Security First Forum: Iran’s Long-Term Security Interests—and Ours

by J. Peter Pham

Amitai Etzioni makes a compelling case for a "mutual security enhancement deal" with Iran, predicated on both an implicit deadline and a credible military threat in the absence of agreement. I have to admit that the notion of a non-aggression pact with an unapologetic state sponsor of terrorism struck a rather discordant note with me at first. How would one ever trust the word of a regime whose envoys’ mendacity goes far beyond anything encompassed by Sir Henry Wotton’s dictum that a diplomat is "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country"? After all, the mullahs’ constantly repeated mantra—that the Iranian nuclear program is entirely peaceful and meant only to produce electricity—makes no sense from both the economic and the technical perspectives.

However, taking this skepticism as a point of departure, one has to ask how President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has managed to sell his well-educated public on this dubious expenditure—estimated to have already cost the Iranian economy, sluggish despite the oil windfall of recent years, at least $10 billion. The answer is nationalism. While Persians just barely constitute a majority of the country’s 65 million people—Azeris make up 24 percent, with other ethnic groups (Gilaki, Mazandarani, Kurd, Arab, Lur, Baloch, Turkmen and others) accounting for another 25 percent—Persian nationalism has been the official creed of the state since the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. And for all practical purposes, this imperial project has been largely successful in welding the disparate ethnic groups together, as Saddam Hussein learned during the Iran-Iraq war, when few of Khuzestan’s Arabs or Sunnis from elsewhere in Iran (Sunnis represent some 10 percent of the Shi’a-dominated country’s population) rose in support of his failed invasion of the nascent Islamic Republic. When they overthrew the monarch’s son, Mohammad Reza, in 1979, the mullahs were careful to preserve this one innovation of the Pahlavi dynasty and continued to nurture the populace’s attachment to the grandeurs of the pre-Islamic Persian civilization of the Median, Achaemenian, Parthian and Sassanian empires. Thus the apparent broad support that the nuclear program—at least as it is explained to the ordinary people—appears to enjoy across a wide spectrum of Iranian society. If a sixty-year-old contrived state like Pakistan is allowed to have nuclear technology, why not their own millennia-old polity?

Along with a classical culture, modern Iranians also inherited unparalleled geopolitical endowments quite beyond their own possession of the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and third-largest of petroleum. To their north, Iranians abut the resource-rich Caspian basin and provide access to the strategic steppes of Central Eurasia, where a reinvigorated Russia and a rising China will face off. To their south, Iranians sit astride the entire Persian Gulf and can easily dominate the narrow Straits of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s entire oil production must pass. To their east, Iranians are potentially a bulwark against the troubles of a possibly disintegrating (and nuclear-armed) Pakistan spilling into the already volatile Middle East. To their west, while the current Iranian regime has been less than helpful with respect to Iraq, a strong Iran will likewise serve as a firewall between whatever happens in Mesopotamia and powder kegs in Central Asia.

While the CIA’s role in carrying out British wishes to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1952 is often cited in discussions of U.S.-Iranian relations, the United States, for the reasons cited above and similar calculations, has traditionally maintained a more-than-friendly interest in the security and well-being of what is today Iran since 1883. That year, President Chester Arthur dispatched Samuel Green Wheeler Benjamin to Tehran in response to an appeal from Persia’s Qajar rulers for help resisting British and Russian attempts to dominate the country. With a similar mutually beneficial objective in mind, President William Howard Taft answered the Persian foreign minister’s 1911 request for a "disinterested American expert as Treasurer-General" to sort out the kingdom’s finances amid the depredations of the other powers by sending W. Morgan Schuster, who had earlier reorganized the finances of Cuba and the Philippines. In 1946, President Harry Truman alerted U.S. military forces, including three combat divisions in Austria about to return home, to be prepared to deploy to Iran to force Soviet troops to withdraw from the country. And it should be recalled that the eponymous strategic doctrine promulgated by the otherwise pusillanimous Carter administration in 1980—"any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force"—carried an implicit security guarantee for Iranian statehood.

All that being said, I am not especially optimistic that any kind of grand bargain can be struck with the current Iranian regime. In fact, I would not be surprised if, whether under the Bush Administration or its successor, U.S. military force will ultimately have to be deployed to persuade the mullahs to heed the demands of the United Nations Security Council to halt uranium enrichment and suspend work on plutonium-producing facilities. (And the mullahs cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons since, as I have previously argued, messianic religion is an intractable enough force that conventional deterrence cannot be counted upon to constrain their behavior.)

However, in weighing its policy options, the United States would do well to adopt a more expansive horizon for any "security first" agenda, considering not only the short-term backlash its actions might provoke, but also the long-term strategic consequences. In the end, the militant Islamism of the mullahs will, like the revolutionary communism of the commissars in Eastern Europe before it, prove a failed ideology that collapses under the weight of its own failed promises. When that happens, what will remain, to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, will not be the enmities or friendships of the present moment, but the permanent interests both of Iranians—who will want to reassert their ancient historical identity—and of the United States, whose security interests will lie once more with a strong Iranian ally in what has been a geostrategically vital arena from time immemorial.



J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University.

Source: The National Interest
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16206

Bush handed blueprint to seize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

· Architect of Iraq surge draws up takeover options
· US fears army's Islamists might grab weapons

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
Saturday December 1, 2007

The man who devised the Bush administration's Iraq troop surge has urged the US to consider sending elite troops to Pakistan to seize its nuclear weapons if the country descends into chaos.
In a series of scenarios drawn up for Pakistan, Frederick Kagan, a former West Point military historian, has called for the White House to consider various options for an unstable Pakistan.

These include: sending elite British or US troops to secure nuclear weapons capable of being transported out of the country and take them to a secret storage depot in New Mexico or a "remote redoubt" inside Pakistan; sending US troops to Pakistan's north-western border to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida; and a US military occupation of the capital Islamabad, and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan if asked for assistance by a fractured Pakistan military, so that the US could shore up President Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani, who became army chief this week.

"These are scenarios and solutions. They are designed to test our preparedness. The United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss," Kagan, who is with the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank with strong ideological ties to the Bush administration, told the Guardian. "We need to think now about our options in Pakistan,"

Kagan argued that the rise of Sunni extremism in Pakistan, coupled with the proliferation of al-Qaida bases in the north-west, posed a real possibility of terrorists staging a coup that would give them access to a nuclear device. He also noted how sections of Pakistan's military and intelligence establishment continued to be linked to Islamists and warned that the army, demoralised by having to fight in Waziristan and parts of North-West Frontier Province, might retreat from the borders, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by radicals. Worse, the military might split, with a radical faction trying to take over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Kagan accepted that the Pakistani military was not in the grip of Islamists. "Pakistan's officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah's regime and look what happened in 1979," he said, referring to Iran.

The scenarios received a public airing two weeks ago in an article for the New York Times by Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, who has ties to the Democrats.

They have been criticised in the US as well as Pakistan, with Kagan accused of drawing up plans for another US occupation of a Muslim country.

But the scenarios are regarded with some seriousness because of Kagan's influence over thinking in the Bush administration as the architect of the Iraq troop surge, which is conceded to have brought some improvements in security.

A former senior state department official who works as a contractor with the government and is familiar with current planning on Pakistan told the Guardian: "Governments are supposed to think the unthinkable. But these ideas, coming as they do from a man of significant influence in Washington's militarist camp, seem prescriptive and have got tongues wagging - even in a town like Washington, built on hyperbole."

Kagan said he was not calling for an occupation of Pakistan.

"I have been arguing the opposite. We cannot invade, only work with the consent of elements of the Pakistan military," he said.

"But we do have to calculate how to quantify and then respond to a crisis that is potentially as much a threat as Soviet tanks once were. Pakistan may be the next big test."

The political and security crises there have led the Bush administration to conclude that Pakistan has become a more dangerous place than it was before Musharraf took over in the coup of October 1999.

One Pentagon official said last week that the defence department had indeed been war-gaming some of Kagan's scenarios.

A report by Kagan and O'Hanlon in April highlighted their argument.

"The only serious response to this international environment is to develop armed forces capable of protecting America's vital interests throughout this dangerous time," it said.

But in Pakistan, aides to Musharraf yesterday dismissed Kagan's study as "hyperbole".

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331424342-103595,00.html

America's Favorite Dictator

By Selig S. Harrison

The catastrophe now engulfing Pakistan was made in America. It is the direct and inevitable result of the huge infusions of U.S. military hardware and cash subsidies for the past half-century that have built up Pakistan's armed forces into a bloated behemoth with both overwhelming firepower and financial might beyond the reach of civilian control.
Whatever happens to Gen. Pervez Musharraf, it will be difficult to break the grip of the generals in Islamabad over economic as well as political life in Pakistan. A growing confrontation lies ahead between the armed forces and a politically aroused populace with explosive implications in a nuclear-armed state in a dangerous neighborhood.

In the most optimistic scenario for the weeks ahead, Musharraf will fulfill his promises to end martial law, step down as army chief of staff and permit National Assembly elections. But even if elections are held, campaigning will be controlled and the elections are likely to be rigged so that Benazir Bhutto does not get enough assembly seats to claim a meaningful share of power and ends up fronting for continued military rule.

