Tuesday 28 December 2010

Monday 27 December 2010

DIPLOMATS ENJOY THEIR XMASS PARTY AT THE SIERA LEONE HIGH COMMISSION IN LONDON









































































































Friday 17 December 2010

Thursday 16 December 2010

Final countdown to First Oil in Ghana
In preparation for tomorrow’s First Oil celebrations in Ghana we have added four new videos to the Tullow Ghana website; Creating shared prosperity, Delivery through partnership, EHS in Ghana and the Journey to First Oil. New videos will be added to the site during the rest of the week. These can all be found in the Media section of the site or by clicking on the following link: http://www.tullowoil.com/ghana/index.asp?pageid=26

Friday 3 December 2010

Press release

Tuesday 30 November 2010

For immediate use


Speech to Demos - Douglas Alexander MP


- Check Against Delivery -

Douglas Alexander MP, Labour's Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary said today in a speech to Demos:

Good morning. It’s very good to be here at Demos. For years, Demos has been at the heart of creative thinking on the centre-left, but now with the creation of the Open Left project, with people whose talent I saw during my time in Government like Kitty and Richard, I suspect Demos will be even more central to the renewal of progressive politics in the years ahead. And I’m particularly grateful to Chris Melvin from Reed in Partnership for chairing today’s event; Chris and his company have been on the frontline of delivering welfare to work services and I’m hugely grateful for the work they do.

Let me being with the broader canvass on which the labour market and w elfare reform should be seen, starting with the political context, before discussing the appropriate policy responses.

What we have witnessed in recent months in economic policy, I believe, marks the end of an era and the beginning of an experiment. With the CSR the dice has been rolled. The outcome for growth, jobs and tax remains uncertain. Yet it is also true that the deficit, how it arose, where responsibility lies, and how it can most effectively be reduced remains a key issue of economic debate and political controversy.

The starting point for this discussion is to acknowledge a paradox. In the days and months after the global financial crisis, most people, faced with the need for the Government to act decisively to stop the collapse actually supported the policy we implemented. And they also supported the subsequent action we took to respond to the recession by keeping people in their jobs and homes.

That action allowed 116,000 firms to defer over £2 bi llion in taxation until the recovery was underway and introduced measures that helped keep home recessions at half the rate of the 1990s recession.

Indeed, even at the time of the election when voters were asked whose policy, without party labels, they supported on dealing with the deficit, they were more likely to support Labour’s policy.

Yet in May, many, many of these people left us. Why? There are of course a range of reasons why past supporters decided not to back us in May. But I would suggest that part of that loss of support reflected the fact that we got the recession response right, and yes that meant a temporarily higher deficit, but the politics wrong in leaving the impression that we were too unwilling to talk about the consequences of our decisions.

I believe that the label of “denial” was defied by the fiscal plan laid out by Alistair– and that’s why I support Alan Johnson in his endorsement of his predecessor’s approach. But too man y people still got to polling day with the impression that Labour preferred to talk about familiar political dividing lines rather than future policy consequences.

In making the right judgements during the crisis, we saved the taxpayer from the untold cost of a recession turning into a depression. But, as with every important choice you make in Government, there was a price to be paid – the public got that and they were worried that we didn’t.

As I argued within Government at the time and as I still believe today, the repeated refusal by some to use the word “cuts” for many months after the global financial crisis and the repetition of phrases like “Mr 10%” gravely damaged voters’ confidence that we got it.

It didn’t resonate economically or emotionally with the experience of families and households across the country and it gave spurious credence to the charge of denial, with which our opponents to this day seek to damage us.

So ho w should Labour, now in opposition, respond? The truth is the safest place to stand in life and in politics. The trust voters felt in Labour was diminished in the last Parliament and we must work to rebuild that trust in this Parliament. And we can do so, by advancing the case with humility and confidence that there is a credible and better approach than either denial or dogma.

But there is another step Labour must take to win back trust and support. The Conservatives now want to create a false and damaging image of a Labour Party that sits in Westminster rubbing its hands at every bit of bad news and willing a double dip recession.

When Labour came to power in 1997, the Conservatives shot their credibility by almost immediately forecasting a “downturn made in Downing Street” with barely disguised glee. Both Alan Johnson and Alistair Darling before him have been far too wise to be tempted into that kind of politics.

I sincerely hope the British economy achieves strong growth in the years to come. Even in our final weeks and months in office we were taking steps to secure post recession growth this year – growth we have now seen emerge. And it’s not contradictory to say that George Osborne is taking unnecessary risks with the recovery and to nonetheless hope that the recovery takes hold.

Yesterday’s Office for Budget Responsibility forecast, showed how that growth strengthened earlier this year, but how it was expected to be somewhat slower next year and the year after.

In the sometimes overblown media claims about double-dips, and rapid recovery, I think there is a risk that the real and present danger in the jobs market goes almost unnoticed. So today, I want to look at what’s happening in labour markets here and abroad. I’m worried that, the Government is too complacent about the risk of a slower and more painful return than many yet realise to the levels of employment and unemployment we have bec ome used to.

We saw it yesterday, with the Chancellor failing to recognise the fact that the ILO unemployment rate and the claimant count are now both set to rise next year, and were both revised up in each year from January onwards.

The Government’s response to these challenges has been defined more by cuts than by reform. However today, I also want to talk about the one element of their strategy that could help – the Work Programme – and set out some of our thinking about how to ensure it doesn’t fail.

Looking abroad helps us both to better see our domestic political debates and what’s happening in our labour market in a wider context.

In the United States, people have started to use the phrase “jobless recovery”, with unemployment on the ILO measure, still above 9 per cent as it was at the end of last year.

While the Administration is at pains to avoid a tag that would be both unfair and unhelpful, there is still a lot in the employment figures to worry about. When the last set of unemployment statistics were published, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis talked about a fall in the unemployment rate from 10.1 per cent to 9.6 per cent. But this in a country that was used to unemployment rates of half that.

