Tag: United States
Intervene now or later?
Joshua Landis, who knows the Syrian regime as well as any American, warns vigorously against military intervention: we’ve failed at nation-building elsewhere, the effort would be difficult and expensive, our military is overstretched, the Syrians are fractious. He argues further:
In all likelihood, the Syrian revolution will be less bloody if Syrians carry it out for themselves. A new generation of national leaders will emerge from the struggle. They will not emerge with any legitimacy if America hands them Syria as a gift. How will they claim that they won the struggle for dignity, freedom and democracy? America cannot give these things. Syrians must take them. America can play a role with aid, arms and intelligence, but it cannot and should not try to decide Syria’s future, determine winners, and take charge of Syria. If Syrians want to own Syria in the future, they must own the revolution and find their own way to winning it. It is better for Syria and it is better for America.
Convinced of the strategic significance of depriving Iran of its Syrian ally, Jamie Rubin takes the opposite view.
The rebellion in Syria has now lasted more than a year. The opposition is not going away, and it is abundantly clear that neither diplomatic pressure nor economic sanctions will force Assad to accept a negotiated solution to the crisis. With his life, his family, and his clan’s future at stake, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator’s stance. Absent foreign intervention, then, the civil war in Syria will only get worse as radicals rush in to exploit the chaos there and the spillover into Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey intensifies…
Arming the Syrian opposition and creating a coalition air force to support them is a low-cost, high-payoff approach. Whether an air operation should just create a no-fly zone that grounds the regimes’ aircraft and helicopters or actually conduct air to ground attacks on Syrian tanks and artillery should be the subject of immediate military planning. And as Barak, the Israeli defense minister, also noted, Syria’s air defenses may be better than Libya’s but they are no match for a modern air force.
The larger point is that as long as Washington stays firm that no U.S. ground troops will be deployed, à la Kosovo and Libya, the cost to the United States will be limited. Victory may not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will likely regard the United States as more friend than enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes.
Both Landis and Rubin try to make the choice sound easy. It is not. What could go wrong with American intervention ? Remember Iraq and Afghanistan. What could go wrong if we don’t intervene, or if we delay? Remember Bosnia and Rwanda.
Rubin has conveniently forgotten that the Kosovo intervention that he cites as the right way to do things did eventually involve American boots on the ground. Units of the National Guard are still there 13 years later. But he is right that a successful intervention resulting in a pro-Western Syria would reduce Iran’s influence. If you don’t count firefights among militias at the international airport, you can count Libya as the kind of success Rubin would like in Syria.
The trouble is that an intervention without Russian concurrence, which as Rubin notes will not be forthcoming, would end the P5+1 talks with Iran and wreck any possibility of a united Security Council to deal with its nuclear program. If your primary strategic objective is not limiting Iran’s influence but rather preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, preferably by diplomatic means, that would be a big loss. Intervention in Syria could even hasten Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capability.
Whatever the merits, I don’t think the intervention is going to happen any time soon. Neither does Bashar al Assad, whose speech to Syria’s puppet parliament yesterday gave no indication that he expects to face international intervention. He seems to have not even mentioned the Annan plan or the international observers (but I confess I am still trying to get hold of a full English translation). Bashar remains confident he can weather the storm.
I’m not certain he is wrong. Many people are saying that he will never be able to regain control of Syria because he is now illegitimate. But was he ever really legit? The difference is that the state he presided over, which once more or less functioned to preserve his hold on power, is now broken, perhaps even failed.
There is little chance that Syria after the civil war in which it is currently engaged will be able to pick itself up, dust off and proceed peacefully to democratic rule, or stable rule of any sort. Those who hope for a “managed transition” are likely to be disappointed. Even a coup will not be clean and easy. Bashar could even stay for years.