If Musharraf does actually trade his uniform for a Savile Row suit, he is likely to be a figurehead president beholden to his anointed successor as chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani. If Bhutto becomes prime minister, she is likely to use her limited power to rebuild her decimated Peoples Party and to reach out to disaffected ethnic minorities. Pakistan would then remain unstable, but intact.

By contrast, naked military rule without a civilian component would sharpen tensions between the Punjabi-dominated armed forces and the Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi separatists seeking to break up Pakistan into four ethnically defined independent states.

The U.S. buildup of the armed forces has been almost continuous since the founding of Pakistan. During the Cold War and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. military assistance totaled some $15 billion at current prices. But it was no secret that Pakistan wanted its F-16s and heavy tanks to bolster its balance of power with India — and did, in fact, use them against New

Delhi in two wars. Then came the World Trade Center attack and $10 billion more in new military aid and “counterterrorism” subsidies.

Emboldened by Washington's largesse, the successive military dictatorships of Ayub Khan, Zia Ul Haq and Musharraf have established an economic empire patterned after the military-operated conglomerates of Indonesia and Thailand.

In her just-published study, “Military, Inc.,” Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa estimates that these military-run enterprises have assets totaling $36.19 billion. The empire embraces everything from stocks, bonds, insurance and banking to breakfast cereals, bakeries and airlines. The biggest real estate firm in the country and the biggest trucking network are army-controlled. Civil servants in economic posts have been replaced by military officers, serving and retired. Parliamentary committees seeking to exercise oversight over the military role in the economy are brushed aside.

Faced with the economic tentacles of the armed forces throughout Pakistani society and their repressive machinery, both overt and covert, Benazir Bhutto and other mainstream opposition leaders are no match for “Military, Inc.”

But the separatists pose a serious challenge. The Baluch Liberation Army in the southwest is a well-organized guerrilla force with close ties to Sindhi dissidents in the adjacent coastal commercial center of Karachi.

Most important, a simmering Pashtun secessionist movement could lead to the unification of the 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the emergence, in time, of a new national entity, “Pashtunistan,” under radical Islamist leadership.

The United States ignores ethnic factors in its operations against the Taliban and other jihadi forces. For example, the Pashtuns have resisted Punjabi domination for centuries. Yet Washington wonders why Pakistan's Punjabi soldiers have so little success in their operations in Pashtun border areas.

Similarly, the Taliban is composed mainly of Pashtuns. Thus, when air strikes lead to large-scale civilian casualties in Afghan and Pakistani Pashtun areas, the United States inadvertently helps the Taliban capture the leadership of Pashtun nationalism.

In one estimate, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have numbered nearly 5,000 since 2001. The International Crisis Group reported that “indiscriminate and excessive force alienated the local populace” when Pakistani forces, under pressure from Washington, conducted helicopter and artillery attacks in early 2004 that displaced some 50,000 people in Pashtun border areas. More recently, many of the 300 seminary students killed in Musharraf's July assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad were Pashtun girls.

At a recent Washington seminar at the Pakistan embassy, Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani, a Pashtun, observed, “I hope the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don't merge. If that happens, we've had it, and we're on the verge of that.”

Bush's repeated statements that Musharraf is an indispensable partner in the “war on terror” are puzzling. In his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” Musharraf made clear that he lined up with the United States after 9/11 not out of conviction but only because Washington had threatened to “bomb us back to the Stone Age” if he refused to do so.

On Sept. 19, 2001, to reassure pro-Taliban Pakistanis outraged by his alignment with Bush, Musharraf made a revealing TV address in Urdu not intended for American ears.

“I have done everything for the Taliban when the whole world was against them,” he said, “and now we are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to them.”

The evidence is overwhelming that Pakistan has permitted the Taliban to operate freely from sanctuaries in the border areas of Pakistan adjacent to Afghanistan since 2001 and in most cases has cooperated in apprehending al-Qaida operatives only when confronted with evidence on their whereabouts obtained by FBI and CIA agents in Pakistan.

So far, Bush's “pressure” for democratization in Islamabad has been a charade. When he called on Musharraf to end martial law and hold elections, it was easy for Musharraf to yield, since martial law had already enabled him to oust his nemesis, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhury, as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Now Bush should put U.S. influence to a more serious test by pressuring Musharraf to hand over power to a genuinely neutral caretaker government headed by an independent figure like Chaudhury so that the promised elections do not become another charade.

Is this a pipe dream? Not if the United States gives the generals a clear, firm and credible choice: a real democratic transition or a cutoff of the pipeline of weaponry and cash that has been flowing to the armed forces for five decades.

Source: theday.com
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=bb172447-befe-4467-b64b-31d1de44fade

Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem

By FREDERICK W. KAGAN and MICHAEL O’HANLON

AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.

We do not intend to be fear mongers. Pakistan’s officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate and more interested in building a strong, modern state than in exporting terrorism or nuclear weapons to the highest bidder. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late.

Moreover, Pakistan’s intelligence services contain enough sympathizers and supporters of the Afghan Taliban, and enough nationalists bent on seizing the disputed province of Kashmir from India, that there are grounds for real worries.

The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.

All possible military initiatives to avoid those possibilities are daunting. With 160 million people, Pakistan is more than five times the size of Iraq. It would take a long time to move large numbers of American forces halfway across the world. And unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or using Special Forces to destroy them.

The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size. Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.

For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico; but even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate. More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act. The price for rapid action and secrecy, however, would probably be a very small international coalition.

A second, broader option would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership. This would require a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations.

Even if we were not so committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western powers would need months to get the troops there. Fortunately, given the longstanding effectiveness of Pakistan’s security forces, any process of state decline probably would be gradual, giving us the time to act.

So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center — primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south.

We would also have to be wary of internecine warfare within the Pakistani security forces. Pro-American moderates could well win a fight against extremist sympathizers on their own. But they might need help if splinter forces or radical Islamists took control of parts of the country containing crucial nuclear materials. The task of retaking any such regions and reclaiming custody of any nuclear weapons would be a priority for our troops.

If a holding operation in the nation’s center was successful, we would probably then seek to establish order in the parts of Pakistan where extremists operate. Beyond propping up the state, this would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.

The great paradox of the post-cold war world is that we are both safer, day to day, and in greater peril than before. There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be the next big test.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18kagan.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Why the West should not fear to intervene

For 10 years, Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair's chief of staff and at the heart of all his key foreign policy initiatives. Last week, in his first major speech on foreign affairs since leaving No. 10, Powell launched an impassioned defence of liberal interventionism. Here is an extract from his landmark address

Jonathan Powell

The principle of non-interference in other nations' affairs was established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and brought to an end the 30 Years War. Unprecedented devastation had been visited on the continent by armies trying to impose the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation on neighbouring states and the two sides had fought themselves to a draw. The monarchs of the day decided to bring these wars to a permanent end. In future, it would be OK to defend yourself against attack and OK to fight over territory or succession, but countries could no longer fight for ideas.
The principle of non-interference lasted through the succeeding centuries and was regularly invoked by the Soviet Union. We in the West used it as an excuse to avoid doing anything about the Hungarian Uprising or the Prague Spring. It was morally questionable but probably sensible in a nuclear-backed stand-off.

The world has changed since then. Intervening in another country no longer risks tipping the two superpowers into global war, because there is only one superpower. More important, the force of globalisation has changed the world. With 24-hour news, massive global travel and migration, the world has become a much smaller place.

So whether or not isolationism was ever sensible or moral, it is no longer practical. We can't protect our industries from competition by erecting tariff barriers and we can't protect our citizens from terrorist attack simply by better border controls. If we stand by while other peoples are brutally suppressed in other parts of the world, from Kosovo to Iraq, and if we turn a blind eye when countries disintegrate into anarchy, as we did in Afghanistan and Somalia, we will face the consequences at home. And that is why what is happening now in Pakistan is so important to us.

Let me look at the lessons to be drawn from the 10 years of the Blair administration and our four wars. First, Sierra Leone. We could hardly claim self-defence for our military action there. As it was a success, no one questioned its theoretical justification. Now, with a democratic change of government in Sierra Leone, and democratic government established in neighbouring Liberia, there is real hope for the people of that part of West Africa.

Kosovo was trickier. First, the Clinton administration did not want to deploy ground troops after what had happened in Somalia. We applied pressure because we believed, correctly, it was impossible to win the war from the air. They did the right thing and Milosevic crumbled. But we never managed to secure UN support for the war because of the Russian veto. No one in the West questioned that because the operation was a success.

Afghanistan, again, was not self-defence. The ultimatum to the Taliban was clear - give up al-Qaeda or we will topple your regime. And that is what the US did. This time, no one complained, even though the intervention has not yet been a sustained success.

