Month: August 2011
Roadblocks with more than one significance
Herewith an interview I did for Bekim Greicevci of Kosovo’s Daily Express on the situation in northern Kosovo (you can play the Kosovo band Gillespie, subject of a nice piece on PRI’s The World yesterday here in DC, while reading):
Gillespie – E Di (Official Video)
Gillespie | Myspace Music Videos
- Kosovo Government took a decision to establish control over border crossings along Kosovo’s northern border with Serbia. What is your opinion on Government’s decision?
There is no question in my mind about the right of a sovereign state to control its own borders, but Belgrade has not recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty. That is the underlying problem that needs to be resolved. It will not be solved quickly or easily. Nor will it be solved by unilateral actions or the use of force. Belgrade’s acceptance of Kosovo’s customs documents would be a good first step in the right direction and ameliorate the situation in the north.
- EULEX refused to help Kosovo authorities to establish the control at Northern border crossings. Kosovars are very unhappy with the EU Mission. What is your comment on EULEX and its position about the North?
EULEX reflects division within the EU, in particular between the five non-recognizing states and the 22 recognizing states. As control of the border is a sovereign function, it should surprise no one that the five non-recognizing states do not want to be responsible for establishing sovereign controls there.
- Belgrade and some EU officials have called for the situation in the North to return to what it was before July 25. Kosovo Government says there is no turning back. In your view, how can this be resolved?
While I understand those who may not want to help Kosovo establish sovereign controls on the northern border, I find it hard to understand those who want a return to the previous situation. Belgrade cannot claim that UN Security Council resolution 1244 gave either Serbian officials or local hoodlums the right to control what it regards as the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia proper. That responsibility clearly should lie with the Kosovo institutions. The status quo ante should not be restored.
- Taking into account the statements by Serb high officials during past months advocating the change of borders do you think that Serbia’s final goal is partition of the North from Kosovo?
I think there is no question but that Belgrade’s goal is partition. It has been for a long time. Partition is a grave danger to peace and security throughout the Balkans, as it may precipitate problems in Macedonia, Bosnia, southern Serbia and Sandjak. Belgrade needs to get back to the Ahtisaari plan, read it carefully and specify precisely what more it wants than what is already provided there for the north.
- How do you see the role of the international community, namely the United States and the European Union regarding latest developments in Kosovo?
Washington and Brussels would like to see this problem resolved quickly and peacefully, with no partition. It is not clear whether those goals are all compatible. They are going to need to work hard to convince Pristina not to make unilateral moves and Belgrade to give up on partition.
- The international community is calling for discussions in the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia facilitated by the EU. After the events in North, what chances does this dialogue have? The Serb chief negotiator Borislav Stefanovic is everyday calling local Serbs not to remove the roadblocks in the North.
You make peace with your enemies, not with your friends. Borko Stefanovic is not being helpful, but you still have to talk with him. I imagine he has some complaints about things that are said in Pristina, too. The EU-facilitated dialogue is the only show in town—it is important to try to make it a success. The Americans will look for a peaceful and mutually acceptable outcome and back it fully.
The Europeans have the ultimate leverage: control over Belgrade’s EU candidacy and the date for starting negotiations. Stefanovic, or one of his bosses, needs to worry that those northern Kosovo roadblocks might become obstacles on Serbia’s path to EU membership.
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Crouching tiger, hidden dragon
Now that the UN Security Council has at least condemned the regime violence in Syria, everybody is looking for President Obama to amp up calls for Bashar al Assad to step aside. The Administration, I am assured, knows perfectly well that an orderly transition to a less autocratic regime in Damascus would be a big improvement from the U.S. perspective.
But what if the President says Bashar has to go, and then he doesn’t? The U.S. hasn’t got lots of leverage, as it did over an Egyptian army that was heavily dependent on U.S. money, training and equipment. The most vulnerable sector in Syria is energy, where European rather than American companies are the critical players. Posing the President as a crouching tiger is better than exposing him as a paper tiger, especially after the week he has just gotten himself through.
And what if the transition is not orderly, but breaks down into sectarian and ethnic violence, with the risk of overflow into Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey? That could be a big mess, one we would regret for many years into the future.
The problem with this argument is that it suggests a quicker transition would be far better for the U.S. than one that drags on . Those who know Syria well are saying Aleppo and Damascus will turn against Bashar sooner rather than later. Sami Moubayed says unemployment, lack of moderate community leaders willing to calm the situation, and the influx of people from all over Syria into the two largest Syrian cities will ensure that the revolution eventually spreads there. In the meanwhile, the demonstrators are straining the security forces and beginning to bend them at the edges.