But the day is likely to come when the battered Syrian state fails utterly. The international community may then want to intervene to prevent the civil war and refugees from overflowing into Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. It may also want to prevent the slaughter of the Alawite sect that provides the foundation of the Assad regime, along with Christians and others who have supported Bashar and his father. If so, it will require boots on the ground.
The question is whether to intervene now, or later.
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Serbia and Europe, at risk
Sonja Biserko, President of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia and the Eric Lane Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Josip Glaurdic, the Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, write:
In an expression of the real spirit of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić won the presidential election on a wave of popular discontent thanks to a series of blunders by former President Tadić’s Democratic Party. The conservative segment of Serbia’s society and a consolidated populist right are the beneficiaries. The result presents a potentially momentous challenge for Serbia, its neighbors, and the whole of Europe. With Nikolić at its helm, Serbia is now an unreliable partner, save perhaps for Putin’s Russia.
Nikolić’s victory and the strong showing of his Serbian Progressive Party in earlier parliamentary elections have brought the decade-long efforts to keep Serbia on a Euroatlantic course into question. Serbia’s contemporary political climate and its political culture have demonstrated the low achievement of its democratic transition. Since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000, Serbia has not achieved political consensus regarding its future or its strategic orientation.
In spite of efforts in Brussels to spin Serbia’s electoral results into a “victory of pro-European forces,” these electoral results have exposed as perilously fragile the political engineering that has tried to bind Serbia into European integration. What Serbs term the “grey zone” of their politics – the security apparatus, the current and former military brass, the nationalist intelligentsia – abandoned Tadić because it wanted to slow down Serbia’s European integration and halt the process of coming to terms with Serbia’s recent past. The grey zone will now seek to slow democratic reforms and normalization of relations with the rest of the region. Serbia’s dialogue with Kosovo, its judicial, military, and police reforms, its cooperation with NATO and integration with the EU–already sluggish–will grind to a halt.
The president-elect rushed to announce that his foreign policy will be “both Russia and the EU,” that he will never recognize Kosovo, that he recognizes Montenegro but not the Montenegrins as a nation, and that Serbia does not want NATO membership. His recent statements to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recalling Serb ambitions he supported to take Croatian territory serve as a potent reminder of the tragic policies of the 1990s, which could revive under his leadership.
Tadić’s loss jeopardizes the Democratic Party, which faces an identity and leadership crisis similar to the one it faced after the assassination of its leader and Serbia’s Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003. The Democratic Party could be irreparably damaged as an organizational foundation for reform. The further slowdown, or even reversal, of Serbia’s democratic transformation could frustrate consolidation and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro and even cause regional instability.
A great deal depends on the stance of the EU and the Unites States. The electoral results were an indirect consequence of a subtle, but noticeable, policy shift in Brussels and Washington. The appeal of Tomislav Nikolić among centrist voters (which, at the very least, led to their decision to abstain from voting) arguably had a lot to do with Western signals of approval of his possible victory and of his supposed transformation from a nationalist radical into a pro-European conservative.
Those in Western capitals who crafted such a policy shift seem not to have learned much from recent history. They are bound to be disappointed by Nikolić, just as they were let down by their two other notable “projects” – Serbia’s former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik. Serbia and Europe will have to live with Nikolić as president for at least the next five years. If its relationship with Tadić was difficult because of his inability to shed nationalist ballast, Brussels is in for an even more frustrating ride with Nikolić.
European leaders will still have to rise to the challenge and offer a real path to EU integration for all the countries of the Western Balkans, and especially for Serbia’s neighbors. Only a strategy which continuously supports the accession process can ensure that the region, no matter how slowly, moves forward and that the EU maintains its position of influence.
Any sign of a decline in commitment to enlargement by the EU capitals lowers the Union’s influence and, thus also the influence of the truly pro-European forces in politics and society. This could have even more devastating consequences for the democratization and stabilization of the whole region than the election of Tomislav Nikolić.
