military is making to increase its numbers in Afghanistan. There's a shabby air of permanence about the temporary facilities at the U.S. military Air Base in Kabul. I'm here as the guest of the US Air Force, and in a windowless room, I get a brisk box briefing from the head of US operations, Brigadier General Philip Stewart. The NATO combat mission in Afghanistan ended two and a half years ago. That's when the battle against the Taliban officially became the responsibility of Afghan forces. But the involvement of America and its NATO allies did not end there. Some 13,000 foreign troops stayed on to train, assist and advise the Afghan forces. General Stewart and his colleagues are part of that mission, he explains. What that means in practice is providing the Afghans with fighter planes and attack helicopters and then training up pilots like Major Zarin, as well as, crucially, mechanics who can look after all the complex new kit. And here is where the debate in Washington comes in, because the US military is now arguing that it needs to boost the numbers of American troops there in order to strengthen the Afghan forces enough to be effective air support makes all the difference in the world, the general tells me. It provides an asymmetric advantage over the enemy. It's something you have that they don't have. So training the Afghan military to have an air force when the insurgents don't have an air force provides an enormous advantage for them. As far as he's concerned, this is part of an exit strategy. If we do our job right, we'll be out of a job, says General Stuart, because they'll be able to run it themselves. The offices upstairs could be straight out of central casting. There are plain seats as chairs and a square jawed squadron leader who is handsome, confident and blunt. I ask him how Afghan pilots like Major Zarin are shaping up. They've been through the same basic training as me back in the States, Lt. Col. Johnny Green says. They don't get any special favors. If they aren't good enough, we fail them. So how good are this first crop? I want to know. I've flown a few missions with them. He chews his lip for a moment. And they're good, Very good. Out beside the aircraft, Major Zarin is keen to tell me what he and his team can do. If you miss a target by 2 metres, we call that a missed target, he explains. As a result, we haven't killed any civilians or any friendly forces. This is a big achievement for our air force, for our military. Nowadays we can support our ground troops everywhere. We have all Afghanistan covered. His pride is palpable, but the signals from Washington are that Donald Trump is not yet convinced it would be worth pouring more resources into a war that is, as the American top brass acknowledged, a stalemate. The best hope is that stronger Afghan forces may be able to force the Taliban to the negotiating table eventually. For a man like President Trump, that must sound like a very hollow victory indeed. But does he really have any choice? I reflect as we bump back through a series of checkpoints in a vast Ford pickup truck, a litter of rifles on the floor. If America and its NATO allies pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban would probably flourish, as could Islamic State and Al Qaeda. And that would be even worse for the American president. A clear Afghan defeat.
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Narrator/Presenter
Justin Rolat the Rwandan genocide in the 90s caused horror, suffering and a fair amount of guilt in the international community for failing to prevent it. Perhaps why so much foreign aid has poured in since the post genocide leader Paul Kagame was viewed optimistically as the man to reconstruct and reunite a failed state. But since then, there have been signs of growing authoritarianism in Rwanda and the assassination of dissenters both inside and outside the country. There are elections. There's a presidential vote on Friday. But from what Chris Haslam has heard, the result is a foregone conclusion.
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Chris Haslam
There are two things you'll struggle to find in Rwanda this, a dog and someone who isn't going to vote for President Paul Kagame. The absence of mutts is easy to explain. After developing a taste for human flesh in the wake of the 1994 genocide, they were all shot. As for the abstainers and dissidents, there aren't any, say Rwandans, because there's no viable alternative to the 59 year old now affectionately known as the the Old Man. In towns from Kerechi in the east to Rusisi in the west, this isn't so much a presidential election as a jubilee celebrating what Kagame himself describes as a Victory won in December 2015. Back then, he asked Rwandans to allow a constitutional change that in theory would allow him to rule until 2034. 98% of them said yes. That alarmed officials in the US and EU. Kagame, they said, is beginning to look like a dictator. He should step down, they said, to allow a new generation of leaders to come through. He should stop repressing the media and persecuting political opponents. Beside the pool at the Kigali Marriott Hotel, a young American aid worker sipped her latte and told me Rwanda is a police state. So what if it is? Said Fabian Busageera, a truck driver who ships skin whiteners all the way from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, across Rwanda to Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We're younger than Europe, he said, and some of us do not yet know how to behave. The delinquents vandalise what the responsible people have built. So we need strong leaders. In a women's community centre in the eastern Village of Kayonza 60 year old Monique Mukaraguaya spoke eloquently about the murder of her family in the 1994 genocide. If you look back, you see bad politics caused it, she said. Whether you like Mr. Kagame's policies or not, the alternative is a return to those same bad politics. I couldn't find anyone who didn't like his policies, certainly