Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-08-Speech-2-212"
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"en.20080708.32.2-212"2
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"Mr President, the brilliant foreign-policy strategist Franz Josef Strauss, whose death exactly 20 years ago we shall be commemorating on 3 October this year, always said that if you button up your jacket wrongly you have to undo it again in order to button it up correctly. That is exactly the situation that we now have in Afghanistan, for we have been using the wrong political strategy. We have built our efforts around the minority groups of the Northern Alliance and have ignored the representative powers of the majority population, namely the Pashtuns. That is why politics and democracy are simply not working there.
If we do not succeed in winning over the majority of the representative Pashtun community to the side of the West, to democracy and to commitment to our cause then we shall most dramatically fail in Afghanistan, as now seems to be a distinct possibility. I would therefore simply appeal to all those involved to adopt a fresh political approach in Afghanistan and not to drive the Pashtuns into the arms of what is left of the Taliban by lumping Pashtuns and Taliban all in together. That would be a big mistake. We need a new political strategy, one that is more discriminating.
As Europeans we know all about the problems of nationality, possibly even better than others. We should be applying this experience wisely and competently in Afghanistan."@en1
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