Tag: Russia
The road forward is civilian as well as military
I spoke this afternoon at on a “political analysts” panel at The Road Forward conference on planning the future of the Syrian American Community. Here are my speaking notes:
1. Let me start by saying the obvious. This comes from someone who would have preferred that you stick with nonviolent rebellion. But four years have passed and that is history.
2. Now you’ve got to do better on the military front. There is no substitute for that.
3. The regime’s relative success on the battlefield, with ample Iranian and Russian support, has made a political solution less feasible than in June 2012, when the Geneva communiqué was adopted.
4. If you want to get back to its provision for a transitional governing body with full executive powers, you are going to need somehow to threaten Bashar al Assad’s hold on power, making him feel that failure to agree puts him more at risk than agreeing. That is vital for a negotiated solution.
5. But it is only a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient one.
6. Today’s Syria is the scene of a devastating regional proxy war pitting Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran against each other, with the US and Russia only slightly more removed.
7. Syrians need to re-establish control over their own destiny.
8. The civilian dimension is as important as the military one.
9. One vital civilian dimension is diplomacy. The Syrian opposition did well at the Geneva 2 conference. But it failed to follow up on that triumph by uniting its factions.
10. That is still vital. Broad unity under a single umbrella would make the opposition a more serious negotiating partner not only for the regime but also for the Americans, Russians and Iranians.
11. A second important civilian dimension is governance. You cannot hope to be taken seriously unless you are serious about plans to govern effectively inside Syria. The “Back to Syria” idea was a good one, but it was never implemented.
12. It never even got out of the planning stage, so far as I know.
13. Even that would have an impact: a serious plan to govern protected areas in the north and south would give people sympathetic to your pleas for American help, like me, what they need to argue in your favor.
14. It is now ancient history, but in both Kosovo and Bosnia civilian governance during the wars weighted heavily with the international community. In Kosovo, the Albanians created institutions that provided health and education, in addition to a parliament and a presidency. In Bosnia, the collaboration of Croats and Muslims in the Bosnian Federation was vital to success at the Dayton peace talks.
15. The time is ripe in Syria. One way or another, Syrians trained in US-sponsored programs will begin to be inserted back into the country over the next year or so.
16. Failure to protect them from bombardment could lead to a Bay of Pigs fiasco.
17. No-fly zones, even with anti-aircraft weapons, are insufficient. The regime and extremists could well attack with artillery. What Syrians need are protected areas along the Turkish border and in the south, where American, opposition, Jordanian and Israeli interests converge.
18. These would not be “safe” areas. They would be target-rich environments in the view of both extremists and the regime.
19. On the ground, they will have to protect themselves. But air cover should come from Coalition countries, including Turkey and Jordan.
20. Military protection will not however make protected areas a success. Only if governance succeeds will they represent a serious step forward.
21. Success in governance will depend on planning and unity.
22. The national plans for The Day After and the Syrian Transition Roadmap have been overtaken by events. Nor is it sufficient for disparate administrative local councils to accomplish heroics here and there.
23. What you need is a plan for governance and enough performance to convince the powers that be that the opposition is a viable governing entity and a bulwark against extremism.
24. I have to admit that I voted twice for Barack Obama, who has made big mistakes in Syria. If you want him to correct those mistakes, you need to do better not only on the battlefield but also in diplomacy and governance.
25. This is a dark moment for the Syrian opposition, but also an opportunity: to write a serious plan for governing liberated areas of Syria.
26. I hope you’ll move in that direction. I pledge my personal support for such an effort.
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Drums don’t win wars
A president who was trying to extract America from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is now preparing to escalate the war in Ukraine and the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Yesterday, his nominee for Defense Secretary made it clear he supports sending lethal armaments to the Ukrainian government to fight off Russian aggression, a position also advocated by former officials. The White House is also preparing to send Congress a request for an authorization to use military force (AUMF in Washington parlance) against ISIS, something the administration is already doing.
Both these moves fall in the inevitable category. We’ve pretty much run out of alternatives.
ISIS is universally regarded as not only a threat to vital interests but also one with which it is impossible to negotiate. They seem intent on proving that with the immolation a month ago of a Jordanian pilot whom they then feigned being prepared to exchange for an Al Qaeda terrorist. If we are going to fight ISIS whenever and wherever, it is certainly proper that there be a Congressional authorization. Hawks will want it broad. Doves will want it narrow. But both will want it, even though it will make little difference to what the US actually is doing.
