Month: February 2019
Needed: better Arab armies
The Middle East Institute (MEI) hosted a book talk on February 14 with Kenneth Pollack, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), former CIA intelligence analyst, and the author of Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.
Pollack argues that since the second world war, Arab armies had underperformed. He believes that the size, material factors and the weaponry with which they waged war could have enabled Arabs to win easily, but instead they lost catastrophically. The few times they won were modest victories. Reflecting on the core reason for Arab military backwardness in the last seventy years, Pollack attributes it to Arab society itself. He argues that what defines a good and bad military in the industrial age warfare is a hierarchy based on mission-oriented orders in which the general gives the subordinate a sense of what he is trying to achieve and leaves it to them to figure out how best to do it. Arab culture’s educational system, though, inculcates a rigidly top-down system of organization and hierarchy.
Pollack explained that every culture develops in response to its own circumstances. And Warfare is usually a competitive activity against the organization of another society that organizes itself differently. Arabs were trying to fight industrial warfare in a way that their culture and society did not equip them to do, against foes who were way better equipped l(ike, for instance, the Israelis).
Strikingly similar patterns of underperformance in Middle Eastern wars suggest recurrent problems. Descriptions of Egyptian performance in 1948 and Iraqi performance in 2014 read like plagiarized versions of one another. Arabs have not experienced the industrial revolution, or the information revolution of today.
Apart from the cultural piece, Pollack identifies a set of problems Arab armies suffer. Most Arab generals were inexperienced and did not know what they were doing. Junior officers are passive, inflexible, unimaginative, and unable to respond to battlefield developments. At the bottom of Arab chain of command, personnel had difficulties handling their weapons and maintaining them properly. The more sophisticated a weapon it is, the harder for them to handle. For instance, All countries who trained Arab armies (the Russians, French, Americans, and British) attest that they performed better with the older Soviet MIG 17 and MIG 21 than they did with American F4 and F16. Providing Arab armies with sophisticated weapons did not improve their combat capability.
In addition, the Arab world is replete with bad civil military relations. Many regimes lacking legitimacy tend to be concerned the generals surrounding them, as the leaders themselves came to power by overthrowing others. They seek therefore to hobble the military so that can not do likewise. Saddam Hussein was an outstanding example, as he put people in charge whom he knew to be incompetent. The golden rule has thus always been loyalty over competence.
It is important for those who want the US out of the region that it not to be replaced by Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, or Al-Qaeda. Without the US, it is imperative to leave behind a strong Arab army able of defending against these threats.
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The bromance isn’t going well
Agon Maliqi raises three legitimate issues in response to my post welcoming Kosovo’s negotiating platform:
1) Domestic costs of prolonging this indefinitely not taken into account;
2) Can we rely on EU accession as a carrot considering EU crisis?
3) Will there be leaders with political capital to pull it off?
He concludes that waiting seems the higher risk.
I don’t agree. Of course there are domestic pressures, but the proper role of leadership is to manage those, not to cave to them. I don’t think a flag at the UN or in Belgrade is what most citizens in Kosovo are thinking about: their primary concern is jobs. When you start counting your GDP growth at 3%, you are not doing so badly, but the economy has slowed significantly:
Maybe a bit more attention to that and less to the sovereignty question is in order.
Nor is there any sign that giving up a piece of Kosovo’s territory to Serbia, which is what the President has been proposing as a short-cut to an agreement, will be accepted either by the Parliament or the citizens. Kosovo’s best negotiating strategy is to make its red lines clear–that the Platform does–and wait until Serbia is hungry enough to talk.
I understand those who doubt the future attraction of the EU, but what better choice do either Serbia or Kosovo have? Euroskepticism in my experience (which is now many decades long) is tightly correlated with the business cycle. Kosovo’s near-term goal is getting a Schengen visa waiver, this year. Ensuring that is far more important right now than signing on the dotted line with Serbia.
Once we are passed whatever the Brits are going to do to themselves, as well as the ridiculous trade war Trump has conducted with China, my guess is the recovery will resume. Everyone, including those who live in Kosovo, will cheer. No one can ever guarantee that the political door to the EU will open, even if Kosovo gets busy and qualifies in 10 years or so. But most of the benefits of EU membership accrue by qualification, not membership. The money a candidate gets during the process is also pretty good.
As for political leadership, I have been critical of President Thaci’s pursuit of a people and land swap, which would demonstrate that both Kosovo and Serbia are incapable of treating their minorities equally under the law. Thaci would do much better to sit back and wait for President Vucic to come to him, which should happen sooner rather than later if he hopes to get anything for whatever they agree. Neither is listening to me at the moment, but their bromance isn’t going well:
Are these really the political leaders who can pull off the historic compromise between Kosovo and Serbia? May be, but they are not sounding like it right now. The simple fact is that neither can get a land swap through his own parliament, never mind the referendum promised in Kosovo.