Iraq was the most difficult, even if not very different theoretically from our other interventions. No one in their right mind would wish to see the blood-letting and chaos that is going on in Iraq today. There is no point in trying to pretend it is all a wonderful success. But equally, I don't think there are many people in Iraq or the rest of the world who want Saddam back. There was, however, a problem with the justification of the invasion - the holding of weapons of mass destruction in breach of UN resolutions. We now know Saddam didn't have them. But to suggest it was all a conspiracy between Tony Blair and George W Bush to pretend he did is nonsense. We believed he had them, as did pretty much every other government in the world, whatever they say now. We didn't kit our troops up in chemical warfare suits in the desert every time a missile was fired just for fun. So suggesting it was all a matter of Alastair Campbell cobbling together a dossier to pretend there were weapons of mass destruction is nonsense.

We should have been clear we were removing Saddam because he was a ruthless dictator suppressing his people. But the lawyers said there was no legal basis for proceeding on these grounds, and so we were not able to make this case as wholeheartedly as I would have liked.

Next the UN. The argument goes that we should not have intervened without a second United Nations Security Council resolution. But we intervened in Kosovo without such a resolution. The two crucial differences from Afghanistan and Kosovo were that a) we could not get a majority of countries on our side and b) we were not successful on the ground.

One of the reasons we argued so hard for a second resolution and tried so hard to get countries such as Mexico and Chile on side was that we believed if things got difficult in Iraq, we would do much better if we had the balance of the international community with us. And it is clearly true that if we had secured that support, we would be in a different place today, with a major UN role in Iraq and majority support around the world.

So if success on the ground was one of the big differences with Kosovo, why were we so relatively unsuccessful in Iraq? The biggest failing in my view was not fully to understand the consequences of our intervention. When you remove a brutal dictator who has annihilated all opposition for 30 years, it is inevitable you will face a period of anarchy when he is gone. All the basics of an ordinary society and law and order are not there. And when you superimpose that on a country where the minority, the Sunni, have ruled the majority, the Shia, for centuries, and you are trying to replace that with a majoritarian regime, it takes a long time to shake out the problems.

Let me draw some lessons from our 10 years of experience. We need a rules-based system. As other big countries rise to be superpowers they will have very different value systems from us. So it is in the US interest, as it is in the interest of medium-sized powers like the UK, to have the rule of law applied internationally as it is domestically.

We need a strong and reformed UN Security Council with the addition of Japan, Germany, India and Brazil. We need to make sure we have effective alliances that allow intervention to be undertaken when it can't be done by medium-sized countries like ours alone. That means working with France to develop effective European intervention forces. And most of all it means trying to ensure that the US does not revert to isolationism. If it withdraws into itself as it did after Vietnam and Somalia, I fear it will face another 9/11 and all the rest of us will suffer.

We need to be better prepared for the aftermath of intervention. We weren't properly prepared in Kosovo, in Afghanistan or in Iraq. It is no good saying as Donald Rumsfeld did, 'We don't do nation building.' That is exactly what we do need to be able to do.

In making the argument for interventionism, I am not suggesting we should go around invading countries willy-nilly. Tony Blair's Chicago speech of 1998, in which he made the case for liberal interventionism, set out five conditions in which intervention may be appropriate and I think these still hold:

1. We need to be sure of our case. War is a very imperfect instrument for righting wrongs, but armed force is sometimes the only way of replacing dictatorships.

2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance.

3. Are there practical and sensible military options? Sending gunboats to Zimbabwe won't work.

4. Are we prepared for the long term? We talk about exit strategies, but we cannot just walk away when a fight is over.

5. Do we have national interests engaged? That does not mean oil, but do we promote our own security better by protecting the rights of others in a particular situation?

I think there are cases today where the application of those tests would lead to a more robust approach.

Take Burma. What about actually doing something about the obscene regime of the generals? Are we just spectators as the monks march and are killed? Of course, the primary responsibility lies in the hands of its neighbours, but we can do far more to encourage them to be more robust in their attitudes.

Or Zimbabwe? Mugabe can use anything we say or do to stir the dying embers of anti-colonialism. And again, the primary responsibility lies with its neighbours, particularly South Africa, but are we really saying we just have to watch while his people suffer?

What are we going to do in Iraq? The first thing is to recognise that the solution is political rather than military. Now the danger of the country splitting apart is past, it is the moment to concentrate on trying to get the Shia and Sunni to come to an accommodation. Once the Sunnis have come to terms with sharing power with the Shia, our task will be done. It is only when there is a political settlement that we will be able to leave.

In Iran, I am not in favour of a military option because I don't think it is practical. No one is suggesting invading Iran to overthrow the regime. That is the task of the overwhelmingly young population that wants to be rid of the corrupt mullahs. The difficulty we face is one of timelines. The regime will be overthrown. And if there was a democratic and stable regime in place, I suppose, as in the case of India, we would not object so much to a nuclear-armed Iran. But we don't know when it will be overthrown. In the meantime, they are developing nuclear weapons, helping attacks on our troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan and supporting Hizbollah and Hamas. Western policymakers have yet to come up with a way of dealing with these different timelines and I do not have the answer either, although I suspect it lies in a combination of sanctions targeted on the regime. There is nothing like measures that affect the bank accounts of the Republican Guard to get their attention quickly.

My former boss is fond of saying that the political divide that matters in the world now is not that between left and right but that between open and closed. The threat we face is from those that advocate isolationism, protectionism and nativism - and it is striking how the debate on immigration has taken off in Europe and in the US. The enemy are the people who want to divide us into groups, to turn people against one another and take society backwards. The only hope we have is that those who want openness, tolerance and progress still have the political will to fight that battle and resist the tide of Luddism.

I believe the idea of liberal interventionism will survive as the best way of defending our interests and the moral way of promoting our values.

· Jonathan Powell was speaking at a dinner hosted by Portland Communications

Source: The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331295133-102273,00.html

The Case for Restraint

Barry R. Posen

With only 14 months left in the Bush presidency, it is not too soon to ask what will follow for U.S. foreign policy. While politics will determine the dramatis personae of the next administration, the challenges greeting the new President will transcend partisan plotlines. From now until election day 2008, the AI will examine questions of strategy, tone and tactics over a range of issues. We begin with Barry R. Posen’s case for strategic restraint (along with comments from members of the editorial board), an interview with Joseph Nye and Richard Armitage on “smart power”, and analyses of U.S. policy options in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Since the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy establishment has gradually converged on a grand strategy for the United States. Republican and Democratic foreign policy experts now disagree little about the threats the United States faces and the remedies it should pursue. Despite the present consensus and the very great power of the United States, which mutes the consequences of even Iraq-scale blunders, a reconsideration of U.S. grand strategy seems inevitable as the costs of the current consensus mount—which they will. The current consensus strategy is unsustainable.

If we understand properly the current foreign policy consensus and review the four key forces affecting U.S. grand strategy, the contours of an alternative strategy will emerge. The alternative, a grand strategy of “restraint”, recommends policies dramatically different from those to which we have grown accustomed not just since the end of the Cold War, but since its beginning.11. Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press and Harvey M. Sapolsky, “Come Home, America: The Strategy of Restraint in the Face of Temptation”, International Security (Spring 1997). The United States needs to be more reticent about the use of military force; more modest about the scope for political transformation within and among countries; and more distant politically and militarily from traditional allies. We thus face a choice between habit and sentiment on the one side, realism and rationality on the other.

The Consensus
A state’s grand strategy is its foreign policy elite’s theory about how to produce national security. Security has traditionally encompassed the preservation of a nation’s physical safety, the country’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity, and its power position—the last being the necessary means to the first three. States have traditionally been willing to risk the safety of their people to protect sovereignty, territorial integrity and power position. A grand strategy enumerates and prioritizes threats and adduces political and military remedies for them. A grand strategy also explains why some threats attain a certain priority, and why and how the remedies proposed could work.

Democratic and Republican strategists alike hold that the most imminent threats today are threats to U.S. safety. Terrorism, basically Islamist in origin, is the key problem. It is caused by something that is wrong with Arab society in particular, but also the societies of other Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. “Rogue” states—with interests and forms of government different from our own, a willingness to use force and, in the worst case, an inclination to acquire nuclear weapons—are a closely related threat because they may assist terrorists. “Failed” states, and the identity politics that travels with them, are also a serious threat: They produce or nurture terrorists, and they produce human rights violations, refugees and crime. Declining U.S. global influence relative to the rise of one or more peer competitors sometimes is recognized as an overarching threat, but this is construed to be a more distant problem.

Based on this threat analysis, the consensus therefore supports a U.S. grand strategy of international activism. The United States must remain the strongest military power in the world by a wide margin. It should be willing to use force—even preventively, if need be—on a range of issues. The United States should directly manage regional security relationships in any corner of the world that matters strategically, which seems increasingly to be every corner of the world. The risk that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of violent non-state actors is so great that the United States should be willing to take extraordinary measures to keep suspicious countries possibly or even potentially in league with such actors from acquiring these weapons. Beyond uses of force, the United States should endeavor to change other societies so that they look more like ours. A world of democracies would be the safest for us, and we should be willing to pay considerable costs to produce such a world.

