The Belgian Bus Crash: Part 1.

It's currently around 15:45 on 20/3/12. Ideally I would also have liked to have posted this on Sunday (18/3/12) but I guess I'll have to do it now while I've got the chance.

In the early hours of last Wednesday (14/3/12) a bus carrying Belgian school children crashed in a tunnel in Switzerland killing 22 children and 6 adults. What appears to have happened is that the bus driver simply chose to crash his vehicle into a kerb probably in the belief that he would survive and only a few of his passengers would suffer major injuries. This was primarily done in order to allow the Belgian Royal Family to assist the British Royal Family in getting what they wanted out of the meeting between the British Prime Minister and the US President that was taking place at the time. So in order to understand the crash you first need to understand the meeting between David Cameron and Barack Obama.

Although many topics were discussed including Syria, Iran, the US election race and the global economy the main work of the meeting - done by the civil servants in the respective entourages - was how to withdraw from Afghanistan. The current plan is for the US & UK troops who make up the bulk of the NATO force to withdraw in 2014 and leave the Afghan government, police force and army in charge. Many people - myself included - think that this is a terrible idea because in many ways the situation in Afghanistan is worse now then when the US invaded in 2001. Back then it was just a three way contest between the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the Northern Alliance. Now it's a cauldron of competing interests including those three actors along with the NATO alliance which is neither as strong or unified as it likes to present itself, the Afghan government, the Afghan army, the Afghan police, the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Gulf states and the Iranians to name but a few. As a result unless the US withdrawal is done absolutely perfectly there is a very strong possibility that Afghanistan will once again be used as a base for terrorist attacks to launched against foreign nations. For a number of years Britain has been responsible for training the Afghan security forces (army/police) and intends to continue that role beyond 2014 allowing them to act as gatekeepers for those future terror attacks. Therefore I think it would be better for the US to cut the UK out of the equation and use the troops that have been freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to take over responsibility for the Afghan security forces. That way if they cannot completely stamp out the terrorists they can at least make sure it isn't the US who gets attacked.

However this approach is politically difficult for President Obama for two main reasons. Firstly the US military and wider electorate are already very war weary so telling the troops that have just got back from Iraq that they've got to re-deploy to Afghanistan is never going to be popular in an election year. However I believe that the actual military and their families will be prepared to make that sacrifice provided that they are being asked to do so for the right reasons. The second - much larger - problem is that Britain is very opposed to this change and is prepared to resist it violently. So by involving the Belgian military in the operation to recover the victims of the bus crash the Belgian Royal Family was issuing the threat to the US that it is prepared to send it's people to fight and die alongside Britain.

Another thing that Britain had been hoping to achieve from the meeting was to kick-start the Republican Party's 2012 Presidential campaign which - speaking as an observer - prior to Cameron's visit seemed unlikely to defeat Obama. Britain's most high profile tool in this plan was me and this blog. Prior to the arrival of the estate agent my plan for last Tuesday (13/3/12) was to go to bed early and quietly. However the estate incident forced me to go back online whilst getting ever more drunk in the hope that I would launch into a drunken tirade detailing everything that Obama has been doing wrong. For the most part I managed to avoid that but just as I was going to bed things were getting just a bit too concise for a time when the UK Prime Minister could simply turn to the US President and ask "So what do you think of that then?" It was just as I'd turned off my PC and people were placing bets on whether or not I'd make it to bed (I did) that the first confused reports of some sort of crash somewhere in Europe started to emerge. Apart from creating even further confusion the idea was to convince the Americans that the British plan had crashed and burned giving them the confidence to go ahead with whatever they had planned for the following day.

What the Americans had planned for the following day (14/3/12) turned out to be the false flag suicide bomb attack on US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta's plane as it sat on the runway at the British Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. What the US were hoping to achieve here was to cause a panic that would force the British delegation to call on it's intelligence gathering networks in Afghanistan and in doing so expose those networks. Basically they were looking to see if the British delegation had a guilty look on their faces as if they'd carried out the attack or a smug look that said they knew who'd carried out the attack but they weren't prepared to tell the Yanks. Unfortunately it was so immediately obvious to anyone in that sort of business that the Americans had carried out the attack that the British delegation probably had the sort of big grin on their faces that said they were trying very hard not to roll about on the floor laughing.


Beyond that the bus crash was intended to spread generalised confusion and tackle some regional and local issues that I will address in parts 2 and 3 which will hopefully follow soon provided I have Internet access.