While Juan Cole is correctly disappointed in the wording and lack of teeth in the UN Security Council statement, I’m more philosophical about it. I see it as a necessary step along the way to ratcheting up pressure on Bashar. Its significance is that it happened at all, not the specific wording.
I wish we could wave a magic wand and make the Syrian army turn into pussycats, but we can’t. Only the demonstrators can make that trick work, by maintaining their nonviolent discipline and convincing some of the soldiers and police that their interests will be better served if they embrace the revolution rather than fight it.
While not often mentioned, it is important to keep an eye on the Chinese, who could either save the Syrian regime with cash for oil contracts or sink it by permitting more action in the Security Council and lining up with the Americans and Europeans. Syria doesn’t have enough oil to be of great interest to the Chinese, and a lot more of it is likely to flow once Bashar is gone. The hidden dragon may well be the deciding factor against the regime.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army has punched into the center of Hama, killing a few dozen more of its own citizens and making an orderly transition less likely. Bashar seems to have decided that he prefers to resist the inevitable, like Gaddafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, than give in like Mubarak in Egypt or Ben Ali in Tunisia. Yesterday’s scenes of Mubarak caged in a Cairo courtroom will not have encouraged him to rethink.
PS: AJ English continues to do a good job, with a lot of help from courageous friends at Shaam:
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Past the twelfth hour
So Iraq has finally, in the 11th hour (actually the 12th, since it happened after midnight Baghdad time) told the Americans it is willing to talk about a continuing American troop presence past the end of 2011, mainly to train the Iraqi air force and navy. According to the LA Times, Prime Minister Maliki and his archrival (and coalition partner) Iyad Allawi used the occasion to hash out an agreement on how nominees to the still unfilled positions of Defense and Interior Minister will be handled.
The agreement to talk is important, but there are still necessarily a lot of unanswered questions. Will the Americans have any combat or counter-terrorism role? Will they continue to play a role in the confidence building measures (CBMs) between the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish peshmerga? Will they be permitted to defend themselves? Will they be held accountable if they kill or injure someone unjustifiably in an Iraqi court or in an American one? Who will pay for this training mission, the hard-strapped United States or the Iraqis, who have been collecting close $100 per barrel for oil?
The Sadrists appear to have objected but not so strongly as to prevent the negotiations from starting. They lack the votes in parliament to stop the move on their own, but they could certainly make life difficult for Prime Minister Maliki. I wonder what he promised in exchange for their quiescence. Or have the Sadrists come to realize that an American presence in Iraq as a counterweight to Iran is not such a bad thing even from their perspective?
If we can presume for the moment that these talks will in fact lead to 10,000 American troops remaining in Iraq, is that a good thing, or not? In my book it is. It will help to ensure a united Iraq that can defend and maintain itself in a rough neighborhood, and give the Americans an opportunity to engage constructively with its armed forces, which are bound to remain a key institution there. A more or less democratic Iraq that aligns itself with the U.S. and Europe on issues like Iran’s nuclear program or democractic transition in Syria would not pay back all the effort we have made and the losses we have suffered there, but it would be a positive mark in a foreign policy ledger that has not accumulated many in recent years.
I know Americans are tired of Iraq, but it remains an important piece of the Middle East jigsaw. As I’ve noted previously, a large military training program is only one dimension of American relations with the new Iraq. Also important is the direction of its oil and gas pipelines, which could literally tie Iraq more closely to Europe by flowing north and east. I can do no better than quote myself on this subject:
In my view, another important contribution to Iraq’s future international alignment could come from its capability to export oil other than by loading it on ships and moving it through the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz. The Gulf export facilities are already a bottleneck, not to mention the risk that conflict there could disrupt Iraq’s exports.
But Iraq is geographically advantaged. It can export oil (and gas) to the north and west, reaching European markets more directly and cheaply than through the Gulf. My understanding is that even Iraq’s southern oil fields can export more economically to the north and west, provided the “strategic pipeline” that once linked them to northern Iraq is repaired and enlarged.
If the Americans really want an Iraq that will see its interests more aligned with the West, oil and gas pipelines to the north and west are likely to be at least as important as F-16′s and American troops in the long run. There is no time like the present to get busy making the long run happen.