The key conceptual difference between the two political parties lies in attitudes toward international institutions: Democrats like and trust them; Republicans do not. Republicans accuse Democrats of a willingness to sacrifice U.S. sovereignty to these organizations. This is not the case. Democrats think that the great power of the United States will permit it to write the rules and dominate the outcomes in international institutions, thus producing a net gain in U.S. influence. Democrats accuse Republicans of not understanding this, especially of failing to appreciate the value of international legitimacy.

The Iraq war, meanwhile, has mainly produced only tactical arguments between the two parties. The most sustained critiques of the Bush Administration have centered on two issues: The poor quality of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, and whether this was a result of honest error or political manipulation; and the Administration’s bungling of the occupation and reconstruction efforts, and the subsequent counterinsurgency campaign. Though some Democratic Party leaders believe the war was launched on false pretenses, its current presidential frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, has not repudiated her original support for the war. Though some Democratic Senators and Congressmen voted against the 2002 resolution permitting the use of force against Iraq, few party leaders argue forthrightly that Iraq could have and should have been contained and deterred rather than invaded, even had the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs been correct. Advocates of a policy of containment and deterrence toward a potentially nuclear Iran are even harder to find.

Nor do Democrats assert that nation-, state- and democracy-building in Iraq were always fools’ errands; instead, they argue that it could and should have been done better. Even now, policy analysts connected to the Democratic Party offer implausible and internally contradictory schemes to get the United States out of Iraq while keeping the United States in Iraq.22. See James N. Miller and Shawn W. Brimley, Phased Transition: A Responsible Way Forward and Out of Iraq, Center for a New American Security, June 2007. Under this plan, 60,000 or more U.S. soldiers would still be in Iraq in January 2009, and the last ones would not leave until the end of 2012. We do not have a debate on the deep foundations of grand strategy in the U.S. mainstream today. Instead, we loudly dispute only those matters that lie close to the surface.

Four Facts
Since the Cold War ended, the United States has been affected by four important facts: the great concentration of capability in the United States relative to other consequential powers, a condition often shorthanded as “unipolarity”; the re-emergence of identity politics, especially amalgams of religion and ethno-nationalism, as the key ideational foundations of modern domestic and, to a lesser extent, international political conflict; the diffusion of power—especially military power—to nominally weak states and to non-state actors alike; and, finally, globalization.

These four facts each have discrete effects on the international environment, but they also interact. The consequences of their interaction have been costly to the United States and will likely continue to be so. Put simply, the great power of the United States has proved a constant temptation to action for policymakers, even as the other three factors have combined to increase the costs of U.S. action.

Unipolarity. By almost every reasonable measure the United States emerged from the Cold War as one of the most powerful states in history. Its population exceeded that of any other great or middle power except China and India, and has continued to grow. Its GDP was (and remains) two or three times that of its closest economic competitor. Even after post-Cold War reductions, U.S. military spending exceeded the combined defense budgets of most of the other large powers in the world; today it exceeds the defense spending of the rest of the entire world combined. U.S. military technology sets the world standard; its strategic nuclear and conventional forces are peerless. The United States had (and retains) command of the global commons—the sea, the air and space—and U.S. technical capabilities for intelligence collection far eclipse those of any other state. (Indeed, the U.S. intelligence budget alone has roughly equaled the entire defense budgets of Britain or France, two of the world’s most capable military powers, and the only ones other than the United States with any global reach.)

The United States also enjoyed (and still enjoys) a favorable geographical position—with weak and friendly neighbors to the north and south, oceans to the east and west. The Cold War network of global alliances, coupled with massive investments in strategic lift, gave the U.S. military the ability to put large forces almost anywhere there is a coastline. In 1991, five U.S. divisions reached Saudi Arabia in four months, and nearly ten in six months.

Additionally, the collapse of Soviet power, and the all-but-rhetorical abandonment of communist principles of economic, social and political organization in China, left Western elites, especially in the United States, with a feeling of ideological triumph. Democracy and capitalism had won the great ideological struggle of the 20th century, and it was easy to suppose that all that was left were mopping-up operations. Other nation-states would easily find their way to our way: History, if it wasn’t “over”, was certainly on our side.

These enormous strengths masked certain weaknesses, however. U.S. active ground forces have been relatively small since conscription was abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War. The all-volunteer ground forces of the United States shrunk quickly from their end-of-Cold War peak of nearly a million, reaching 470,000 in the Army and a bit under 170,000 in the Marines in 2001. By comparison, the United States had 440,000 soldiers and marines in Vietnam in 1969, out of a total personnel strength of nearly two million.

Even with the 92,000-soldier increase now pledged by Republicans and Democrats alike, U.S. ground forces will remain small. It is difficult to maintain more than a third of a professional ground force in combat at any one time without suffering acute retention, recruitment and training problems. The United States now has roughly half of its forces deployed, and this is widely understood to be unsustainable. The demands of the Iraq war have essentially swallowed the Army and Marines over the past five years, and other possible U.S. adversaries dwarf Iraq in population—Iran is nearly three times as populous, Pakistan nearly six times.

The U.S. national security establishment, to include the intelligence agencies and the State Department, also remains short of individuals who understand other countries and their cultures. It lacks sufficient numbers of analysts, diplomats, advisors and intelligence agents for the array of global engagement opportunities it has taken up. It also seems to lack the domestic political capacity to generate sufficient non-military material resources to support its foreign policy. Whether foreign economic assistance is money well spent or not, the United States has a difficult time generating these funds. In a more general sense, the American public has been trained by its politicians to be chary of taxes. So the U.S. government has financed much of its security effort since September 11, 2001 with borrowed money. Even obvious security-related taxes, such as a tax on gasoline to discourage consumption and thus help wean the United States off imported oil, find no political sponsors.


Identity Politics. Aside from Saddam Hussein’s attempted smash-and-grab robbery of Kuwait, the most troublesome conflicts of the post-Cold War world have been internal and have centered on identity politics. For the U.S. military this included Desert Storm’s unhappy postscript in the Kurdish and Shi‘a rebellions in northern and southern Iraq, respectively, and civil wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The United States eschewed military intervention to stop the Rwanda genocide, but those in the Clinton Administration who made this decision all regret it deeply, and most critics of this policy believe with unwarranted certainty that such an intervention would have been easy and successful.

The U.S. approach to all of these conflicts bore certain similarities rooted in U.S. liberalism, which exalts in the rational calculating individual and thus underestimates the power of group loyalty. The United States was usually surprised by one or more of the following: the outbreak of conflict itself, the extent of group ambitions, the ferocity of the violence, the intensity of group loyalties, and the cost and duration of any U.S. military intervention. This myopia crossed party lines: Most Republican security strategists have been as confounded by the bloody, stubborn and resilient identity politics of Iraq as the Clinton Administration was in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

But why? Academic disputes aside, there is enough of an historical pattern of association between identity politics and violence that U.S. policymakers should know to take nationalism and religion seriously, both as immediate causes of violence and as key ingredients sustaining military capability and armed resistance—particularly in periods of political and economic insecurity.


The Diffusion of Power. The diffusion of power, especially of military capacity, is the third important trend of the last twenty years. Though the United States faces few if any plausible competitors in the open oceans or space, or even in the air at medium and high altitudes, states and groups have learned how to tilt with the Americans using the advantages of their home turf. Ruthless, committed and skilled Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans and miscellaneous al-Qaeda fighters have fought U.S. forces directly; they seldom “win”, but they do make the Americans pay. Somali, Iraqi and al-Qaeda air-defense gunners have shot down dozens of U.S. helicopters, mainly with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Serb SAM operators using mainly 1970s technology shot down few U.S. aircraft, but so complicated U.S. air operations that most Serb ground forces in Kosovo survived the 1999 air campaign.

At the same time, the ability to manufacture such relatively low-tech weapons has spread. Simple long-range artillery rockets and more complex anti-ship missiles manufactured in Iran turned up in the hands of Hizballah in the summer 2006 war with Israel. According to the U.S. government, components of “Explosively Formed Penetrators” (EFPs), off-route, anti-armored-vehicle mines discovered in Iraq were manufactured and supplied by Iran—which surely has more sophisticated versions of the same weapons on the other side of the border. Iran is also one of the world’s largest producers of new warheads for the ubiquitous Soviet-designed RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. More ominously, Iranian arms exporters now offer night-vision devices for sale. If they work, a presumed U.S. area of great tactical superiority in infantry combat will soon wane.

More important than the proliferation of moderately sophisticated conventional weapons is the apparent spread of military expertise. The combination of good-enough conventional weapons, large numbers of committed young men, proven tactics and competent training, cleverly adapted to urban, suburban and rural environments that favor infantry, has inflicted meaningful combat costs on high-technology U.S. ground forces. Costs get even higher if the United States or other Western forces intend to settle into other countries to reform their politics, and are thus forced into long counterinsurgency campaigns.


Globalization. Globalization is the final trend complicating U.S. foreign and security policy. I define globalization as the spread of capitalism across the globe along with the intensification of international trade and the diffusion of manufacturing, investment and finance. Globalization is enabled by the crumbling of old political barriers and by the continuing improvements in all modes of transportation for goods and people. The IT revolution, too, has made low-cost, high-bandwidth communications possible on a global scale.

