Speaking at the seventh annual Brussels Forum on 24 March, the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan outlined the basic goal of the now-suspended talks with the Taliban. “The goal of any conversation with the Taliban is to get Afghans talking to Afghans,” said Mark Grossman during a panel discussion on Afghanistan. “We are looking to open the door for the Afghan peace process.”
Talks were “not about sharing power with the Taliban, they are about including all Afghans in the society,” according to Shaida Abdali, deputy national security advisor of Afghanistan.
“The solution to the current problems is not in these talks. After 2014, the real talks begin,” said Carl Bildt, Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs, in reference to the end date of the Nato combat mission in Afghanistan.
Before the Afghanistan session, a panel addressed energy security. Richard Morningstar, US special envoy for Eurasian energy, summed up the panel by saying “there is no silver bullet; the key is diversification” – especially for China, the United States, and Europe.
Other members of the panel included Nikolay Mladenov, minister of foreign affairs of Bulgaria; Iain Conn, BP’s chief executive of refining and marketing; and Julia Nanay, senior director of markets and country strategies group for PFC Energy.
Mladenov said that, while nuclear energy should still be an option, in the wake of Fukushima, “Europe must live up to the challenge that we have now after Fukushima and really come up with common standards on nuclear energy and use.”
Regarding Europe’s dependency on gas supplies from Russia, Morningstar said that while he didn’t think it was actually happening, coercion is an issue so long as China and Russia continue to disagree on prices.
“I don’t think Europe should ever let itself be blackmailed,” he said. “Europe is the best customer Russia ever had.”
The afternoon concluded with the announcement of the selection of Nora Fisher Onar, Merle Maigre and Mark Simakovsky as the three recipients of the inaugural Asmus Policy Entrepreneurs Fellowship.
Named after Ronald D Asmus, the former executive director of German Marshall Fund’s Brussels office, who died on 30 April 2011, the Asmus fellows were selected as promising young foreign policy professionals whose fellowship projects show a commitment to the transatlantic relationship and will challenge existing foreign policy practices, two ideas that Asmus embodied.
The Brussels Forum is an annual conference on transatlantic relations organised by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and attended by heads of state, officials from the EU institutions and member states, US officials, congressional representatives, parliamentarians and academics.