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When all you have is a hammer
Josh Rogin over at Foreign Policy does a nice, quick job explaining why it is unclear how much defense will be cut as a result of the debt deal the Senate is expected to pass today. The deal lumps defense together with diplomacy, aid, intelligence, nuclear weapons and other non-Defense Department contributions to national security.
It is unclear how the $420 billion in “security” cuts will be distributed across those national security activities. And even less clear how additional cuts will be distributed, if Congress fails to act and the trigger mechanism for automatic cuts is activated.
From an intellectual perspective, it is correct to consider national security expenditures overall, but let’s remind ourselves what our national security objectives are. President Obama defines them this way:
- security: the security of the United States, its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners.
- prosperity: a strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity.
- values: respect for universal values at home and around the world.
- international order: an international order advanced by U.S. leadership that promotes peace, security, and opportunity through stronger cooperation to meet global challenges.
If this is too “soft” for you, try George W. Bush’s version from 2002, shortly after the 9/11 attacks:
- champion aspirations for human dignity;
- strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends;
- work with others to defuse regional conflicts;
- prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends, with weapons of mass destruction;
- ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade;
- expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy;
- develop agendas for cooperative action with other main centers of global power; and
- transform America’s national security institutions to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
President Bush was clearly more focused on countering terrorism, but did not exclude other interests.
These are far-reaching agendas that include preventing future attacks and creating a world that is safe for democracy, in the Wilsonian tradition. Obama skipped the sweeping statement about human dignity but included values no less explicitly.
The problem is that our Congress does not think about national security in the broad terms defined by our two most recent presidents. It thinks much harder about how to distribute defense contracts across the nation and worries little about diplomacy and foreign aid, which don’t bring home much pork.
It is a pretty good bet that when Congress distributes funds between appropriations committees, the Defense Department will get not only the lion’s share (it always has) but a smaller cut than the “150” account that funds State, AID and other foreign affairs functions. Those functions are already running on fumes, as Rogin noted last month.
We are headed towards further militarization of national security responsibilities. I am an admirer of our military–it is a magnificent organization capable of truly amazing feats. But it is not the appropriate tool for achieving all the national security goals Presidents Bush and Obama have set. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We need some other tools in the tool box.
PS: There are indications already that defense will do very well, despite the cutting.
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Change course, overhaul Dayton, fix Bosnia
Bruce Hitchner of Tufts and the Dayton Peace Accords Project writes:
If there is one lesson that ethnic nationalists on all sides in Bosnia learned from the 1992-5 conflict it is that their goals could not be achieved by war. They learned this lesson when the United States, finally accepting that one of its vital national interests—peace in Europe—was at stake, intervened to stop the war.
But the ethnic nationalists also absorbed another lesson, some to their relief, others to their dismay: that a Bosnia not at war did not have any special claim on the vital national interests of the United States. The Dayton Agreement, brokered by the United States, was first and foremost a peace treaty, and by any measure Washington has stood by its responsibility to enforce the peace.
The annexes are another story; they laid out the mechanisms and procedures for rebuilding Bosnia, but rather than root out firmly and finally the institutions and structures that had caused the war, the annexes glossed over many of them. And while there were many technical and legal solutions to political, constitutional, and economic problems articulated in the Annexes, supported by an international mission, the OHR, created to help implement them, their fulfillment ultimately depended on many of the same people and structures that had instigated the war.
All of this was not lost on the ethnic nationalists. They determined, each in their own way, that their respective goals could be achieved by exploiting the legal ambiguities and often complex institutional mechanisms embedded in the Annexes. It might take longer, but what could not be achieved by war, they determined, could be attained by peaceful political attrition.
If what I suggest here is true, the answer to the problems of Bosnia does not lie in further measures to enforce the peace treaty per se or in the re-empowerment of international authority to enforce the annexes, but in the recognition that securing the peace and creating a stable democratic society in Bosnia cannot be achieved under the existing Dayton post-war settlement. It is time, I suggest, that the United States, as well as the European Union, acknowledge that the Dayton Annexes have failed to achieve their ultimate purpose; and that the only acceptable way forward is a complete overhaul of the country’s constitutional, political, and electoral order.