Globalization has largely been embraced by U.S. business and political elites as a good thing. Certainly it offers economic opportunity to many formerly excluded from most of the benefits of modernity, and it seems to explain the vast abatement in acute poverty over the past dozen years. But all this opportunity and change come with a cost, and not for the first time.

The intensification of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century mobilized large numbers of people for politics by disrupting their traditional ways of life, drawing them into cities, subjecting them to the new insecurities of industrial capitalism, and exposing them to regular, intense political communication. Globalization is now having similar effects in many heretofore unperturbed parts of the world. Those socially mobilized for politics in the late 19th century became vulnerable to the appeals of nationalists, communists and fascists, all of whom offered simple and powerful ideologies of solidarity and inclusion in times of economic and political uncertainty. Estimates of population growth and urbanization over the next several decades suggest that the developing world will see a steady supply of urbanized citizens at the lower end of the income scale. Most will experience acute economic and personal insecurity at the same time that modern technology opens them to intense mass communications, and simultaneously permits small independent groups to communicate directly with large numbers of people. These individuals will seek political protection and participation, and will be vulnerable to political mobilization on the basis of identity politics. The governments of many developing countries are bound to have a hard time keeping up with these demands, so that political entrepreneurs will find fertile ground for appeals based on the resurrection of supposedly traditional values.

Globalization adds some new complications to these old processes. The intensity of international trade and investment makes it easy for political entrepreneurs to blame foreigners for local problems. The enhanced ability to communicate and travel makes it possible for like-minded groups in different countries to find each other, and to organize and cooperate.

To the generic problems posed by globalization must be added the peculiar tinder of the Arab world. There pan-Arab and Islamic identities overlap in 22 countries with a combined population of more than 200 million. Population growth and urbanization proceed apace but economic growth lags, and the political organization of these countries leaves vast numbers bereft of any sense of control over their destinies. The oil wealth of some Arab countries, compared with the poverty of others, fuels resentment. Oil and gas also bring the interests and presence of the great powers to the region, especially the United States. The emergence of an economically and militarily successful Westernized Jewish liberal democracy—Israel—in their midst serves both as a focus of identity politics and a reminder of the extent of Arab political failure in the postwar independence era. Macro-level economic and technological forces and specifically regional characteristics thus combine to create fertile ground in the Arab world for extremists hostile to existing international political and economic systems.


These four facts have interacted to draw the United States into costly national security policies that produce new problems faster than they can solve old ones. The great concentration of power in the United States skews the American security-policy debate toward activism. If the global distribution of power were more equal, U.S. policymakers would have to be more cautious about the projects they choose. The existence of a peer competitor would inject into the U.S. policy debate a persistent question: Will this project help or hurt our ability to deter or contain X? Moreover, it is tempting to imagine that with this much power, the United States could organize a safe world, once and for all—where the United States would remain the acknowledged military and ideological leader.

Whatever else it may achieve, U.S. activism is bound to discomfit other states. The great preponderance of U.S. power makes direct opposition to the United States difficult and dangerous, but other states are doing what they can to put themselves in a better position. Some fear U.S. freedom of action, worry about the possibility of being drawn into policies inimical to their interests, and so wish to distance themselves from the United States—even as they free-ride within the broader U.S. security umbrella. The European Union has gradually strengthened its military capabilities so that it can get along without the United States if it must. Others fear that U.S. policies will harm their interests indirectly, and look for ways to concert their power, as Russia and China have done in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Still others expect U.S. attentions to be directed straight at them, and so they seek to improve their abilities to deter U.S. military action or fight the United States directly if they must. North Korea and Iran pursue nuclear weapons for those purposes. Iran also has developed a conventional capability to inflict costs on U.S. forces in the Gulf and has been implicated in inflicting such costs in Iraq. To the extent that the United States continues its current activist policy path, these reactions will continue and will slowly increase the costs of future U.S. activism. They will also reduce the propensity of others to share these costs.


Anti-WTO protestors in the Philippines blame Uncle Sam, September 2003. [credit: Associated Press] American activism also interacts with globalization to provoke negative reactions to the United States. Insofar as the U.S. economy is the largest and most dynamic in the world, the forces associated with globalization—trade, global supply chains, investment, travel and communications—are often associated with the United States by those experiencing the downside consequences. Not only does an activist foreign and security policy make the United States the most obvious unkind face of globalization, political entrepreneurs in the developing world will find it expedient to attribute the difficulties experienced by their target populations to the actions of the United States. When U.S. activism turns to direct military intervention in the affairs of other countries, local political leaders can rely on the most elemental of forces: nationalism.

Increased opportunities for travel and communications have enabled transnational groups, particularly al-Qaeda, to organize against the United States. They can mobilize people politically without one-to-one contact. Given populations of hundreds of millions, these organizations do not need a high conversion rate to sustain themselves. They need only produce sympathy on a large enough scale to provide an environment from which relatively modest material and human resources can be collected.

Al-Qaeda and other similar, but less ambitious, groups have also professionalized the training of their soldiers and terrorist operatives. They learn from one another, adapt to local circumstances, and profit from the more general availability of weaponry. The ease of international travel and trade allows human and material resources to be shifted rapidly from place to place. This turns U.S. interventions into opportunities for transnational anti-system groups like al-Qaeda to assist local resistance movements and to harness the power of nationalism and politicized religion to their more diffuse but still distinctly anti-American agenda.

The activist U.S. grand strategy currently preferred by the national security establishment in both parties thus has a classically tragic quality about it. Enabled by its great power, and fearful of the negative energies and possibilities engendered by globalization, the United States has tried to get its arms around the problem: It has essentially sought more control. But the very act of seeking more control injects negative energy into global politics as quickly as it finds enemies to vanquish. It prompts states to balance against U.S. power however they can, and it prompts peoples to imagine that the United States is the source of all their troubles.

Iraq should therefore be seen not as a singular debacle, but as a harbinger of costs to come. There is enough capacity and motivation out in the world to increase significantly the costs of any U.S. effort to manage global politics directly. Public support for this policy may wane before profligacy so diminishes U.S. power that it becomes unsustainable. But it would be unwise to count on it.

A Strategy of Restraint
If more activism has not produced better policy, what is to be done? The United States should try doing less: It should pursue a grand strategy of restraint. Less is not nothing, however, meaning in essence that the United States should conceive ways to shape rather than to control international politics.

We can well afford to think this way because extant threats to the United States are not threats to U.S. sovereignty. The country is in no danger of conquest or intimidation from those more powerful. U.S. territorial integrity is secure. The power position of the United States is excellent; any power position that allows a country to even think about running the world ought to provide ample capability for defense. Protecting this power position is an important goal, but direct action is the wrong way to go about it. If regional powers grow strong enough to threaten their neighbors—and perhaps ultimately threaten the United States—local actors will wish to balance that power. The United States should preserve an ability to help out if necessary, but it should be stingy in this regard. Others should get organized and dig into their own pockets before the United States shows up to help. U.S. command of the sea, air and space enables such assistance, but, coupled with a favorable geographic position, it also permits the United States to wait. This capability should cast a stabilizing shadow in any case.

Today the most imminent U.S. security problem has to do not with conquest or intimidation but safety. Here, at least, the consensus view is correct. The main discrete threat is al-Qaeda, but if the foregoing analysis is right, there are deeper forces feeding that organization than its interpretation of religious texts. These forces could give rise to other violent organizations. In other words, al-Qaeda is not the problem, but a particularly threatening example of a condition of global disorder and disaffection capable of giving rise to numerous such groups, Islamist and otherwise. This condition is the problem, which American power and actions over the years have done a good deal, albeit inadvertently, to cause, but cannot now easily or by themselves redress.

This threat should not be minimized, but neither should it be exaggerated. Al-Qaeda is ruthless, persistent and creative. It and other groups yet to form will retain the ability to kill tens and hundreds if not occasionally thousands with materials already at hand. This will not bring down the United States, however, and it would be wise to stop suggesting to these groups that it can. If such groups get their hands on a nuclear weapon and use it, our costs obviously go much higher, but even then the United States would still go on. Its soldiers and agents will hunt down the perpetrators and whoever helped them, no matter how long it takes. Public repetition of this promise may assist in deterrence, and a single effective execution after the fact may contribute to the deterrence of subsequent attacks. That is obvious, but still unsettling. Discomfort with punishment after the fact leads policymakers to consider preventive war against new nuclear weapons states for fear that they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists, or simply lose them. But a rich and capable country that asks its citizens to commit hundreds of billions of dollars annually to defense ought to be able to come up with a better answer than an open-ended series of costly preventive wars.

Two strategies have been suggested to take on al-Qaeda. The Bush Administration has pursued the first: an expansive strategy of direct offensive action. Its priorities, however, have been bizarre. It appropriately first went after al-Qaeda and its immediate friends in Afghanistan, but before finishing the job quickly turned to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, dubious future allies of al-Qaeda. By the U.S. intelligence community’s own admission, the respite allowed al-Qaeda to recover.

