Christopher Meyer
Those who think that there is such a thing as progress in international affairs - that we are capable of learning the lessons of history - have been brutally disabused by the Georgian crisis. You can have all the rules you like to discipline international behaviour; but they are not worth the paper they are written on if they run against fierce nationalisms and ethnic passion.
Ethnic and nationalist rivalry is as old as sin, and as inextinguishable. As a diplomat in Britain's Moscow Embassy during the Cold War, I spent time in two of the Caucasian republics, Georgia and Azerbaijan. They were then under Moscow's heel as part of the Soviet Union. Their loathing of Russians was palpable.
At the time of my visits, Stalin, a Georgian by birth, was still officially a non-person, airbrushed by his successors from the annals of Soviet history. But in defiance of Moscow his portraits could still be seen in Georgian state farms and government offices. I asked a Georgian official why this was so. “Because he killed so many Russians,” came the sardonic reply.
The feeling was mutual. Later in Moscow I related my Caucasian experiences to Leonid Brezhnev's interpreter, Viktor Sukhodrev. “That's no place for a white man,” he said with his impeccable North London accent (he had equally good American).
Recent events have shown no weakening in these ancient hatreds. But the Western powers behaved as if caught on the hop. Last year a French diplomat warned me that once Kosovo got its independence (itself the unnatural product of Balkan hatreds), Russia would feel free to make its move in Georgia. And so it has come to pass. As a Times leader put it recently, history has resumed, leaving Francis Fukuyama, the apostle of its end, trailing in its wake. But Professor Fukuyama was adrift from the very start. Once the iron fists of the former Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia had been removed, nationalist and ethnic tensions broke surface with the murderous velocity of the long suppressed. Contrary to what David Miliband has been telling us, the glacial years of the Cold War were “the period of calm”. The years since have been marked by the constant turmoil of history's march.
Globalisation and interdependence were supposed to have swept aside these ancient feuds and rivalries. Theories of the postmodern state now abound. Tony Blair preached how national interest would be trumped by the spread of “global values”. This is self-evident rubbish. For here is the paradox of the modern world. Money, people, culture, business and electronic information cross porous frontiers in ever-increasing volume. But as national boundaries dissolve in cyberspace, so everywhere the sense of nationhood and national interest strengthens. Five minutes in Beijing, Washington, Tehran or Moscow will tell you that. What is the European Union if not the 21st-century arena for the intense and competitive prosecution of the national interest by its 27 member states?
It is useless to say that nationalism and ethnic tribalism have no place in the international relations of the 21st century. If anything the spread of Western-style democracy has amplified their appeal and resonance. The supreme fallacy in foreign policy is to take the world as we would wish it to be and not as it actually is. In Britain's case, the delusion is compounded when we are powerless to effect the outcome we desire. This has been particularly the case with Russia, where we have managed to be both impotent and provocative. If we really want to put a halt to bad Russian behaviour, let us do so where we can make a difference, and where it is justified - starting with the expulsion of the vast nest of Russian intelligence officers in London, as Labour and Conservative governments did not hesitate to do in the 1970s.
We can foolishly downgrade national interest within the armoury of British diplomacy, if we wish. But we had better not underestimate its driving force in the international behaviour of others. That is the road to dangerous miscalculation.
Take Russia, China and Iran. Each seethes at the recollection of what it considers historical humiliations visited on it by Western powers. For all three the beginning of the 21st century has opened opportunities for payback - for getting respect as a nation (just look at recent Russian newspapers). You don't have to like or approve of these regimes. But not to understand their histories is not to understand the mainspring of their external policies - in Russia's case its determination to rebuild its greatness, dismantled, as millions of Russians see it, by Mikhail Gorbachev and his Georgian Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, aided and abetted by the West. I would bet a sackful of roubles that Russian foreign policy would not be one jot different if it were a fully functioning democracy of the kind that we appear keen to spread around the globe.
What is to be done, as Lenin once put it? The first thing is to sweep away any rose-tinted illusions left from the Blair-Bush era. For the democracies of North America and Europe, relations with Russia are always going to be awkward and bumpy, at best co-operative and adversarial in equal measure.
The fall of the Soviet Union did not wipe the slate clean. The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West's protestations of pacific intent as it pushes Nato and the EU ever eastwards.
Most important of all, Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. Mr Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war.
Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.
This may sound shocking and anachronistic to the modern sensibility. But, there is no other way to remove the scope for miscalculation, the mother of far too many wars.
Sir Christopher Meyer was Ambassador to Washington, 1997-2003
The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4656255.ece
Monday, December 1, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
One Surge Does Not Fit All
By DONALD H. RUMSFELD
THE surge in Iraq has been one of the most impressive military accomplishments in recent years. It has been so successful that the emerging consensus is that what may now be needed in Afghanistan is a similar surge of American forces. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned on his intention to do so, as did his former opponent, John McCain.
As one who is occasionally — and incorrectly — portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq, I believe that while the surge has been effective in Iraq, we must also recognize the conditions that made it successful. President Bush’s bold decision to deploy additional troops to support a broader counterinsurgency strategy of securing and protecting the Iraqi people was clearly the right decision. More important, though, it was the right decision at the right time.
By early 2007, several years of struggle had created the new conditions for a tipping point:
•
Al Qaeda in Iraq’s campaign of terrorism and intimidation had turned its Sunni base of support against it. The result was the so-called Anbar Awakening in the late summer of 2006, followed by similar awakening movements across Iraq.
•
From 2003 through 2006, United States military forces, under the leadership of Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, inflicted huge losses on the Baathist and Qaeda leadership. Many thousands of insurgents, including the Qaeda chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were captured or killed and proved difficult to replace.
•
The Iraqi Security Forces had achieved cohesion, improved operational effectiveness and critical mass. By December 2006, some 320,000 Iraqis had been trained, equipped and deployed, producing the forces necessary to help hold difficult neighborhoods against the enemy. By 2007, the surge, for most Iraqis, could have an Iraqi face.
•
And the political scene in Iraq had shifted. Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, declared a cease-fire in February 2007. The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, seated in May 2006, moved against militias and Iranian-backed militias and has imperfectly, but notably, rejected narrow sectarian policies.
The best indication that timing is everything may be that there had been earlier surges without the same effect as the 2007 surge. In 2005, troop levels in Iraq were increased to numbers nearly equal to the 2007 surge — twice. But the effects were not as durable because large segments of the Sunni population were still providing sanctuary to insurgents, and Iraq’s security forces were not sufficiently capable or large enough.
The decision to conduct a surge came out of an interagency review in the fall of 2006. By mid-December, as I was leaving the Pentagon, there was a rough consensus in the Defense Department that deploying additional combat brigades to Iraq was the right step. Some military leaders raised reasonable questions about the potential effectiveness of a surge, in part because of a correct concern that military power alone could not solve Iraq’s problems. I agreed, and emphasized that a military surge would need to be accompanied by effective diplomatic and economic “surges” from other departments and agencies of the American government, and by considerably greater progress from Iraq’s elected leaders.
During my last weeks in office, I recommended to President Bush that he consider Gen. David Petraeus as commander of coalition forces in Iraq, as General Casey’s tour was coming to an end. General Petraeus and his deputy, Gen. Ray Odierno, had the experience and skill to recognize and exploit the seismic shifts that were taking place in Iraq’s political landscape. And United States troops had the courage to win the alliance of Iraq’s people against a common enemy — and the benevolence to win their friendship.
At the critical moment — a moment when the Iraqis were able and willing to be part of the surge with the American forces — the United States surged into Iraq with the right commanders, additional forces and a fresh operational approach rooted in years of on-the-ground experience. Americans can be proud of what has been accomplished in Iraq over the last five-plus years. They should also be impressed by the results of the surge, which, thus far, has outstripped expectations, including mine.
President Bush’s decision to increase combat troop levels in Iraq in January 2007 sent a clear message that he was determined not to abandon a people to death squads and terrorists. We will need the same commitment to helping the people of Afghanistan succeed, but that does not mean we will achieve it with the same tactics or strategies.
The way forward in Afghanistan will need to reflect the current circumstances there — not the circumstances in Iraq two years ago. Additional troops in Afghanistan may be necessary, but they will not, by themselves, be sufficient to lead to the results we saw in Iraq. A similar confluence of events that contributed to success in Iraq does not appear to exist in Afghanistan.
What’s needed in Afghanistan is an Afghan solution, just as Iraqi solutions have contributed so fundamentally to progress in Iraq. And a surge, if it is to be successful, will need to be an Afghan surge.
Left unanswered in the current debate is the critical question of how thousands of additional American troops might actually bring long-term stability to Afghanistan — a country 80,000 square miles larger than Iraq yet with security forces just one-fourth the size of Iraq’s. Afghanistan also lacks Iraq’s oil and other economic advantages. It is plagued by the narcotics trade. Its borders are threatened by terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq.
Further, Afghanistan has a long history of defeating foreign armies that sought strength in numbers. The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of troops — and withdrew, defeated and broken. More United States troops could raise tensions, particularly in Afghanistan’s Pashtun south, where the insurgency is strongest.
Only capable indigenous forces can ultimately win an insurgency. Afghan forces, backed by coalition troops, will need to move into the most violent areas to secure and protect the local population, enabling Afghans to cooperate with their government without losing their lives.
To do this, the size of the Afghan National Army will need to be increased well beyond its 70,000 or so troops and its training accelerated. More American forces will need to undertake the unglamorous work of embedding with Afghan soldiers as advisers, living and fighting together. Kingpins and senior facilitators in the thriving poppy industry that helps to fuel the insurgency will need to be treated as military targets, as Qaeda and Taliban leaders are. Reconstruction projects should be focused on provinces and towns that are cooperating with the Afghan government, instead of making blanket commitments to increase foreign assistance across Afghanistan and possibly fostering a culture of dependence.
The current suggestion of “opening negotiations” with the Taliban may well win over some low- and mid-level supporters, but if history is any guide, offering the hand of peace to hardened fanatics is not likely to prove successful. Aggressive action against Taliban and Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan will need to continue. Pakistani officials will have to isolate any factions in their military and intelligence services that are sympathetic to the Taliban.
In a few weeks, the new commander in chief, Barack Obama, will assume the responsibility of leading a nation at a time of war. Time and flexibility are the two constants of military success. In a struggle with an adaptable, thinking enemy, there is no single template for success. More is not always better. One size does not fit all.
The singular trait of the American way of war is the remarkable ability of our military to advance, absorb setbacks, adapt and ultimately triumph based upon the unique circumstances of a given campaign. Thus it has been throughout our history. And thus it will be in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we have the patience and wisdom to learn from our successes, and if our leaders have the wherewithal to persevere even when it is not popular to do so.
Donald H. Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006.
Source: NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23rumsfeld.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1227589200&en=17a6020edb96eb41&ei=5087%0A
THE surge in Iraq has been one of the most impressive military accomplishments in recent years. It has been so successful that the emerging consensus is that what may now be needed in Afghanistan is a similar surge of American forces. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned on his intention to do so, as did his former opponent, John McCain.
As one who is occasionally — and incorrectly — portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq, I believe that while the surge has been effective in Iraq, we must also recognize the conditions that made it successful. President Bush’s bold decision to deploy additional troops to support a broader counterinsurgency strategy of securing and protecting the Iraqi people was clearly the right decision. More important, though, it was the right decision at the right time.
By early 2007, several years of struggle had created the new conditions for a tipping point:
•
Al Qaeda in Iraq’s campaign of terrorism and intimidation had turned its Sunni base of support against it. The result was the so-called Anbar Awakening in the late summer of 2006, followed by similar awakening movements across Iraq.
•
From 2003 through 2006, United States military forces, under the leadership of Gen. John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, inflicted huge losses on the Baathist and Qaeda leadership. Many thousands of insurgents, including the Qaeda chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were captured or killed and proved difficult to replace.
•
The Iraqi Security Forces had achieved cohesion, improved operational effectiveness and critical mass. By December 2006, some 320,000 Iraqis had been trained, equipped and deployed, producing the forces necessary to help hold difficult neighborhoods against the enemy. By 2007, the surge, for most Iraqis, could have an Iraqi face.
•
And the political scene in Iraq had shifted. Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, declared a cease-fire in February 2007. The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, seated in May 2006, moved against militias and Iranian-backed militias and has imperfectly, but notably, rejected narrow sectarian policies.
The best indication that timing is everything may be that there had been earlier surges without the same effect as the 2007 surge. In 2005, troop levels in Iraq were increased to numbers nearly equal to the 2007 surge — twice. But the effects were not as durable because large segments of the Sunni population were still providing sanctuary to insurgents, and Iraq’s security forces were not sufficiently capable or large enough.
The decision to conduct a surge came out of an interagency review in the fall of 2006. By mid-December, as I was leaving the Pentagon, there was a rough consensus in the Defense Department that deploying additional combat brigades to Iraq was the right step. Some military leaders raised reasonable questions about the potential effectiveness of a surge, in part because of a correct concern that military power alone could not solve Iraq’s problems. I agreed, and emphasized that a military surge would need to be accompanied by effective diplomatic and economic “surges” from other departments and agencies of the American government, and by considerably greater progress from Iraq’s elected leaders.
During my last weeks in office, I recommended to President Bush that he consider Gen. David Petraeus as commander of coalition forces in Iraq, as General Casey’s tour was coming to an end. General Petraeus and his deputy, Gen. Ray Odierno, had the experience and skill to recognize and exploit the seismic shifts that were taking place in Iraq’s political landscape. And United States troops had the courage to win the alliance of Iraq’s people against a common enemy — and the benevolence to win their friendship.
At the critical moment — a moment when the Iraqis were able and willing to be part of the surge with the American forces — the United States surged into Iraq with the right commanders, additional forces and a fresh operational approach rooted in years of on-the-ground experience. Americans can be proud of what has been accomplished in Iraq over the last five-plus years. They should also be impressed by the results of the surge, which, thus far, has outstripped expectations, including mine.
President Bush’s decision to increase combat troop levels in Iraq in January 2007 sent a clear message that he was determined not to abandon a people to death squads and terrorists. We will need the same commitment to helping the people of Afghanistan succeed, but that does not mean we will achieve it with the same tactics or strategies.
The way forward in Afghanistan will need to reflect the current circumstances there — not the circumstances in Iraq two years ago. Additional troops in Afghanistan may be necessary, but they will not, by themselves, be sufficient to lead to the results we saw in Iraq. A similar confluence of events that contributed to success in Iraq does not appear to exist in Afghanistan.
What’s needed in Afghanistan is an Afghan solution, just as Iraqi solutions have contributed so fundamentally to progress in Iraq. And a surge, if it is to be successful, will need to be an Afghan surge.
Left unanswered in the current debate is the critical question of how thousands of additional American troops might actually bring long-term stability to Afghanistan — a country 80,000 square miles larger than Iraq yet with security forces just one-fourth the size of Iraq’s. Afghanistan also lacks Iraq’s oil and other economic advantages. It is plagued by the narcotics trade. Its borders are threatened by terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fractured groups of Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border do not yet appear willing to unite and take on the insurgents in their midst, as Arab tribes did in Iraq.
Further, Afghanistan has a long history of defeating foreign armies that sought strength in numbers. The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of troops — and withdrew, defeated and broken. More United States troops could raise tensions, particularly in Afghanistan’s Pashtun south, where the insurgency is strongest.
Only capable indigenous forces can ultimately win an insurgency. Afghan forces, backed by coalition troops, will need to move into the most violent areas to secure and protect the local population, enabling Afghans to cooperate with their government without losing their lives.
To do this, the size of the Afghan National Army will need to be increased well beyond its 70,000 or so troops and its training accelerated. More American forces will need to undertake the unglamorous work of embedding with Afghan soldiers as advisers, living and fighting together. Kingpins and senior facilitators in the thriving poppy industry that helps to fuel the insurgency will need to be treated as military targets, as Qaeda and Taliban leaders are. Reconstruction projects should be focused on provinces and towns that are cooperating with the Afghan government, instead of making blanket commitments to increase foreign assistance across Afghanistan and possibly fostering a culture of dependence.
The current suggestion of “opening negotiations” with the Taliban may well win over some low- and mid-level supporters, but if history is any guide, offering the hand of peace to hardened fanatics is not likely to prove successful. Aggressive action against Taliban and Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan will need to continue. Pakistani officials will have to isolate any factions in their military and intelligence services that are sympathetic to the Taliban.
In a few weeks, the new commander in chief, Barack Obama, will assume the responsibility of leading a nation at a time of war. Time and flexibility are the two constants of military success. In a struggle with an adaptable, thinking enemy, there is no single template for success. More is not always better. One size does not fit all.