And while the Tea Party Movement is built on a dozen disparate grievances, one of them appears to be a perception that jobs are not appearing and families and communities are being left behind.

In Europe, the International Labour Organisation forecasts that European high income economies will see no return to the pre-crisis levels of employment in the next five years. French, German and Italian unemployment are all set to fall by, at most 0.7 percentage points in the next two years according to the OECD forecast at the start of November. That forecast also predicted Irish unemployment to be over thirteen per cent this year and next year – and it was conducted before the impact of this lat est crisis.

It’s too early to say what the recent instability will mean either for big economies like Germany or for Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain – but in an interconnected European market, what happens in those countries will have an impact on the British labour market.

The point here is not actually to flag up the scale of the recovery that still needs to happen in the global jobs market.

It is to say that while growth and jobs go together, you can’t assume that returning to growth means returning to full employment. Some recoveries see strong jobs growth, others see little.

In fact, the point works the other way; some recessions can mean mass unemployment for modest falls in GDP, some recessions hit growth harder than jobs.

The UK’s own Office for National Statistics has compared what happened to jobs in the three recessions the UK has experienced since 1979. I joined the Labour Party in the wake of the 1980-1981 recession w hen the Linwood car factory was shut down and the area I grew up in and now represent was devastated. When people think back to their own memories of that recession, and the second Tory recession in the 1990s, unemployment is what people always come back to.

The last recession – which was global, unlike its two predecessors – lasted longer and saw a bigger fall in Britain’s national income than in either the 1980s or the 1990s.

But the ONS study shows that on a comparable basis, in the last recession, employment fell by substantially less than in the 1980s and 300,000 less than in the 1990s. That doesn’t mean that being made redundant was any easier for anyone touched by the recent recession. But the difference didn’t happen by chance. It confirms that recessions can be worse or better because of the choices made by governments, central banks, employers and employees.

A central point risks being lost in this debate: the international and historical evi dence is that you can return to growth without creating enough jobs, just as you can even go into recession without succumbing to mass unemployment. Policy choices are central to the route taken.

The figures I just quoted about jobs in the UK during the recession, aren’t actually to flag up the virtues of government or central bank intervention, important though that was. Economists Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth, writing for the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, have noted how, in this recession “firms did the right thing in, wherever possible, holding onto valuable labour in the face of the pressure on profits”.

Of course measures like the Time to Pay scheme to let business delay their tax payments helped with that, but we should be very clear that British business as a whole did the right thing in this recession and they deserve real praise from across the political spectrum for doing so.

After the 1980s recession, there was a painful wait b efore the Lawson boom that saw job numbers growing again. After the 1990s recession, unemployment remained stubbornly high but private sector employment did recover – as CIPD chief economist John Philpott put it recently, because many employers “oversacked” following Norman Lamont’s exit from the ERM.

The consequence of that effort to keep people on during a recession, however, means that we have not seen a jump in vacancies since the recession officially ended.

If a company has already got more staff on its books than it needs to fulfil the orders it has, then even if orders pick up, there will be long period before it starts advertising for new vacancies.

So what do we see in the British labour market today? On the surface figures that are read out once a month on the rolling news, it looks more resilient than some expected. We all welcome that good news. But the detailed figures reveal some worrying trends:

• Vacancies have fallen every mon th since June and, even when seasonally adjusted, stand below the levels they were at the start of the year when the UK was only just emerging from recession

• The claimant count has fallen by just 15,000 since this Government was formed – a 1% drop in five months. If we continued at that rate, it would take 15 years for the claimant count to drop below a million. And that means that long term unemployment is also rising, with all the attendant risks that poses.

• There has been a growth in economic activity. But looking at the last quarter’s data, it’s not clear that that is coming from a strengthening recovery. 150,000 more people were economically active in the last quarter; but half of that increase came from women between the ages of 50 and 65 who started to see their pension age rise from April. A further 20 per cent of the increase was men over the age of 65. That’s a demographic change that means we need more jobs to raise real employment rates, not a green shoot.

These are issues that the Government doesn’t seem comfortable with. For their economic policy relies on the idea that the private sector will create

- enough jobs to employ those people who lost their jobs in the recession
- and then hundreds of thousands more jobs for everyone who loses their jobs as the public sector is cut – either the hundreds of thousands of direct public sector roles that the OBR estimates will go or the further half a million private sector jobs that rely on government contracts that Pricewaterhouse Coopers predict will go

Writing in the Observer last month, Will Hutton set out the scale of that challenge “the private sector [outside business and financial services] that generated a mere 300,000 jobs between 1993 and 1999 is now expected to generate more than 2 million between now and 2015”.

Yesterday the Office for Budget Responsibility published figures that showed

• that the ILO unemploym ent rate and the claimant count are not expected to fall to pre-crisis levels at any point between now and 2015
• that both were somewhat lower than predicted in 2010, but are now expected to rise in 2011
• that yesterday’s changes to the forecast will mean an extra £500m has to be spent over the coming years on social security benefits

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development agree with the OBR in that they don’t predict a double dip, but they have expressed concerns that the OBR forecast is “very optimistic” on employment. The OBR’s summary of independent forecasts has claimant count unemployment 120,000 higher next year than under the OBR predictions.

Whoever had won the last election, the deficit would have had to come down. I don’t stand here today and tell every public service worker that, if we had won the General Election in May, every job would have been safe.

But the impact of cutting the deficit on demand in th e macroeconomy is a well rehearsed argument and no one here needs me to go through it once again. Most people now have a firm view on one side of it or the other although, incidentally, if you’re a Liberal Democrat, it seems you now a firm view on the opposite side to the one you held on May 5th.

But the microeconomic argument against cutting too far, too fast, I believe, is equally strong, if you look at local and sectoral labour markets. In many areas, the local council or the local hospital are the biggest employers in town. It’s true in my own constituency.

Whoever had won the General Election, I’d have been working with local businesses to try and encourage investment so that the private sector was creating enough jobs for people to go to if there were fewer jobs in the public sector locally.