Moreover, the United States has squandered one relatively constant factor that should work in its favor. Al-Qaeda’s very nature condemns it to theatrical terrorist attacks against innocent people, and such attacks have a way of alienating potential supporters. By overstressing offensive action in Iraq, and in particular by occupying an Arab country, the United States has added credence to the al-Qaeda story in the Arab world, and done a terrible job of telling its own.

After September 11, I suggested a second strategy—more defensive than offensive and more precisely directed at al-Qaeda.33. Posen, “The Struggle Against Terrorism, Grand Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics”, International Security (Winter 2001–02). We should seek to draw as many other states as possible into the effort, while avoiding adding new facts to the jihadi narrative. The United States needs to reduce, not increase, its presence within the abode of Islam. The U.S. military should abandon permanent and semi-permanent land bases in Arab countries, and generally lower the profile of its military and security cooperation with Arab states. The fight against al-Qaeda should continue, but it should be conducted in the world of intelligence. Cooperation with foreign intelligence and police agencies comes first, but the U.S. intelligence community may need to engage in direct action from time to time. To the extent that the United States has interests in the Arab world that can only be pursued with old-fashioned military power, such as the possible need to defend Arab states from Iranian expansionism, the United States should rely on its massive power-projection capabilities. The U.S. military should be “over the horizon.”

Politically, the United States needs projects in the developing world that are consistent with U.S. values and that permit the United States to look like the “good guy.” Three steps commend themselves. First, the United States should build on the experience of Operation Unified Assistance, which provided prompt relief to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004. The remarkable power-projection capability of the U.S. military provides an inherent capability to get into many major natural disaster areas “first with the most.” Assistance rendered by the U.S. military in the early desperate days after the disaster brought fairly dramatic political results, not least in Indonesia. Disasters happen, and the United States can gain significant political respect for helping victims dig out of them. And in contrast to peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations, which for many have the same purpose, natural-disaster relief has a natural exit strategy.

Second, instead of focusing on the export of democracy, which we lack sufficient cause-effect knowledge to accomplish in any case, let us recommend practices that will allow others to find their own way to democracy—or at least to more benign forms of government. The United States should therefore make itself a voice for the rule of law, for press freedom and for the rights of collective bargaining, not just or mainly for democracy.

Third, the United States should be willing to assist in humanitarian interventions, but under reasonable guidelines. The most important guideline is to avoid overselling the prospective results to the American people. When the United States is about to engage in armed philanthropy, it should not disguise the effort as the pursuit of a security interest. If the latter is required to sell the policy, then the policy is already in trouble. Once characterized as a security interest, the U.S. Congress and the public expect that the United States will lead the fight; that decisive military means will be employed; and that victory will be achieved—all of which raises U.S. military and political costs. Instead, the United States should only engage in armed philanthropy in coalitions, operating under some kind of regional or international political mandate. The United States should not insist on leadership; indeed, it should avoid it whenever possible. On the whole, too, the United States should offer logistical rather than direct combat assets.

The United States must also develop a more measured view of the risks of nuclear proliferation. Without the promiscuous use of preventive war, it will not be possible to stop all possible new nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear weapons are no longer mysterious, but neither are they easy to get. It is costly and technically difficult to produce fissionable material in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons, and only a few countries can do it. It has taken a good bit of time for those smaller states who wished to develop nuclear weapons to get them. Though an imperfect regime, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency do provide obstacles to the development of nuclear weapons, and some early warning that mischief is afoot. Good intelligence work can provide more warning, and well-crafted intelligence operations could presumably slow the diffusion of nuclear know-how, and even the progress of national nuclear programs, if need be.

It is worthwhile to keep proliferation relatively costly and slow because other states require time to adapt to such events, and extra time would be useful to explain to new nuclear powers the rules of the game they are entering. U.S. policymakers feel compelled to trumpet that all options, including force, are on the table when dealing with “rogue” state proliferators. True enough: The United States is a great military power and on vital security matters its forces can never be off the table. But preventive war must never become either a casual or a default policy choice. It has serious and probably enduring political costs, which the United States need not incur. Deterrence is still a better strategy.

The United States is a great nuclear power and should remain so. Against possible new nuclear powers such as North Korea or Iran, U.S. capabilities are superior in every way. In contrast to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, where neither country would have survived a nuclear exchange, it is clear which nation would survive such an exchange between the United States and North Korea or Iran. Indeed, these states should be made to worry that they will be vulnerable to preemptive nuclear attacks by the United States in the unhappy event that they attempt to make nuclear threats over important issues. Similarly, new nuclear states ought not to be encouraged through loose talk to believe that they can give nuclear weapons to others to use on the United States and somehow free themselves of the risks of U.S. retaliation. Clear deterrent statements and strong nuclear forces are preferable to preventive war, because deterrence is both a more credible and more sustainable policy.

Encourage Responsibility
Finally, U.S. security guarantees and security assistance tend to relieve others of the need to do more to ensure their own security, and they often ironically enable others to pursue policies that are unhelpful to the United States. The United States should stop offering such guarantees and assistance. A U.S. strategy of restraint must include a coherent, integrated and patient effort to encourage its long-time wards to look after themselves. If others do more, this will not only save U.S. resources, it will increase the political salience of other countries in the often bitter discourse over globalization. If other consequential powers benefit as much from globalization as does the United States, they should share ownership of its political costs. If others need to pay more for their security, they will think harder about their choices.

Virtually all existing U.S. international relationships need to be rethought in this light. Policy changes must be implemented as a package to produce the desired effect, but it would not be prudent to launch these policies overnight. A governing rule should be not to shift positions so rapidly or decisively that altered regional politics open windows of vulnerability or opportunity that either tempt or compel military action. Three examples will serve to suggest the magnitude of the changes I have in mind: NATO, Israel and Japan.

The effort to preserve and expand NATO, a project aimed at ensuring U.S. power and influence in Eurasia, enabled the excessive draw-down of some European military capabilities, notably those of Germany and Italy, and deflected possible improvements in European and EU military capacities. This also has had the effect of allowing EU members to postpone decisions about how to integrate Turkey into Europe: They can merely consign this task to NATO and the United States. The United States should develop a ten-year plan to turn NATO into a more traditional political alliance. During this decade, U.S. forces should gradually withdraw from all military headquarters and commands in Europe, which could migrate to the EU if Europeans still find them useful.

U.S. military assistance to Israel makes the occupation of the territories relatively inexpensive for Israeli political leaders, and implicates the United States in the deed. This may not be “central” to U.S. problems in the Arab world, as so many insist, but it certainly does not help. The United States should therefore develop a ten-year plan to reduce U.S. government direct financial assistance to Israel to zero. Israel is now a prosperous country that happens to be surrounded by military powers lacking any capacity to conquer it. Two of these countries, Egypt and Jordan, have peace treaties with Israel, and the rest have no possible superpower patron to back them with new supplies of modern conventional offensive weapons. Israel has to decide on the merits, and within its own sovereign capacities, how much the occupied territories matter to its security, and how to allocate security spending accordingly.


Too close for comfort? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with President Bush in August [credit: Associated Press] Israel is not an enemy of the United States and will not become one: friendly relations should continue. Israel should be permitted to purchase spare parts for existing U.S. military equipment and new military equipment to the extent necessary to ensure a regional military balance conducive to peace. To ensure that the reduction of military assistance to Israel is perceived as fair in American politics, and to ensure against the creation of any windows of vulnerability or opportunity, U.S. assistance to Egypt should be put on the same diet, with due allowance for Egypt’s comparative poverty. The United States should also practice restraint in all its arms sales to the region and encourage others to do the same. If other states attempt to disrupt the regional military balance, the United States can reconsider these decisions, and should make clear that it would not hesitate to do so.

The United States also needs to reconsider its security relationship with Japan. The current relationship allows Japan to avoid the domestic political debate necessary to determine a new role for itself in Asia. In particular, it allows Japan to avoid coming to terms with its own past and relieves it of the necessity to develop diplomatic strategies to make it more “alliance worthy” in Asia. The modalities of a change in the alliance with Japan are trickier than they are in Europe because Asia is a more unsettled place due to China’s rapid economic expansion and concomitant military improvements. Nevertheless, change is in order.


Since the end of the Cold War 16 years ago, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have been running an experiment with U.S. grand strategy. The theory to be tested has been this: Very good intentions, plus very great power, plus action can transform both international politics and the domestic politics of other states in ways that are advantageous to the United States, and at costs it can afford. The evidence is in: The experiment has failed. Transformation is unachievable, and costs are high.

The United States needs now to test a different grand strategy: It should conceive its security interests narrowly, use its military power stingily, pursue its enemies quietly but persistently, share responsibilities and costs more equitably, watch and wait more patiently. Let’s do this for 16 years and see if the outcomes aren’t better.

The American Interest
http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=331&MId=16

The Kosovo test

Ian Bancroft

Talks about the status of Kosovo are scheduled to end on December 10, and the Troika of Russia, the EU and the US will report back to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. Several EU members oppose the independence for Kosovo that the US strongly supports, while Russia is promising to veto any imposed settlement. Should Kosovo Albanians unilaterally declare independence on or after December 10, the ramifications would be felt not only in the western Balkans, but within the EU's own borders and beyond.

