Prince Harry: I've killed in Afghanistan. But Dad wants me to act like a prince

The Guardian, Monday 21 January 2013

Prince Harry has flown out of Afghanistan at the end of a four-month tour, during which he admitted killing insurgents while piloting his Apache helicopter and spoke in rare depth about the tensions and frustrations of being a royal (video) who craved life out of the spotlight.

He also revealed his disdain and distrust of some sections of the media and described how his father constantly reminded him to behave more like a member of the royal family.

A commander of the army's most sophisticated attack helicopter, the prince said he had fired on the Taliban during operations to support ground troops and rescue injured Afghan and Nato personnel. His remarks may be seized upon by insurgents to stir anti-British sentiment, but the prince said he was only doing his job. Most of the time the helicopter acted more as a deterrent, he said.

"If there's people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we'll take them out of the game, I suppose," he said. "Take a life to save a life … the squadron's been out here. Everyone's fired a certain amount."

In a series of interviews during his time based at Camp Bastion in Helmand province, he hinted at the difficulty of reconciling the different roles in his life. The prince, known as Captain Wales in the army, explained his "three mes". "One in the army, one socially in my own private time, and then one with the family and stuff like that. So there is a switch and I flick it when necessary."

He admitted he sometimes "let himself down" with his laddish behaviour, which he put down to "probably being too much army, and not enough prince", but he said he was entitled to privacy, too.

In another unusually frank exchange, he aimed biting criticism at the media, particularly the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, three of the royal family's most ardent supporters in Fleet Street. He said he was particularly annoyed at articles comparing his role as an Apache co-pilot gunner to Spitfire crews waiting to scramble during the second world war. "No it's not like that at all," he said. "I don't know who quoted that." Referring to the phone-hacking scandal that hit News International, he said: "I think it was probably the Sun newspaper, but because we haven't got mobile phones out here they obviously can't bug our phones so they don't know what we're saying."

The prince said his suspicion of the media was rooted in the treatment of his family when "I was very small", but that he couldn't help monitoring the stories written about him. "Of course I read them," the prince said. "If there's a story and something's been written about me, I want to know what's being said. But all it does is just upset me and anger me that people can get away with writing the stuff they do. Not just about me, but about everything and everybody. My father always says, 'Don't read it'. Everyone says, 'Don't read it, because it's always rubbish'."

The prince was posted to Afghanistan last September to command a £45m Apache helicopter – one of the military's most sophisticated and well armed aircraft. During his tour the Apaches flew missions supporting Nato troops fighting the Taliban, and accompanied British Chinook and US Black Hawk medical helicopters during casualty evacuations.

Four years ago, the prince had to be spirited out of Afghanistan during his first tour after a media embargo was broken by mistake by an Australian magazine. This time, the Ministry of Defence chose to publicise his deployment on the understanding that newspapers and broadcasters would not give a running commentary on his life out there to allow him to get on with his job. Two-man crews from the BBC, Sky and ITN were sent once each to report on his visit, while a photographer and a reporter from the Press Association were embedded on all three visits.

Asked whether he felt more comfortable being Captain Wales than Prince Harry, his reply was one of the most revealing he has given about his relationship with Prince Charles: "Definitely. I've always been like that. My father's always trying to remind me about who I am and stuff like that. But it's very easy to forget about who I am when I am in the army. Everyone's wearing the same uniform and doing the same kind of thing. I get on well with the lads and I enjoy my job. It really is as simple as that."

Shortly before he went to Afghanistan, the prince was caught in another media furore, when pictures emerged of him frolicking naked in Las Vegas during a private party. Harry said he had let himself down, but also blamed the media. "I probably let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down. But at the end of the day I was in a private area and there should be a certain amount of privacy that one should expect. It was probably a classic example of me probably being too much army, and not enough prince. It's a simple case of that.

"The papers knew that I was going out to Afghanistan anyway, so the way I was treated from them I don't think is acceptable." He added: "Certain people remind me, 'Remember who you are, so don't always drop your guard'."