But last week we saw just what the pace of cuts means – with the Conservative Chair of the Local Government Association predicting 140,000 local governm ent jobs to go in England in just one year, 2011. Although the Government wanted to focus on figures in the OBR forecast yesterday that suggested fewer public sector jobs will go by 2015 than had initially been expected, yesterday’s publication promised a steeper reduction in 2010/11 and in 2011/12, where the data is more reliable, than was forecast in June.

Over a number of years, with the right support, businesses in each area might be able to deliver the alternative jobs. In the long run, across the country, businesses will grow and the labour market will adapt to the new demands of a rebalancing economy: if high-tech manufacturing really takes off, more people will start training as engineers, if new industries in particular areas start advertising for good jobs, more people will naturally move to those areas.

But the pace of adjustment matters. For people in work now but worried they might lose a public sector job or a private sector job dependent on governme nt contracts, it isn’t possible to adjust to a different economic geography or learn a whole new set of skills overnight.

The risk of a too static labour market wouldn’t just hurt people who are out of work – the continued threat of unemployment will leave millions less secure and less likely to spend money in the local economy. That is likely to mean that certain people and certain communities fall into the jobs gap just as they have done before.

We don’t just need to avoid a jobless recovery across the country, we need to prevent one in any community. Otherwise, the risk is that we don’t see jobs emerging in those areas and a hugely expensive and socially damaging trend of rising long term unemployment can’t be reversed because there are so few vacancies in certain areas.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the only problem that George Osborne has left for Iain Duncan Smith to solve.

I hope that anyone looking at the approach I’ve taken sin ce becoming Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary will see that wherever possible, I’ve tried to offer a constructive response to the Government plans; trying to work with them where they are making reasonable reforms, suggesting changes to their more rushed announcements that could limit the damage and only invoking the toughest language when it is justified by the evidence.

As Ed Miliband told the BBC last week, despite tangible successes in getting people into work, for example in relation to sickness benefits, we should have gone further to reform welfare. Now the Government are implementing the plans we started in 2008 to move people off incapacity benefit and onto the improved Employment and Support Allowance and they have my support in doing so.

But we also have to point out that by scrapping Regional Development Agencies and offering their successor bodies neither funding nor the capacity to act, the Government is left without agents on the ground to help strengthen a regional jobs recovery. Decisions like the Sheffield Forgemasters Loan also fly in the face of any strategy for jobs.

Iain Duncan Smith’s top priority is work incentives and he is right to think that clear incentives to make work pay will make a difference to employment. That’s why I’ve said I want to work with him on the Universal Credit even when there are questions to be raised about how much the Treasury has managed to limit some of the Universal Credit’s potential.

But what did George Osborne do for work incentives in his Budget? From next April, 20,000 more people are going to lose 90 pence in every extra pound they earn because of his Budget. Millions of families will see their tax credits tapered at a faster rate, so they lose an extra 3p in the pound as they earn. And the extra targeted tax credit for those in their 50s who return to work – often the hardest to reach – was abolished.

In the Spending Review he went furthe r, cutting the amount working families could claim for childcare and allowing the value of the Working Tax Credit to fall behind compared to Jobseeker’s Allowance so that the gains from moving into a job will be lower for thousands of families.

One day, Universal Credit might solve some of these problems. Geoffrey Howe famously complained of being the opening batsman, sent to the crease with a bat that the team captain had broken. On work incentives, Iain Duncan Smith has been sent to the crease with nothing but the promise of an exciting new bat that will be fully operational in seven years time.

Of course, Andy Coulson and Chris Grayling will never tire of creating a splash about a huge toughening of the welfare system that actually turns out to affect a tiny fraction of people. But if you look at what the Government is doing on conditionality, they are themselves admitting that their new sanctions regime will be applied to a handful of people and don’t substantively go beyond the existing rules about claimants of Jobseeker’s Allowance seeing their benefits cut if they refuse a reasonable offer of a job.

And by scrapping the Future Jobs Fund that created jobs for unemployed young people – jobs that they had to take or lose their benefits – they have actually scrapped the toughest conditionality regime of all; a requirement to take real work and the offer of a real job tied together.

In this Parliament, Iain Duncan Smith only really has one tool to try and reduce unemployment.

From next summer, he will be launching a new system of welfare to work support called the Work Programme.

I’ve been clear that I think the principles behind the Work Programme – continuing the move to payments based on outcomes rather than processes, bringing in private and voluntary provision – represent continuity with Labour’s Flexible New Deal and are something I want to encourage.

And of course, I can see the potential in having dozens – perhaps hundreds – of providers trying new and innovative ways of getting people into work, with techniques that are successful being financially rewarded and emulated across the system. Chris’ company is just one of a number of bidders that are keen to take on one of the toughest tasks in Britain today; getting someone from benefits into sustained employment.

But there are key questions that will determine if the Work Programme is a success or a failure.

Firstly, we can’t afford bureaucratic vacuums as the transition is undertaken. The major bidders need clarity to design their financial models.

Subcontractors, especially small charities, shouldn’t be left in the dark or in the lurch over the next few months when they are going to be absolutely vital to the long term success of the programme.

And most of all, next year may be precisely the point at which the risk of problems in the jobs market is going to be at its highest and people will need all the support they can get – so nobody can afford to have half a system running for the first six months of the year.

Secondly, we need a structure that really does reward and incentivise results. On pricing, we are told that the pricing system will reward providers that help those hardest to reach, but will it treat, for example, all people on Employment and Support Allowance, the same? The danger then would be that it wouldn’t be financially viable to invest the extra money that it will take to help those furthest from the labour market within each group of claimants.

Will it treat each local jobs market the same? The risk then could be that providers have fewer incentives to work in areas that have high unemployment but very few vacancies.

And will we see genuine competition - with several firms competing in each region? If we do, we should expect to see market discipline but there also needs to be public scr utiny too – the Government needs to be clear about what role local authorities will have in scrutinising the work of providers in their area.