The singular trait of the American way of war is the remarkable ability of our military to advance, absorb setbacks, adapt and ultimately triumph based upon the unique circumstances of a given campaign. Thus it has been throughout our history. And thus it will be in Iraq and Afghanistan, if we have the patience and wisdom to learn from our successes, and if our leaders have the wherewithal to persevere even when it is not popular to do so.
Donald H. Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006.
Source: NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/opinion/23rumsfeld.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1227589200&en=17a6020edb96eb41&ei=5087%0A
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Pakistan’s Dangerous Double Game
Ron Moreau and Mark Hosenball
NEWSWEEK
Mullah Nasrullah, a Taliban commander, made what has become a routine trek from his guerrilla base in Afghanistan across the jagged peaks into Pakistan last month. His destination: the headquarters of his patron and supplier, the powerful insurgent leader Sirajuddin Haqqani. A genial young man in his late 20s or early 30s with a bushy black beard, Haqqani leads the bloody Taliban insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, where American casualties are highest. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Nasrullah refused to specify the reason for his meeting with Haqqani, though it's likely he was looking for more suicide bombers, explosive vests, weapons and money to use against U.S. and NATO forces.
Once inside Pakistan, Nasrullah says, he traveled between insurgent camps. He rode in a new four-wheel-drive vehicle with a towering radio antenna fixed to the front bumper, followed by four pickup trucks filled with militants. Yet their convoy sailed through Pakistani military checkpoints. Whenever they neared one, the jihadists would hail someone named "Col. Niazi" on the radio, who would arrange their safe passage. Nasrullah believes this was a Pakistani Army officer and possibly an operative in the military's premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. "He seems to feel invulnerable," Nasrullah says of his patron, Haqqani. "The ISI protects him."
Washington seems to agree. Combating Haqqani fighters has become one of the top priorities for American commanders in Afghanistan. But U.S. officials who would speak only on condition of anonymity when discussing sensitive matters say they have evidence that some elements of Pakistan's ISI are protecting or even helping the Haqqani network. That's helping to drive a far more aggressive U.S. strategy in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups have established a network of safe havens and training camps for their own and Al Qaeda fighters. And it's raising tensions between America and Pakistan, supposed allies in the war against terror, to levels not seen since September 11.
Senior Pakistani officers say now is not the time to move against Haqqani. They have limited forces, and are concentrating on militants like Baitullah Mehsud, another powerful Taliban leader who is the source of most of the suicide bombers deep inside Pakistan, and who may have been behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Because of their mistrust of the United States and neighboring India, the Pakistani military and the ISI may also see the Haqqani network and other Taliban forces as potential assets to gain influence inside Afghanistan. As long as they're not attacking Pakistani targets, say several Pakistan experts, the Haqqanis are not a priority.
According to the Americans, however, Pakistani inaction has allowed the Haqqanis to grow from one insurgent group among many into perhaps the most deadly threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This July, top U.S. military and CIA officers confronted their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of the ISI links to Haqqani. One consequence: over the summer President George W. Bush approved new, more relaxed rules of engagement along the border. The Pentagon once required "90 percent" confidence that a "high-value target" was present before approving Predator strikes in Pakistan territory. Now U.S. officials on the ground need to have only 50 to 60 percent confidence to shoot at compounds suspected of sheltering foreign fighters, according to knowledgeable U.S. sources who would speak of sensitive matters only anonymously. The CIA declined to comment.
The new rules also allow "hot pursuit" incursions by U.S. Special Operations troops into Pakistan, a move that Bush had long avoided so as not to offend his close ally President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last month. On Sept. 3, in the first known raid in Pakistani territory, two dozen U.S. Navy SEALs were airlifted into a cluster of huts near the village of Angor Adda, located about one mile from the Afghan border. Last week Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Kayani furiously denied the existence of "any agreement or understanding with the Coalition Forces" allowing them to cross the border, and he said he would not permit such actions.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States took a sharp downward turn after the July meeting between Kayani and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which one Pakistani military official described as "extremely testy." Perhaps seeking to placate the Americans, Kayani ordered a new offensive in early August in the Bajaur tribal area in northwestern Pakistan. Afterward, Kayani asked for another meeting with Mullen and other senior U.S. commanders, according to the Pakistani military source, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely. In late August, the Pentagon responded by inviting Kayani to huddle on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf with Mullen and a team that included incoming CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus; Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Adm. Eric Olson, chief of the Special Operations Command.
At that meeting, pressed to deal with Haqqani's growing power as well as that of other militants, Kayani told the Americans that he didn't have the military capability to take on several, sizable insurgent strongholds at once. He asked Washington to provide more modern and highpowered military equipment, notably attack helicopters. But the U.S. commanders were apparently not prepared to give the Pakistani Army chief what he wanted. According to a Pakistani diplomat who asked for anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, the Americans told Kayani the United States now reserved the right to strike, even on the ground, against significant Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan without getting prior approval. Less than one week after the aircraft carrier meeting, the U.S. military launched the Sept. 3 operation, killing what U.S. officials say were two dozen Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Kayani and his high command were embarrassed by the operation and became enraged, Pakistani officials say. The Pakistanis insist that the dead were almost all civilians, including women and children. "The attack was carried out with bad and faulty intelligence," says the senior military source. "It crossed an acceptable threshold and had a negative impact inside the military and on Pakistani public opinion." Despite protests, at least four more Predator attacks were carried out shortly afterward in North Waziristan against areas controlled by the Haqqani network. One attack on Sept. 8 hit a madrassa complex where Haqqani family members lived and where Qaeda and Taliban fighters frequently sheltered while moving back and forth across the border.
At least one U.S. official, who would discuss American dealings with Islamabad only on condition of anonymity, suggests that there may be some political theater at work in the Pakistani reaction. He says that the U.S. and Pakistani military have reached a "more than tacit" understanding about the new U.S. tactics, in which the Pakistani side has agreed to allow "hot pursuit" operations by American troops, provided that Pakistani authorities are allowed to maintain complete "deniability." That means the Pakistanis will be permitted to publicly criticize the United States for any such operations and assert, without fear of contradiction from Washington, that U.S. forces were acting without Pakistani approval.
Still, U.S. officials acknowledge that if they're not careful, these new aggressive U.S. tactics could backfire. If large numbers of innocents are being killed, U.S. attacks could motivate even more Afghans and Pakistani tribals to join the insurgency on both sides of the frontier. That would widen the war further and undermine the already shaky Pakistani government. It could also create more Islamist sympathizers inside the Pakistani Army and ISI.
Washington is willing to take that risk, in part because Haqqani has become the most active, aggressive and powerful Taliban commander along the border. The son of Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, an aging, ailing former Afghan mujahedin commander who became legendary leading the fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, Siraj is increasingly admired by many jihadists for his smarts and discretion. "He is always friendly, polite and simple, is a good listener, answers directly and has a computerlike memory," says Nasrullah. "He is wise beyond his years."
Under Siraj's leadership, the Haqqani network has come a long way since 2004, when its men were waging small-unit, small-arms, hit-and-run attacks on U.S. bases just a mile or two across the border. Qaeda military experts, ideologues and senior leaders now operate out of Haqqani bases in the tribal areas, and the network has become the primary pipeline for foreign fighters looking to join the jihad in Afghanistan. According to senior Taliban sources who did not want to be identified for security reasons, Siraj also enjoys a steady stream of funding from the Gulf, where three of his brothers are based. "We weren't strong like they are today," says Malem Jan, 42, a veteran Haqqani fighter who led guerrilla strikes across the border until he defected in early 2005 because he thought the Americans were "invulnerable." "If I'd known Siraj would get so strong, I would have never defected."
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, who leads the 19,000 U.S. soldiers operating on the frontier, estimates that his forces are facing some 7,000 to 10,000 insurgents in eastern Afghanistan—a higher number than previously disclosed by any U.S. commander. Most of them operate under Haqqani's control, including the insurgents who launched a multiple suicide-bomber attack on a major U.S. military base, Camp Salerno, in Khowst province, last month. Schloesser says the attack was striking because all the suicide bombers were Arabs and Chechens; normally foreigners act as trainers and organizers, not cannon fodder. He says combat incidents have risen by 20 to 30 percent this year compared with last—one reason Bush recently announced that he plans to send an additional 4,000 or so troops to Afghanistan.
Haqqani has also claimed responsibility for the January attack on Kabul's premier hotel, the Serena, that killed seven and nearly missed the Norwegian foreign minister, and the abortive April assault on the country's National Day parade that targeted Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who escaped unharmed. Afghan and U.S. intelligence have fingered Haqqani as the mastermind of the bloody suicide car bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul last July that killed two Indian officials and more than 40 others. U.S. officials say they intercepted communications between an ISI officer and the Haqqani operatives who were planning the embassy attack. Pakistani officials strenuously deny the charge.
U.S. counterterrorism officials, who asked for anonymity discussing official assessments, say they do not believe that the top levels of the Pakistani military or ISI have sanctioned aid to the Haqqanis; they think local and perhaps retired operatives are to blame. Nevertheless, the insurgents certainly believe that they have powerful connections. One jihadist, a 25-year-old named Shah Muhammad who fights for Haqqani, says he recently got caught in a roundup of militants by the Pakistani Army in North Waziristan. After checking the identity papers and the loyalties of the fighters, the soldiers released the Afghans who could prove they were linked to Haqqani and arrested those tribal militants linked to Baitullah Mehsud.
Today, Haqqani has become the ISI's "darling," says a former Taliban cabinet minister who is still an active supporter of the insurgency and who would speak only on condition of anonymity for security reasons. According to Jan, the Haqqani defector, the clan frequently received visitors he believed to be ISI operatives in the family's North Waziristan camps back in 2004. Jan says a young Pakistani Army officer named Salim, who he believed worked out of the ISI office inside the 11th Army Corps's main base at Miran Shah, located near the Haqqani madrassa complex, used to meet regularly with Siraj. Jan also claims he believes the Pakistanis used to tip off Siraj whenever a U.S. missile strike was imminent. Soon after suddenly huddling with a visitor, whom Jan associated with the ISI, Siraj would immediately change his position and order his men to move from the Miran Shah area to the mountains.
While top Pakistani officers reject out of hand any accusation that the ISI or any Pakistani intelligence agency is aiding the Taliban, Pakistani Army Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the armed forces' spokesman, does not rule out that the ISI is maintaining contacts with the Haqqanis. "Do you think any intelligence agency in the world would like to sever its last contact with any organization it has an interest in?" he asked rhetorically. "It would like to maintain at least one last channel through which it can access and get feedback on the on the-ground realities." Indeed, Afghan Taliban sources say that at the behest of the ISI, Haqqani may now be trying to persuade his ally Mehsud to cease his attacks against Pakistan and to focus on Afghanistan instead.
Whatever ties they may have to the ISI, the Taliban don't feel entirely secure, says the former cabinet minister. He claims the ISI knows the location of Taliban safe havens, training and military facilities, and the precise addresses in towns and villages along the border where commanders and their families live. "I wouldn't be surprised if the ISI arrested us all in one day," he says. "We are like sheep which the Pakistanis could round up whenever they want." He adds that many insurgents still don't have a strong enough foothold inside Afghanistan to spend the winter months there. But more and more are planning to do so, worried about their position within Pakistan.
Recognizing that trend, Schloesser plans to keep his troops operating deep inside Taliban territory this winter. "I plan on having a winter campaign that will take advantage of the mobility that I have to seek out any [insurgent] safe havens in Afghanistan, any facilitation areas, any places they go to for rest and recreation in Afghanistan," Schloesser says. "We're going to give them those options: either flee, get killed or captured, or reconcile." But if they escape across the border—and Islamabad doesn't step up—a new kind of war could well begin.
Source: Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158861
With John Barry and Michael Hirsh in Washington
NEWSWEEK
Mullah Nasrullah, a Taliban commander, made what has become a routine trek from his guerrilla base in Afghanistan across the jagged peaks into Pakistan last month. His destination: the headquarters of his patron and supplier, the powerful insurgent leader Sirajuddin Haqqani. A genial young man in his late 20s or early 30s with a bushy black beard, Haqqani leads the bloody Taliban insurgency in eastern Afghanistan, where American casualties are highest. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Nasrullah refused to specify the reason for his meeting with Haqqani, though it's likely he was looking for more suicide bombers, explosive vests, weapons and money to use against U.S. and NATO forces.
Once inside Pakistan, Nasrullah says, he traveled between insurgent camps. He rode in a new four-wheel-drive vehicle with a towering radio antenna fixed to the front bumper, followed by four pickup trucks filled with militants. Yet their convoy sailed through Pakistani military checkpoints. Whenever they neared one, the jihadists would hail someone named "Col. Niazi" on the radio, who would arrange their safe passage. Nasrullah believes this was a Pakistani Army officer and possibly an operative in the military's premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. "He seems to feel invulnerable," Nasrullah says of his patron, Haqqani. "The ISI protects him."
Washington seems to agree. Combating Haqqani fighters has become one of the top priorities for American commanders in Afghanistan. But U.S. officials who would speak only on condition of anonymity when discussing sensitive matters say they have evidence that some elements of Pakistan's ISI are protecting or even helping the Haqqani network. That's helping to drive a far more aggressive U.S. strategy in the tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups have established a network of safe havens and training camps for their own and Al Qaeda fighters. And it's raising tensions between America and Pakistan, supposed allies in the war against terror, to levels not seen since September 11.
Senior Pakistani officers say now is not the time to move against Haqqani. They have limited forces, and are concentrating on militants like Baitullah Mehsud, another powerful Taliban leader who is the source of most of the suicide bombers deep inside Pakistan, and who may have been behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Because of their mistrust of the United States and neighboring India, the Pakistani military and the ISI may also see the Haqqani network and other Taliban forces as potential assets to gain influence inside Afghanistan. As long as they're not attacking Pakistani targets, say several Pakistan experts, the Haqqanis are not a priority.
According to the Americans, however, Pakistani inaction has allowed the Haqqanis to grow from one insurgent group among many into perhaps the most deadly threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This July, top U.S. military and CIA officers confronted their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of the ISI links to Haqqani. One consequence: over the summer President George W. Bush approved new, more relaxed rules of engagement along the border. The Pentagon once required "90 percent" confidence that a "high-value target" was present before approving Predator strikes in Pakistan territory. Now U.S. officials on the ground need to have only 50 to 60 percent confidence to shoot at compounds suspected of sheltering foreign fighters, according to knowledgeable U.S. sources who would speak of sensitive matters only anonymously. The CIA declined to comment.
The new rules also allow "hot pursuit" incursions by U.S. Special Operations troops into Pakistan, a move that Bush had long avoided so as not to offend his close ally President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last month. On Sept. 3, in the first known raid in Pakistani territory, two dozen U.S. Navy SEALs were airlifted into a cluster of huts near the village of Angor Adda, located about one mile from the Afghan border. Last week Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Kayani furiously denied the existence of "any agreement or understanding with the Coalition Forces" allowing them to cross the border, and he said he would not permit such actions.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States took a sharp downward turn after the July meeting between Kayani and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which one Pakistani military official described as "extremely testy." Perhaps seeking to placate the Americans, Kayani ordered a new offensive in early August in the Bajaur tribal area in northwestern Pakistan. Afterward, Kayani asked for another meeting with Mullen and other senior U.S. commanders, according to the Pakistani military source, who asked for anonymity in order to speak freely. In late August, the Pentagon responded by inviting Kayani to huddle on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf with Mullen and a team that included incoming CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus; Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Adm. Eric Olson, chief of the Special Operations Command.
At that meeting, pressed to deal with Haqqani's growing power as well as that of other militants, Kayani told the Americans that he didn't have the military capability to take on several, sizable insurgent strongholds at once. He asked Washington to provide more modern and highpowered military equipment, notably attack helicopters. But the U.S. commanders were apparently not prepared to give the Pakistani Army chief what he wanted. According to a Pakistani diplomat who asked for anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, the Americans told Kayani the United States now reserved the right to strike, even on the ground, against significant Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan without getting prior approval. Less than one week after the aircraft carrier meeting, the U.S. military launched the Sept. 3 operation, killing what U.S. officials say were two dozen Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Kayani and his high command were embarrassed by the operation and became enraged, Pakistani officials say. The Pakistanis insist that the dead were almost all civilians, including women and children. "The attack was carried out with bad and faulty intelligence," says the senior military source. "It crossed an acceptable threshold and had a negative impact inside the military and on Pakistani public opinion." Despite protests, at least four more Predator attacks were carried out shortly afterward in North Waziristan against areas controlled by the Haqqani network. One attack on Sept. 8 hit a madrassa complex where Haqqani family members lived and where Qaeda and Taliban fighters frequently sheltered while moving back and forth across the border.