nobody who would say so openly. He's banned plastic bags, he. He gives cows to the poor and brings Rwandans together on the last Saturday of every month for omuganda or community work. He's brought free education, high speed Internet and cheap universal healthcare. And he's declared war on the corruption that has dogged neighbouring states. Most importantly, he's formally erased the identities which once divided this land. There are no longer Tutsis and Hutus here, just Rwandans, say the official slogans. And the country now has the highest percentage of female MPs in the world, with 61% of seats held by women. His supporters dispute accusations that he's repressed opposition and controls the Media. There are 11 political parties, 12 television stations, 34 radio stations, and free and fair elections here, they say. But that's not quite as good as it sounds. Nine out of the 11 opposition parties have decided to support Kagame. Media coverage of the election is laughably one sided and the unnervingly pristine streets of the capital Kigali are lined with soldiers. Mr. Kagame's two adversaries in this vote are Philippe Mapaimana, an independent candidate who spent the last 13 years in France, and Frank Habenezer of the Green Party. They're having a hard time. In a field in Ngoma, Frank outlined his policies to a bunch of curious kids and some doubtful looking women. He's going to build roads, reduce taxes and erect a Trump style wall along the Congolese border. The kids drifted away. The women rolled their eyes. Meanwhile, in Mukamira, just down the road from where Tourists are paying $1,500 to spend an hour with a mountain gorilla, Philippe told passersby that if he got elected, Rwandan families will be limited to just three children by law. Contrast that with the 150,000 strong, flag waving, T shirt wearing crowd dancing at the K rally in Rilindo. And it's obvious that for better or for worse, the old man has already won. In a mosquito infested beer garden beside Lake Kivu on the DRC border, I finally met a skeptic. He checked for eavesdroppers, then leaned in close. Kagame is a good friend to the people of Rwanda, as long as you agree with him, he said. But if you don't, you have to go then. He shrugged. But I suppose it's better to have a lion in charge than hyenas.
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Narrator/Presenter
Chris Haslam Tens of thousands of Mexicans have lost their lives to the violence that surrounds the drug trade there. The police and army continue to battle the gangs as the gangs continue to fight each other. The death toll is rising faster than ever, and the once localized violence is spreading to previously peaceful parts of the country. That makes reminders of the dead and the disappeared hard to miss. Antonia Quirk has found in the town
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Antonia Quirk
of Comala in west Mexico. The bells of the yellow church in the central square clang the passing afternoon. This town was declared an historic monument zone in 1988, a Pueblo Magico, one of Mexico's magical towns, and celebrated with gala events held here as recently as 2011. But there is to the place now the feeling you often get with towns that have served of their purpose in a government PR drive, that sense of the spotlight having passed on. Two women lie asleep on benches, something you see a lot in Mexico. Not drunks or tramps, just women passed out with fatigue between shifts at work at 7pm the flagstones cool. A man rides his raggedy mule with a pink ribbon braided into its mane around the narrow streets as he does every night while the local mariachi band wanders from cafe to cafe. There are five of them, elderly men with dusty boots, wiping sweat from their noses with their sleeves as they launch into another song. There's a subtle change of atmosphere at one of the cafe tables as a 30something man, casually dressed and unsmiling, takes his seat as staff bustle around him. Local businessman or gang member? Who can say? But the tone of it, the very pressure in the air, reminded me of the time I watched a mafioso pulling up a plastic cafe chair in the back streets of Palermo and receiving his pizzo, his protection money, from stallholders, as a local restaurateur hurried an espresso over to him. I go for a walk past shops selling second hand hobby horses and coconut liqueur. There's a rack of postcards with bucolic painted scenes of the state the region was once called Valley of the Flowers. Puma and armadillo drink from pools surrounded by great baskets of papayas and cherries. Ambrosial, idyllic. Yet the town feels watchful. It feels off. Wandering into an empty community hall, I see some of the signs and posters for bygone Pueblo magico celebrations stacked in a corner and then a wall covered in faces. They're mostly homemade posters, although some were issued by local police and other authorities, bearing the images of people who have gone missing from this town young men and women, even babies. Here's Alexis, 22, and smiling his Perla, 19, last seen walking to a bus stop, and Vanessa, 4, playing in the grass with a white bow in her hair. Last year there were scores of such disappearances in the wider state of Colmar. The surging drug related violence in Mexico has made the last year one of the deadliest on record. The girls are trafficked, the babies sold into adoption, and the men forced into gangs or killed, dispirited. I call my friend Cale, a surfer who lives further north along the Pacific coast in San Pancho. He told me about the nearby state of Michoacan, with its long stretches of deserted silver sand beaches, a secret favorite destination of longboarders who turn off the geotags on their Instagram whenever they go there, so nobody else knows where to follow them. But inland, the violence is intense. Kalle tells me villagers have recently been standing up to the cartels, hiring hitmen or learning to protect themselves. Ah, he says when I describe this wall of faces. The