In Ukraine, the government is losing control of the southeastern Donbas region and could lose control of even more of its territory to insurgents fully backed by Russia’s substantial military might. I’ll leave to military experts assessment of whether American assistance with lethal but defensive weapons will have a serious impact at this point. It could take a year or more before any significant materiel and training is deployed on the battlefield. In the meanwhile, Moscow will use any American decision to arm the Ukrainians as an excuse to redouble its own efforts.
So neither of these noisy headline issues is likely to have any quick impact. Drums don’t win wars. And these two wars are not only conventional force-on-force clashes between organized military forces, even if they involve some battles of that sort. Both involve counter insurgency, the kind of war (known in the Pentagon as COIN) the US loves to forget.
I’ll leave to the COINistas the analysis and policy prescriptions on the military side. The important point for me is that COIN necessarily involves an important civilian component. You win the war against insurgency by protecting the civilian population. You have to win the peace over a decade or more by ensuring a continued safe and secure environment, establishing the rule of law, ensuring stable governance, growing the economy and meeting social needs. If you fail to do those things in the aftermath of war, you end up with Libya: a weak state that has collapsed now into civil war, leaving breeding grounds for extremists.
The civilian efforts required are in the first instance the responsibility of the governments involved. But their capabilities are at best limited and at worst nonexistent. In Ukraine, even a government victory would likely require peacekeepers to ensure stability in Donbas and avoid reignition of conflict. In Iraq, it is hard to picture the Baghdad government’s security forces welcomed in Anbar and Ninewa provinces. Some kind of local governance with its own security forces (the proposed National Guard?) will be needed. In Syria, Bashar al Asad has shown no sign of willingness to govern fairly or effectively in areas the government retakes. There too some kind of local governance will be needed.
The international capacity to contribute to these efforts is also limited. The State Department has shrunk its civilian conflict and stability operations capability, which was never substantial. The European Union has grown weary and leery of deploying its much more substantial capacity. The UN is stretched thin. OSCE is doing a yeoman job of observing the much-violated ceasefire in Ukraine, but it is a giant step from that to peacekeepers and monitoring implementation of a peace agreement.
We are embarking on another long period of war. We should be strengthening not only our military capacities, but also our civilian ones.
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Why pay attention to Kosovo?
If you stick around international affairs long enough, some of the people you met in the earlier years are likely to turn up in high places later on. I first met the still youthful Hashim Thaci, a two-term prime minister who is now foreign minister, in 1999, when the US Institute of Peace hosted a post-war meeting of Kosovo Albanians at Lansdowne in Virginia.
The issue at the time was not so much conflict between Serbs and Albanians. With notable exceptions, NATO brought large scale interethnic violence to a fairly quick end after the war, until rioting in 2004 unsettled things again. At Lansdowne we were concerned with Albanian on Albanian violence, as different factions vied for post-war dominance. The dialogue and the Lansdowne Declaration they agreed on that occasion are often credited with ending an incipient civil war and turning both the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and its more peaceful rivals in the direction of political rather than military competition.
Hashim Thaci was a key figure at Lansdowne, representing an important faction of the KLA that had fought the Serbs from the mid 1990s until the war ended in June 1999. His role was mainly a political one. He had also been a key figure at the failed Rambouillet negotiations that preceded the war and played a role in the UN administration of Kosovo, though he remained out of power until he was elected prime minister in 2007. He presided over independence in 2008 and governed until this year, when his party won a plurality in parliament but failed to be able to put together a majority without giving up the prime ministry.
His talk here today focused on Kosovo’s post-war transition, its increasing role in the region, Russian efforts to influence the Balkans, Kosovo’s efforts to counter violent extremism, and the importance of keeping the country on its democratic and European trajectory. He is looking for American help to keep the doors to NATO and the EU open, as well as private sector American investment.
I asked the foreign minister about the firing yesterday of a Serb minister from the government. He underlined that the minister was fired for inappropriate remarks he had made, not because he is a Serb. That’s the right thing to say, even if it is a bit of distinction without a difference in this circumstance. No Albanian would have made the same comments. I also asked about the special tribunal Kosovo is supposed to create to prosecute in The Hague crimes committed during and after the NATO/Yugoslavia war. He said he thought there was no need for it to convene in The Hague, but the legislation will pass and the court will be created, enabling EULEX to proceed with indictments.
Thaci pledges cooperation in countering the flow of extremists to Iraq and Syria and the influence of Russia, both of which are inimical to Kosovo as well as the US. Moscow is now more active than in many years in Serbia, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Macedonia and even Montenegro, which has rejected the Russian overtures. The number of Kosovar “foreign fighters” is not huge–hundreds rather than thousands–but it represents an important qualitative shift in a country that has generally not taken religion too seriously. The government is now cracking down and has arrested more than 130 returnees.