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Bravo, but Kosovo can wait
On the eve of today’s 11th anniversary of its independence, Kosovo has published its “Platform for Dialogue on a Final, Comprehensive and Legally Binding Agreement on Normalization of Relations Between the Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia.” There are a lot of things to like in this document, including:
- A clear statement of Kosovo’s negotiating goals, which has been lacking: Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign and independent state.
- Re-assertion of the validity of the Kosovo constitution on the state’s entire territory and explicit rejection of any cession of part of that territory.
- Reciprocity: for Albanians in Serbia to be treated as well as Serbs in Kosovo, for war crimes committed by Serbs to be treated like war crimes committed by Albanians, including in a special tribunal.
- Refusal to create any layer of government between the central one and municipalities (read any association of Serb municipalities with governing authority or responsibility).
- Approval of the ultimate agreement in a referendum and by parliament in both Kosovo and Serbia.
- Provisions for transparency, inclusivity, and accessibility of the state negotiating team.
- Settlement of outstanding wartime issues (accounting for missing persons, return of displaced people, return of property, compensation, reparations, division of sovereign debt, etc.).
- An end to UN Security Council resolution 1244 and approval of the final agreement in the Council and the General Assembly.
- Conditioning of progress in EU accession on implementation of the final agreement.
All good. So what’s missing?
Two things:
- Clarity on how and when UN membership will occur. It may be implicit in the reference to UNSC approval of the agreement, but it will need to be explicit before the negotiations are concluded. The controlling powers are China and Russia: how will they be brought around to allow a breakaway province to enter the UN? China won’t like it because of Tibet. Russia may like it but will want a quid pro quo in Crimea and possibly also South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria.
- Any indication of what Serbia might get in the deal. It is not Pristina’s responsibility to worry about this in the first instance, but it will need to worry about it in due course. What would be helpful is for Serbia to publish a similar platform. It has never been clear what Belgrade wants from the talks with Pristina, other than convincing Washington and Brussels that Serbia is willing to talk. That itself does have value, especially as it has been done on an equal basis that implicitly acknowledges that Kosovo has a legitimate and independent governing structure (already also recognized in the April 2013 “Brussels agreement”).
Of course Belgrade has also appeared to want territory, especially the majority-Serb municipalities north of the Ibar River. The Platform however is unequivocal in seeking “recognition of Kosovo’s independence and statehood within the existing borders.”
There are outstanding issues that might have value for Serbia: the composition and capabilities of the Kosovo army, the functions (other than governing) of the not yet created Association of Serb Municipalities, and Kosovo’s assumption of its share of Yugoslavia’s debt (mentioned in the Platform). But I doubt these will be sufficient to lead to an early agreement. More likely, Serbia will not engage seriously until the failure to reach an agreement with Kosovo noticeably slows its progress toward EU accession. Then it will be too late: all the leverage in the endgame of EU accession lies with the individual member states, which have to ratify accession, not with the candidate country.
One member state has dared to say what we all have known for years but no one wanted to say out loud. At the Security Council 10 days ago Christoph Heusgen, the German representative, said bluntly in a prepared (therefore cleared in Berlin) statement:
The only way that Serbia will enter the European Union will be with a successful normalization dialogue, with the recognition of Kosovo.
Belgrade would be wise to enter a serious negotiation sooner rather than later, while it can hope to still get something in exchange for recognizing Kosovo. Now that it has made its position clear, Pristina can afford to wait, as its EU accession is much further in the future.
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From War to Peace
Here are the notes I used for my presentation of From War to Peace in the Balkans, Middle East, and Ukraine yesterday at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which has made it available free world-wide at that link. I am grateful to colleagues David Kanin and Majda Ruge for commenting and critiquing.
- It is a pleasure to present at this Faculty Research Forum, which will I think be a bit different from others. I’ll be concerned not only with analyzing what happened and is happening now in the Balkans but also with what should happen. I will try to fill the academic/practitioner gap.
- I am particularly pleased as the event includes two of the best-informed people I know on the Balkans: David Kanin, whom I first met when he worked in the 1990s at the CIA Balkans Task Force, teaches the Balkans course here at SAIS; and Majda Ruge, who is both a native of the Balkans and a colleague at the Foreign Policy Institute.
- Some of you will remember the Balkans in the 1990s: the US and Europe fumbling for years in search of peaceful solutions in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo only to find themselves conducting two air wars against Serb forces.
- But most Americans have forgotten this history. Europeans often believe there were no positive results. In the Balkans, many are convinced things were better under Tito.
- I beg to differ: the successes as well as the failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.