And finally, will providers be faced with a pricing structure that genuinely allows them to innovate and doesn’t bar some options on ideological grounds? For example, one of the most effective models we came to in government, but one which appears to have been rejected by this Government on purely ideological grounds were Jobs Guarantees and the Future Jobs Fund.

Obviously subsidised jobs can only play a limited role in the overall labour market, but they can make a huge difference for some of the most difficult cases. The Government’s alternative of unwaged work experience looks likely to be less effective or targeted. But similar models to our jobs guarantees within the Work Programme, paying providers by the results they achieve, could create a system that combines the effectiveness of the jobs guarantee with the effic iency of a private sector solution.

So let me make clear: I do think the Work Programme if properly designed and delivered can play a big role in helping reduce unemployment. Just as with the Universal Credit, my starting point is a readiness to cooperate with the Government where they propose positive reforms that build on our work in office.

But the wider jobs gap is an issue that the Government doesn’t seem to have recognised. In the end, some of the media speculation over the possibility of two quarters of negative growth has obscured the real risk of too slow employment growth in the years ahead.

We are seeing in the US and in many other industrialised countries, a painfully slow return to pre-crisis levels of employment.

For the UK, my fear is that George Osborne’s agenda, even with some amelioration from Iain Duncan Smith, will make that return slower and more painful than is yet widely understood.

As in their whole approach to welfa re reform, without work it won’t work.


Ends



Editor's notes:



For more information, please contact the Labour Party press office on 020 7783 1393.

Thursday 2 December 2010








For Immediate Release November 29, 2010
2010/1715


STATEMENT BY SECRETARY CLINTON



Scotland’s St. Andrew’s Day



On behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, I congratulate the people of Scotland as you celebrate St. Andrew’s Day on November 30.



Scotland’s unique culture and traditions have long been admired around the world, and the special ties between our two nations date back to the founding of the United States. From Patrick Henry and John Paul Jones to Davy Crockett and Neil Armstrong, trail-blazing Scottish-Americans have helped shape the history of our country in profound ways.



Today, the United States and Scotland continue to share strong ties rooted in our common ancestry, values, and interests. Our people work together on many of the most pressing challenges of our time, and both houses of the United States Congress have Friends of Scotland Caucuses to further promote friendship and cooperation between Scotland and the United States.



I wish the people of Scotland a joyous St. Andrew’s Day celebration and a successful year ahead. We look forward to further deepening our friendship throughout the future.



# # #

Wednesday 1 December 2010

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Office of the Spokesman

For Immediate Release December 1, 2010

2010/1732


MEDIA NOTE



Troika Statement on the Southern Sudan Referendum



The following is the text of a joint statement by the Sudan Troika (United States, United Kingdom, and Norway) on the Southern Sudan Referendum.



Begin text:



We congratulate the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission for the ongoing registration process in Sudan as an essential milestone towards the 9 January Referendum and full implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We welcome the peaceful and orderly conduct of registration to date at nearly 3,000 registration centers. We note the recent visit by the United Nations Secretary General’s Monitoring Panel to Sudan and its recognition of encouraging signs of progress.



We welcome the commitment to the timely conduct of the Referendum and respect for its outcome, as reaffirmed by both parties to the CPA at the IGAD Summit on 23 November. We underline the importance of ensuring that the referendum reflects the will of the people of Southern Sudan, and the responsibility of both parties to address outstanding challenges, ensuring that their public commitments are underpinned by practical action.



To that end, we recognize the vital importance of the ongoing work of the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, and urge the parties to ensure the Commission is properly supported and to respect the hard work and integrity of the Commission as it carries out its historic tasks. In particular, we urge both parties to ensure measures taken by the Commission in pursuit of a timely referendum are approved as necessary through presidential or legislative action, and publicly endorsed by the parties.



We call upon both parties, and the Governments of Sudan and Southern Sudan, to take all necessary steps to ensure a campaigning environment for the referendum free from intimidation and obstruction. We urge both parties and governments to make clear that the rights and safety of southerners living in the north and northerners living in the south are fully protected throughout the referendum process and beyond.



Our governments reaffirm their abiding commitment to completion of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. We welcome the role of President Mbeki in the ongoing political talks on the CPA and post-CPA issues and the progress that has been made to date, and we encourage further work to finalize the Framework Agreement. We remain very concerned by the lack of agreement on Abyei. We welcome the forthcoming resumption of talks between President Bashir and First Vice President Kiir and we urge both parties to reach urgent agreement on Abyei in a manner that reassures communities on the ground that their rights will be protected and maintains peace and stability in the area.



# # #



Dr Alistair soyode , CEO Ben tv with Atiku Abubakar -Nigeria Presidential candidate
OREIGN PRESS CENTER WITH ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS, COMMANDER, U.S. EUROPEAN COMMAND AND NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER EUROPE

THE WASHINGTON FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, WASHINGTON, D.C.

TOPIC: “U.S. EUROPEAN COMMAND & NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMAND EUROPE UPDATE”

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2010 AT 10:00 A.M. EDT

MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. Today, we have Admiral James Stavridis, who is the U.S. European Command and NATO Commander, and he will deliver a EUCOM and NATO update. Please turn off your cell phones at this time. And without further ado, here is the admiral.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Good. Thank you, Andy, and good morning, everybody. I thought I might start by talking for just a moment about the summit, which we’ve just concluded, and then I’d be happy to take questions. I’m here today speaking principally in my role is the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe.

First, do we have any journalists here from Portugal? (In Portuguese.) It was perfect. It was really extremely well organized, extremely well done. My congratulations. An excellent summit from my viewpoint.

We had, I think, three principal baskets of conversation that were important. The first was the delivery of the new Strategic Concept. And I’ll talk very briefing about a few ideas that came out of that, and then we obviously can go into depth on any of them. I think secondly the NATO-Russia interaction at the NATO-Russia Council was very important and very positive. And then thirdly, of course, we talked about Afghanistan, not just as NATO, but as ISAF, which is a coalition of 48 countries, the 28 NATO countries and 20 additional, with a 48th nation arriving for the summit, Kazakhstan. And that discussion focused principally on transition which will begin in 2011, continue through 2014, President Karzai’s stated goal of completion of transition to Afghan-led operations. And it also focused on longer term strategic partnerships between Afghanistan and NATO ISAF.