As the European Security Strategy concluded in 2003, the credibility the EU's foreign policy "depends on the consolidation of our achievements" in the Balkans. In order to prevent further losses of credibility, Europe to clearly define the core of its fledgling Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). To do so, the EU must look inwards and project externally those innovations in autonomy and sovereignty that have facilitated the evolution of the European model.

After its failure to contend with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the EU's CFSP is once more challenged by events in the region. Speaking about collective security failures in the early 1990s, Chris Patten, the former EU Commissioner for External Relations, observed: "As Yugoslavia broke into bits, Europe was largely impotent because it was not united. Some member states wanted to keep Yugoslavia together at all costs, some wanted to manage its break-up, and others still felt we should stay out of the whole mess."

These words remain apt with respect to Kosovo. Several EU member states, particularly Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia refuse to endorse even conditional independence, each fearing that the precedent established will have damaging implications for their own internal politics. For instance, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Cyprus and its unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Romania and Slovakia with their respective Hungarian minorities. While the notion of "constructive abstention" in the EU Council of Ministers bypasses the stated need for unity in EU foreign policy matters, these divisions undermine the power of Europe's voice. The absence of a UN security council resolution on Kosovo's independence will only ferment further dissent and division.

These European divisions have already been exploited by Russia to re-emphasise the negative repercussions a pro-independence decision could have on the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia and Moldova's breakaway region of Transdniestria. Though Russia's stance is motivated more by geopolitical, regional and domestic considerations, and despite the repeated insistence by diplomats that Kosovo is a unique case without future precedent, it is difficult to see how independence will do anything other than fuel greater tension throughout the region. As Eastern Europe becomes an ever greater sphere of interest for the EU, its ability to mediate conflicts there will be affected by the decisions it takes with respect to Kosovo.

Regionally, there are fears that a pro-independence decision will further destabilise the western Balkans, most notably the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYRM), where tensions between the Albanian and Macedonian communities continue to escalate in spite of the widely touted 2001 Ohrid Agreement, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. While diplomats continue to insist that Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina are separate issues, with Bosnia and Herzegovina's High Representative, Miroslav Lajcak, dismissing the artificial linking of the two, a pro-independence decision will only serve to antagonise the questions of autonomy and self-determination in the western Balkans, with serious implications for regional stability and security. The claim that Kosovo is the last unresolved territorial issue in the western Balkans may prove somewhat aspirational. Having played a decisive role in the birth of a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), as major element of the CFSP, the western Balkans could instead now play a crucial role in its demise.

According to Javier Solana, the EU's High Representative for the CFSP, the CFSP "is about the European Union being able to project its values and its interests, the core of its political identity, effectively beyond its own borders". The development of the EU is marked by a number of integrative innovations that have redefined and challenged prevailing understandings of sovereignty and autonomy. Parallel to Europe's integration and the spread of the idea of "Europeanisation" has been the growth of regionalism throughout Europe; of a "Europe of the Regions", of "Unity in Diversity". Throughout the evolution of the EU, regions and regional policy have been central to promoting greater social, political and economic cohesion, underpinned by the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality and necessity. The European Economic Area Agreement, meanwhile, which allows Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein to participate in the EU's internal market while not being member states, highlights the flexibility of the EU to establish integrative relationships with outside parties.

If the EU's CFSP is to be an external projection of the "core of its political identity" as Solana insists, then it is the EU's capacity for innovation in accommodating and integrating diversity that must be projected "effectively beyond its own borders". Only then can Europe galvanise support among its member states, particularly those with legitimate and understandable concerns about the precedent of independence for their own territorial integrity, and build a platform from which to mediate in future conflicts.

With respect to Kosovo, discussions over independence must be replaced by discussions over broad autonomy and special relations with the EU - including the deployment of a ESDP Mission to assist "in the development of effective, fair and representative rule of law institutions" - thereby reaffirming the EU's commitment to complex, multiple layers of shared and limited sovereignty.

Applying these principles with respect to Kosovo will reinforce peace and stability throughout the region, while reinforcing the fatigue-threatened enlargement process. Though the countries of the western Balkans remain prospective members of the EU, the lure of membership itself is insufficient to make people and politicians forget or ignore the issues of autonomy and self-determination. Supporting Kosovo's independence from Serbia while concurrently insisting that both have a common European future seems somewhat contradictory and inconsistent. In the absence of a security council resolution granting independence, a unilateral declaration by Kosovo Albanians would have to be recognised by countries on a bilateral basis. As such, Kosovo's status would remain in limbo; recognised by some, but not by others.

What events relating to Kosovo have highlighted is the prevailing weakness of the EU's CFSP. Divisions over the status of Kosovo have undermined this crucial aspect of the European project, further damaging the reputation of the EU in foreign affairs. If the EU is to avoid the impotency of which Chris Patten speaks, then it must define its foreign policy in terms of the "core of its political identity". In this sense, Kosovo has the potential to be a defining issue for Europe's CFSP. If Europe is to reassert itself as a credible global player, then its CFSP must reflect and project those integrative innovations in autonomy and sovereignty that have defined and facilitated the evolution of the European model. In relation to Kosovo, this means advocating broad autonomy and a special relationship with the EU. Decisions taken over Kosovo will go a long way to determining whether a CFSP for Europe is an aspiration or reality, rhetorical or active, symbolic or explicit.

Source: The Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_bancroft/2007/11/the_kosovo_test.html

ANTI-AMERICAN ISLAMIC NATIONALISM IS BEHIND PAKISTAN CRISIS

By Graham E. Fuller

WASHINGTON — Washington is now confronted with an essentially no-win situation in Pakistan. We are witnessing the culmination of many years of ad hoc American policies based on an abiding faith in the power of U.S. military force coupled with ignorance of the strategic, cultural and psychological realities of the region. At heart is an incompatibility of American strategic interests with those of Pakistan, particularly as perceived by the country’s strategic elite. Powerful popular forces of Pakistani and Islamic nationalism intensify this divide.

Washington wants what Pakistan will not deliver, or cannot deliver except to a modest degree. Bush wants to destroy al-Qaida in the Pak-Afghan region, a goal shared by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. But while al-Qaida lacks native roots in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is still the object of sympathy by huge numbers in Pakistan and beyond. Humbled Muslim societies everywhere see bin Laden as one of the few figures in the Muslim world willing to stand up with honor and bravery to the American colossus and defy its imperial ambitions. That makes bin Laden more popular than Bush or Musharraf, even if most of the population does not share bin Laden’s vision of violent global jihadi struggle.

But Washington’s demands cut still closer to the Pakistani bone. Bush wants Pakistan to cut off cross-border contact between Pakistan and Afghanistan, to deny Pakistan as a safe haven for the Afghan Taliban.

Musharraf and his generals will pay lip service to this goal, but they will not ultimately do it. The reasons are not complex. As distasteful a symbol of primitive Islamic practice as the Taliban have been, today they represent essentially the major vehicle for Pashtun nationalism in Afghanistan, the single biggest ethnic group and much under-represented in the U.S.-backed Karzai government. More important, there are twice as many ethnic Pashtuns in Pakistan itself as there are in Afghanistan. The cross-border ties are inextricable: clan, family, history, culture, language, religion. This ethnic organism will not be sundered by the arbitrary and unpopular borders between the two countries. Pashtuns can, do and will casually ignore this artificial divide. Indeed, the Taliban as a political and ideological movement is growing more powerful within Pakistan itself.

Pakistan already has one powerful enemy on its eastern flank — India. It cannot afford to have a hostile Afghanistan on its western side. Every Pakistani strategic thinker knows this. Yet under the Karzai government in Afghanistan, the enemies of Pakistan — the anti-Pashtun Northern Alliance, and a strong Indian political and intelligence presence — have grown strong. Pakistan’s primary voice and influence inside Afghanistan comes mainly via the Taliban, supported behind the scenes by the Pakistani military on strategic grounds. Washington may rail at this, but it cannot change these facts on the ground.

Pakistan’s government is meanwhile still heavily influenced by powerful feudal rural landholders with regressive social and economic policies.

The country desperately needs agricultural and social reform. But reform will undercut the powerful feudalists, a key pillar of power. Benazir Bhutto, for all her Western polish, herself represents those very landowning powers in her native Sindh region. The kind of deep social reform required is not in the offing, neither with Musharraf nor with Bhutto. She has been tested — twice — and found wanting.

Washington wants a compliant Pakistan that will dutifully play its assigned role in the U.S. regional hegemonic vision. Washington will take it any way it can get it, with or without democracy. So U.S. calls for democracy are now issued in panic and ring hollow after six years of support for the Musharraf dictatorship. Pakistani liberals condemn the U.S. for supporting the Pakistani military dictatorship for so long in the name of an unpopular “war against terror” and perceive U.S. confrontationalism as only serving to inflame the militant jihadists.