Washington has a hard time even remembering that it once saved Kosovo from a Serbian onslaught that made half the Albanian population refugees. With threats throughout the Middle East and in Ukraine, few care much about Kosovo. But it behooves us to remember that a bit of diplomatic dynamism to help Kosovo to get into the EU’s visa waiver program and to sign a Stabilization and Association Agreement as well as enter NATO’s Partnership for Peace could go a long way to preventing further radicalization and ensuring that Kosovo becomes the consolidated European democracy it aspires to be.
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Couphobia
Fear of coups (couphobia?) has broken out in all too many places. Turkey’s President Erdogan is cracking down on the Gulen movement members for fear they are plotting against him. Russia’s President Putin has done the same with foreign funding of nongovernmental organizations. Egypt’s President Sisi fears the Muslim Brotherhood will do to him what he has done to their (former) President Morsi, who languishes in prison.
Even in Macedonia, an EU candidate country, the Prime Minister says the opposition was plotting to oust him. Then again, the United States is said to be orchestrating an anti-Victor Orbán coup d’état in EU member Hungary.
I can’t be sure all these claims are as baseless as that last one. Washington just doesn’t care enough about Hungary to engineer a coup there. My guess is that Sisi has plenty to worry about, as he has vastly overdone the repression, creating a growing reservoir of resentment that might fuel an effort to oust him one day, though Egyptians are so tired of disorder (and the army so satiated) that it is unlikely a coup there would be popular. Erdogan and Putin are likewise doing their best to fulfill their own prophecies by making life hard for their legitimate opponents, whose natural reaction will be to think about their options. A coup might be one of them.
Then there are the guys–and they are guys–who really should fear a coup. Syria’s President Asad has destroyed his country in order to prevent anyone else from challenging his hold on power. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un presumably thinks he protected himself, but who knows which uncle or cousin still alive might make the attempt?
Yemen’s President Hadi is facing a coup in everything but name. The Houthi rebels who have him trapped don’t want to displace him, partly for fear that would end military assistance against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from the Americans the Houthis love to hate. Libya can’t have a coup because it is unclear who has power. It is having a civil war instead.
All the couphobiacs should remember Nouri al Maliki. He was so afraid of a coup that he appointed cronies to command his army and grabbed as much direct control over the other institutions of the state as he could. The result was collapse of the Iraqi Security Forces when faced with the Islamic State and his removal from power because even the Iranians and his own Dawa party turned against him. It doesn’t always work that way, but the example should serve to illustrate the perils of concentrating power too much.
The couphobiacs are unlikely to be chastened however. Once they start down the road of repression, it is hard to turn around or back out. They fear removal from power means they lose their lives as well. What Erdogan, Putin and Sisi need more than anything else is assurance that they can retire gracefully and live out their natural lives. Not everyone can afford to keep autocrats in power well into senility, as the Saudis do. But countries that want their autocrats to retire need to follow the Vatican’s lead and provide funding and protection (before they start committing war crimes and crimes against humanity). Come to think of it, that’s America’s solution too.
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Nothing new
President Obama said a lot more about foreign policy in last night’s State of the Union message than many of us expected. But did he say anything new?
His first entry point to international affairs was notable: he got there via exports and trade, pivoting quickly to TTP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and TTIP, the Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. Though he didn’t name them, that’s what he was referring to when he appealed for Congress to provide him with what is known as trade promotion authority to negotiate deals with Asia and Europe that are “not only free, but fair.” Nothing new here, just an interesting elevation of economic diplomacy to pride of place. Ditto the plea to close tax loopholes that encourage American companies to keep their profits abroad.
But after a detour to the internet and scientific research, the President was soon back on the more familiar territory of national security. He plugged smart leadership that builds coalitions and combines diplomacy and military power. He wants others to do more of the fighting. But there was little or no indication of how collapsed states like Syria, Yemen and Libya might be governed in the future.
Leaving it to their own devices hasn’t worked out well, but this is a president who (like all his predecessors) doesn’t want to do nationbuilding abroad and who (unlike many of his predecessors) has been disciplined enough to resist it. He talks non-military means but uses force frequently and says he wants an authorization from Congress to use it against the Islamic State, which he is doing anyway.
Russia is isolated and its economy in tatters, the President claimed, but it also holds on to Crimea and a large part of Donbas in southeastern Ukraine. He offered no new moves to counter Putin but rather “steady, persistent resolve.” On Cuba, the Administration has already begun to restore diplomatic ties. The President reiterated that he wants Congress to end the embargo, which isn’t in the cards unless Raul Castro gets converted to multi-party democracy in his dotage.
