Tomorrow/Wednesday, Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen will brief the media about the upcoming International Conference on Afghanistan in The Hague. Short of him handing out the draft of the Final Declaration to the press, don’t expect too much of this. The draft has no doubt already been written, with some sentences or entire paragraphs between brackets. Those brackets mean that the civil servants expect that these particular details cannot count on unanimity at this stage and need further negotiation. Ideally, only a few brackets will be left by next Tuesday, the day of the conference.
At the same time, the mayor of The Hague will provide details about the security measures surrounding the Afghanistan Conference. The venue will attract demonstrators. No problem here, the city is used to them. But it also offers a target-of-opportunity to terrorist networks. I wonder how many details Mayor Jozias van Aartsen (himself a former foreign minister) will make public, as spelling out security measures is a two-edged sword. On the one hand the authorities will want to assure the participants (and the local population) that everything is in place to guarantee security; on the other hand, publishing too many details could work counterproductive.
The question also is: how to qualify this meeting? It’s not really a ‘Summit’, as these, by definition, are attended by heads of state and government. Only two of the participants meet this lofty qualification: UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Still, suppose the secret services of the key countries involved have decided to designate the meeting a true Summit anyway, the Dutch will deploy the full gamut of security measures.
Previous summit meetings have shown that this routinely involves serious air defence (an AWACS radar plane monitoring the air space; fighter planes on standby; ground-to-air missiles conveniently positioned in the nearby dunes or an air defence frigate off the coast (as has happened before during important meetings)) and enough Special Forces on the ground to thwart even the most serious of potential attacks. And of course, there will be more modest counterterrorism measures such as sniffer dogs, metal detectors, concrete road barriers and the like. Unseen (and by now already in full swing) will be a concerted effort of intelligence services to detect in a timely manner any signs that terrorist may want to have a go at the Afghanistan Conference.
Official website of the Conference
Radio Netherlands coverage of the Conference
