EU: there is increasing scepticism about foreign interventions

With Gordon Brown and, reportedly, Barack Obama both agreeing to up their respective countries’ troop count in Afghanistan,  Afghan watchers have understandably spent the past week focusing on the military component of the international effort (plus, of course, the nefarious activities of the Italians).

Yet, as with most large-scale interventions these days, Afghanistan also enjoys a significant civilian presence—police, rule of law experts, reconstruction teams and the like. And while the instinct in America is always to turn to the Pentagon first, we Europeans, with our far more subtle understanding of the complex nature of modern security challenges,  are much better at deploying this so-called “civilian power” effectively—right?

Wrong. It turns out that the EU’s much-vaunted “comprehensive approach” is chimerical—a figment more of an illusory European self-image than any reflection of our performance abroad. In a new report published by my