Nor can the crisis in Pakistan be viewed in isolation. It is of a piece with the war in Afghanistan, and is inextricably linked as well to broader convulsions across the Middle East. Islamic “nationalism” is a growing force as activists push back against American “boots on the ground” — a Pentagon term more revealing than the Pentagon realizes. It is the U.S. military presence and strategy across the region that is seen to rob Muslims of their dignity and sovereignty, in what increasingly is understood as an American war against Islam — bolstered in Washington by neo-con calls for a “World War IV against Islamofascism.” U.S. policies have helped forge a unity of vision across a Muslim world that under more normal circumstances would be far more focused on distinctive local concerns.

The military remains the single most important force in Pakistan. It will most likely ensure that the country does not fall apart. Yet it incorporates many who sympathize with the Islamist agenda and the need to protect the country against outside domination. As radical Islamist power grows across the country, the military will not likely confront it directly; it will seek to divert it, placate some of it, accommodate large elements into the system where possible. We may even witness some bloodshed as militants clash with the military. But the military knows these forces cannot basically be destroyed by force. Meanwhile, the center of gravity is shifting toward the many Islamists who have joined hands with a few liberals against Musharraf. Any new political accommodation will likely be far less congenial to Washington.

Today the U.S. military presence is perhaps the single most inflammatory element in politics across the region. The American military response to this regional challenge only serves to exacerbate it. Sadly, Pakistan is now swift on the heels of Iraq and Afghanistan in heading toward increased civil strife and bitter anti-American emotions.

A “made in Washington” settlement in Afghanistan — the heart of the problem — is not going to work. It only generates increasing hostility as thousands more Lilliputians swarm the helpless Gulliver, drawing hostile Pakistani Islamists more deeply into the equation as well. In this sense bin Laden is winning. The region will only calm down following a withdrawal of U.S. forces from its confrontation with “Islam” and the development of a regional approach to the Afghan issue — one that acknowledges the deep interests of the main regional players who also seek stability in the region: Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and India. Yet this reality is anathema to the hegemonic global strategy of the Bush administration.


Graham E. Fuller, a former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, is currently an adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of "The Future of Political Islam."


And so the arc of Islamic crisis continues to swell.

Source: New Perspective Quarterly
http://www.digitalnpq.org/articles/global/219/11-08-2007/graham_e._fuller

Inside Track: A Tale of Two Client States

by Anatol Lieven

Every empire—indeed, every state that wishes to project dominant influence beyond its borders—sooner or later runs into the question of how to manage client states: states which imperial powers can closely influence without having to incur the expense, risk and unpopularity of occupying and ruling them directly. Empires like Rome, China, the Netherlands and Britain have all used a strategy of clientism as well as direct rule. For the U.S., this is the core of America’s entire global project, since in the vast majority of cases direct empire is ruled out both by democratic ideology and sheer lack of manpower.

While cheaper in every way than direct empire, client states have however always been extremely tricky to manage. If they are too strong, they will either escape from your influence altogether—or on the other hand use that influence to pursue their own local ambitions, which may have nothing in common with your interests. If they are too weak, they will collapse in the face of their external or internal enemies, leaving the imperial state with the agonizing choice of either accepting a serious geopolitical defeat or stepping in and ruling these states directly, with everything that this entails.

An extra complication is that quite often, it is precisely the influence of the imperial state which is responsible for weakening the client state: whether externally, by embroiling it in wider geopolitical conflicts with more powerful neighbors or internally, by demanding various forms of tribute that weaken its domestic prestige and infuriate powerful sections of its population. This may be through the provision of military help, agreement to unfavourable terms of trade, official conformity to the imperial religion or unpopular domestic reforms. These are dilemmas that have faced one great power after another. Two of the most disastrous examples of mismanaging a collapsing client state were the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

If you take “democracy” (albeit often of a very thin and formal kind, better described as “democratism”) as the official religion of the contemporary American empire, then every one of these factors and problems applies to present U.S. efforts to exert predominant influence in various parts of the world. At the present moment, they are dramatized by the travails of two very different American clients, Pakistan and Georgia. The similarities and differences between them illuminate wider issues in America’s current global strategy.

The first, and most obvious, is the difference between essential and non-essential clients. Pakistan is obviously in the former category, both because Pakistan is vital to America’s interests as presently defined, and because—occasional gibberings like recent ones by Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon notwithstanding—a U.S. invasion and occupation of Pakistan is simply not an option. Even a more limited military intervention in Pakistan’s tribal areas or to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would be fraught with truly appalling risks. In other words, however unsatisfactory the relationship from America’s point of view, it has to remain a relationship of influence, not direct control.

If the U.S. is to remain engaged in the Muslim world at all, then Pakistan is vital to U.S. interests: Most immediately, because of its critical impact on developments in neighboring Afghanistan; more generally, because its sheer size and extensive diaspora (especially in Britain) make it a vital potential prize for enemies of America (with six times the population of Afghanistan or Iraq, Pakistan is well over half the size of the entire Arab world); and finally, because of the apocalyptic threat of terrorists getting their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons—a threat which is far less real than it can appear from much Western analysis and reporting.

The opposition that Musharraf’s administration is facing from within the Pakistani elite is due partly to his own mistakes and partly to certain inexorable patterns of Pakistani politics, which eventually doom every regime to failure because it cannot satisfy the incessant demands for jobs and other patronage from its own supporters.1

As far as the Pakistani masses are concerned, however, by far the most important reason for the steep fall in his popularity has been his subservience to the demands of the U.S. in the “war on terror”, which most Pakistanis detest. But while the U.S. might modify its policy somewhat in this regard, as long as the U.S. remains heavily present on the ground in Afghanistan and committed to the Karzai “administration” there, it obviously cannot afford to let any Pakistani administration off the hook over this—quite apart from the need for Pakistani help in pursuing international terrorists based in Pakistan and breaking up plots aimed at the U.S., or more frequently Britain.

The U.S. now finds itself in the embarrassing position of either backing to the bitter end a man who has after all undertaken immense risks in order to help the U.S., or ditching him in the name of “democracy”—which would send a pretty discouraging signal to U.S. allies elsewhere in the region. Washington thinks that it has a replacement candidate available in the person of Benazir Bhutto, but if she misgoverns Pakistan as she did twice before, and also fails to do more to crack down on Islamist extremism, then in a few years time the U.S. may find that it does not have many options. Washington would either have to back a return to full military dictatorship—which would leave America’s official religion in tatters—or accept an Islamist presence in a ruling coalition, which would raise risks that much of the Washington establishment would find completely unacceptable.

The U.S. has to confront these extremely difficult dilemmas in the case of Pakistan because it has no choice but to do so. But Georgia, on the other hand, presents a set of dilemmas which are lesser in scope, which have a smaller impact on U.S. policy because of the willingness of much of the U.S. media to ignore developments in Georgia which do not suit dominant U.S. paradigms and ambitions. Of course, objectively speaking, the geopolitical risks and moral embarrassments involved in supporting the Saakashvili regime in Georgia should be condemned more than those involved in supporting Musharraf because they are to a great extent gratuitous: they are not compelled by truly vital U.S. interests.

The risks for the U.S. in Georgia are essentially twofold. The first is already occurring: the Saakashvili administration could become so authoritarian at home that it will reduce the entire U.S. democracy promotion agenda in the former Soviet Union to a farce. The second is much more serious: It is that faced with growing domestic discontent, Saakashvili will seek to rally the nation behind him through an attack on one of the two Russian-backed separatist territories, Abkhazia or (more likely) South Ossetia. The president could gamble that faced with the humiliation of seeing a favored client crushed by Russia, the U.S. will feel impelled to come to Georgia’s aid.

If Saakashvili ever does make that grave decision, it will be the last one he makes as Georgian president. For in practical military terms, there is almost nothing that the U.S. could or would do to help Georgia in these circumstances. Nonetheless, this would indeed represent a humiliation for the U.S., as well as a very great and totally unnecessary crisis in U.S.-Russian relations. It would also have serious implications for Russian behavior in other areas of truly vital U.S. interest, like Iran.

Fortunately, in the case of Georgia the danger of this happening is to some extent mitigated by the fact that—at least judging by the remarks of European officials—recent events have made it much less likely that Georgia will join NATO. Therefore one reason for Russian hostility to Georgia will fade, or at least not grow further.

Above all, Georgia illustrates a fundamental historical truth about client states: a great power should only adopt them when it has no other choice to defend vital interests, or when they are strong enough to act as an effective buffer against a real enemy. Pakistan meets the first of these criteria; Georgia meets neither. Georgia might qualify as at least an important interest if there were a real chance of the energy of Central Asia (and not just Azerbaijan) flowing through Georgia to the West. But for a long time to come, a mixture of geographical reality, legal ambiguity, and Russian, Iranian and Chinese power seems almost certain to prevent this from happening.

In the case of Pakistan, the U.S. needs to maintain its influence by increasing but redirecting its aid, as recommended in an interesting paper last week by Senator Joseph Biden. If necessary, Americans need to be asked to make the kind of sacrifices to help Pakistan that they made to strengthen European and Asian states against Communism. In the case of Georgia, U.S. policymakers should take a hard look at what aid and influence in that country really bring to the U.S. at all.



Professor Anatol Lieven is chair of international relations at King’s College London and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (co-authored with John Hulsman), is published in paperback this month by Vintage Books.


Source: National Interest
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16130