I would highlight five or six things from the Strategic Concept, and then I’ll open it up to any of your questions.

First, I think the Strategic Concept put a strong marker down on cyber and the need for the alliance to focus additional resources and work on cyber defense. Secondly, we talked about missile defense, another 21st century concern. And we talked a little bit about how the alliance will hook into the U.S.-offered phased adaptive approach in the time to come. Obviously, that becomes very technical, but we made a commitment at Lisbon that as an alliance we would move forward with that integration, and I think that’s important.

Thirdly, we talked a lot in the Strategic Concept about partnerships. Here I would highlight, in particular, partnerships, strategic partnership with Russia. President Medvedev’s participation was noteworthy. And we talked about working together on terrorism, piracy, narcotics, Afghanistan, missile defense. And I felt a very positive atmosphere in terms of NATO-Russia strategic partnership, and that is also highlighted, as you know, in the Strategic Concept.

Two other items that I think came out of the discussions: The idea of using more of a comprehensive approach. Here, I mean, in particular, interoperations in Afghanistan. Comprehensive approach is NATO terminology for bringing together a wide variety of capabilities to address challenges: economic, political, military, of course, developmental, bringing together all these elements in positive ways. That is highlighted in the Strategic Concept. And lastly, we talked a bit about NATO reform, trying to find more efficiencies in the structure for NATO operational command.

So with that is a quick overview of the summit. I’d be happy to take any of your questions, and I think Andy will moderate for us.

MODERATOR: Yes. As we move to the Q&A portion, please state your name and publication and wait for the microphone, which could be coming from either side. We’ll go in back.

QUESTION: Thank you. Mina Al-Oraibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, Arabic language newspaper. I wanted to ask you some detail about the missile defense agreement. First of all, how important in your position do you feel this is going to be to protect NATO member countries? And also what countries are seen as the threat? I mean, it was often said that it’s 30-plus countries that are seen as the threat; however, Iran was previously always highlighted. I know Turkey had some objection to this. So if you could just elaborate a little bit on that meetings.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Well, the second part is the easiest one to address, which is the 30-plus countries, and frankly, I think that’s the right way to think about this rather than trying to identify any particular nation as a threat to NATO, because the world changes. So we’re developing a capability, just like to do with cyber, to create a defense.

I think that, as the United States moves forward with the European Command-led phased adaptive approach, it’ll initially be sea-based. It will come into the Eastern Mediterranean. It will have a U.S. command and control backbone that will run from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to me as the Combatant Commander, and then down to my Air Force subordinates in an air defense center in Germany, thence down to the ships initially.

Over time, as we decide how to integrate with the NATO air command and control system, we will plug in the NATO part of that architecture, and it will be roughly parallel to the U.S. one. Fortunately, I am dual-hatted as the U.S. European Commander and the Supreme Allied Commander, so that same structure, which will run operationally from the nations, the 28 nations, secretary general to me and down through the NATO parallel chain of command, will then go down to the shooting asset. So it will be parallel to the structure the United States employs, the details will be worked out, the European – or I should say the NATO system that will be the backbone is called the ALT – A-L-T – BMD system. And I’m quite confident we’ll be able to surmount the technical challenges as we go forward.

MODERATOR: Okay. Right there.

QUESTION: Ilhan Tanir, Hurriyet daily news and Vatan from Turkey. I just want a quick follow-up on that actually. Last time I ask Ambassador Daalder, he said very similar to what you just said that – about the command and control system of the missile defense system will be very similar to the one that integrated air missile defense system that, I believe under your command. Could you please elaborate on that? Because there’s a huge discussion in Turkey, as you are aware, who is going to push the button if threat emerges.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Well, all of that, as I mentioned, will be part of the discussion as we move forward. So there’s no definitive answer at this moment for how the NATO side will plug into the U.S. side.

But the point I made with the reporter here in the back is that we have an idea, based on the U.S. structure, and I think we’ll do something somewhat similar. But all of that will be a proposal that I will develop over the next six months or so and then will be presented to the nations via the North Atlantic Council, and all these decisions will be taken in consensus. But there is no detail to add to it beyond what I’ve offered thus far.

QUESTION: Follow up? How certain we are that these radar part of the installment will be placed in Turkey? Is this still detail question that will be worked out in the future, or it’s for sure that Turkey decided, and what’s the next step? Thank you.

ADM STAVRIDIS: There are no concrete decisions on the emplacement of the NATO side of the installation as yet. All that will be a matter of discussion and will be eventually proposed and then, again, decided by consensus.

And I must say, coming out of the Lisbon summit, when I looked at the decisions that were taken on the Strategic Concept, on the NATO-Russia Council, on Afghanistan, I felt a great deal of consensus among all 28 of the nations. So therefore, I’m confident we can work through the technical part of this to come to a structure that is acceptable to all of the nations. Thanks.

QUESTION: Well, but that’s –

MODERATOR: I’m sorry. We have to move on.

QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Ahmad Lami. I’m from Voice of America Afghanistan service. I was in Lisbon to cover the summit. So my first question is in the next year or two, how many NATO combat troops will still be Afghanistan, or is it only U.S. troops that will stay there through 2014? And the second question: You say that Russia was agreed – Russia agreed to cooperate with NATO on some issues like in Afghanistan. So don’t you think that looking at the history and the Afghan-Russian War, there would some sensitivity among the Afghans against Russian operation in Afghanistan and that will create some problem for NATO in future? Don’t you think so?

ADM STAVRIDIS: Let me take the second part of your question first. In terms of Russian cooperation with NATO in Afghanistan, it’s really with ISAF and, of course, with the Government of Afghanistan. All that we do in Afghanistan is led by Afghans in the sense that it’s their country, their sovereign country. And this dialogue between ISAF, between the international community and the Government of Afghanistan will be where all these decisions would be taken. To clarify, I didn’t, at any time, say we were going to see Russian operations in Afghanistan. No one is talking about that.

