Arms Sales Ban Lifted

BRUSSELS, Oct. 31 (Reuters) — The European Union agreed today to lift a ban on supplying weapons to anti-Taliban rebels in Afghanistan. A spokeswoman said ambassadors from the 15-member nations agreed to modify their understanding of United Nations sanctions to exempt the rebels from the bloc's previous blanket ban on sending arms. A senior diplomat said the shift, adopted after Sweden, Finland and Ireland dropped reservations, would allow European Union states to help Northern Alliance states whose chief arms suppliers have been Iran and Russia.

REACTION:

This is a short news item with marginal relevance to the war: the European nations can't produce & deliver weapons to Central Asia at costs anywhere near as low as Russia's. It's a largely symbolic action that is a moral victory for the United States.
Perhaps the more interesting insights are to be found in the process of making the decision. It is 100% unclear who's really in charge in this case. The decision was precipitated by similar unilateral decisions from Ireland, Finland, and Sweden, but the ban being repealed was supposedly binding on all European Union members. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? As the EU undergoes the growing pains (or labor pains?) of becoming a federation, the relative sovereignty of the member states vis-a-vis the Brussels government will have to be clarified.
We won't be hearing any more about this decision; most of the Europeans agree that the Northern Alliance is not a threat to anybody but the Taliban at this point, and it's not going to be an important enough change to motivate debate. However, when arms sales to a Balkan or suchlike entity (say, an autonomous Kosovo) are outlawed or legalized the EU will have to grapple with some major sovereignty issues.
For a comparison in the United States (a centralized semi-federal system), the State of Massachusetts imposed a boycott of Burma last year for its brutal regime. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that boycott illegal, since the U.S. Constitution yields foreign policy power to the Federal Government.
Hope you all enjoyed that analysis - I won't always be that esoteric; but it's not a very emotional issue.