At least one U.S. official, who would discuss American dealings with Islamabad only on condition of anonymity, suggests that there may be some political theater at work in the Pakistani reaction. He says that the U.S. and Pakistani military have reached a "more than tacit" understanding about the new U.S. tactics, in which the Pakistani side has agreed to allow "hot pursuit" operations by American troops, provided that Pakistani authorities are allowed to maintain complete "deniability." That means the Pakistanis will be permitted to publicly criticize the United States for any such operations and assert, without fear of contradiction from Washington, that U.S. forces were acting without Pakistani approval.
Still, U.S. officials acknowledge that if they're not careful, these new aggressive U.S. tactics could backfire. If large numbers of innocents are being killed, U.S. attacks could motivate even more Afghans and Pakistani tribals to join the insurgency on both sides of the frontier. That would widen the war further and undermine the already shaky Pakistani government. It could also create more Islamist sympathizers inside the Pakistani Army and ISI.
Washington is willing to take that risk, in part because Haqqani has become the most active, aggressive and powerful Taliban commander along the border. The son of Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, an aging, ailing former Afghan mujahedin commander who became legendary leading the fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, Siraj is increasingly admired by many jihadists for his smarts and discretion. "He is always friendly, polite and simple, is a good listener, answers directly and has a computerlike memory," says Nasrullah. "He is wise beyond his years."
Under Siraj's leadership, the Haqqani network has come a long way since 2004, when its men were waging small-unit, small-arms, hit-and-run attacks on U.S. bases just a mile or two across the border. Qaeda military experts, ideologues and senior leaders now operate out of Haqqani bases in the tribal areas, and the network has become the primary pipeline for foreign fighters looking to join the jihad in Afghanistan. According to senior Taliban sources who did not want to be identified for security reasons, Siraj also enjoys a steady stream of funding from the Gulf, where three of his brothers are based. "We weren't strong like they are today," says Malem Jan, 42, a veteran Haqqani fighter who led guerrilla strikes across the border until he defected in early 2005 because he thought the Americans were "invulnerable." "If I'd known Siraj would get so strong, I would have never defected."
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser, who leads the 19,000 U.S. soldiers operating on the frontier, estimates that his forces are facing some 7,000 to 10,000 insurgents in eastern Afghanistan—a higher number than previously disclosed by any U.S. commander. Most of them operate under Haqqani's control, including the insurgents who launched a multiple suicide-bomber attack on a major U.S. military base, Camp Salerno, in Khowst province, last month. Schloesser says the attack was striking because all the suicide bombers were Arabs and Chechens; normally foreigners act as trainers and organizers, not cannon fodder. He says combat incidents have risen by 20 to 30 percent this year compared with last—one reason Bush recently announced that he plans to send an additional 4,000 or so troops to Afghanistan.
Haqqani has also claimed responsibility for the January attack on Kabul's premier hotel, the Serena, that killed seven and nearly missed the Norwegian foreign minister, and the abortive April assault on the country's National Day parade that targeted Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who escaped unharmed. Afghan and U.S. intelligence have fingered Haqqani as the mastermind of the bloody suicide car bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul last July that killed two Indian officials and more than 40 others. U.S. officials say they intercepted communications between an ISI officer and the Haqqani operatives who were planning the embassy attack. Pakistani officials strenuously deny the charge.
U.S. counterterrorism officials, who asked for anonymity discussing official assessments, say they do not believe that the top levels of the Pakistani military or ISI have sanctioned aid to the Haqqanis; they think local and perhaps retired operatives are to blame. Nevertheless, the insurgents certainly believe that they have powerful connections. One jihadist, a 25-year-old named Shah Muhammad who fights for Haqqani, says he recently got caught in a roundup of militants by the Pakistani Army in North Waziristan. After checking the identity papers and the loyalties of the fighters, the soldiers released the Afghans who could prove they were linked to Haqqani and arrested those tribal militants linked to Baitullah Mehsud.
Today, Haqqani has become the ISI's "darling," says a former Taliban cabinet minister who is still an active supporter of the insurgency and who would speak only on condition of anonymity for security reasons. According to Jan, the Haqqani defector, the clan frequently received visitors he believed to be ISI operatives in the family's North Waziristan camps back in 2004. Jan says a young Pakistani Army officer named Salim, who he believed worked out of the ISI office inside the 11th Army Corps's main base at Miran Shah, located near the Haqqani madrassa complex, used to meet regularly with Siraj. Jan also claims he believes the Pakistanis used to tip off Siraj whenever a U.S. missile strike was imminent. Soon after suddenly huddling with a visitor, whom Jan associated with the ISI, Siraj would immediately change his position and order his men to move from the Miran Shah area to the mountains.
While top Pakistani officers reject out of hand any accusation that the ISI or any Pakistani intelligence agency is aiding the Taliban, Pakistani Army Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the armed forces' spokesman, does not rule out that the ISI is maintaining contacts with the Haqqanis. "Do you think any intelligence agency in the world would like to sever its last contact with any organization it has an interest in?" he asked rhetorically. "It would like to maintain at least one last channel through which it can access and get feedback on the on the-ground realities." Indeed, Afghan Taliban sources say that at the behest of the ISI, Haqqani may now be trying to persuade his ally Mehsud to cease his attacks against Pakistan and to focus on Afghanistan instead.
Whatever ties they may have to the ISI, the Taliban don't feel entirely secure, says the former cabinet minister. He claims the ISI knows the location of Taliban safe havens, training and military facilities, and the precise addresses in towns and villages along the border where commanders and their families live. "I wouldn't be surprised if the ISI arrested us all in one day," he says. "We are like sheep which the Pakistanis could round up whenever they want." He adds that many insurgents still don't have a strong enough foothold inside Afghanistan to spend the winter months there. But more and more are planning to do so, worried about their position within Pakistan.
Recognizing that trend, Schloesser plans to keep his troops operating deep inside Taliban territory this winter. "I plan on having a winter campaign that will take advantage of the mobility that I have to seek out any [insurgent] safe havens in Afghanistan, any facilitation areas, any places they go to for rest and recreation in Afghanistan," Schloesser says. "We're going to give them those options: either flee, get killed or captured, or reconcile." But if they escape across the border—and Islamabad doesn't step up—a new kind of war could well begin.
Source: Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158861
With John Barry and Michael Hirsh in Washington
Sunday, September 7, 2008
A doomed presidency
Peter Preston
Forget labels. In reality, two giant parties struggle perennially for power in Pakistan. One is the politicians' party, whose candidate, Asif Ali Zardari, has just been elected president. The other is the army party, which prefers bazookas to ballot boxes. Democracy in this pivotal country is a frail blossom. And Zardari is as frail as they come.
The crude apology for a party system in Pakistan is 60 years old and shows scant sign of changing. First, the politicians have an election and govern for a while. When they falter, the generals take over. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf - they come and go, punctuated briefly by elected prime ministers (mostly called Bhutto). It's a malign sort of game, growing perilously close to an endgame now. Indeed, President Zardari's inevitably brief tenure may well be the end of it all as a third party - young, idealistic, fervent and brave - begins to tip the board over. You may not have heard the Taliban so described before, but that doesn't mean that brute force isn't with them.
In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's murder by hands unknown last December, the Pakistan People's party had a triumphant election. It possessed just enough numbers in the national and provincial parliaments to deliver the presidency, but you'd be hard pressed to invent a more hopeless, doomed prospectus.
This president isn't a politician. He's a businessmen who's been haplessly entangled in too much monkey business over the years. Nine years in prison for corruption on trumped-up charges? Perhaps they have never been fully, fairly investigated, but to too many Pakistanis he is Mr Ten Per Cent. He vows to fight against the Taliban and defend US interests, even when they include US special forces staging bloody raids inside Pakistan's borders. He promises to put right a broken, increasingly beleaguered economy, and to spend another $15bn of American aid wisely and well. But what comes next will be failure, unpopularity and a new tide of sleaze allegations.
A year or two down the line, the men in braid will sense a familiar opportunity and mount another coup. Washington, glad to have the military back at the top, will find another $15bn. The army will buy more guns, and feed more of its private bank accounts. The looting of Pakistan's hope and Pakistan's future will proceed on schedule.
The twin supposed champions of democracy - Zardari and Nawaz Sharif - couldn't have made a lousier fist of the past eight months: any sense of national interest was lost immediately in an orgy of squabbling. The governing party couldn't have chosen a worse candidate for commander in chief (retaining most of Musharraf's powers). And Nato's American leadership, insisting increasingly shrilly that feebleness in Islamabad will give Waziristan's cross-border invaders free rein in Afghanistan, couldn't be hastening the demise of democracy more idiotically.
Zardari announced his arrival - to the Washington Post - as a warrior from Sind bent on destroying the "Lahore-Islamabad oligarchy". The oligarchs scheduled for destruction are Sharif and a military top brass trapped between a new leadership they despise and a religious insurrection that is beginning to dismember the nation.
Yet the Taliban, whom the generals must defeat to get America's billions, are much more than a gang of terrorist thugs. They are also a madcap reform movement of young men disgusted by corruption and the godless wheeler-dealers they think have drained the purity out of Jinnah's "pure state", and the success they're experiencing in the borderlands and beyond shows that many ordinary Pakistanis agree with them. It's a battle for hearts and minds and, on his record, Asif Ali Zardari is the predestined loser of last resort.
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/08/pakistan/print
Forget labels. In reality, two giant parties struggle perennially for power in Pakistan. One is the politicians' party, whose candidate, Asif Ali Zardari, has just been elected president. The other is the army party, which prefers bazookas to ballot boxes. Democracy in this pivotal country is a frail blossom. And Zardari is as frail as they come.
The crude apology for a party system in Pakistan is 60 years old and shows scant sign of changing. First, the politicians have an election and govern for a while. When they falter, the generals take over. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul-Haq, Pervez Musharraf - they come and go, punctuated briefly by elected prime ministers (mostly called Bhutto). It's a malign sort of game, growing perilously close to an endgame now. Indeed, President Zardari's inevitably brief tenure may well be the end of it all as a third party - young, idealistic, fervent and brave - begins to tip the board over. You may not have heard the Taliban so described before, but that doesn't mean that brute force isn't with them.
In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's murder by hands unknown last December, the Pakistan People's party had a triumphant election. It possessed just enough numbers in the national and provincial parliaments to deliver the presidency, but you'd be hard pressed to invent a more hopeless, doomed prospectus.
This president isn't a politician. He's a businessmen who's been haplessly entangled in too much monkey business over the years. Nine years in prison for corruption on trumped-up charges? Perhaps they have never been fully, fairly investigated, but to too many Pakistanis he is Mr Ten Per Cent. He vows to fight against the Taliban and defend US interests, even when they include US special forces staging bloody raids inside Pakistan's borders. He promises to put right a broken, increasingly beleaguered economy, and to spend another $15bn of American aid wisely and well. But what comes next will be failure, unpopularity and a new tide of sleaze allegations.
A year or two down the line, the men in braid will sense a familiar opportunity and mount another coup. Washington, glad to have the military back at the top, will find another $15bn. The army will buy more guns, and feed more of its private bank accounts. The looting of Pakistan's hope and Pakistan's future will proceed on schedule.
The twin supposed champions of democracy - Zardari and Nawaz Sharif - couldn't have made a lousier fist of the past eight months: any sense of national interest was lost immediately in an orgy of squabbling. The governing party couldn't have chosen a worse candidate for commander in chief (retaining most of Musharraf's powers). And Nato's American leadership, insisting increasingly shrilly that feebleness in Islamabad will give Waziristan's cross-border invaders free rein in Afghanistan, couldn't be hastening the demise of democracy more idiotically.
Zardari announced his arrival - to the Washington Post - as a warrior from Sind bent on destroying the "Lahore-Islamabad oligarchy". The oligarchs scheduled for destruction are Sharif and a military top brass trapped between a new leadership they despise and a religious insurrection that is beginning to dismember the nation.
Yet the Taliban, whom the generals must defeat to get America's billions, are much more than a gang of terrorist thugs. They are also a madcap reform movement of young men disgusted by corruption and the godless wheeler-dealers they think have drained the purity out of Jinnah's "pure state", and the success they're experiencing in the borderlands and beyond shows that many ordinary Pakistanis agree with them. It's a battle for hearts and minds and, on his record, Asif Ali Zardari is the predestined loser of last resort.
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/08/pakistan/print
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world
Seumas Milne
If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.
The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.
That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.
But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.
Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge, this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been absorbed from central Asia to Latin America.
In Georgia itself, both Medvedev's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence and Russia's destruction of Georgian military capacity have been designed to leave no room for doubt that the issue of the enclaves' reintegration has been closed. There are certainly dangers for Russia's own territorial integrity in legitimising breakaway states. But the move will have little practical impact and is presumably partly intended to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.
Miliband's attempt in Ukraine, meanwhile, to deny the obvious parallels with the US-orchestrated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year rang particularly hollow, as did his denunciation of invasions of sovereign states and double standards. Both the west and Russia have abused the charge of "genocide" to try and give themselves legal cover, but Russia is surely on stronger ground over South Ossetia - where its own internationally recognised peacekeepers were directly attacked by the Georgian army - than Nato was in Kosovo in 1999, where most ethnic cleansing took place after the US-led assault began.
There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."
Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.
Of course, that new multipolarity can easily be overstated. Russia is a regional power and there is no imminent prospect of a serious global challenger to the US, which will remain overwhelmingly the most powerful state in the world for years to come. It can also exacerbate the risk of conflict. But only the most solipsistic western mindset can fail to grasp the necessity of a counterbalance in international relations that can restrict the freedom of any one power to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.
One western response, championed by the Times this week, is to damn this growing challenge to US domination on the grounds that it is led by autocratic states in the shape of Russia and China. In reality, western alarm clearly has very little to do with democracy. When Russia collapsed into the US orbit under Boris Yeltsin, his bombardment of the Russian parliament and shamelessly rigged elections were treated with the greatest western understanding.
The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/russia.usforeignpolicy
If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.
The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable - and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it. After that, the British foreign secretary David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.
That this month's events in the Caucasus signal an international turning point is no longer in question. The comparisons with August 1914 are of course ridiculous, and even the speculation about a new cold war overdone. For all the manoeuvres in the Black Sea and nuclear-backed threats, the standoff between Russia and the US is not remotely comparable to the events that led up to the first world war. Nor do the current tensions have anything like the ideological and global dimensions that shaped the 40-year confrontation between the west and the Soviet Union.
But what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states", are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.
Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge, this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been absorbed from central Asia to Latin America.
In Georgia itself, both Medvedev's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence and Russia's destruction of Georgian military capacity have been designed to leave no room for doubt that the issue of the enclaves' reintegration has been closed. There are certainly dangers for Russia's own territorial integrity in legitimising breakaway states. But the move will have little practical impact and is presumably partly intended to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.
Miliband's attempt in Ukraine, meanwhile, to deny the obvious parallels with the US-orchestrated recognition of Kosovo's independence earlier this year rang particularly hollow, as did his denunciation of invasions of sovereign states and double standards. Both the west and Russia have abused the charge of "genocide" to try and give themselves legal cover, but Russia is surely on stronger ground over South Ossetia - where its own internationally recognised peacekeepers were directly attacked by the Georgian army - than Nato was in Kosovo in 1999, where most ethnic cleansing took place after the US-led assault began.
There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."
Why that should be so isn't hard to understand. It's not only that the US and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to "account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership". But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.
Of course, that new multipolarity can easily be overstated. Russia is a regional power and there is no imminent prospect of a serious global challenger to the US, which will remain overwhelmingly the most powerful state in the world for years to come. It can also exacerbate the risk of conflict. But only the most solipsistic western mindset can fail to grasp the necessity of a counterbalance in international relations that can restrict the freedom of any one power to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.
One western response, championed by the Times this week, is to damn this growing challenge to US domination on the grounds that it is led by autocratic states in the shape of Russia and China. In reality, western alarm clearly has very little to do with democracy. When Russia collapsed into the US orbit under Boris Yeltsin, his bombardment of the Russian parliament and shamelessly rigged elections were treated with the greatest western understanding.
The real gripe is not with these states' lack of accountability - Russian public opinion is in any case overwhelmingly supportive of its government's actions in Georgia - but their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations. In the circumstances, that might come to seem quite appealing to whoever is elected US president.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/russia.usforeignpolicy
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Georgia is important. But what it tells us about global politics is far more so
Paul Kennedy
In the anarchic world we politely term international relations, there was little surprising or unusual about the Russian aggressions into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A great power was in a fierce quarrel with a small neighbour about that most commonplace cause of war - who should be boss when mixed ethnic groups claim the same lands and straddle international borders. Eventually the larger nation savagely spanked the smaller one, chiefly to impose its own solution on the problem but partly also to remind onlookers of that age-old truth: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". Big boys still rule.