- That’s why I wrote my short book, which treats the origins, consequences, and aftermath of the 1995, 1999 and 2001 interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars.
- As for the causes of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, my view is that there were three fundamental ingredients: the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević’s political ambitions and military capability, and ethnic nationalism, particularly in its territorial form.
- Where all three were present in good measure, as in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, war was inevitable. Where Milosevic’s political ambitions were limited, as in Slovenia, war was short. Where his political ambitions and others’ ethnic nationalism were attenuated, as in Macedonia and Montenegro, war was mostly avoided.
- The breakup of Yugoslavia is now a done deal, even if Serbia continues to resist acknowledging it. So too are Milosevic’s political ambition AND military capability. No one has inherited them. The third factor—ethnoterritorial nationalism—is still very much alive. All the Balkans peace agreements left it unscathed.
- Conflict prevention and state-building efforts since the 1990s have been partly successful, though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. My former SAIS colleague Michael Mandelbaum is wrong: the transformation mission in the Balkans is not a failed mission, but rather an incomplete one.
- He thinks it failed because his explicit point of comparison is an ideal: the U.S. he says did not “succeed in installing well-run, widely accepted governments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo.” I think Bosnia and Kosovo are works in progress because they are so obviously improved from their genocidal and homicidal wars. State capture is better than mass atrocity.
- The book examines each of the Balkan countries on its own merits, as well as their prospects for entry into NATO and the EU, whose doors are in theory open to all the Balkan states.
- {slide} Bottom line: all the states that emerged from Yugoslavia as well as Albania are closer to fulfilling their Euroatlantic ambitions than they are to the wars and collapse of the 1990s.
- All can hope to be EU members, and NATO allies if they want, by 2030, if they focus their efforts.
- {Slide} They were making decent progress when the financial crisis struck in 2007/8. The decade since then has been disappointing in many different respects:
- Growth slowed and even halted in some places.
- The Greek financial crisis cast a storm cloud over the EU and the euro.
- The flow of refugees, partly through the Balkans, from the Syrian and Afghanistan wars as well as from Africa soured the mood further.
- Brexit, a symptom of the much wider rise of mostly right-wing, anti-European populism, has made enlargement look extraordinarily difficult.
- {Slide} The repercussions in the Balkans have been dire:
- Bosnia’s progress halted as it slid back into ethnic nationalist infighting.
- Macedonia’s reformist prime minister became a defiant would-be autocrat.
- Kosovo and Serbia are stalled in their difficult normalization process.
- Russia has taken advantage of the situation to slow progress towards NATO and the EU.
- Moscow tried to murder Montenegro’s President to block NATO membership, finances Bosnia’s Serb secessionist entity, campaigned against resolving the Macedonia name issue, and undermines free media throughout the Balkans.
- Now the question is whether the West, demoralized and divided by Donald Trump and other populists, can still muster the courage to resolve the remaining problems in the Balkans and complete the process of EU and, for those who want it, NATO accession.
- Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A.
- When I wrote the book, three big obstacles remained. Now there are only two.
- The first obstacle was the Macedonia “name” issue. For those who may not follow the Balkans, the Greeks claim the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to the Hellenic tradition and would like the modern, majority Slavic country that uses that name to stop using it.
- Skopje and Athens have now resolved this issue. New leadership was key to making it happen.
- For those who claim the West is prepared to tolerate corruption and state capture in order to ensure stability in the Balkans, I suggest a chat with Nikola Gruevski.
- Washington and Brussels helped chase him from office in 2017, once his malfeasance was well-publicized and a popular alternative appeared on the horizon. If there is a viable liberal democratic option, the West has been willing to support it.
- The solution to the name issue is deceptively simple: now ratified in both parliaments, the Republic of Macedonia will become the Republic of North Macedonia, which most of its inhabitants and most of us will continue to call just Macedonia.
- The Republic of North Macedonia can now hope to join NATO, perhaps by the end of this year, and become a candidate for EU accession.
- There is a lot more to it, but that is all that will matter to you and me. The rest is for the Greeks and Macedonians.
- The second big obstacle is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, which will require mutual recognition and exchange of diplomatic representatives at the ambassadorial level.
- This is closer than most think. Serbia has already abandoned its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, in an April 2013 Brussels agreement that established the validity of the Kosovo constitution on its whole territory and foresaw Kosovo and Serbia entering the EU separately and without hindering each other. Only sovereign states can enter the EU.
- {Slide} Belgrade has also implicitly acknowledged Kosovo’s sovereignty in opening the question of partition along ethnic lines. Serbia would like to absorb the 3.5 or 4 (depending on how you count) municipalities in northern Kosovo, three of which were majority Serb before the war.