This may appear a radical and not especially welcome proposal, but after 16 years of falling short of fully implementing the annexes and other necessary reforms, and no prospect of a change in this pattern driven by this generation of politicians, a fundamental policy shift of this magnitude is perhaps the only way out of an increasingly stalemated political environment in Bosnia. Otherwise, the very thing that the Dayton peace treaty clearly established–peace–will be at risk.
This does not mean calling for a Dayton II or yet another international conference. What is required instead is the will and imagination to put forward a new vision of post-Dayton Bosnia that is matched by renewed international efforts at building fundamental trust and reconciliation. While there may always be a segment of the population of Bosnia who will desire separation over national unity, there are many among even among the ethnic nationalists who know implicitly that there are solutions to protecting group rights and interests in a unified, democratic, and functional Bosnia that hold far more hope for their future than a fateful and quixotic attempt at extreme autonomy or independence.
Indeed, there are many, I suspect, who will welcome it even among those who are thought to be against such things, but only so long as it is backed by a genuine commitment to building trust, confidence and political security across ethnic lines, and thereby ending the incentives to zero-sum politics that Dayton inherently encourages and sustains.
In the end, it comes down to facing up to a failure, and changing course. I think the United States and European Union have the capacity to do that in the case of Bosnia. More importantly, I believe the majority of Bosnians across the spectrum would welcome it. The question is whether Washington and Brussels are prepared to change course before things get worse, rather than when events compel them to do so.
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Three blind mice
I first used this title 15 years ago in a piece for the Secretary of State’s Morning Summary about Presidents Tudjman, Milosevic and Izetbegovic. It drew a personal word of interest and praise from President Clinton. That doesn’t happen often, so a lowly office director tends to remember when it does. And maybe resurrect the charmed title at an appropriate moment.
Today’s three blind mice are chiefs of state Bashar al Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Syria, Libya and Yemen, respectively. While it is easy now to imagine that things will get worse in these three countries before they get better, it is clear enough that they would be better now if their chiefs had stepped aside long ago to allow orderly transitions. Sunday the Syrian armed forces made a clear summer day in Hama sound like this:
Bashar al Assad therefore rates a word of particular opprobrium: he and his brother Maher are showing themselves heirs to the blood-shedding tradition of their father Hafez. This should not surprise, but people have come to think Bashar is somehow better than the rest of his homicidal family. It just isn’t so.
Things are arguably worse in Libya and Yemen. A kind of multi-faceted tribal, regional and sectarian chaos reigns in the latter, on top of a popular protest movement that remains vigorous and terrorist bands who harbor in the hinterlands. In Libya, the killing by we know not whom of General Abdel Fatah Younes, a rebel military leader who came over from the Gaddafi regime, has raised lots of questions about the Transitional National Council (TNC) that leads the rebellion, which apparently had to fight off Gaddafi forces inside Benghazi over the weekend.
These three Middle Eastern potentates are blind not just to the interests of their countries but also to their own. A few months ago it would have been possible to arrange a decent exit for these embattled chiefs of state. Now the International Criminal Court has indicted Gaddafi, Saleh is nursing wounds in Saudi Arabia and Bashar al Assad cannot hope to escape responsibility for several thousand deaths of peaceful demonstrators. Only Saleh can hope to live out a peaceful old age, and only if he gives up on his ambition to return to Yemen.
What we are lacking here is the farmer’s wife, who is supposed to cut off their tails with a carving knife. By this I mean some international party that can persuade chiefs of state who have lost the consent of the people they govern to step aside. In the midst of this Arab spring Ban Ki Moon was reelected as United Nations Secretary General, but he has not been empowered to negotiate what the international community clearly seeks: abdication of these chiefs of state. He has a clear mandate only with respect to Gaddafi, and that is for a ceasefire and withdrawal rather than abdication.
Several “mediators” have sought compromise solutions. The African Union and Turkey have tried with Libya, Turkey has tried with Syria, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia and its wealthy monarchy friends) has tried with Yemen. None of this has worked so far. What we are witnessing is a failure of diplomacy, which should make us think harder about how to strengthen international norms and institutions that can deliver results more effectively.
That is precisely what is not happening, though I happily credit U.S. ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford (who testifies this week in Congress) for his courageous display of support to the demonstrators. Instead, the U.S. Congress is considering budgets that would slice diplomacy to the bone and limit contributions to international organization. I can’t really say there are 535 blind mice, since some members of Congress understand better than I do what is needed. But the collective decision is likely to disarm the farmer’s wife, leaving her standing there without even a carving knife to discipline the unruly despots of the 21st century.
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