Yet if there are no surprises, there certainly are many intriguing implications. As diplomatic historians well know, a relatively small incident in foreign affairs can have an importance well beyond the region in which the clash takes place - because of the responses of the larger powers, because it reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the available international machinery, and because it reminds us of the political realities and priorities of the age. Yet crises that seemed serious at the time - say, the Anglo-French confrontation over Fashoda in 1898 - have faded into the dustiest textbooks. A somewhat later crisis, such as Munich in 1938, is continually thrown up as a "lesson" for our present age.
More often than not, a sudden confrontation can catch a great power in a state of some confusion. It would be fascinating, for instance, to know how the Chinese politburo is regarding the events in Ossetia. At present, clearly, its chief concern is the Olympics, and there must surely be irritation with both Georgia and Russia for pushing their quarrel into open shooting now. There must also be concern about revived Russian assertiveness and nationalism - although there is no fear in Beijing, for the Chinese know the canny Putin wouldn't push things against them: China is strong, and doesn't mind taking losses, so don't mess with it. More upsetting, Russia has breached that clause of the UN charter China holds most important of all: no interference in the internal affairs of a member nation.
On the other hand, the Han Chinese cannot but like the idea of dissident ethnic minorities along a troublesome border being firmly spanked. Georgia's fate is not a matter of direct concern to Beijing. And Putin's roughing of Mikheil Saakashvili's government is a blow to American prestige and influence in Asia, always a congenial thought to China. So, while never, ever trusting the Russians, China can see that the Ossetian mess is nothing to get upset about.
This is certainly not the feeling in Nato and the EU, or in the major capitals of Europe. Here, above all in France and Germany (Gordon Brown seems beset by his own regional difficulties, in Scotland), there is concern that Russian military actions and political toughness portend a fading away of the post-1991 "new European order" - that it is a sort of latter-day Rhineland crisis of 1936, heralding the end of Versailles treaty Europe. Friendship with Russia cannot wear the bullying and blackmail of western companies like BP, the attempted intimidation of Russian dissidents in the west, the re-entry of the KGB into foreign countries - in sum, the plain fact that Russia is not "normal". It is not Poland, it is not Hungary; it never knew the Enlightenment.
And it is scary in other ways. First, Russia is terrifying to all those east European states that sought eagerly to flee the bear's grasp at the first opportunity following 1989 and 1991: to states, therefore, to whom Europe extended not only the economic and cultural ties of the EU but the security ties of Nato, with all its frightening implications. Right now, Georgia is not a Nato member, despite the Bush administration's urgings. This must be a cause for massive, nervous relief in Brussels and Washington. But what if a border dispute arises between Estonia (now in Nato) and Russia? Are the Portuguese and Danish armies prepared to march east? Are the Germans? Secondly, how will western and central Europe handle its heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, and its awful capacity for being blackmailed by Moscow? Things have come a long way since the wall crashed down in November 1989.
As for the US, the possible implications of the last week are many and serious. Consider the challenge facing Washington: how on earth to make a coherent policy in response to a distant, fast-exploding ethno-linguistic conflict, contested borders, a risk-prone Georgian ally, an increasingly assertive Russia with a new energy trump card, a confused EU and a paralysed security council? All at a time when other areas of the world have sucked in US military resources, as if its own politicians were not already preoccupied enough by the nonsenses of presidential campaigning. We don't have the big stick. Moscow does, at least in this area of the world. You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical meaning of the Georgian scrap - namely, the measure of US power in today's fast-changing world. It could be better. It has been brought lower during the past eight years by inconsiderate and sometimes arrogant diplomacy, by an obsession with "the war on terror" and reckless fiscal policies. The post-1991 decade of the US's position as unchallenged number one - in Charles Krauthammer's memorable phrase, "the unipolar moment" - is over. To later historians, the pace of this shift will seem astounding. In the early 1990s, the elder George Bush, James Baker and other foreign policy veterans were wondering how to prevent Russia collapsing. Now the concern is about excessive Russian power.
To other scholars, the Caucasian struggles may appear as a storm in a teacup. The real challenge to the US in the future - and perhaps to the west more generally - is the steady rise of Asia and, in particular, China. Putin's muscle-flexing against pesky small neighbours is a mischievous distraction.
At the end of the day (but when is that?), it is probably Putin's hard-knuckled Russia that will be the loser. He may look tough and confident now, but his deck of cards is not so strong for the future. His strength rests on two supports: energy supplies and Russian nationalism. Those oil and natural-gas resources may evaporate sooner than he thinks. And Russian nationalism provokes enormous fear, enmity and resistance. Around the vast, open frontiers of the present Russian republic, and among the 100 ethnic minorities within the borders, no one loves the Russians. That has to be a geopolitical drag.
So the Ossetian scrap is important, though it should not be exaggerated out of proportion. But it tells us a lot about our present, delicate, international system of states. We have interesting times ahead.
· Paul Kennedy is Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University. He is the author/editor of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/16/russia.georgia/print
In the anarchic world we politely term international relations, there was little surprising or unusual about the Russian aggressions into South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A great power was in a fierce quarrel with a small neighbour about that most commonplace cause of war - who should be boss when mixed ethnic groups claim the same lands and straddle international borders. Eventually the larger nation savagely spanked the smaller one, chiefly to impose its own solution on the problem but partly also to remind onlookers of that age-old truth: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". Big boys still rule.
Yet if there are no surprises, there certainly are many intriguing implications. As diplomatic historians well know, a relatively small incident in foreign affairs can have an importance well beyond the region in which the clash takes place - because of the responses of the larger powers, because it reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the available international machinery, and because it reminds us of the political realities and priorities of the age. Yet crises that seemed serious at the time - say, the Anglo-French confrontation over Fashoda in 1898 - have faded into the dustiest textbooks. A somewhat later crisis, such as Munich in 1938, is continually thrown up as a "lesson" for our present age.
More often than not, a sudden confrontation can catch a great power in a state of some confusion. It would be fascinating, for instance, to know how the Chinese politburo is regarding the events in Ossetia. At present, clearly, its chief concern is the Olympics, and there must surely be irritation with both Georgia and Russia for pushing their quarrel into open shooting now. There must also be concern about revived Russian assertiveness and nationalism - although there is no fear in Beijing, for the Chinese know the canny Putin wouldn't push things against them: China is strong, and doesn't mind taking losses, so don't mess with it. More upsetting, Russia has breached that clause of the UN charter China holds most important of all: no interference in the internal affairs of a member nation.
On the other hand, the Han Chinese cannot but like the idea of dissident ethnic minorities along a troublesome border being firmly spanked. Georgia's fate is not a matter of direct concern to Beijing. And Putin's roughing of Mikheil Saakashvili's government is a blow to American prestige and influence in Asia, always a congenial thought to China. So, while never, ever trusting the Russians, China can see that the Ossetian mess is nothing to get upset about.
This is certainly not the feeling in Nato and the EU, or in the major capitals of Europe. Here, above all in France and Germany (Gordon Brown seems beset by his own regional difficulties, in Scotland), there is concern that Russian military actions and political toughness portend a fading away of the post-1991 "new European order" - that it is a sort of latter-day Rhineland crisis of 1936, heralding the end of Versailles treaty Europe. Friendship with Russia cannot wear the bullying and blackmail of western companies like BP, the attempted intimidation of Russian dissidents in the west, the re-entry of the KGB into foreign countries - in sum, the plain fact that Russia is not "normal". It is not Poland, it is not Hungary; it never knew the Enlightenment.
And it is scary in other ways. First, Russia is terrifying to all those east European states that sought eagerly to flee the bear's grasp at the first opportunity following 1989 and 1991: to states, therefore, to whom Europe extended not only the economic and cultural ties of the EU but the security ties of Nato, with all its frightening implications. Right now, Georgia is not a Nato member, despite the Bush administration's urgings. This must be a cause for massive, nervous relief in Brussels and Washington. But what if a border dispute arises between Estonia (now in Nato) and Russia? Are the Portuguese and Danish armies prepared to march east? Are the Germans? Secondly, how will western and central Europe handle its heavy dependence on Russian natural gas, and its awful capacity for being blackmailed by Moscow? Things have come a long way since the wall crashed down in November 1989.
As for the US, the possible implications of the last week are many and serious. Consider the challenge facing Washington: how on earth to make a coherent policy in response to a distant, fast-exploding ethno-linguistic conflict, contested borders, a risk-prone Georgian ally, an increasingly assertive Russia with a new energy trump card, a confused EU and a paralysed security council? All at a time when other areas of the world have sucked in US military resources, as if its own politicians were not already preoccupied enough by the nonsenses of presidential campaigning. We don't have the big stick. Moscow does, at least in this area of the world. You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical meaning of the Georgian scrap - namely, the measure of US power in today's fast-changing world. It could be better. It has been brought lower during the past eight years by inconsiderate and sometimes arrogant diplomacy, by an obsession with "the war on terror" and reckless fiscal policies. The post-1991 decade of the US's position as unchallenged number one - in Charles Krauthammer's memorable phrase, "the unipolar moment" - is over. To later historians, the pace of this shift will seem astounding. In the early 1990s, the elder George Bush, James Baker and other foreign policy veterans were wondering how to prevent Russia collapsing. Now the concern is about excessive Russian power.
To other scholars, the Caucasian struggles may appear as a storm in a teacup. The real challenge to the US in the future - and perhaps to the west more generally - is the steady rise of Asia and, in particular, China. Putin's muscle-flexing against pesky small neighbours is a mischievous distraction.
At the end of the day (but when is that?), it is probably Putin's hard-knuckled Russia that will be the loser. He may look tough and confident now, but his deck of cards is not so strong for the future. His strength rests on two supports: energy supplies and Russian nationalism. Those oil and natural-gas resources may evaporate sooner than he thinks. And Russian nationalism provokes enormous fear, enmity and resistance. Around the vast, open frontiers of the present Russian republic, and among the 100 ethnic minorities within the borders, no one loves the Russians. That has to be a geopolitical drag.
So the Ossetian scrap is important, though it should not be exaggerated out of proportion. But it tells us a lot about our present, delicate, international system of states. We have interesting times ahead.
· Paul Kennedy is Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University. He is the author/editor of 19 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/16/russia.georgia/print
Friday, August 15, 2008
Six days that broke one country - and reshaped the world order
Ian Traynor
Pity Georgia's bedraggled first infantry brigade. And its second. And its hapless navy.
For the past few evenings in the foothills of the Southern Caucasus on the outskirts of Joseph Stalin's hometown of Gori, reconnaissance units of Russia's 58th army have been raking through the spoils of war at what was the Georgian army's pride and joy, a shiny new military base inaugurated only last January for the first infantry, the army engineers, and an artillery brigade.
A couple of hours to the west, in the town of Senaki, it's the same picture. A flagship military base, home to the second infantry brigade, is in Russian hands. And down on the Black Sea coast, the radars and installations for Georgia's sole naval base at Poti have been scrupulously pinpointed by the Russians and destroyed.
Gori and Senaki are not ramshackle relics of the old Red Army of the type that litter the landscape of eastern Europe. "These bases have only recently been upgraded to Nato standard," said Matthew Clements, Eurasia analyst at Jane's Information Group. "They have been operationally targeted to seriously degrade the Georgian military."
"There is a presence of our armed forces near Gori and Senaki. We make no secret of it," said the general staff in Moscow. "They are there to defuse an enormous arsenal of weapons and military hardware which have been discovered in the vicinity of Gori and Senaki without any guard whatsoever."
The "enormous arsenals" are American-made or American-supplied. American money, know-how, planning, and equipment built these bases as part of Washington's drive to bring Nato membership to a small country that is Russia's underbelly.
The American "train and equip" mission for the Georgian military is six years old. It has been destroyed in as many days. And with it, Georgia's Nato ambitions. "There are a few countries that will say 'told you so'" about the need to get Georgia into Nato," said Andrew Wilson, Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "But many more will want to walk away from the problem. And for the next few years, Georgia will be far too busy trying to pick itself up."
If Georgia and Nato are the principal casualties of this week's ruthless display of brute power by Vladimir Putin, the consequences are bigger still, the fallout immense, if uncertain. The regional and the global balance of power looks to have tilted, against the west and in favour of the rising or resurgent players of the east.
In a seminal speech in Munich last year, Putin confidently warned the west that he would not tolerate the age of American hyperpower. Seven years in office at the time and at the height of his powers, he delivered his most anti-western tirade
Pernicious
To an audience that included John McCain, the White House contender, and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary and ex-Kremlinologist, he served notice: "What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious ... unacceptable ... impossible."
This week, he turned those words into action, demonstrating the limits of US power with his rout of Georgia. His forces roamed at will along the roads of the Southern Caucasus, beyond Russia's borders for the first time since the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
As the Russian officers sat on the American stockpiles of machine guns, ammunition, and equipment in Gori, they were savouring a highly unusual scenario. Not since the Afghan war had the Russians seized vast caches of US weaponry. "People are sick to the stomach in Washington," said a former Pentagon official. And the Russians are giddy with success.
Celebrating the biggest victory in eight years of what might be termed Putinism, the dogged pursuit by whatever means to avenge a long period of Russian humiliation and to deploy his limited range of levers - oil, gas, or brute force - to make the world listen to Moscow, the Russian prime minister has redrawn the geopolitical map.
In less than a week, Putin has invaded another country, effectively partitioned Georgia in a lightning campaign, weakened his arch-enemy, President Mikheil Saakashvili, divided the west, and presented a fait accompli. The impact - locally, regionally, and globally - is huge.
"The war in Georgia has put the European order in question," said Alexander Rahr, one of Germany's leading Russia experts and a Putin biographer. "The times are past when you can punish Russia."
That seems to be the view among leading European policymakers who have been scrambling all week to arrange and shore up a fragile ceasefire, risking charges of appeasing the Kremlin.
"Don't ask us who's good and who's bad here," said Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, after shuttling between Tbilisi and Moscow to try to halt the violence. "We shouldn't make any moral judgments on this war. Stopping the war, that's what we're interested in."
His boss, President Nicolas Sarkozy, went to the Kremlin to negotiate a ceasefire and parade as a peacemaker. Critics said he acted as Moscow's messenger, noting Putin's terms then taking them to Tbilisi to persuade
Saakashvili to capitulate. Germany also refused to take sides while Italy warned against building an "anti-Moscow coalition".
That contrasted with Gordon Brown's and David Milliband's talk of Russian "aggression" and Condoleezza Rice's arrival in Tbilisi yesterday to rally "the free world behind a free Georgia".
The effects of Putin's coup are first felt locally and around Russia's rim. "My view is that the Russians, and I would say principally prime minister Putin, is interested in reasserting Russia's, not only Russia's great power or superpower status, but in reasserting Russia's traditional spheres of influence," said Gates. "My guess is that everyone is going to be looking at Russia through a different set of lenses as we look ahead."
In Kiev certainly. Ukraine's pro-western prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, Saaksahvili's fellow colour-revolutionary, is chastened and wary. His firebrand anti-Russian prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, has gone uncharacteristically quiet.
Invasion
"An invasion of Ukraine by 'peacekeeping tanks' is just a question of time," wrote Aleksandr Sushko, director of Kiev's Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Weimar Russia is completing its transformation into something else. If Russia wins this war, a new order will take shape in Europe which will have no place for Ukraine as a sovereign state."
All around Russia's rim, the former Soviet "captive states" are trembling. Even Belarus, the slavishly loyal "last dictatorship in Europe", went strangely silent, taking days before the regime offered Moscow its support. "Everybody's nervous," said Wilson.
The EU states of the Baltic and Poland are drumming up support for Georgia, with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski declaring that Russia has revealed "its true face". That divides the EU since the French and the Germans refuse to take sides and are scornful of east European "hysteria" towards Russia. Rahr in Berlin says the German and French governments are striving to keep the Poles and the Baltic states well away from any EU-led peace negotiations. It was the Germans and the French who, in April, blunted George Bush's drive to get Georgia into Nato. They will also resist potential US moves to kick Russia out of the G8 or other international bodies.
There are many who argue that Putin's gamble will backfire, that he has bitten off more than he can chew, that Russia remains weak, a "Saudi Arabia with trees" in the words of Robert Hunter, the former US ambassador to Nato.
Compared to the other rising powers of China, India or even Brazil - the companions referred to as the BRIC - Russia does indeed appear weak. Its economy struggles to develop goods or services, depends on raw material exports and on European consumption and the price of oil for its current wealth.