What we are talking about is Russian support to ISAF, and I’ll give you some concrete examples. Additional support on the logistics flow through our distribution networks; helping by selling Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanistan; perhaps doing some training in Russia for Afghans; if this is something that would be of interest to the Afghan Government, providing us with ideas and lessons learned from their experiences. So I think there’s a broad basket of cooperation and support that is possible, but it will all be done in the context of the Afghan Government and with sensitivity for past relationships.

QUESTION: But we had news in recent few weeks that Russian troops or operational groups conducted an operation in Afghanistan against the narcotics, a joint operations, that later on it was some kind of hot news if Afghanistan.

ADM STAVRIDIS: There were no Russian troops, to my knowledge, in Afghanistan.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MODERATOR: In back there?

QUESTION: Also the –

MODERATOR: I’m sorry, sir. You’re done.

QUESTION: Naseem Stanazai, Voice of America, Afghanistan Service for the radio. What will be the measures taken within the next four years to make sure that Afghan security forces will be ready to take charge in 2014, while President Karzai complained about the equipments and other stuff and even threatened that he will acquire the equipment from somewhere else? So I would like you to elaborate on this. Thanks.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Sure. And I think perhaps I can get some of your question sort of combined with this excellent question. The key to transition will be the training of the Afghan security forces. Today we have about 263,000 combined army and police. Their numbers are growing. The goal at the moment is for about 300,000 total by next fall. I am very pleased with the training process that is in place. This is a NATO training mission in Afghanistan. It’s been in place about a year, and we see not only the increase in quantity of the Afghan police and army, but the quality of the operations is going up pretty dramatically.

To your point about how is this going to happen, how will this sort of unfold, let’s look at operations today down, for example, around Kandahar. A year and a half ago, we had a ratio of 10 coalition troops for every one Afghan troop who was operating in southern Afghanistan. Today, in the Kandahar region, we have 60 percent of the troops are Afghans. That’s six Afghan troops for every four coalition troops operating down there. So we’ve really seen these numbers start to shift. And as you look around Afghanistan broadly, we see more and more operational capability.

So when we begin the transition process next year, the key will be to continue this training regime, which includes everything from literacy training to target marksmanship training, to aviation training, as the Afghan air force comes online. The heart of transition will be the quality and the quantity of the Afghan troops. And so over the course, starting in 2011, we will go province by province, district by district, turning over – transitioning to Afghan-led operations. From what I can see at this moment, I’m quite confident we’ll be able to do that over time. The alliance, I think, as it begins to withdraw troops will do so in a measured way that follows the normal NATO approach, which is in together, out together.

It’s the same process, for example, that we’re using today in Kosovo, where we have come down from a total of over 50,000 NATO troops in the Balkans at one time down to 15,000. We came down to 10,000 last year. And I’ve just authorized a reduction to 5,000 NATO troops in Kosovo. As we do that, the allies are leaving proportional to the size of the troop strength that is there. So this in together, out together concept, I think, will determine how we begin withdrawing troops as the transition unfolds from 2011 forward to the completion that we all look for in 2014.

MODERATOR: Go to Portugal, in back.

QUESTION: Morning, Admiral. My name is Vitor Goncalves. I’m with RTP, Portuguese public television. I’d like to ask you a specific question about the joint force combined in Lisbon that might close down next few months. First question is: Strategically, how important is it right now? And second, if it closes what NATO forces may lose, especially on the fight against piracy. Thank you.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Well, in order to answer the question sensibly, let me step back from it slightly and say that overall in the NATO command structure right now, which is the forces that actually command our troops and our sailors as they operate in Afghanistan, and the Balkans, at sea, throughout the NATO enterprise, we currently have about 12 headquarters, and we have about 13,000 total people. In order to create more efficiencies, we’re going to reduce that to a level of about seven headquarters and down to about 8,900 in the command structure.

As we do that, we’re going to reorient the number of commands. No decisions have been as yet as to which individual commands will be closing. No decisions have been made as yet. The next step in the process, now that we’ve determined the overall size to which we want to reduce, is to have a detailed analysis of each of the headquarters and then to try to have a set of recommendations that will be analytically based, where we’ll look at actual infrastructure, host nation support, the actual metrics for each of these headquarters. And then we will also apply military judgment. We’ll look at what each of these headquarters are doing. We’ll think about how we would operate the alliance going forward in that reduced number. And then all of that will be presented to the nations. And again, these decisions must be taken by consensus, exactly as we talked about in the case of missile defense.

So over the coming months, an analytically based and, I believe, military sound set of recommendations will come forward. But I want to emphasize that no decisions have yet been made about specific locations, although we have agreed collectively as an alliance to reduce the overall size of the command structure. And I think that’s a sensible decision in the current fiscal environment.

MODERATOR: Okay. Now I’d like to break away and read a question from the New York Foreign Press Center, from Corriere della Sera, a two-part question. The Secretary General of NATO after the Lisbon meeting sounded quite positive about the possibility that Russia may cooperate to the missile deployment plan in Eastern Europe. How realistically to you assess this development? And second, NATO, since the operations in former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, has expanded its out of area operations. With the Korean crisis developing, do you see any role for the alliance?

ADM STAVRIDIS: Let me take the Korean question first. The alliance, I believe, speaking through our spokesman in Brussels have condemned the attacks of North Korea on South Korea and we are monitoring the situation very closely.

In terms of the missile defense and how realistic it is to have envisioned Russian participation, I think it’s very realistic. As I look at it, the technical capabilities that both the alliance and Russia possess are compatible. We could combine them. In terms of the political will, I was present at the meeting where President Medvedev said the Russians are very willing to listen to serious technical proposals. We’re committed to going forward and providing those, and then we’ll have a dialogue as the new year unfolds. And as a personal viewpoint, as the supreme allied commander and the operations officer, if you will, of the alliance, I think it’s very realistic from a technical perspective, and we’ll see how this all develops from a political perspective.