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The Syrian people still hold the key to Syria
Randa Slim writes:
During the recent discussions in Baghdad between the global powers and Iran, the United States rejected an Iranian proposal to add Syria and Bahrain to the discussion agenda. It might be worth pursuing this proposal at the next round of talks in Moscow. Time and again, Iranian senior officials have stressed the need for a political resolution to the Syrian crisis. They have been reaching out to different groups in the Syrian opposition. As the Western community keeps searching for a political solution in Syria, Iran might have some ideas about how to bring it about.
Iran will no doubt have ideas about Syria, but they won’t be ideas that Bashar al Assad’s opposition (or I) will like. The Iranians will want to get in Syria compensation for whatever they give the P5+1 (that’s the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) on nuclear issues.
Bahrain is a red herring. The Iranians don’t really expect the Americans to yield anything there, because it hosts the American Fifth Fleet. But the refusal of the Americans to yield to the Shia majority in Bahrain is a good analogy from Iran’s perspective to Tehran’s refusal to yield to the Sunni majority in Syria. Tehran will want to know: if majority rule is good for Syria, why isn’t it good for Bahrain?
From the perspective of Americans sympathetic with the rebellion, it would be best to keep the Syria issue separate.
If the impending American election is what restrains President Obama from taking action more vigorous action on Syria, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney loosened the constraint a bit last weekend by criticizing the President for not doing enough and calling for arming the opposition. The trouble with that proposition is that it is already happening and won’t likely alter the balance much. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are providing arms to what the Americans think are reliable recipients. It is unrealistic to expect that the violent side of the Syrian uprising will win the day, but it can likely sustain an insurgency indefinitely.
The more important constraint on President Obama is the need to keep the Russians on board for the p5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. Any overt American military move would likely cause Moscow to scuttle those talks and leave the Americans with the unhappy choice of military action or nothing in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. Stopping Iran short of a nuclear weapon is one of America’s top foreign policy and national security priorities. It is unrealistic to expect the president to put it at risk with a military strike on Syria.
The fact is that no one has come up with anything demonstrably better than pursuing the Annan plan for Syria, though Andrew Tabler’s suggestion of an arms quarantine against the regime certainly merits consideration as a supplement. The key to making the Annan plan work is moving Bashar al Assad out of power so that work can begin on a political process. The Iranians and Russians will do this once they see him teetering on the brink. He is not far from that point. I still think the best way to put him there is through nonviolent means, like the general strikes that have recently plagued Damascus and other cities. It is very hard to crack down on large numbers of merchants for not opening their shops in the souk.
The Syrian people still hold the key to Syria.
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A fortiori
Marko Prelec of International Crisis Group asks a good question:
…if it is indeed a “miracle that the Kosovo government gets anything done with so many foreigners people looking over its shoulders” and thus “the time is coming this fall for this overly supervised country to struggle on its own”, is not the same true a fortiori of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where international supervision will this year mark its seventeenth anniversary?
The difference is in part constitutional. Kosovo has a workable constitution. Bosnia and Herzegovina does not, because the Americans in their haste froze in place the warring parties and then the international community failed to make adequate provision for returns. Had we written a constitution for Bosnia that was even half as savvy as the one for Kosovo (which had the benefit of the Bosnia experience), and achieved as much implementation, we wouldn’t still be hanging around.
The High Representative and EUFOR are also a lot less present in Bosnia than UNMIK, EULEX, and KFOR and the rest of the alphabet soup in Kosovo. The ICO (the International Civilian Office) is the exception that proves the rule. It has “Bonn”-type powers in Kosovo but hasn’t had to use them. That was wise restraint in part, but it was also that no really compelling occasion arose. The Dayton agreement is just a whole lot harder to implement than the Kosovo agreement, except in northern Kosovo. And there it will not be easy for the Kosovars or the international community to end supervision.