Resources
But Putin's talent is for playing a weak hand well, maximising and concentrating his limited resources, and creating facts on the ground while the west dithers.
"There is a lack of a clear and unified European policy towards Russia," said Clements. In the crucial contest over energy "the Russian strategy of keeping control of exports and supply is outpacing any European response".
Putin may now calculate he can call off the dogs of war, having achieved his aims and able to pocket his gains very cheaply. The Georgia campaign becomes the triumphant climax of Putinism.
"In politics, it is very important to know one's measure," wrote Aleksey Arbatov, director of Moscow's International Security Centre. "If Russia continues to inflict strikes on Georgian territory, on facilities, on population centres, we may lose the moral supremacy we have today."
But Wilson and many in eastern Europe worry that rather than being the climax of Putinism, the Russians in Georgia signal the start of something else. "This may not be a culmination, but only step one," said Wilson. "If you don't stop this kind of behaviour, it escalates."
About this articleClose
Russia's victory over Georgia has redrawn the geopolitical map This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday August 16 2008 on p12 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:19 on August 16 2008.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/georgia.russia1
Pity Georgia's bedraggled first infantry brigade. And its second. And its hapless navy.
For the past few evenings in the foothills of the Southern Caucasus on the outskirts of Joseph Stalin's hometown of Gori, reconnaissance units of Russia's 58th army have been raking through the spoils of war at what was the Georgian army's pride and joy, a shiny new military base inaugurated only last January for the first infantry, the army engineers, and an artillery brigade.
A couple of hours to the west, in the town of Senaki, it's the same picture. A flagship military base, home to the second infantry brigade, is in Russian hands. And down on the Black Sea coast, the radars and installations for Georgia's sole naval base at Poti have been scrupulously pinpointed by the Russians and destroyed.
Gori and Senaki are not ramshackle relics of the old Red Army of the type that litter the landscape of eastern Europe. "These bases have only recently been upgraded to Nato standard," said Matthew Clements, Eurasia analyst at Jane's Information Group. "They have been operationally targeted to seriously degrade the Georgian military."
"There is a presence of our armed forces near Gori and Senaki. We make no secret of it," said the general staff in Moscow. "They are there to defuse an enormous arsenal of weapons and military hardware which have been discovered in the vicinity of Gori and Senaki without any guard whatsoever."
The "enormous arsenals" are American-made or American-supplied. American money, know-how, planning, and equipment built these bases as part of Washington's drive to bring Nato membership to a small country that is Russia's underbelly.
The American "train and equip" mission for the Georgian military is six years old. It has been destroyed in as many days. And with it, Georgia's Nato ambitions. "There are a few countries that will say 'told you so'" about the need to get Georgia into Nato," said Andrew Wilson, Russia expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "But many more will want to walk away from the problem. And for the next few years, Georgia will be far too busy trying to pick itself up."
If Georgia and Nato are the principal casualties of this week's ruthless display of brute power by Vladimir Putin, the consequences are bigger still, the fallout immense, if uncertain. The regional and the global balance of power looks to have tilted, against the west and in favour of the rising or resurgent players of the east.
In a seminal speech in Munich last year, Putin confidently warned the west that he would not tolerate the age of American hyperpower. Seven years in office at the time and at the height of his powers, he delivered his most anti-western tirade
Pernicious
To an audience that included John McCain, the White House contender, and Robert Gates, the US defence secretary and ex-Kremlinologist, he served notice: "What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious ... unacceptable ... impossible."
This week, he turned those words into action, demonstrating the limits of US power with his rout of Georgia. His forces roamed at will along the roads of the Southern Caucasus, beyond Russia's borders for the first time since the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
As the Russian officers sat on the American stockpiles of machine guns, ammunition, and equipment in Gori, they were savouring a highly unusual scenario. Not since the Afghan war had the Russians seized vast caches of US weaponry. "People are sick to the stomach in Washington," said a former Pentagon official. And the Russians are giddy with success.
Celebrating the biggest victory in eight years of what might be termed Putinism, the dogged pursuit by whatever means to avenge a long period of Russian humiliation and to deploy his limited range of levers - oil, gas, or brute force - to make the world listen to Moscow, the Russian prime minister has redrawn the geopolitical map.
In less than a week, Putin has invaded another country, effectively partitioned Georgia in a lightning campaign, weakened his arch-enemy, President Mikheil Saakashvili, divided the west, and presented a fait accompli. The impact - locally, regionally, and globally - is huge.
"The war in Georgia has put the European order in question," said Alexander Rahr, one of Germany's leading Russia experts and a Putin biographer. "The times are past when you can punish Russia."
That seems to be the view among leading European policymakers who have been scrambling all week to arrange and shore up a fragile ceasefire, risking charges of appeasing the Kremlin.
"Don't ask us who's good and who's bad here," said Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, after shuttling between Tbilisi and Moscow to try to halt the violence. "We shouldn't make any moral judgments on this war. Stopping the war, that's what we're interested in."
His boss, President Nicolas Sarkozy, went to the Kremlin to negotiate a ceasefire and parade as a peacemaker. Critics said he acted as Moscow's messenger, noting Putin's terms then taking them to Tbilisi to persuade
Saakashvili to capitulate. Germany also refused to take sides while Italy warned against building an "anti-Moscow coalition".
That contrasted with Gordon Brown's and David Milliband's talk of Russian "aggression" and Condoleezza Rice's arrival in Tbilisi yesterday to rally "the free world behind a free Georgia".
The effects of Putin's coup are first felt locally and around Russia's rim. "My view is that the Russians, and I would say principally prime minister Putin, is interested in reasserting Russia's, not only Russia's great power or superpower status, but in reasserting Russia's traditional spheres of influence," said Gates. "My guess is that everyone is going to be looking at Russia through a different set of lenses as we look ahead."
In Kiev certainly. Ukraine's pro-western prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, Saaksahvili's fellow colour-revolutionary, is chastened and wary. His firebrand anti-Russian prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, has gone uncharacteristically quiet.
Invasion
"An invasion of Ukraine by 'peacekeeping tanks' is just a question of time," wrote Aleksandr Sushko, director of Kiev's Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Weimar Russia is completing its transformation into something else. If Russia wins this war, a new order will take shape in Europe which will have no place for Ukraine as a sovereign state."
All around Russia's rim, the former Soviet "captive states" are trembling. Even Belarus, the slavishly loyal "last dictatorship in Europe", went strangely silent, taking days before the regime offered Moscow its support. "Everybody's nervous," said Wilson.
The EU states of the Baltic and Poland are drumming up support for Georgia, with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski declaring that Russia has revealed "its true face". That divides the EU since the French and the Germans refuse to take sides and are scornful of east European "hysteria" towards Russia. Rahr in Berlin says the German and French governments are striving to keep the Poles and the Baltic states well away from any EU-led peace negotiations. It was the Germans and the French who, in April, blunted George Bush's drive to get Georgia into Nato. They will also resist potential US moves to kick Russia out of the G8 or other international bodies.
There are many who argue that Putin's gamble will backfire, that he has bitten off more than he can chew, that Russia remains weak, a "Saudi Arabia with trees" in the words of Robert Hunter, the former US ambassador to Nato.
Compared to the other rising powers of China, India or even Brazil - the companions referred to as the BRIC - Russia does indeed appear weak. Its economy struggles to develop goods or services, depends on raw material exports and on European consumption and the price of oil for its current wealth.
Resources
But Putin's talent is for playing a weak hand well, maximising and concentrating his limited resources, and creating facts on the ground while the west dithers.
"There is a lack of a clear and unified European policy towards Russia," said Clements. In the crucial contest over energy "the Russian strategy of keeping control of exports and supply is outpacing any European response".
Putin may now calculate he can call off the dogs of war, having achieved his aims and able to pocket his gains very cheaply. The Georgia campaign becomes the triumphant climax of Putinism.
"In politics, it is very important to know one's measure," wrote Aleksey Arbatov, director of Moscow's International Security Centre. "If Russia continues to inflict strikes on Georgian territory, on facilities, on population centres, we may lose the moral supremacy we have today."
But Wilson and many in eastern Europe worry that rather than being the climax of Putinism, the Russians in Georgia signal the start of something else. "This may not be a culmination, but only step one," said Wilson. "If you don't stop this kind of behaviour, it escalates."
About this articleClose
Russia's victory over Georgia has redrawn the geopolitical map This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday August 16 2008 on p12 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:19 on August 16 2008.
Source: the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/16/georgia.russia1
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Power and morality
Martin Jacques
You may remember that Robin Cook, newly appointed as Britain's foreign secretary back in 1997, promised to introduce an "ethical foreign policy". Such talk disappeared long ago, brought to an abrupt end by the illegalities and immorality of the invasion of Iraq.
I was reminded of Cook's efforts by Gordon Brown's address yesterday to the Israeli Knesset, where he uttered barely any criticisms of Israel and fulminated long and hard against Iran and its alleged nuclear policy. I have a serious problem with western hypocrisy over Iran and the bomb. We are against nuclear proliferation and yet no one breathes a word about the fact that Israel has many nuclear weapons, and has had them for a long time. So, why not Iran? One might add that Israel has always lived by the sword in the Middle East but the same cannot be said of Iran.
I am against nuclear proliferation (though sceptical that the line can be held in the long term) but only if the policy is even-handed (there is also the small fact that it clearly privileges those that already possess them). This is clearly not the case in the Middle East. Israel is the agent and surrogate of the United States and as such is treated entirely differently from every other country in the region. How can anyone expect Iran to accept that it is right for Israel to have nuclear weapons while itself being disallowed?
Recently the international criminal court (ICC) charged the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir with war crimes in Darfur. That the Sudanese regime has behaved with considerable barbarity in Darfur is beyond question. But again I find myself troubled by the moral logic of the argument. The biggest war criminals of recent years are President George Bush and former premier Tony Blair. They have been responsible for the death of more than 700,000 Iraqis as a result of the war, countless grave injuries, massive displacement and a serious deterioration in the conditions of life. Perversely, notwithstanding their crimes against humanity, they have not yet been charged by the ICC.
The reason, of course, is simple. Though the discourse of such a court is concerned with justice and morality, there is a higher priority altogether in its work, and that is called power. The ICC is not mainly about morality; it is about power combined with a very light sprinkling of morality. Its targets are western-approved and powerless. Established in 2002, the court has opened investigations into four situations: Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Darfur. The court has issued public arrest warrants for 12 people; six of them remain free, two have died, and four are in custody.
Every major power always seeks to justify its action on moral grounds. Such behaviour is almost as old as the hills. The west has been a particularly vigorous exponent of this credo; and there is no reason to believe that China, for example, will be any different. But behind the moral rhetoric invariably lies interest and ideology. While the west has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
The western line on Iran's bomb is morally flawed while it turns a blind eye to Israel's. Likewise, the charging of Omar al-Bashir, the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, and the arrest of Radovan Karadzic will always lack moral force while those who possess infinitely greater power are allowed to escape the clutches of justice.
About this articleClose
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday July 23 2008. It was last updated at 10:00 on July 23 2008.
Source: Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/foreignpolicy.warcrimes/print
You may remember that Robin Cook, newly appointed as Britain's foreign secretary back in 1997, promised to introduce an "ethical foreign policy". Such talk disappeared long ago, brought to an abrupt end by the illegalities and immorality of the invasion of Iraq.
I was reminded of Cook's efforts by Gordon Brown's address yesterday to the Israeli Knesset, where he uttered barely any criticisms of Israel and fulminated long and hard against Iran and its alleged nuclear policy. I have a serious problem with western hypocrisy over Iran and the bomb. We are against nuclear proliferation and yet no one breathes a word about the fact that Israel has many nuclear weapons, and has had them for a long time. So, why not Iran? One might add that Israel has always lived by the sword in the Middle East but the same cannot be said of Iran.
I am against nuclear proliferation (though sceptical that the line can be held in the long term) but only if the policy is even-handed (there is also the small fact that it clearly privileges those that already possess them). This is clearly not the case in the Middle East. Israel is the agent and surrogate of the United States and as such is treated entirely differently from every other country in the region. How can anyone expect Iran to accept that it is right for Israel to have nuclear weapons while itself being disallowed?
Recently the international criminal court (ICC) charged the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir with war crimes in Darfur. That the Sudanese regime has behaved with considerable barbarity in Darfur is beyond question. But again I find myself troubled by the moral logic of the argument. The biggest war criminals of recent years are President George Bush and former premier Tony Blair. They have been responsible for the death of more than 700,000 Iraqis as a result of the war, countless grave injuries, massive displacement and a serious deterioration in the conditions of life. Perversely, notwithstanding their crimes against humanity, they have not yet been charged by the ICC.
The reason, of course, is simple. Though the discourse of such a court is concerned with justice and morality, there is a higher priority altogether in its work, and that is called power. The ICC is not mainly about morality; it is about power combined with a very light sprinkling of morality. Its targets are western-approved and powerless. Established in 2002, the court has opened investigations into four situations: Northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and Darfur. The court has issued public arrest warrants for 12 people; six of them remain free, two have died, and four are in custody.
Every major power always seeks to justify its action on moral grounds. Such behaviour is almost as old as the hills. The west has been a particularly vigorous exponent of this credo; and there is no reason to believe that China, for example, will be any different. But behind the moral rhetoric invariably lies interest and ideology. While the west has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
The western line on Iran's bomb is morally flawed while it turns a blind eye to Israel's. Likewise, the charging of Omar al-Bashir, the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, and the arrest of Radovan Karadzic will always lack moral force while those who possess infinitely greater power are allowed to escape the clutches of justice.
About this articleClose
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday July 23 2008. It was last updated at 10:00 on July 23 2008.
Source: Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/foreignpolicy.warcrimes/print
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The menace in Pakistan
Editorial
Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States is asking for understanding as the new civilian government tries to cope with the persistent insurgency in tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. That is asking a lot of the U.S. and its Afghan allies, whose past patience has not been rewarded. If Islamabad wants time, it needs to show the world it is prepared to act firmly against a chronic menace that endangers not only the Pakistani government, but Afghans, and quite possibly, Americans.The insurgents include elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They have terrorized Pakistan, and they have launched attacks more frequently this year across the border into Afghanistan. American forces recently killed 11 members of Pakistan's paramilitary forces by mistake, in a bombing attack on enemy units along the border. Meanwhile, Taliban forces struck at a prison in Kandahar, freeing some 1,200 prisoners. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he would send troops into Pakistan to "destroy terrorist nests"—though he probably doesn't have the forces to carry out the threat. According to U.S. intelligence, there is a growing flow of foreign jihadists into Pakistan. Most sobering is that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas are plotting new attacks on the American homeland. The U.S. needs no reminder of what can happen when it allows terrorism to flourish in a safe haven provided by a foreign government.The U.S. options, from cutting off aid to Pakistan to launching missile strikes against insurgent sites, are hardly foolproof. But they look better than doing nothing. Islamabad has to understand that no American president can sit by and ignore the danger. Under military ruler Pervez Musharraf, however, Islamabad preferred to negotiate feckless deals that left the terrorists free to continue making trouble across the border. The new government has to make an unequivocal break with that cynical, short-sighted policy. U.S. policy has also been plagued by internal disputes over how aggressive the U.S. can be against Al Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan.Pakistan has launched a new military offensive against militants. Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqqani promises things have changed. The Washington Post reported that he "will not agree to any cease-fires that do not include a halt to attacks in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan, and the expulsion of foreign fighters—which means Al Qaeda." That's a hopeful signal. But Washington can't afford to wait long to see it backed up with concrete action. When asked by the Post if he worried what would happen if Al Qaeda forces use this haven to plan and execute another spectacular act of terrorism against America, Haqqani replied, "What do you think keeps me up at night?" He's not the only one losing sleep.