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Ignominy
Donald Trump has maneuvered himself into conceding to Democrats in his unsuccessful campaign to get the Congress to pay for his top priority: the border wall he pledged Mexico would fund. His only alternative is another partial government shutdown. To avoid that, he has to accept a compromise he says he doesn’t like. This is not only defeat. It is defeat with dishonor, shame, embarrassment, humiliation, ignominy.
It is also a good thing. Elections have consequences. November’s put the Republicans in the minority in the House and handed the gavel to Nancy Pelosi, who has proven that she can wrangle the Democratic caucus as well as ever anyone could. There has been no sign of defection. The Republicans, however, turned on Trump and made him an offer he is unable to refuse. The compromise provides a minimal length of enhanced fencing that falls far short of Trump’s ambitions.
He is saying that he’ll build the wall anyway–he even claims to already be doing it. I suppose he can scrounge a bit of money here and a bit of reprogramming there, but every time he does he is likely to end up in court, or at least offending one constituency or another. Ditto for a declaration of national emergency, which many Republicans oppose. Splintering his Senate caucus is not going to help the Republican cause. Trump’s border wall has turned into a political debacle worse than his failure to repeal Obamacare.
He has no one to blame but himself. He arguably had a better deal on offer months ago but chose to pull the rug out from under the Senate Republicans, who had agreed to more money for the border wall than he is getting now as well as some relief for undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. That might even have given the Republicans a claim on Hispanic votes, which the deal he is about to sign into law does not. It is a lose lose lose: no wall, relatively little money, no deferred action for childhood arrivals.
Trump’s claque won’t notice. They’ll give him credit for trying. And where can they turn for any better from their perspective? The flim-flam president has captured 35% or a bit more of the country with his patter. But his rallies are not attracting the crowds they used to and he is losing relatively independent voters with every shrunken refund check attributable to his giant tax cut for the wealthy.
Looming on Trump’s horizon is the Special Counsel investigation, which has now convinced a Federal judge that Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort lied about meeting with a Russian linked to Moscow’s intelligence services. That and other lies cancel the Special Counsel’s promise of support in limiting Manafort’s sentence on other charges. It is hard to imagine reasons for the lies other than hope for a presidential pardon, which could still be forthcoming.
Defeat of Trump’s wall fantasy was ignominious for the President. A pardon for Manafort would be ignominious for the United States.
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Money and Israel
Newly elected Member of Congress Ilhan Omar has generated accusations of anti-Semitism for her tweet implying that money (Benjamins) from AIPAC is the main reason for support for Israel. This was by way of explanation of her claim that
Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.
#Gaza#Palestine#Israel
I don’t much like that appeal to Allah, but in addition Omar certainly oversimplified the situation: many members of Congress support Israel for religious reasons, and others because they think it is in America’s national security interest or because the two countries share democratic values. But charging that money is also a main factor in blinding Congress to Israeli wrongdoing is not in my view anti-Semitic, as many have charged.
Mehdi Hasan makes the point graphically in a series of tweets:
So, on the whole
@IlhanMN controversy, I wanted to do this#thread pointing out the absurdity of saying it’s off limits to mention money and support for Israel, when the US media (rightly) does mention money, influence-peddling & lobbying when it comes to Saudi Arabia and DC. 1/Why is it okay to talk about Saudi lobbies, and Saudis buying Trump, and Saudi-first policies, why is it not Islamophobic to say all of that, but it’s anti-Semitic when it comes to Israel? Try changing Saudi to Israel in some of these mainstream headlines – here we go: 2/
Here’s the Washington Post; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 3/
Here’s the Washington Post again; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 4/
Here’s the New York Times; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 5/
Here’s more from the New York Times; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 6/Here’s Vox; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 7/
Here’s NPR; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 8/
Here’s more NPR; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 9/
Here’s MSNBC; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 10/
Here’s the Tablet; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 11/
Here’s the FT; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 12/
Here’s Vanity Fair; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 13/
Here’s Time magazine; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 14/
Here’s Politico; remember, Saudi, not Israel: 15/
To be clear, it’s not illegal, & of course above it’s the Saudi *government* buying influence in DC vs pro-Israeli *American* groups buying influence in DC but the point is that influence *is* bought. Don’t be naive or play dumb. We see it with Saudi, why not with Israel? *ENDS*
The short answer to that question is that many of us do see it, and that includes the majority of American Jews who, like me, would like to see an end to Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians and creation of a Palestinian state that will live in peace and prosperity with its Israeli neighbors. AIPAC and the money of its supporters is opposing that goal. There is virtue in recognizing reality. It’s not the whole story, but it is an important piece of it. Would anyone pay attention to Sheldon Adelson if he were poor?
Ilhan Omar has apologized unequivocally for using an anti-Semitic “trope.” I wonder how many of her antagonists who expressed anti-Muslim sentiments in response to her will do likewise.
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