It is therefore not the length of time that the international community hangs around that determines whether it needs to stay longer. We stayed in Germany–administering Berlin no less–for 45 years, because of the Soviet occupation of the East. That’s the general rule: it is the specific conditions of the peace you are trying to implement that determine how long you stay. Kosovo has implemented the Ahtisaari plan. Bosnia has not fully implemented Dayton. Stability could break down and cause a big mess. So we stay until conditions allow us to leave. That isn’t unreasonable to me.
One could argue of course that shifting responsibility to the locals, as we are planning to do in Afghanistan, would force them to behave more responsibly. But that hasn’t really worked in Iraq, isn’t likely to work in Afghanistan and certainly won’t work in Bosnia, where Republika Srpska has no intention at all of implementing the provisions of the Dayton agreements that it doesn’t like, much less help prepare Bosnia for European Union membership. A fortiori, it is not wise to expect better if international supervision is withdrawn. So it needs to stay.
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Goat rope
I arrived in Pristina yesterday and have enjoyed two days of intense conversations about Kosovo’s international relations, which are enormously complex for a country of less than 1.8 million inhabitants.
Let’s review the bidding. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, after almost nine years of UN administration following the 1999 NATO/Yugoslavia war. Serbia, of which Kosovo was at one time a province, did not concur in independence and has not recognized the Kosovo state’s sovereignty. But 90 other countries have, including the United States and 22 of the 27 members of the European Union (EU) and 24 of 28 members of NATO. Russia has blocked approval of UN membership in the Security Council, at the behest of Serbia. An International Civilian Office (ICO) will supervise Kosovo’s independence until September, when it plans to certify that the Kosovo government has fulfilled its responsibilities under the international community “Ahtisaari plan” (the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement). That was intended to be the agreement under which Kosovo became independent but was implemented unilaterally (under international community pressure) by the Kosovo government when Serbia refused to play ball. Belgrade and Pristina talk, but almost exclusively in an EU-facilitated and US-supported dialogue limited to resolution of technical, not political, issues.
Even after the ICO closes, Kosovo will be under intense international scrutiny (for a fuller account, see the Kosovar Center for Security studies report). NATO provides a safe and secure environment and is training its security forces for their enhanced roles after the July 2013. An EU rule of law mission monitors Kosovo’s courts and provides international investigators, prosecutors and judges for interethnic cases. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) provides training and advice on democratization, human and minority rights. The Council of Europe (CoE) administers programs on cultural and archaelogical heritage, social security co-ordination and cybercrime. The UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) continues despite its inconsistency with both the Ahtisaari plan and the declaration of independence, which at Serbia’s behest the International Court of Justice has advised was not in violation of international law or UN Security Council resolution 1244 (which established UNMIK).
Kosovo’s many complications get even worse north of the Ibar river, in the 11% of the country’s territory contiguous with Serbia that is still not under Pristina’s control. It may not really be under Belgrade’s control either, but that makes the situation there even more difficult. Partition of that northern bit, which Belgrade authorities have pursued, would likely precipitate ethnic partitions in other parts of the Balkans: Macedonia, Bosnia and Cyprus would all be at risk if Kosovo were split, an outcome neither Europe nor the U.S. wants to face. Serbia’s President-elect Nikolic suggested last week that Belgrade might recognize the Georgian break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abhazia, a move that would simultaneously deprive Serbia of its heretofore principled stance against Kosovo independence but at the same time reinforce Belgrade’s hope for partition of northern Kosovo.
What we’ve got here is a goat rope, as the U.S. military says. The situation seems hopelessly tangled. It is a miracle that the Kosovo government gets anything done with so many foreigners people looking over its shoulders. It naturally also has to meet domestic expectations, which are increasingly in the direction of more independence and fewer non-tourist foreigners, though Americans seem always to get a particularly warm welcome because of their role in past efforts to protect Kosovo from the worst ravages of Slobodan Milošević.