gangs, they must have pushed into Kolyma now, too. Ah, things are rough. As he talks, I can hear San Pancho in the background, safe and lively, enjoying its evenings, the surfers drinking mezcal, the slobbering happy dogs playing with Frisbees opposite a shrine to the Virgin decorated with ice pops and bottles of chilli sauce. The Mexico everybody dreams of visiting, not this reduced and anxious place. A few days later, I fly north, and at Komola's tiny airport are two very obvious gang members, henchmen this time, you can tell by their tattoos. One is covered entirely in inkings of a forest across his shaved scalp, just as eyes peering through the elaborate foliage. Again that sense of everybody aware of his presence but no certain acknowledgement of who he is, of his cruelty or his crimes. Everybody I speak to who lives in this country feels simultaneously weak and afraid and angry as he stands first in line to board the small plane, casually eating a corn cake out of newspaper. A flight of collared doves surges high above, above towards the hills, and the late morning sun throws black shapes over the tarmac ahead of us. So he walks on all our shadows.
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Narrator/Presenter
Antonia Quirk those who travel to the Arctic often return with tales of heroic adventure. The researchers left stranded after a pack of polar bears destroyed their Camp and Ronald finds who cut off part of his own fingers after getting frostbite. For many, though, even simple tasks can be challenging, like putting up a tent or even just keeping your feet dry. David Shukman has just returned from Greenland inside the Arctic Circle, where he joins scientists investigating the melting, darkening landscape.
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David Shukman
My first steps on the Greenland ice sheet were no trouble. My boots pressed into a firm surface. I sank a little in the snow, but nothing alarming. And I wasn't slipping on the patches of ice. There was a tiny stream in front of me, easy to cross. I spotted a few holes in the ice, ranging from the size of a small coin to that of a dinner plate, but they were easy to avoid. Although we were in an incredibly remote world, at first sight it didn't seem that strange. The landscape appeared white and gently rolling, not so different from a field in a British winter, except that the horizons were very distant and we were very much alone. A helicopter had brought us in, a team of scientists and three people from the BBC. Once the engines had shot down and the rotors stopped, a deep stillness settled over us. We were a very small band in a vast landscape. The ice sheet spreads over an area that could cover much of Western Europe. In fact, the word sheet is misleading. It's a great layer of staggering thickness, up to two miles deep in places. We unloaded the helicopter and then watched it swoop away towards the coast, our only form of transport receding to a tiny red dot. We each had a small tent to sleep in, and there was a much larger one in which everyone could eat and work. The instructions for what would be a large domed structure seemed clear. Orange poles go here, dark grey ones there, pale grey ones somewhere else. But things did not go well. Some of the brightest minds in polar science were stumped. I tried to help, but when I released a clip that was wrongly connected, I blundered right onto the precious material of the tent in my boots, almost tearing a hole in it. Eventually, the orange and white dome rose over the ice sheet. Right, said the professor in charge, it's time for a brew. And he immediately set off to find fresh water. He didn't have to go far. By this stage in the day, the sun felt almost warm and things were changing underfoot. July is the peak of the melt season in Greenland, and we were in the middle of it. The ice, which had been firm just a few hours before, was suddenly brittle and the snow was treacherous, covering gaps below. Our producer was the first to slip into a hidden puddle and fill her boot with icy Water. The cameraman and I were more careful until we too misjudged the surface, stepping onto ice that snapped beneath us, our socks becoming needle sharp with cold. Hobbling now and far more cautious, we started to explore. After the freezing water, the biggest shock was the colour of the ice. Far from the brilliant white you might expect, the surface was grey or dark brown. The scientists had come here to study this darkening of the ice sheet. I took off a glove and reached down. Specks of what looked like soot were embedded in the ice. Some of this dark material is indeed pollution, blown here from distant power stations and factories. But most of it turns out to be algae, tiny plants. The apparently barren ice sheet is actually alive. And this matters because the darker a surface becomes, the more it warms up and the faster it can melt. Inside the tent, over tea, I was told that if the melting is more rapid than expected, it could raise sea levels around the world by far more than currently forecast. It felt eerie in this little outpost to think that the research being carried out here could affect millions of people who've maybe never heard of Greenland, but live near a coast and may suffer as the oceans rise. Outside, the surface was transformed once more. Instead of one tiny stream, there were now thousands, the whole ice sheet glinting with gold. A beautiful and innocent sight. But these myriad minute cascades of water were all trickling towards the sea. It was time to turn in. I knew there was a large hole outside my tent because I had slipped into it once already. But exhaustion and confusion got the better of me and I stepped into the wrong place once more. And, yes, flooded my boot again. I hunted around for my eye shades, essential when the sun never really sets this far north, and felt rather depressed when I realised I'd lost them. But I did find one thing that was comforting. A spare pair of socks.