MODERATOR: Okay.

QUESTION: Christian Wernicke from Germany, Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Welcome home for Thanksgiving, sir.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Danke schon.

QUESTION: I’d like to ask you also as the U.S. commander in Europe, in the – during the summit in the corridors, there was already talk and I understand it will come up in spring that there are plans in the Pentagon, but also in Congress, to redeploy U.S. forces from Europe. What is your point of view as the U.S. commander in Europe or as SACEUR, and how necessary is it to keep the five brigades that you currently have in Europe and – or because there seem to be plans to withdraw one or two of them?

ADM STAVRIDIS: First of all, I can assure you there are no decisions made and no specific plans at this moment concerning any adjustment to the force posture in Europe. The United States is always evaluating its force posture globally. That’s a normal process. It’s underway. There will be decisions that will be taken as there are every year when the United States evaluates its force posture. A minor technical point: There are actually four brigades in Europe right now.

And at the moment, we’ll continue to draw on U.S. presence in Europe as a fundamental part of the alliance. We heard President Obama in an op-ed in the New York Times before the summit talk about relationships in Europe as a cornerstone of U.S. security. I’m quite convinced that no matter what the force level is in Europe by the United States, there will continue to be the closest relationship to include the excellent training that occurs in Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels. And I’m looking for a long-term presence in Europe. The exact size of it is, of course, always under discussion; more to follow on that in the spring.

Down here.

QUESTION: A follow-up on that. Sorry.

MODERATOR: Quickly.

QUESTION: Sir, I understand this year in spring you were very concerned about the effects that a partial withdrawal would have on the multiplying effect of U.S. forces in the alliance. Are these concerns now less kind of vibrant, or are you just preparing for the withdrawal and you don’t talk that tough anymore?

ADM STAVRIDIS: I don’t think I’ve ever talked tough about definitive force levels in Europe. As I mentioned, they are constantly under review. Situations change, and decisions will be forthcoming in the spring.

MODERATOR: Down here to Romania.

QUESTION: You mentioned, Admiral, the good interaction with Russia – sorry, my name is Nicolae Melinescu. I work for the Romanian Television -- National Television.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Nicolae.

QUESTION: So you mentioned the good interaction with Russia during the summit. At the time when Romania proposed and stated that it was ready to host part of the nuclear defense, the Russian establishment –

ADM STAVRIDIS: The missile defense.

QUESTION: Missile defense. Sorry.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Yes, I understand.

QUESTION: The Russian president and his advisors were somehow outraged by this and warned about consequences and even retaliation. Now, within this framework of better understanding with Russia, where would you place Romania as a host of part of the defense? Thank you.

ADM STAVRIDIS: I think the specific discussions about hosting part of the U.S. portion of the system, the phased adaptive approach, are moving along with Romania, and I am confident that we’ll continue to move in a positive direction in that regard. In terms of Russian comments, I’m unfamiliar with what you’ve mentioned. I will simply say that I look for – if the alliance ultimately adopts this system overall under a consensus principle, there will be decisions made then about where the NATO pieces of it would be. The U.S. portion of it is moving forward looking at a land-based deployment in Romania in the middle of this decade.

MODERATOR: Down here.

QUESTION: It’s –

ADM STAVRIDIS: You can get the next question.

QUESTION: -- Mike Evans from the Times, London Times. Just on that last thing, if you do deploy – if the Americans do deploy a radar system in Romania, which is the current plan, would that not be sufficient to also cover the European end, the NATO end, of the integrated system? Would you need to go to Turkey or somewhere else to add to it?

And can I just ask about the 300,000 Afghan troops? There’s much focus on numbers. You’ve obviously emphasized that it’s quality, not just quantity, which is clearly important. But do you seriously consider that by 2014 the Afghan security forces will have enough, as it were, backup to take over control of the security for the country? American intelligence, American aviation, logistics, all that now taken for granted in Afghanistan. If all that goes, how will they be able to seriously cope with holding back the Taliban and al-Qaida?

ADM STAVRIDIS: The first question: One radar is good; a second radar would be better. I could envision a world where we have three radars. These technical issues are being sorted right now. So as we watch not only the geography of what we have to defend, we have to look at the development of potential threat as well. So it will certainly be more than one radar before we’re done with that.

In terms of Afghan security development, to be honest with you, when I look at the progress that’s been made over the last two years in the Afghan security forces and I look at the planning going forward, I am reasonably optimistic, reasonably confident, that Afghan-led operations are indeed a possibility throughout Afghanistan by 2014. I think that is a realistic goal. Will there be additional training and assistance and possibly enablers? I think that’s a possibility, but that’s a fair ways out there at this point.

What I can say for sure to our Afghan friends is that the long-term commitment of NATO to make sure this enterprise upon which we are embarked succeeds is absolutely firm. And that’s NATO and ISAF. I had the chance to brief over 40 heads of state. General Petraeus also – the two of us briefed. And the resounding voices I heard in that room were of long-term commitment to this.

We are not going to fall off a cliff in 2014. I think that necessary support will continue. However, again, I am very confident of the progress in all aspects, including intelligence, including aviation, and indeed including logistics. So more to follow, but I think we can make very strong inroads in that regard by 2014.

MODERATOR: Down in front here.

QUESTION: Thank you very much. My hand got tired raising it.

ADM STAVRIDIS: (Laughter.) I’m sure.

QUESTION: Mounzer Sleiman with Think Tank Monitor and New Orient News based in Lebanon. On Afghanistan, would your calculation that about maybe 40,000 security and army Afghan is needed to reach the 300,000 in the next year, right?

ADM STAVRIDIS: Right.

QUESTION: Now, after nine years, we were able to reach the 264.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Right.

QUESTION: And we have a situation where the Pentagon released a report to the Congress suggesting that the past six months, 300 percent increase in operation of Taliban and their supporter against U.S. and other forces. So what kind of confidence we have that by additional only 40,000 security and army, plus the type of environment that you have there, that going to compared with nine years of training and other things?