Source: Chicago Tribune
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0712edit1jul12,0,5959144.story
Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States is asking for understanding as the new civilian government tries to cope with the persistent insurgency in tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. That is asking a lot of the U.S. and its Afghan allies, whose past patience has not been rewarded. If Islamabad wants time, it needs to show the world it is prepared to act firmly against a chronic menace that endangers not only the Pakistani government, but Afghans, and quite possibly, Americans.The insurgents include elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They have terrorized Pakistan, and they have launched attacks more frequently this year across the border into Afghanistan. American forces recently killed 11 members of Pakistan's paramilitary forces by mistake, in a bombing attack on enemy units along the border. Meanwhile, Taliban forces struck at a prison in Kandahar, freeing some 1,200 prisoners. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he would send troops into Pakistan to "destroy terrorist nests"—though he probably doesn't have the forces to carry out the threat. According to U.S. intelligence, there is a growing flow of foreign jihadists into Pakistan. Most sobering is that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas are plotting new attacks on the American homeland. The U.S. needs no reminder of what can happen when it allows terrorism to flourish in a safe haven provided by a foreign government.The U.S. options, from cutting off aid to Pakistan to launching missile strikes against insurgent sites, are hardly foolproof. But they look better than doing nothing. Islamabad has to understand that no American president can sit by and ignore the danger. Under military ruler Pervez Musharraf, however, Islamabad preferred to negotiate feckless deals that left the terrorists free to continue making trouble across the border. The new government has to make an unequivocal break with that cynical, short-sighted policy. U.S. policy has also been plagued by internal disputes over how aggressive the U.S. can be against Al Qaeda leaders holed up in Pakistan.Pakistan has launched a new military offensive against militants. Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqqani promises things have changed. The Washington Post reported that he "will not agree to any cease-fires that do not include a halt to attacks in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan, and the expulsion of foreign fighters—which means Al Qaeda." That's a hopeful signal. But Washington can't afford to wait long to see it backed up with concrete action. When asked by the Post if he worried what would happen if Al Qaeda forces use this haven to plan and execute another spectacular act of terrorism against America, Haqqani replied, "What do you think keeps me up at night?" He's not the only one losing sleep.
Source: Chicago Tribune
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0712edit1jul12,0,5959144.story
Friday, June 6, 2008
The Democratic Foreign Policy Wars
By Ari Berman
At the Des Moines Register presidential debate in December, Barack Obama was asked how voters could expect him to provide a "break from the past" when many of his top foreign policy advisers were holdovers from the Clinton Administration. Obama gracefully parried the challenge by saying he was willing to take good advice from several previous administrations, not just Bill Clinton's. But the question did reflect a common suspicion that despite all his talk about providing "change," the Obama campaign's differences with Hillary Clinton on foreign policy may be more stylistic than substantive.
No matter who injected the issue of race and gender into the Democratic presidential campaign, it's not going away. It's true that a number of Obama's key advisers--like former National Security Adviser Tony Lake, former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig--held prominent positions under Bill Clinton. At the same time, Obama's team includes some of the most forward-thinking members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment--like Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, the party's leading experts on nonproliferation and defense issues, respectively, along with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Added to the mix are fresh faces who were at times critical of the Clinton Administration, like Harvard professor Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell", a widely acclaimed history of US responses to genocide. These names suggest that Obama may be more open to challenging old Washington assumptions and crafting new approaches.
Hillary Clinton's camp, meanwhile, is filled with familiar faces from her husband's administration, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Unlike Obama's advisers, the top Clintonites overwhelmingly supported the war in Iraq. From the march to war onward, Clinton and her advisers have dominated foreign policy discussions inside the Democratic Party. After largely supporting the war, they resisted calls for an exit strategy until 2005, when the situation had become unmanageably bleak. After turning against the war the Clintonites argued retroactively that Senator Clinton had voted, in Holbrooke's words, "to empower the President to avoid war."
As the nation hurtles from the January primaries to the "Super Tuesday" of February 5, top Democrats continue to develop their views on a number of foreign policy questions. How and when should America withdraw its troops from Iraq? How should we manage Iran? How should US power be deployed in the post-Bush era? How should foreign policy deal with global warming, the rise of China and India, an increasingly multipolar world and the continuing threat of nuclear proliferation? Perhaps it's too much to expect candidates to lay out a comprehensive vision for the new era in the heat of a presidential campaign. But how the campaigns address these questions today offers a window into how they'll govern tomorrow.
Hillary's campaign portrays its foreign policy team as a big tent. At the top are the troika of Albright, Holbrooke and former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Albright is very close to Hillary and a key confidante and surrogate. Berger is a skilled behind-the-scenes operative who keeps the troops in line. More on Holbrooke in a moment. Close behind are policy figures who also play a political role, like retired Gen. Wesley Clark and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who are popular with the party's antiwar base and appear on the campaign trail; Clark appears in the campaign's TV ads. (Clinton supporters who backed Bush's recent "surge" of troops in Iraq, like Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, are now kept at arm's length, although Clinton does consult with Gen. Jack Keane, an architect of the troop increase.) Following the old guard are a younger crop of less hawkish experts, like Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, who co-chairs an advisory group on terrorism, and Iran specialists Ray Takeyh and Vali Nasr, who favor broad US engagement with Iran. At the center is Lee Feinstein, a former State Department official whom Clinton plucked from CFR in July and made the campaign's national security director. Feinstein wrote a controversial Foreign Affairs essay in 2004 with Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter arguing that in cases of humanitarian catastrophe, "the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough." Today Feinstein says, "Unilateral action that involves force ought to be avoided at all costs," and "a clear reading of my piece is a strong rebuttal of the Bush doctrine."
Of the top Clinton Administration staffers, Albright, who's 70 and has already served in the upper echelon of government, and Berger, who became a controversial figure after smuggling classified documents from the National Archives, are unlikely to return in a Hillary Clinton administration. That leaves Holbrooke, other than Bill himself, as the most commanding member of Hillary's foreign policy cabinet-in-exile. "He's the heaviest of the heavyweights," says Peter Galbraith, Bill Clinton's former ambassador to Croatia. Galbraith worked closely with Holbrooke in the Balkans and remains a close friend as well as a Hillary supporter. Holbrooke personifies the strong feelings those in the Democratic foreign policy community harbor toward the Clintons: they respect Holbrooke's experience, accomplishments and intelligence but are dismayed at his arrogance, political opportunism and hawkish posturing. Clinton insiders speculate that if Hillary assumes the presidency, Holbrooke could very well land the Secretary of State position he's always coveted.
Like Clinton, Holbrooke seems to have been groomed for higher office. He's been described by pundits as "the raging bull of US diplomacy," "the closest thing the party has to a Kissinger," "a man driven to be a central protagonist in the shaping of the American empire." Just look at his résumé: a young foreign service officer in Vietnam under the tutelage of JFK's best and brightest; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia in the Carter Administration (where he controversially cultivated Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and supported Indonesia during its brutal occupation of East Timor); a successful Wall Street banker in the 1980s; the architect of the Dayton Accords, which ended the fighting in Bosnia; UN ambassador; the list goes on.
Holbrooke's brand of "muscular liberalism" has come to define Hillary. He helped shape not only Bill Clinton's but Hillary's views on the necessity of using force in Bosnia and consulted with her frequently about her vote on Iraq. "I know her well, I saw her through that period, I accept it 100 percent," he said in September. Indeed, in his last press conference as UN ambassador, Holbrooke called Saddam Hussein "a clear and present danger at all times" and said the incoming Bush Administration "will have to deal with this problem," reflecting the Clinton Administration's official policy of regime change. In the run-up to war, Holbrooke was quoted in the New York Times or Washington Post every week. He urged President Bush to go to the UN but afterward said Bush had "ample justification" to invade Iraq and wrote that antiwar demonstrators, along with the French and German governments, had "undoubtedly encouraged" Saddam. In the 2004 campaign, Holbrooke became a key foreign policy adviser to John Kerry. Like Hillary, Holbrooke took a particularly cautious tack on Iraq, telling Kerry to keep his views on the war "deliberately vague."
After the election, as figures like former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and Representative John Murtha turned against the war, Holbrooke refused to say how the United States should extricate itself from Iraq. "I'm not prepared to lay out a detailed policy or strategy," he said in December 2005, around the time that Clinton wrote a letter to her constituents defending her vote for the war. A year later, after events on the ground had spiraled even further out of control, Holbrooke, like Clinton, finally argued that the United States should "start to disengage from Iraq while pressing hard for a political settlement." He testified before Congress opposing Bush's troop surge and rebutted Gen. David Petraeus's presentation in support of it this past September, though he noted that, unlike Senate Democrats, he opposed using the Congressional power of the purse to end the war.
As Holbrooke found his footing on Iraq, however, he remained one of the leading hawks in Hillaryland on Iran. In 2004 he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, "The Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States, the stability in the region, and to the state of Israel" and claimed the European Union would "never get their act together." Holbrooke has twice spoken at rallies against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, comparing him to Hitler. At a November 27 speech in Toronto, Holbrooke listed the reasons the Bush Administration would not attack Iran but called the country "the most pressing problem nation" and "the most dangerous country in the region," accusing the Iranians of exporting explosives "that are killing Americans in Iraq."
Little Holbrooke said about Iran could have prepared one for the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which found that the country had abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 as a result of diplomatic pressure. "It significantly decreases the likelihood of a military confrontation with Iran," Holbrooke told me after the NIE became public. "You have to keep all options on the table, but I thought even pre-NIE that there was no justification for a military strike." He stressed, however, that America needed to remain vigilant about Iran. "It's good news that Iran is much, much further from a nuclear weapons capability," Holbrooke said. "But that doesn't change the fact that they are still a deeply destabilizing regime--supporting Hamas, Hezbollah. And they need to be part of the solution in Iraq."
Iran is a particularly sensitive topic among Clinton supporters. Her September vote for the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which dubbed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and accused Iran of fomenting violence in Iraq, aroused a furor among establishment Democrats and grassroots activists. Peter Galbraith, who knows the region well, circulated a statement in the Senate opposing the resolution. "The reason I was so opposed to Kyl-Lieberman was because it was based on the premise that Iran was undermining US efforts in Iraq, and that's just not true," Galbraith told me. Joe Wilson said he also opposed Kyl-Lieberman, primarily because "I don't trust Lieberman or Kyl."
General Clark, who commanded NATO under Bill Clinton, quickly defended Hillary's vote, writing in New Hampshire's Manchester Union-Leader that "she is forcing the Bush administration to apply diplomatic pressure." Clark told The Nation, "The people harping and carping on the vote and comparing it to her vote on Iraq are oversimplifying the complexities of real diplomacy." In an NPR debate following the NIE release, Clinton argued, based on what her advisers said the military had told them, that because of the Kyl-Lieberman vote, "we've seen changes in their behavior." As Iran heated up as a campaign issue, Clinton's advisers welcomed the NIE with a degree of relief. "It removes this as a campaign issue for Democrats," said Lee Feinstein. He noted that Clinton, like Obama, "supports direct negotiations with Iran, now."
Even if Iran is off the table, as Feinstein hopes, Iraq is not. How many troops Clinton would remove from Iraq--and how quickly--remains a source of contention in Democratic policy circles. "We have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq," Clinton told the New York Times in March. That includes, her advisers say, fighting Al Qaeda there, preventing Iranian arms from crossing the border, protecting the Kurds and possibly training Iraqi security forces, depending on their capabilities. Clinton has pledged to start withdrawing troops in her first sixty days in office but until recently refused to specify when most of them would come home and how many would stay behind. In a policy shift, she said on December 20 that "we can bring nearly everybody home, you know, certainly within a year." Feinstein said the remaining troops would engage in a much narrower set of missions, probably entailing "special operations reinforced with air power," which he says "is far different than patrolling a civil war." Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi army in 2003-04 and is advising Clinton, contradicted Feinstein, predicting that such a residual force "is going to be fairly big."
Like Clinton, Obama has more than 200 foreign policy advisers. The campaigns have been dueling over who has the best bench. (Many people who have been linked with Obama are actually advising Clinton, her advisers say.) Obama's advisers tend to be younger, more progressive--having opposed the war from the start--and more likely to stress "soft power" issues like human rights, global development and the dangers of failed states.
The word Obama advisers use most often to describe Clinton is "conventional." As Brzezinski told me, "Look at her response on negotiations. It was conventional and politically convenient." He's referring to CNN's YouTube debate in July, when Obama said he'd meet with the leaders of countries like Cuba, Iran and North Korea without conditions. Clinton responded that she would not "be used for propaganda purposes" and later called Obama's statement "irresponsible and, frankly, naïve." The conventional wisdom was that Obama's answer displayed a stunning lack of presidential gravitas; Hillary dispatched her advisers to reinforce that point. But Obama unexpectedly turned the exchange to his advantage, accusing Clinton of "continuing with Bush/Cheney policies" and painting her as defender of an outdated status quo. "Her vote for the Iraq War and vote for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution are part of a go-along, conventional, momentary type of political thinking," Brzezinski says. Obama included these themes on the fifth anniversary of his 2002 speech opposing the war, assailing "the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq." After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he reiterated the point in criticizing Clinton's Iraq War vote, saying that "by going into Iraq, we got distracted from Afghanistan...we got distracted from dealing with the Al Qaeda havens that have been created in northwestern Pakistan."
Today, advisers like Tony Lake point to a number of "significant differences" between Obama and Clinton. On Iraq, Obama not only opposed the war but has said he would withdraw all combat troops within sixteen months of taking office. On Iran, Obama rejected the Kyl-Lieberman resolution (though he missed the vote while campaigning) and has proposed a broader engagement strategy to lure Iran into the community of nations. On nuclear weapons, he has not only promised to reduce US nuclear stockpiles, as has Clinton, but advocates a world free of nuclear weapons. On Cuba, Obama went to Miami and said the ban on family travel and remittances to the island nation should be lifted, a policy Clinton opposes.
Yet on many issues the differences between Obama and Clinton are more stylistic than substantive--which doesn't necessarily make them less interesting. In the eyes of his advisers, Obama signals the future and Clinton, the past. "Many of the younger former Clinton Administration officials who now support Obama feel that perhaps it is time for the baton to be passed to the next generation--Obama's generation," says Susan Rice. This sentiment is echoed by the elder Obama advisers. "I think Mrs. Clinton will take us back to the self-indulgence of the 1990s," says Brzezinski, "when the country was preoccupied by its own well-being and the leadership preoccupied with its own standing, not recognizing or taking advantage of the world as it was changing." Much of Hillary's campaign has been premised on a restoration of the Bill Clinton era; the word "restore" appears repeatedly in a recent Foreign Affairs article she wrote outlining her policy.
General Clark says it's overly simplistic to suggest that Clinton would take the country "back to the future," to borrow a phrase Bill Clinton used. "No one's proposing we go back to the 1990s," Clark says. "We need to take what we learned from the 1990s and apply it to new challenges." Indeed, in discussions with Hillary's advisers these days, the message seems to be, We're more like Obama than you think! Both candidates favor negotiating directly with Iran, leaving behind a residual force in Iraq (though Obama has said his missions would be more limited); enlarging the military by 92,000 troops; aggressively curbing global warming; and recommitting to working with multilateral institutions like the United Nations. It's not hard to imagine Clark, Feinstein or even Holbrooke serving in an Obama administration. And many Obamaites would probably work in a Hillary Clinton administration.
One point of contention is the question of experience. Clinton's campaign says Obama "would have less experience than any President since World War II," with Bill Clinton recently implying on Charlie Rose that voting for Obama would be "rolling the dice." Obama says Clinton's trips around the world as First Lady were little more than photo-ops. "I don't think being First Lady gives you any foreign policy experience," cracks former Kennedy speechwriter and Obama supporter Ted Sorensen, "except which donors sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom."
Sorensen sees parallels between the youthful vigor and idealism of Obama and JFK. If Obama is Kennedy, I asked Sorensen, who's Clinton? "She's LBJ," he responded, "particularly when it comes to the future of Iraq. Mrs. Clinton is talking about leaving combat troops in Iraq, maybe even whole divisions. That's where LBJ got into trouble in Vietnam."
The top Democrat who puts the least emphasis on foreign affairs and has the fewest number of advisers, John Edwards, has paradoxically said some of the most interesting things during the campaign. Edwards has called the "war on terror" a "bumper sticker, not a plan," and has opposed enlarging the Army, citing the "little rationale given for exactly why we need this many troops." Days before the Iowa caucuses, he more sharply distinguished his position on Iraq from those of Clinton and Obama by calling for a near-total pullout of US forces within ten months. However, in foreign policy circles Edwards's knowledge of world affairs is considered thin, and on the stump he's far more passionate about domestic issues like poverty and trade. His main foreign policy adviser, Mike Signer, was an aide to former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and his longtime national security adviser in the Senate, Derek Chollet, is a Holbrooke protégé and a fellow at the Center for New American Security, a centrist think tank working to align Democrats closer to the military. Both are relatively hawkish; Signer wrote an essay in 2006 calling for a doctrine of "exemplarism," which he labeled "a militarily strong and morally ambitious version of American exceptionalism."
The Clintonites like to view Iraq as an isolated incident. "It is absurd to hold her or any candidate to a litmus-test standard based on a single vote under extremely complicated circumstances," Holbrooke said in a September radio interview. "She has said herself, 'If people don't like that vote, let them go elsewhere.'" To Obama, the vote for the war reflects a more fundamental reflection of poor judgment and political cowardice. Edwards, who co-sponsored the war resolution, has apologized for it and said, "I will not make that mistake again."