Iran is the big issue. The President naturally vaunted the interim Joint Plan of Action and hopes for a comprehensive one by the end of June. He promised to veto any new sanctions, because they would destroy the international coalition negotiating with Tehran and ruin chances for a peaceful settlement. All options are on the table, the President said, but America will go to war only as a last resort. Nothing new in that either, though I believe he would while many of my colleagues think not.
Trolling on, the President did cybersecurity, Ebola, Asia-Pacific, climate change and values (as in democracy and human rights), stopping briefly at Gitmo and electronic surveillance along the way. Nothing new here either, just more of that steady, persistent resolve.
Notable absences (but correct me if I missed something): any mention of the Israel/Palestine “peace process,” Egypt, Saudi Arabia (or the Gulf), India (where the President will visit starting Sunday), Latin America (other than Cuba), North Korea.
What does it all add up to? It is a foreign policy of bits and pieces, with themes of retrenchment, reduced reliance on US military power (but little sign of increased diplomatic potency), prevention of new threats and support for American values woven in. The President continues to resist pronouncing a doctrine of his own but wants to be seen as a moderate well within the broad parameters of American internationalism. He is wishing to get bipartisan action from Congress on a few things: trade promotion authority, the authorization to use force, dismantling the Cuba embargo, closing Guantanamo. But none of this is new ground.
He is also prepared to forge ahead on his own. As I’ve noted before, this lame duck knows how to fly.
In case you didn’t watch it last night and have more patience than I do, here is the whole thing:
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Producing more enemies than you can kill
No doubt one of the few international issues President Obama will highlight in tonight’s State of the Union speech is the threat of international terrorists associated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. He will cite the American military response in Iraq and Syria as vital to our national interests and claim we are making progress, at least in Iraq.
He is unlikely to acknowledge that the problem is spreading and getting worse. In Libya, there are two parliaments and two governments, one of which has ample extremist backing. In Yemen, rebels have laid siege to the government the Washington relies on for cooperation against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram is wrecking havoc. In Syria, moderates have lost territory and extremists have gained. Taliban violence is up in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Fourteen years ago when the World Trade Center was attacked in New York City Al Qaeda amounted to a few hundred militants hiding out mainly in Afghanistan, with small clandestine cells in Europe and the US. Now estimates of the number of extremists change so rapidly it is hard to know which to cite, but there are surely more than 100 times as many actively engaged in extremist Islamist campaigns or recruitment efforts in close to a dozen countries, including (in addition to the ones cited above) Somalia, Egypt, Niger, Mali, Algeria, Palestine and Tunisia. Counting the numbers of sympathizers in Europe, Russia and the United States is just impossible.
The long war against Islamist extremism is not going well. It can’t, because we are fighting what amounts to an insurgency against the existing state system principally with military means. Drones and air strikes are killing lots of militants, and I am even prepared to believe that the collateral damage to innocents is minimized, whatever that means. But extremist recruitment is more than keeping up with extremist losses. We are making more enemies than we are killing. Insurgencies thrive on that.
The Obama administration is apparently prepared to make things worse, as it now leans towards supporting UN and Russian peace initiatives in Syria that are premised on allowing Bashar al Asad to stay in power. The Islamic State will welcome that, as it will push relative moderates in their direction and weaken the prospects for a democratic transition. Bashar has shown no inclination to fight ISIS and will continue to focus his regime’s efforts against democracy advocates.
President Obama knows what it takes to shrink extremist appeal: states that protect their populations with rule of law and govern inclusively and transparently. This is the opposite of what Bashar al Asad, and his father, have done. But President Obama has no confidence the US or anyone in the international community can build such states in a matter of months or even years. So he does what comes naturally to those whose strongest available means is military power: he uses it to achieve short-term objectives, knowing that its use is counter-productive in the longer term.
But producing more enemies than you can kill is not a strategy that works forever. The Union is recovering from a devastating economic crisis and can now afford to take a fresh look at its foreign policy priorities. I’ll be with the President when he calls tonight for completion of the big new trade and investment agreement with Europe (TTIP) and its counterpart in the Pacific (TTP). These are good things that can find support on both sides of the aisle, among Democrats and Republicans.
I’ll groan when he calls for a new Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) but says little or nothing about building the kind of states in the Greater Middle East that are needed to immunize the region against extremism. Support for restoration of autocracy in Egypt and for Gulf monarchies is not a policy that will counter extremism. We are guaranteeing that things are going to get worse before they get better.
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