In addition to that, what the Pakistani now by their rejection of the demand to utilize expanding your operation to the theater of Baluchistan. They refuse adamantly, but we didn’t hear or maybe I did not hear what is you’re going to do about their refusal, especially with the crucial role of Pakistan in assisting with the theater of operation.

ADM STAVRIDIS: If I may, although we have had U.S. and then NATO and then a very broad ISAF coalition of 48 nations engaged in Afghanistan, it kind of built up over nine years. So I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that we’ve been training them for nine years. I think that there has been training; that’s absolutely true. But I would argue that over the last two years, we’ve really gotten the inputs right. We’ve put a NATO training mission in place. We’ve focused on training as job one.

And so I think the answer to your question – how will 300,000 or so Afghan police and troops be able to operate successfully to create a secure environment – is that their quality is now rising. And so I would point you to specific operations that we are conducting, again, in the south and in the southwest, in the west, in the east, where we are seeing increasing capability out of the Afghans.

In terms of Pakistan, I would say that overall cooperation between ISAF, between General Petraeus and his folks, and the Pakistani army general Kayani and his folks is good and is improving. And in terms of specific locations or regions, I’m not going to talk about that. It gets into kind of an operational zone. But when I look at what Pakistan has done to counterterrorism on their side of the border, I look at the improvement overall in the political climate between Afghanistan and Pakistan over the last five years, I think that we have reason for optimism in terms of our engagement between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ISAF in these operations. So I see it improving, not decreasing, and I think that is a very positive aspect of what we’ll see going forward.

QUESTION: Can I follow up?

ADM STAVRIDIS: Sure.

QUESTION: The issue of the Pentagon report about the 300 percent increase versus --

ADM STAVRIDIS: Oh, let me address that. Thank you for reminding me.

QUESTION: And also there was a specific request from Pakistan to you to expand the operation of the drones to certain areas. So you already decided on that. Why you’re not able to talk about it? Thank you.

ADM STAVRIDIS: What I’ll address is the – what you just reminded me of, which was the increase in violence. And that’s a logical result of the increase in the operations and the increase in the number of troops that have been placed in Afghanistan. And in particular, when I look at southwestern Afghanistan and I think about the fact that two years ago Taliban flags were flying in Marjah, you couldn't move around various areas there. These were very much Taliban strongholds.

So when the ISAF coalition decided to increase the number of troops, we have increased the number of Afghan troops and we have moved them into the south, it’s a very logical consequence that there will, unfortunately, be an increase in violence.

In terms of the Pakistan question, that gets into an operational area that I am not going to address.

MODERATOR: Okay, right down here. We’ve got time for one or two more questions.

QUESTION: Jun Takao from NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation. I was also in Portugal and covering the issue, and I want to ask about missile defense also. A high-ranking White House official briefed that in the final stage of missile defense, that system will protect not only Europe but also the United States. And I’m a little bit confused. If so, what kind of difference we can see from the new MD and Bush era missile defense? If, at the end if it is same, doesn't it, I mean, make another problem with Russia?

ADM STAVRIDIS: The two systems are extremely different, and let me quickly articulate it. The current system is called the phased adaptive approach. It is phased in that it will move in over time. It will not be a sudden emplacement of very large, in-ground, very heavy, permanent radars.

It’s phased because the system is going to come off of ships. It’s going to come off the Aegis ships which are employed by the United States, by Japan, by Spain, by Korea, several other nations. That system will come off the ships. It’s light and it can be phased in ashore.

It’s adaptive in that because it is light, it can be moved around.

And thirdly, the capabilities of this system would not pose a strategic threat to any strategic system. It is designed to work against the ballistic missile threat.

So you will find what the system is designed to do is to be very phased, very adaptive. It’s very different than the previous systems. And I am convinced that as we get into technical talks with Russia, we will be able to ameliorate their concerns in a way that we are not posing that system against any of their systems, but rather we want to cooperate with them to create a commonly shared defensive zone.

And yes, over time as we expand the number of radars – back to the question from the gentleman at the Times here – you will see that the coverage also expands, and eventually it will provide coverage not only to Europe but also to the United States, but it will do so in a way that does not interfere with the Russian capability.

MODERATOR: Yes, just one quick follow-up. That’ll be the last question.

QUESTION: My question is what is the estimation of the total – this whole missile system? How much? I mean, end of the phases, I believe is 2018 that will be whole system will be finished. Do you have any kind of estimation how much this is going to cost? And second, do you also have any kind of estimation or plan that which manufacturers will be producing this whole system? Because I believe it’s a marginal topic here, but it’s very important and a lot of discussion is going on. Countries like Turkey that – which sector will be the most beneficial out of whole billions of dollars?

ADM STAVRIDIS: Sure.

QUESTION: Thank you.

ADM STAVRIDIS: Well, first of all, the good news for NATO is that the United States has already borne a great deal of the cost of the research and development of the systems. For example, as I mentioned, the Aegis defense system was developed here. That will be adapted and moved ashore. So a great deal of the costs have already been spent in the development of the R&D portion of this thing.

In terms of the European side of this thing, the cost is actually relatively low, because it’s a command-and-control system that plugs into hardware that is being offered up by the United States at this point. So the command-and-control side of this thing will be in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. The actual infrastructure is indeed in the billions of dollars, but much of those costs will be borne by the United States.

In terms of other entities that will be involved, there are other parts of the system that eventually will plug into it – point defense systems, mid-range systems. Some of those will be developed. Some are already developed. It’s a complicated question, but there’s a variety of actors that will plug into this over time. But those are the kind of technical questions we’ll need to resolve over the next couple of years, frankly.

And you’re correct; the overall endgame for this is 2018 to 2020, so we’ve got time to develop this. I think it’s the right system.

I’m going to have to leave it right there. Thank you very much for all of you, and again, my congratulations to Portugal on an excellent, excellent summit.

MODERATOR: Thank you all for coming. This event is now concluded.