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Narrator/Presenter
David Chookman. A significant test of any foreign correspondent is their ability to decipher what's really happening on their patch. Anyone can report political pronouncements and speeches, but they rarely tell the whole story. The threat of more US sanctions this week produced automatic responses, but no sense of long term Russian strategy. Moscow resident Steve Rosenberg thinks he's lighted upon an untapped method of figuring out what's up.
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Steve Rosenberg
There was a time when to work out what was happening in Moscow, you needed to read between the lines in the newspaper Pravda or look at the line up of Soviet officials at a Red Square parade and study who was standing next to whom. Well, the art of Kremlinology has moved on since then, and I'm proud to say I've come up with my own 21st century method for keeping up to date with the current thinking in the corridors of Russian power. It involves walking to the train station opposite the BBC office in Moscow, going up to the souvenir stand and looking at the fridge magnets on sale. The stand's latest collection includes several different Vladimir Putin in military camouflage magnets, complete with patriotic slogans like together we are a force to be reckoned with and we will always look out for our guys. Kremlin policy in a nutshell. One fridge magnet in particular caught my eye. It looks just like a one hundred dollar bill, but in place of the American founding father, Benjamin Franklin, there is a portrait of Vladimir Putin. Yes, it's only a fridge magnet, but it seems to encapsulate the whole Putin, Trump, Russia, America saga. You see, after six months of Donald Trump in the White House, Russians are beginning to feel that their country enjoys rather a lot of influence over America. And who could blame them? In the light of allegations of the Kremlin hacking a US Election and putting a Russian puppet in the White House? And with all the rumors of Russian lawyers, Russian lobbyists, Russian oligarchs conspiring with the Trump team and members of the Trump family, it'll be up to official investigations to establish whether there was indeed collusion. But even the suggestion there may have been has got the whole world talking about the power of Putin's Russia and the weakness of Trump's America. And you get the feeling that Vladimir Putin quite enjoys that. There's just one problem for President Putin. You could say it's the problem of all fridge magnets, really. They look so pretty when you buy them in the shop, but they don't always work. They don't stick to every fridge, no matter how hard you throw them at the fridge door. When it began, Donald Trump's presidency looked very pretty to Moscow. The Russians hoped, expected maybe, that America's new leader would herald a new era in US Russian cooperation. the time, a news anchor on Russian state TV described Trump as an alpha male, a real man. The day after America's presidential election, one Russian state official told me that she had celebrated Trump's victory with a cigar and a bottle of Champagne. But after six months of President Trump, U.S. sanctions against Russia are still in place. Russian diplomatic compounds closed by President Obama last December remain shut. And the idea of a grand deal with America, much talked about and much hoped for here at the start of the Trump presidency, has disappeared from the pages of the Russian dailies. Moscow isn't blaming Donald Trump for this. As one Russian newspaper, Niezhayvissimaya, explained recently, in the current atmosphere, Trump doesn't have the slightest possibility to improve Russian U. S Relations, since any step he makes, any glance, even in the direction of Russia, is met with suspicion back home and is even viewed as treason. Last week I was chatting to a Russian senator. He complained that the intense pressure President Trump was facing over the Russia question was complicating U. S. Russian diplomacy. Trump is like a prisoner, he told me, and how can you talk to prisoners? But Russia and America are talking. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have now met on the sidelines of the G20 summit. And although progress is slower than Moscow would like, there is cautious talk of cooperation in Syria, for example, and in the area of cyber security. Mr. Trump continues to argue there is nothing wrong in seeking a closer relationship with Russia. He claims that it's in America's interest to do so. And while America's president and America's Western allies often appear poles apart on a variety of issues, Donald Trump seems drawn like a magnet to Vladimir Putin. Indeed, he has openly praised the Kremlin leader. And yet Russia is casting a shadow over the US Administration. For Donald Trump, could this prove a fatal attraction?
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Narrator/Presenter
Steve Rosenberg bringing us to the end of today's programme. We'll be back on Saturday morning with more from our own correspondence. Do join us. Goodbye.