Hillary, though, has refused to apologize, and has often been packaged as a "quasi-Margaret Thatcher," Brzezinski said. "She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband," Holbrooke said. Holbrooke acknowledges that in the wake of the Iraq disaster, it will be harder to carry out the type of humanitarian interventions that defined the Clinton Administration. In the case of Darfur, for example, none of the candidates have suggested sending US forces. "The standard will be higher," Holbrooke said. "The tests of an exit strategy will be higher. The risks will be higher." In the 1990s Holbrooke warned of "Vietnamalia syndrome," the aversion to using military power because of failures in Vietnam and Somalia, and says we cannot retreat now, either. "A swing from neoconservatism to neo-isolationism would not be a good deal."
None of the Democratic candidates, of course, are advocating "neo-isolationism." But Obama has been more willing than Clinton to redefine what it means to be "tough" and to rethink the nature of American power, suggesting that the United States act with greater humility. He told the New York Times, "For most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn't, not by failing to use force."
Statements like these raise the question of what a post-Bush foreign policy should look like. The next President must decide: will the "war on terror" continue? What about the Bush doctrine of preventive war or the escalating size of the military budget? Holbrooke says, "The next President needs to scrap a lot of things from the Bush Administration, and torture, Guantánamo and pre-emptive war should be on that list." Wesley Clark, too, says the concept of a "war on terror" was a "terrible mistake," and he calls the Bush doctrine "nonsense, rubbish." On these points Obama and Edwards concur.
But there are other crucial and less frequently mentioned topics to address: how will the next administration deal with a resurgent Russia, a rising China and a Latin America that has rejected the Washington/IMF neoliberal agenda, forging closer regional ties in its place? How will the United States handle rapidly growing world demand for oil and gas as reserves approach their peak? Is it a mistake to view the world primarily through the lens of Islamic extremism? How should the United States relate to Saudi Arabia and other autocratic Gulf states, and how should the United States address the Israel-Palestine conflict? How should we promote prosperity and stability in Africa? The foreign policy advisers in each Democratic campaign are still grappling with the answers.
The disastrous Bush presidency has upended many assumptions in DC policy circles, particularly about America's place in the world. This historic shift is helping to define the race for the Democratic nomination. All the candidates have sought to separate themselves from the Bush Administration--but rejection of the Bush/Cheney approach will not be enough to formulate a strategy for the next administration. As Obama has said, "The question is, What comes next?"
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080121/berman
At the Des Moines Register presidential debate in December, Barack Obama was asked how voters could expect him to provide a "break from the past" when many of his top foreign policy advisers were holdovers from the Clinton Administration. Obama gracefully parried the challenge by saying he was willing to take good advice from several previous administrations, not just Bill Clinton's. But the question did reflect a common suspicion that despite all his talk about providing "change," the Obama campaign's differences with Hillary Clinton on foreign policy may be more stylistic than substantive.
No matter who injected the issue of race and gender into the Democratic presidential campaign, it's not going away. It's true that a number of Obama's key advisers--like former National Security Adviser Tony Lake, former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig--held prominent positions under Bill Clinton. At the same time, Obama's team includes some of the most forward-thinking members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment--like Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, the party's leading experts on nonproliferation and defense issues, respectively, along with former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Added to the mix are fresh faces who were at times critical of the Clinton Administration, like Harvard professor Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell", a widely acclaimed history of US responses to genocide. These names suggest that Obama may be more open to challenging old Washington assumptions and crafting new approaches.
Hillary Clinton's camp, meanwhile, is filled with familiar faces from her husband's administration, like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Unlike Obama's advisers, the top Clintonites overwhelmingly supported the war in Iraq. From the march to war onward, Clinton and her advisers have dominated foreign policy discussions inside the Democratic Party. After largely supporting the war, they resisted calls for an exit strategy until 2005, when the situation had become unmanageably bleak. After turning against the war the Clintonites argued retroactively that Senator Clinton had voted, in Holbrooke's words, "to empower the President to avoid war."
As the nation hurtles from the January primaries to the "Super Tuesday" of February 5, top Democrats continue to develop their views on a number of foreign policy questions. How and when should America withdraw its troops from Iraq? How should we manage Iran? How should US power be deployed in the post-Bush era? How should foreign policy deal with global warming, the rise of China and India, an increasingly multipolar world and the continuing threat of nuclear proliferation? Perhaps it's too much to expect candidates to lay out a comprehensive vision for the new era in the heat of a presidential campaign. But how the campaigns address these questions today offers a window into how they'll govern tomorrow.
Hillary's campaign portrays its foreign policy team as a big tent. At the top are the troika of Albright, Holbrooke and former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Albright is very close to Hillary and a key confidante and surrogate. Berger is a skilled behind-the-scenes operative who keeps the troops in line. More on Holbrooke in a moment. Close behind are policy figures who also play a political role, like retired Gen. Wesley Clark and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who are popular with the party's antiwar base and appear on the campaign trail; Clark appears in the campaign's TV ads. (Clinton supporters who backed Bush's recent "surge" of troops in Iraq, like Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, are now kept at arm's length, although Clinton does consult with Gen. Jack Keane, an architect of the troop increase.) Following the old guard are a younger crop of less hawkish experts, like Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, who co-chairs an advisory group on terrorism, and Iran specialists Ray Takeyh and Vali Nasr, who favor broad US engagement with Iran. At the center is Lee Feinstein, a former State Department official whom Clinton plucked from CFR in July and made the campaign's national security director. Feinstein wrote a controversial Foreign Affairs essay in 2004 with Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter arguing that in cases of humanitarian catastrophe, "the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough." Today Feinstein says, "Unilateral action that involves force ought to be avoided at all costs," and "a clear reading of my piece is a strong rebuttal of the Bush doctrine."
Of the top Clinton Administration staffers, Albright, who's 70 and has already served in the upper echelon of government, and Berger, who became a controversial figure after smuggling classified documents from the National Archives, are unlikely to return in a Hillary Clinton administration. That leaves Holbrooke, other than Bill himself, as the most commanding member of Hillary's foreign policy cabinet-in-exile. "He's the heaviest of the heavyweights," says Peter Galbraith, Bill Clinton's former ambassador to Croatia. Galbraith worked closely with Holbrooke in the Balkans and remains a close friend as well as a Hillary supporter. Holbrooke personifies the strong feelings those in the Democratic foreign policy community harbor toward the Clintons: they respect Holbrooke's experience, accomplishments and intelligence but are dismayed at his arrogance, political opportunism and hawkish posturing. Clinton insiders speculate that if Hillary assumes the presidency, Holbrooke could very well land the Secretary of State position he's always coveted.
Like Clinton, Holbrooke seems to have been groomed for higher office. He's been described by pundits as "the raging bull of US diplomacy," "the closest thing the party has to a Kissinger," "a man driven to be a central protagonist in the shaping of the American empire." Just look at his résumé: a young foreign service officer in Vietnam under the tutelage of JFK's best and brightest; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia in the Carter Administration (where he controversially cultivated Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and supported Indonesia during its brutal occupation of East Timor); a successful Wall Street banker in the 1980s; the architect of the Dayton Accords, which ended the fighting in Bosnia; UN ambassador; the list goes on.
Holbrooke's brand of "muscular liberalism" has come to define Hillary. He helped shape not only Bill Clinton's but Hillary's views on the necessity of using force in Bosnia and consulted with her frequently about her vote on Iraq. "I know her well, I saw her through that period, I accept it 100 percent," he said in September. Indeed, in his last press conference as UN ambassador, Holbrooke called Saddam Hussein "a clear and present danger at all times" and said the incoming Bush Administration "will have to deal with this problem," reflecting the Clinton Administration's official policy of regime change. In the run-up to war, Holbrooke was quoted in the New York Times or Washington Post every week. He urged President Bush to go to the UN but afterward said Bush had "ample justification" to invade Iraq and wrote that antiwar demonstrators, along with the French and German governments, had "undoubtedly encouraged" Saddam. In the 2004 campaign, Holbrooke became a key foreign policy adviser to John Kerry. Like Hillary, Holbrooke took a particularly cautious tack on Iraq, telling Kerry to keep his views on the war "deliberately vague."
After the election, as figures like former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry and Representative John Murtha turned against the war, Holbrooke refused to say how the United States should extricate itself from Iraq. "I'm not prepared to lay out a detailed policy or strategy," he said in December 2005, around the time that Clinton wrote a letter to her constituents defending her vote for the war. A year later, after events on the ground had spiraled even further out of control, Holbrooke, like Clinton, finally argued that the United States should "start to disengage from Iraq while pressing hard for a political settlement." He testified before Congress opposing Bush's troop surge and rebutted Gen. David Petraeus's presentation in support of it this past September, though he noted that, unlike Senate Democrats, he opposed using the Congressional power of the purse to end the war.
As Holbrooke found his footing on Iraq, however, he remained one of the leading hawks in Hillaryland on Iran. In 2004 he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, "The Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States, the stability in the region, and to the state of Israel" and claimed the European Union would "never get their act together." Holbrooke has twice spoken at rallies against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York, comparing him to Hitler. At a November 27 speech in Toronto, Holbrooke listed the reasons the Bush Administration would not attack Iran but called the country "the most pressing problem nation" and "the most dangerous country in the region," accusing the Iranians of exporting explosives "that are killing Americans in Iraq."
Little Holbrooke said about Iran could have prepared one for the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which found that the country had abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 as a result of diplomatic pressure. "It significantly decreases the likelihood of a military confrontation with Iran," Holbrooke told me after the NIE became public. "You have to keep all options on the table, but I thought even pre-NIE that there was no justification for a military strike." He stressed, however, that America needed to remain vigilant about Iran. "It's good news that Iran is much, much further from a nuclear weapons capability," Holbrooke said. "But that doesn't change the fact that they are still a deeply destabilizing regime--supporting Hamas, Hezbollah. And they need to be part of the solution in Iraq."
Iran is a particularly sensitive topic among Clinton supporters. Her September vote for the Senate's Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which dubbed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and accused Iran of fomenting violence in Iraq, aroused a furor among establishment Democrats and grassroots activists. Peter Galbraith, who knows the region well, circulated a statement in the Senate opposing the resolution. "The reason I was so opposed to Kyl-Lieberman was because it was based on the premise that Iran was undermining US efforts in Iraq, and that's just not true," Galbraith told me. Joe Wilson said he also opposed Kyl-Lieberman, primarily because "I don't trust Lieberman or Kyl."
General Clark, who commanded NATO under Bill Clinton, quickly defended Hillary's vote, writing in New Hampshire's Manchester Union-Leader that "she is forcing the Bush administration to apply diplomatic pressure." Clark told The Nation, "The people harping and carping on the vote and comparing it to her vote on Iraq are oversimplifying the complexities of real diplomacy." In an NPR debate following the NIE release, Clinton argued, based on what her advisers said the military had told them, that because of the Kyl-Lieberman vote, "we've seen changes in their behavior." As Iran heated up as a campaign issue, Clinton's advisers welcomed the NIE with a degree of relief. "It removes this as a campaign issue for Democrats," said Lee Feinstein. He noted that Clinton, like Obama, "supports direct negotiations with Iran, now."
Even if Iran is off the table, as Feinstein hopes, Iraq is not. How many troops Clinton would remove from Iraq--and how quickly--remains a source of contention in Democratic policy circles. "We have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq," Clinton told the New York Times in March. That includes, her advisers say, fighting Al Qaeda there, preventing Iranian arms from crossing the border, protecting the Kurds and possibly training Iraqi security forces, depending on their capabilities. Clinton has pledged to start withdrawing troops in her first sixty days in office but until recently refused to specify when most of them would come home and how many would stay behind. In a policy shift, she said on December 20 that "we can bring nearly everybody home, you know, certainly within a year." Feinstein said the remaining troops would engage in a much narrower set of missions, probably entailing "special operations reinforced with air power," which he says "is far different than patrolling a civil war." Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi army in 2003-04 and is advising Clinton, contradicted Feinstein, predicting that such a residual force "is going to be fairly big."
Like Clinton, Obama has more than 200 foreign policy advisers. The campaigns have been dueling over who has the best bench. (Many people who have been linked with Obama are actually advising Clinton, her advisers say.) Obama's advisers tend to be younger, more progressive--having opposed the war from the start--and more likely to stress "soft power" issues like human rights, global development and the dangers of failed states.
The word Obama advisers use most often to describe Clinton is "conventional." As Brzezinski told me, "Look at her response on negotiations. It was conventional and politically convenient." He's referring to CNN's YouTube debate in July, when Obama said he'd meet with the leaders of countries like Cuba, Iran and North Korea without conditions. Clinton responded that she would not "be used for propaganda purposes" and later called Obama's statement "irresponsible and, frankly, naïve." The conventional wisdom was that Obama's answer displayed a stunning lack of presidential gravitas; Hillary dispatched her advisers to reinforce that point. But Obama unexpectedly turned the exchange to his advantage, accusing Clinton of "continuing with Bush/Cheney policies" and painting her as defender of an outdated status quo. "Her vote for the Iraq War and vote for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution are part of a go-along, conventional, momentary type of political thinking," Brzezinski says. Obama included these themes on the fifth anniversary of his 2002 speech opposing the war, assailing "the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq." After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, he reiterated the point in criticizing Clinton's Iraq War vote, saying that "by going into Iraq, we got distracted from Afghanistan...we got distracted from dealing with the Al Qaeda havens that have been created in northwestern Pakistan."
Today, advisers like Tony Lake point to a number of "significant differences" between Obama and Clinton. On Iraq, Obama not only opposed the war but has said he would withdraw all combat troops within sixteen months of taking office. On Iran, Obama rejected the Kyl-Lieberman resolution (though he missed the vote while campaigning) and has proposed a broader engagement strategy to lure Iran into the community of nations. On nuclear weapons, he has not only promised to reduce US nuclear stockpiles, as has Clinton, but advocates a world free of nuclear weapons. On Cuba, Obama went to Miami and said the ban on family travel and remittances to the island nation should be lifted, a policy Clinton opposes.
Yet on many issues the differences between Obama and Clinton are more stylistic than substantive--which doesn't necessarily make them less interesting. In the eyes of his advisers, Obama signals the future and Clinton, the past. "Many of the younger former Clinton Administration officials who now support Obama feel that perhaps it is time for the baton to be passed to the next generation--Obama's generation," says Susan Rice. This sentiment is echoed by the elder Obama advisers. "I think Mrs. Clinton will take us back to the self-indulgence of the 1990s," says Brzezinski, "when the country was preoccupied by its own well-being and the leadership preoccupied with its own standing, not recognizing or taking advantage of the world as it was changing." Much of Hillary's campaign has been premised on a restoration of the Bill Clinton era; the word "restore" appears repeatedly in a recent Foreign Affairs article she wrote outlining her policy.
General Clark says it's overly simplistic to suggest that Clinton would take the country "back to the future," to borrow a phrase Bill Clinton used. "No one's proposing we go back to the 1990s," Clark says. "We need to take what we learned from the 1990s and apply it to new challenges." Indeed, in discussions with Hillary's advisers these days, the message seems to be, We're more like Obama than you think! Both candidates favor negotiating directly with Iran, leaving behind a residual force in Iraq (though Obama has said his missions would be more limited); enlarging the military by 92,000 troops; aggressively curbing global warming; and recommitting to working with multilateral institutions like the United Nations. It's not hard to imagine Clark, Feinstein or even Holbrooke serving in an Obama administration. And many Obamaites would probably work in a Hillary Clinton administration.
One point of contention is the question of experience. Clinton's campaign says Obama "would have less experience than any President since World War II," with Bill Clinton recently implying on Charlie Rose that voting for Obama would be "rolling the dice." Obama says Clinton's trips around the world as First Lady were little more than photo-ops. "I don't think being First Lady gives you any foreign policy experience," cracks former Kennedy speechwriter and Obama supporter Ted Sorensen, "except which donors sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom."
Sorensen sees parallels between the youthful vigor and idealism of Obama and JFK. If Obama is Kennedy, I asked Sorensen, who's Clinton? "She's LBJ," he responded, "particularly when it comes to the future of Iraq. Mrs. Clinton is talking about leaving combat troops in Iraq, maybe even whole divisions. That's where LBJ got into trouble in Vietnam."