Kosovo unquestionably continues to need help. OSCE recently organized Serbian presidential elections in the Serb communities of Kosovo, a task that would have proven impossible for the Pristina or the Belgrade authorities. NATO has a continuing role because it will be some years yet before Kosovo can defend itself for even a week from a Serbian military incursion, which is unlikely but cannot be ruled out completely until Belgrade recognizes the Kosovo authorities as sovereign. The Kosovo courts would still find it difficult to have their decisions fully accepted in many cases of interethnic crime.
But the time is coming this fall for this overly supervised country to struggle on its own, making a few mistakes no doubt but also holding its authorities responsible for them. Kosovo needs a foreign policy that will take it to the next level. That means not only untangling the goat rope (or occasionally cutting through it) but also achieving normal relations with Belgrade and UN membership. There is no reason that an intense effort over the next decade cannot take Kosovo into NATO and perhaps even into the EU, or close to that goal, provided it treats its Serb and other minority citizens correctly and resolves the many outstanding issues with Belgrade on a reciprocal basis, and peacefully.
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Annan needs to keep at it
With the toll from Friday’s attack on the Syrian village of Houla mounting well over 100 (including dozens of children), it is tempting to denounce the UN’s Annan peace plan as a dead letter. The European edition of the Wall Street Journal this morning headlines, “Syria Massacre Upends Fragile Hopes for Peace.” Others are even more explicit that Annan has failed, and have been saying so for months.
That is a mistake. The UN observers Annan directs did their job at Houla, verifying the incident and assigning blame to the regime. That is precisely what they are there to do. Unarmed, they have no capacity to intervene with force. The Security Council yesterday issued a statement, approved by Russia and China, condemning the Syrian government for the massacre. Minimal as it is, that counts as progress on the diplomatic front. Weaning the Russians from their client, Syrian President Bashar al Assad, is an important diplomatic objective.
The clarity of the UN observers may push the diplomacy further in the right direction. Moscow and Washington are apparently discussing a plan similar to the Yemen transition process, which involved a resignation of the president and a transition guided by the vice president. I have my doubts this particular scheme is viable in Syria, but there may be variants worth discussing that would provide reassurance to the Alawites while initiating a political process that will move the country definitively past the Assad regime.
That is the essential point. It is hard to picture the violence ending and politics beginning without dealing somehow with Alawite fears that they will end up massacred if Bashar al Assad leaves power. That would be a tragedy not only for the Alawites but for the Middle East in general. Let there be no doubt: past experience suggests that those who indulge in abusive violence often become the victims of it when their antagonists get up off the ropes and gain the upper hand.
It would be far better for most Alawites, the relatively small religious sect whose adherents are mainstays of the Assad regime, if a peaceful bridge can be built to post-Assad Syria. They will not of course trust those who have been mistreated not to mistreat them in turn. This is where the diplomats earn their stripes: coming up with a scheme that protects Alawites as a group from instant retaliation while preserving the option of eventually holding individuals judicially accountable for the Assad regime abuses. It is hard to picture a case more difficult than Syria, where the regime has managed to keep most Alawites loyal and used some of them as paramilitary murderers.
There really is no Plan B. The Americans cannot act unilaterally on Syria without losing Russian support in dealing with Iran on its nuclear program. President Obama’s top priority is stopping that program from advancing further toward nuclear weapons. While some think the American elections are a factor restraining the president on Syria, I don’t think he is likely to change his mind even if he wins. Only if he decides that the effort to stop a nuclear Iran has failed will he be tempted to cut the chord with the Russians and lead a military response to Bashar al Assad’s homicidal behavior, thus ending Syria’s alignment with a potentially nuclear Iran and shoring up the Sunni Arab counterweight. But he would only do that in the narrow window before Tehran acquires nuclear weapons, not afterwards.
The observers are supposed to be laying the groundwork for a political solution. Their mandate expires in July. That is the next big decision point. Annan needs to keep at it for now, hoping that the Russians and Americans come to terms and open a window for a political solution that ends the Assad regime.
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