Asked where he and his brother's fascination with helicopters came from, he said: "Probably the fact that you can only fit a certain amount of people in a helicopter, therefore no one can follow us, like you guys."

Text 17

Diplomacy Is Dead

By ROGER COHEN

Published: January 21, 2013

London

The New York Times

DIPLOMACY is dead.

Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia — requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness to talk to the enemy.

This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness and an unwillingness to talk to bad guys. Human rights are in fashion, a good thing of course, but the space for realist statesmanship of the kind that produced the Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late Richard Holbrooke’s realpolitik was not for the squeamish.

There are other reasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its dominant position without any other nation rising to take its place. The result is nobody’s world. It is a place where America acts as a cautious boss, alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss of authority. Syria has been an unedifying lesson in the course of crisis when diplomacy is dead. Algeria shows how the dead pile up when talking is dismissed as a waste of time.

Violence, of the kind diplomacy once resolved, has shifted. As William Luers, a former ambassador to Venezuela and the director of The Iran Project, said in an e-mail, it occurs “less between states and more dealing with terrorists.” One result is that “the military and the C.I.A. have been in the driver’s seat in dealing with governments throughout the Middle East and in state to state (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) relations.” The role of professional diplomats is squeezed.

Indeed the very word “diplomacy” has become unfashionable on Capitol Hill, where its wimpy associations — trade-offs, compromise, pliancy, concessions and the like — are shunned by representatives who these days prefer beating the post-9/11 drums of confrontation, toughness and inflexibility: All of which may sound good but often get you nowhere (or into long, intractable wars) at great cost.

Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, wrote in an e-mail that, “When domestic politics devolve into polarization and paralysis the impact on diplomatic possibility becomes inordinately constraining.” He cited Cuba and Iran as examples of this; I would add Israel-Palestine. These critical foreign policy issues are viewed less as diplomatic challenges than potential sources of domestic political capital.

So when I asked myself what I hoped Barack Obama’s second term would inaugurate, my answer was a new era of diplomacy. It is not too late for the president to earn that Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course diplomats do many worthy things around the world, and even in the first term there were a couple of significant shifts — in Burma where patient U.S. diplomacy has produced an opening, and in the yo-yoing new Egypt where U.S. engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood was important and long overdue (and raised the question of when America would do the same with the Brotherhood’s offshoot, Hamas.)

But Obama has not had a big breakthrough. America’s diplomatic doldrums are approaching their 20th year.

There are some modest reasons to think the lid on diplomacy’s coffin may open a crack. This is a second term; Obama is less beholden to the strident whims of Congress. The Republican never-give-an-inch right is weaker. In John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, his nominees for secretary of state and secretary of defense, Obama has chosen two knowledgeable professionals who have seen enough war to loathe it and have deep experience of the world. They know peace involves risk. They know it may not be pretty. The big wars are winding down. Military commanders may cede some space to diplomats.

Breakthrough diplomacy is not conducted with friends. It is conducted with the likes of the Taliban, the ayatollahs and Hamas. It involves accepting that in order to get what you want you have to give something. The central question is: What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I have to give to get it? Or, put the way Nixon put it in seeking common ground with Communist China: What do we want, what do they want, and what do we both want?

Obama tried a bunch of special envoys in the first term. It did not work. He needs to empower his secretary of state to do the necessary heavy lifting on Iran and Israel-Palestine. Luers suggested that one “idea for a New Diplomacy would be for Hagel and Kerry to take along senators from both parties on trips abroad and to trouble spots. This used to be standard practice. Be bold with the Senate and try to bring them along.”

For diplomacy to succeed noise has to be shut out. There are a lot of pie-in-the-sky citizen-diplomats out there these days blathering on about dreamy one-state solutions for Israel-Palestine and the like. Social media and hyper-connectivity bring huge benefits. They helped ignite the wave of liberation known as the Arab Spring. They are force-multipliers for openness and citizenship. But they may distract from the focused, realpolitik diplomacy that brought the major breakthroughs of 1972, 1989 and 1995.

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Text 18

By THOMAS ERDBRINK