The top Democrat who puts the least emphasis on foreign affairs and has the fewest number of advisers, John Edwards, has paradoxically said some of the most interesting things during the campaign. Edwards has called the "war on terror" a "bumper sticker, not a plan," and has opposed enlarging the Army, citing the "little rationale given for exactly why we need this many troops." Days before the Iowa caucuses, he more sharply distinguished his position on Iraq from those of Clinton and Obama by calling for a near-total pullout of US forces within ten months. However, in foreign policy circles Edwards's knowledge of world affairs is considered thin, and on the stump he's far more passionate about domestic issues like poverty and trade. His main foreign policy adviser, Mike Signer, was an aide to former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and his longtime national security adviser in the Senate, Derek Chollet, is a Holbrooke protégé and a fellow at the Center for New American Security, a centrist think tank working to align Democrats closer to the military. Both are relatively hawkish; Signer wrote an essay in 2006 calling for a doctrine of "exemplarism," which he labeled "a militarily strong and morally ambitious version of American exceptionalism."
The Clintonites like to view Iraq as an isolated incident. "It is absurd to hold her or any candidate to a litmus-test standard based on a single vote under extremely complicated circumstances," Holbrooke said in a September radio interview. "She has said herself, 'If people don't like that vote, let them go elsewhere.'" To Obama, the vote for the war reflects a more fundamental reflection of poor judgment and political cowardice. Edwards, who co-sponsored the war resolution, has apologized for it and said, "I will not make that mistake again."
Hillary, though, has refused to apologize, and has often been packaged as a "quasi-Margaret Thatcher," Brzezinski said. "She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband," Holbrooke said. Holbrooke acknowledges that in the wake of the Iraq disaster, it will be harder to carry out the type of humanitarian interventions that defined the Clinton Administration. In the case of Darfur, for example, none of the candidates have suggested sending US forces. "The standard will be higher," Holbrooke said. "The tests of an exit strategy will be higher. The risks will be higher." In the 1990s Holbrooke warned of "Vietnamalia syndrome," the aversion to using military power because of failures in Vietnam and Somalia, and says we cannot retreat now, either. "A swing from neoconservatism to neo-isolationism would not be a good deal."
None of the Democratic candidates, of course, are advocating "neo-isolationism." But Obama has been more willing than Clinton to redefine what it means to be "tough" and to rethink the nature of American power, suggesting that the United States act with greater humility. He told the New York Times, "For most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn't, not by failing to use force."
Statements like these raise the question of what a post-Bush foreign policy should look like. The next President must decide: will the "war on terror" continue? What about the Bush doctrine of preventive war or the escalating size of the military budget? Holbrooke says, "The next President needs to scrap a lot of things from the Bush Administration, and torture, Guantánamo and pre-emptive war should be on that list." Wesley Clark, too, says the concept of a "war on terror" was a "terrible mistake," and he calls the Bush doctrine "nonsense, rubbish." On these points Obama and Edwards concur.
But there are other crucial and less frequently mentioned topics to address: how will the next administration deal with a resurgent Russia, a rising China and a Latin America that has rejected the Washington/IMF neoliberal agenda, forging closer regional ties in its place? How will the United States handle rapidly growing world demand for oil and gas as reserves approach their peak? Is it a mistake to view the world primarily through the lens of Islamic extremism? How should the United States relate to Saudi Arabia and other autocratic Gulf states, and how should the United States address the Israel-Palestine conflict? How should we promote prosperity and stability in Africa? The foreign policy advisers in each Democratic campaign are still grappling with the answers.
The disastrous Bush presidency has upended many assumptions in DC policy circles, particularly about America's place in the world. This historic shift is helping to define the race for the Democratic nomination. All the candidates have sought to separate themselves from the Bush Administration--but rejection of the Bush/Cheney approach will not be enough to formulate a strategy for the next administration. As Obama has said, "The question is, What comes next?"
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080121/berman
Thursday, June 5, 2008
The Next Intervention
By Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan
Monday, August 6, 2007; A17
Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas.
As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. Throughout its history, America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change. Despite the problems and setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world's dominant military power, spends half a trillion dollars a year on defense and faces no peer strong enough to deter it if it chooses to act. Between 1989 and 2001, Americans intervened with significant military force on eight occasions -- once every 18 months. This interventionism has been bipartisan -- four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the situations in which an American president may have to use force have only grown, whether it is to respond to terrorist threats, to curb weapons proliferation, to prevent genocide or other human rights violations, or to respond to more traditional forms of aggression.
To sustain broad, bipartisan support for interventions requires that we rebuild a domestic consensus on a fundamental but elusive issue: the question of legitimacy. That consensus has been one of the casualties of the Iraq war. Many of President Bush's critics, at home and abroad, argued that the war lacked legitimacy since it was not a clear instance of self-defense nor received the sanction of the U.N. Security Council. Many of Bush's supporters respond that it is not the opinions of other nations or institutions that provide legitimacy but the substance of the action itself. Toppling Saddam Hussein was a just act and therefore was inherently legitimate.
To forge a renewed political consensus on the use of force, we first need to recognize that international legitimacy does matter. It matters to Americans, who want to believe they are acting justly and are troubled if others accuse them of selfish, immoral or otherwise illegitimate behavior. It matters to our democratic friends and allies, whose support may attest to the justness of the cause and whose participation may often be necessary to turn a military victory into a lasting political success.
So how do we determine the legitimacy of armed force? First, substance does count. There is a difference between force used to enlarge one's territory and force aimed at alleviating a grievous harm done to others. A just cause, a clear strategy for success and a definitive threat to ourselves or to others whom we are obliged to protect all lend legitimacy to military action.
But substance alone is not always enough. Process matters, too. The critical question is who decides: Who decides whether a threat is sufficiently real or grave to warrant military action? Who decides whether the threat is directed against a specific state or whether it threatens regional or international security more broadly?
The traditional answer, the U.N. Security Council, no longer suffices, if it ever did. Under the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from using force except in cases of self-defense or when explicitly authorized by the Security Council. But this presupposes that the members of the Security Council can agree on the threat and the appropriate response. From Rwanda to Kosovo to Darfur, however, and from Iraq to North Korea to Iran, the Security Council has not been able to agree and has failed to act decisively. Its permanent members are deeply divided by conflicting interests as well as by clashing beliefs about the nature of sovereignty and the right of the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of nations.
If not the Security Council, then who? The answer is the world's democracies, the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia. As the war in Kosovo showed, democracies can agree and act effectively even when major non-democracies, such as Russia and China, do not. Because they share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states, they tend to agree on when the international community has an obligation to intervene. Shared principles provide the foundation for legitimacy.
A policy of seeking consensus among the world's great democratic nations can form the basis for a new domestic consensus on the use of force. It would not exclude efforts to win Security Council authorization. Nor would it preclude using force even when some of our democratic friends disagree. But the United States will be on stronger ground to launch and sustain interventions when it makes every effort to seek and win the approval of the democratic world.
Eventually, perhaps, these matters could be addressed and decided in a more formal arrangement, a Concert of Democracies, where the world's democracies could meet and cooperate in dealing with the many global challenges they confront. Until such a formal mechanism has been created, however, future presidents need to recognize that legitimacy matters, and that the most meaningful and potent form of legitimacy for a democracy such as the United States is the kind bestowed by fellow democrats around the world.
Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501056_pf.html
Monday, August 6, 2007; A17
Is the United States out of the intervention business for a while? With two difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a divided public, the conventional answer is that it will be a long time before any American president, Democrat or Republican, again dispatches troops into conflict overseas.
As usual, though, the conventional wisdom is almost certainly wrong. Throughout its history, America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change. Despite the problems and setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, America remains the world's dominant military power, spends half a trillion dollars a year on defense and faces no peer strong enough to deter it if it chooses to act. Between 1989 and 2001, Americans intervened with significant military force on eight occasions -- once every 18 months. This interventionism has been bipartisan -- four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the situations in which an American president may have to use force have only grown, whether it is to respond to terrorist threats, to curb weapons proliferation, to prevent genocide or other human rights violations, or to respond to more traditional forms of aggression.
To sustain broad, bipartisan support for interventions requires that we rebuild a domestic consensus on a fundamental but elusive issue: the question of legitimacy. That consensus has been one of the casualties of the Iraq war. Many of President Bush's critics, at home and abroad, argued that the war lacked legitimacy since it was not a clear instance of self-defense nor received the sanction of the U.N. Security Council. Many of Bush's supporters respond that it is not the opinions of other nations or institutions that provide legitimacy but the substance of the action itself. Toppling Saddam Hussein was a just act and therefore was inherently legitimate.
To forge a renewed political consensus on the use of force, we first need to recognize that international legitimacy does matter. It matters to Americans, who want to believe they are acting justly and are troubled if others accuse them of selfish, immoral or otherwise illegitimate behavior. It matters to our democratic friends and allies, whose support may attest to the justness of the cause and whose participation may often be necessary to turn a military victory into a lasting political success.
So how do we determine the legitimacy of armed force? First, substance does count. There is a difference between force used to enlarge one's territory and force aimed at alleviating a grievous harm done to others. A just cause, a clear strategy for success and a definitive threat to ourselves or to others whom we are obliged to protect all lend legitimacy to military action.
But substance alone is not always enough. Process matters, too. The critical question is who decides: Who decides whether a threat is sufficiently real or grave to warrant military action? Who decides whether the threat is directed against a specific state or whether it threatens regional or international security more broadly?
The traditional answer, the U.N. Security Council, no longer suffices, if it ever did. Under the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from using force except in cases of self-defense or when explicitly authorized by the Security Council. But this presupposes that the members of the Security Council can agree on the threat and the appropriate response. From Rwanda to Kosovo to Darfur, however, and from Iraq to North Korea to Iran, the Security Council has not been able to agree and has failed to act decisively. Its permanent members are deeply divided by conflicting interests as well as by clashing beliefs about the nature of sovereignty and the right of the international community to intervene in the internal affairs of nations.
If not the Security Council, then who? The answer is the world's democracies, the United States and its democratic partners in Europe and Asia. As the war in Kosovo showed, democracies can agree and act effectively even when major non-democracies, such as Russia and China, do not. Because they share a common view of what constitutes a just order within states, they tend to agree on when the international community has an obligation to intervene. Shared principles provide the foundation for legitimacy.
A policy of seeking consensus among the world's great democratic nations can form the basis for a new domestic consensus on the use of force. It would not exclude efforts to win Security Council authorization. Nor would it preclude using force even when some of our democratic friends disagree. But the United States will be on stronger ground to launch and sustain interventions when it makes every effort to seek and win the approval of the democratic world.
Eventually, perhaps, these matters could be addressed and decided in a more formal arrangement, a Concert of Democracies, where the world's democracies could meet and cooperate in dealing with the many global challenges they confront. Until such a formal mechanism has been created, however, future presidents need to recognize that legitimacy matters, and that the most meaningful and potent form of legitimacy for a democracy such as the United States is the kind bestowed by fellow democrats around the world.
Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501056_pf.html
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Who Will Watch the Peacekeepers?
By MATTHIAS BASANISI
Bern, Switzerland
THE United Nations, facing criticism that it has failed to police itself in Congo, has hit back in recent days. Press officers insist that there is no problem. Based on my own experience, I disagree.
The BBC and Human Rights Watch have both brought forward evidence that the United Nations covered up evidence of gold smuggling and arms trafficking by its peacekeepers in Congo. The peacekeepers are said to have had illegal dealings with one of the most murderous militias in the country, where millions have died in one of the bloodiest yet least visible conflicts in the world.
Last month, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services at the United Nations, told the BBC that her investigators drew the right conclusions based on the evidence they found: that there was little that warranted prosecution or further investigation.
I wish that were true. I was the investigator in charge of the United Nations team that in 2006 looked into allegations of abuses by Pakistani peacekeepers in Congo and found them credible. But the investigation was taken away from my team after we resisted what we saw as attempts to influence the outcome. My fellow team members and I were appalled to see that the oversight office’s final report was little short of a whitewash.
The reports we submitted to the office’s senior management in 2006 included credible information from witnesses confirming illegal deals between Pakistani peacekeepers and warlords from the Front for National Integration, an ethnic militia group notorious for its cruelty even in such a brutal war. We found corroborative information that senior officers of the Pakistani contingent secretly returned seized weapons to two warlords in exchange for gold, and that the Pakistani peacekeepers tipped off two warlords about plans by the United Nations peacekeeping force and the Congolese Army to arrest them. And yet, much of the evidence we uncovered was excluded from the final report released last summer, including corroboration from the warlords themselves.
I resigned from the Office of Internal Oversight Services in May 2007. But that does not mean I am alone in my concerns. Former colleagues of mine who recently investigated similar allegations against Indian peacekeepers in Congo are worried that some of their most serious findings will also be ignored and not investigated further.
What’s more, two outside management reports have been critical of the oversight office and its work. Ms. Ahlenius, who has been in charge of the office since 2005, says that she agrees with those criticisms. Secretiveness, she told The Washington Post earlier this month, “serves us extremely poorly.”
Indeed. So why does it continue under her watch?
The oversight office hires experienced investigators. Those investigators are required to respect the highest standards of integrity. And yet the office has done little to ensure that management lives up to its own standards. One likely reason for the watered-down reports is that Pakistan and India are the largest contributors of troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions and no one wants to offend them.
I met and worked with many of these peacekeepers and found the majority of them to be professional soldiers willing to risk their lives to bring peace to countries like Congo. But if peacekeepers of any nationality are found to have committed serious crimes, the United Nations must say so. The organization cannot close its eyes and ears to evidence of misconduct. Such behavior undermines peacekeeping efforts everywhere.
It would be shocking to think that the United Nations’ own investigative body is reluctant to act on evidence of cooperation between peacekeepers and alleged war criminals. The United Nations must be prepared to deal with crimes by peacekeepers in the eastern Congo; it must also be prepared to tell the truth.
Matthias Basanisi was the deputy chief investigator with the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services in Congo from 2005 to 2007.
Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23basanisi.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
Bern, Switzerland
THE United Nations, facing criticism that it has failed to police itself in Congo, has hit back in recent days. Press officers insist that there is no problem. Based on my own experience, I disagree.
The BBC and Human Rights Watch have both brought forward evidence that the United Nations covered up evidence of gold smuggling and arms trafficking by its peacekeepers in Congo. The peacekeepers are said to have had illegal dealings with one of the most murderous militias in the country, where millions have died in one of the bloodiest yet least visible conflicts in the world.
Last month, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, the head of the Office of Internal Oversight Services at the United Nations, told the BBC that her investigators drew the right conclusions based on the evidence they found: that there was little that warranted prosecution or further investigation.
I wish that were true. I was the investigator in charge of the United Nations team that in 2006 looked into allegations of abuses by Pakistani peacekeepers in Congo and found them credible. But the investigation was taken away from my team after we resisted what we saw as attempts to influence the outcome. My fellow team members and I were appalled to see that the oversight office’s final report was little short of a whitewash.
The reports we submitted to the office’s senior management in 2006 included credible information from witnesses confirming illegal deals between Pakistani peacekeepers and warlords from the Front for National Integration, an ethnic militia group notorious for its cruelty even in such a brutal war. We found corroborative information that senior officers of the Pakistani contingent secretly returned seized weapons to two warlords in exchange for gold, and that the Pakistani peacekeepers tipped off two warlords about plans by the United Nations peacekeeping force and the Congolese Army to arrest them. And yet, much of the evidence we uncovered was excluded from the final report released last summer, including corroboration from the warlords themselves.
I resigned from the Office of Internal Oversight Services in May 2007. But that does not mean I am alone in my concerns. Former colleagues of mine who recently investigated similar allegations against Indian peacekeepers in Congo are worried that some of their most serious findings will also be ignored and not investigated further.
What’s more, two outside management reports have been critical of the oversight office and its work. Ms. Ahlenius, who has been in charge of the office since 2005, says that she agrees with those criticisms. Secretiveness, she told The Washington Post earlier this month, “serves us extremely poorly.”
Indeed. So why does it continue under her watch?
The oversight office hires experienced investigators. Those investigators are required to respect the highest standards of integrity. And yet the office has done little to ensure that management lives up to its own standards. One likely reason for the watered-down reports is that Pakistan and India are the largest contributors of troops to United Nations peacekeeping missions and no one wants to offend them.
I met and worked with many of these peacekeepers and found the majority of them to be professional soldiers willing to risk their lives to bring peace to countries like Congo. But if peacekeepers of any nationality are found to have committed serious crimes, the United Nations must say so. The organization cannot close its eyes and ears to evidence of misconduct. Such behavior undermines peacekeeping efforts everywhere.
It would be shocking to think that the United Nations’ own investigative body is reluctant to act on evidence of cooperation between peacekeepers and alleged war criminals. The United Nations must be prepared to deal with crimes by peacekeepers in the eastern Congo; it must also be prepared to tell the truth.
Matthias Basanisi was the deputy chief investigator with the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services in Congo from 2005 to 2007.
Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23basanisi.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
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